Abstract: Weber noted the conflict between egalitarian ideals and the tendency of bureaucrats to become a status group, as well as the generic problem of controlling them. This was in its core a principal-agent problem, with the people as principals and discretionary power beyond law the issue. His discussions of Russia illustrate a case in which bureaucratic power and the outsourcing of decisions and power to advisory bodies produced a kind of pseudo-constitutionalism. The case is analogous to present democratic deficits, and with a similar consequence: populist reaction.

Ben Agger was a blazing intellect, whose work provides important lessons-moral lessons, if that is not too pretentious-about the life of the mind and the way to live it.I was made aware of Ben by John O'Neill, who in his usual off-hand way mentioned that he might interest me.I met him only when he was an assistant professor at Buffalo, in the hall during an ASA meeting.We instantly took a liking to each other.He was almost exactly my age, and full of life and intensity.We had a bond, of an odd kind that bears directly on the lessons of his life.We were outsiders, both "sociological theorists" at a time when the field was in a peculiar kind of flux: the best of times and the worst of times.The best part was this: the 1970s, in which we were formed, saw the end of two hegemonic empires, those of Parsons and Merton.It also saw the digging of the grave of sociological positivism.This opened up a range of possibilities, not the least of which was the one Ben seized: the application of literary theory.The worst parts were the remaining hangovers from the past.Ben was a precocious participant in the wide-ranging debates of the early seventies.He gave his first paper in Dubrovnik in 1972, "Of Style and Speech in the New Age," signaling a lifelong interest.He attended, as I did, the 1974 World Congress of Sociology in Toronto, and published a scathing critique of it, attacking the narcissism of sociologists' self-congratulation about being scientific, noting the often amusing confrontation of East and West at a time when the Communist bloc countries treated these international meetings as carefully watched contests between their side and the Western other, and calling for an engaged sociology in the style of C. Wright Mills.The critique reflected what were to be lifelong commitments.But it is important to know what they meant at the time, and how the experience of the time formed him.At the time of this meeting, the official structures, especially in the US, were still dominated by the near-retirement students of Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, who were eager to pass the mantle on to the like-minded, of which there were very few.Generational conflict was intense.In Toronto there were testy exchanges with older sociologists, some of whom had careers dating back to the 1930s and were on their last mission.We, however, had youth on our side.Our opponents were a cartel, powerful, but at the end of the line.Nothing made this clearer than the volume officially sanctioned by the ASA called Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (1975), on what was taken to be the core intellectual contribution of this cartel and the core of sociology and sociological theory, but what amounted to a festschrift for Merton.It was edited by his acolyte Peter Blau, already in his late fifties, and came out of these same meetings.To this might be added Merton's own paper justifying his career (1975), written at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.Many of these papers, and Merton himself, struggled to differentiate Merton's "structuralism" from plain structural functionalism, and failed.They were clearly on the defensive.Yet there was to be one last great gasp from this generation, which had deep consequences, and to which I will return shortly.In the intellectual milieu in which Ben was formed, the battle lines were clear, and it was also clear that they were battle lines.Ben took a position on the Left flank of the new generation.In the period between these meetings and 1982, a year whose significance will become clear, he published a book and nine articles or chapters, several of which were in highly respectable places, including two in Polity, and two in Dialectical Anthropology, at the time an especially lively place to be.He was on the rise, and continued to produce at an astonishing rate for the rest of his life.But to paraphrase Marx, people make their own history, but they don't make the conditions under which it is made.And it is these conditions that make Ben's choices both meaningful and remarkable.The Approaches volume was, not surprisingly, dominated by older men, most of whom were born about 1918

Carl Friedrich produced a list of characteristics of totalitarianism that for nearly a decade was influential as a “theory of totalitarianism” and a point of reference afterward. It was the product of Friedrich’s long and complex intellectual engagement with the theory of the modern state, beginning with his defense of the use of Article 48 in 1930, and his developing thinking as he became an activist in the “defense of democracy” and a war advocate, and later as a participant in the American occupation. Friedrich’s political theory, however, reflected sources and problematics in the German tradition that led him in the direction of the discretionary but “rational” bureaucratic state, and against the standard American understanding of law and constitutional order. His thinking reflected his hostility to Max Weber, Hans Kelsen, and other Continental liberals, and a strong belief that the modern state required a bureaucracy free from supervision and operated by a “responsible elite” rather than governed by direct democratic controls or parliamentary supervision. He was criticized by Herbert Finer in a long-running controversy for the anti-democratic character of his views, as well as by Joseph Dorfman, who pointed out his twisting of political language. His commitments to his view of the state blocked him from criticizing the new regimes of National Socialism and Stalinism in the conventional terms of lack of freedom, the rule of law, democratic accountability, and constitutional literalism which defined the American vernacular conception of politics, all of which he had debunked. Instead, he treated the differences with these new “totalitarian” orders as exaggerations of features of normal democratic regimes which together, and together with new technologies, constituted a historically novel political form. He thus clashed with Harold Lasswell, whose concept of a Garrison State was a rival conception that he differed from by arguing that party control of the state apparatus was an essential feature of totalitarian societies.

This chapter focuses on a question about one role: the explanatory role of normativism or normativity in relation to ordinary 'scientific', meaning social scientific, explanations of actions and beliefs, especially the empirical, observable, or empirically relevant aspects of human conduct. Call this the epistemic form of the naturalistic moment problem. It call this a 'naturalistic moment', a place where normativism makes factual assertions about real processes in the natural world. This pseudo argument boils down to a series of equivocations. The normativist must claim that there is some super-added normative element that cannot be accounted for naturalistically or by social science. Transcendental arguments to the effect that they have to have such and such mental content are likely to fail the mosquito test. The default position of rationalistic normativists, well encapsulated by Korsgaard, who rejects it, is that normativity in particular, rightness is an objective property grasped by reason.

Michael Polanyi popularized the term "tacit knowledge" and developed a distinctive account of its role in thought, and especially in science. The notion of tacit knowledge for him had two aspects. One was similar to skills which could not be articulated, such as the ability to ride a bicycle. The second was the element of meaning that was conveyed along with the words in an utterance but which are not reducible to them. These aspects contrast to presuppositions or premises, and Polanyi's philosophy diverges from traditions which uses these terms, in that they cannot be articulated. But he also rejected the sense-data view of the Logical Positivists. Polanyi's own model of tacit knowing involved a triangular relation between two elements of knowledge, focal (on the particulars we attend to) and subsidiary (the background knowledge we employ to make sense of them), and the knower, who is an active agent. The key to their relation was the indeterminacy of the links between them and the skilled performance by the knower in using these elements. Empathy was a special case of the use of these skills, which involved interiorization of the object of knowledge in ways the knower was unaware of employing.

In the nineteenth century, there was substantial and sophisticated interest in neuroscience on the part of social theorists, including Comte and Spencer, and later Simon Patten and Charles Ellwood. This body of thinking faced a dead end: it could do little more than identify highly general mechanisms, and could not provide accounts of such questions as `why was there no proletarian revolution?' Psychologically dubious explanations, relying on neo-Kantian views of the mind, replaced them. With the rise of neuroscience, however, some of the problems of concern to earlier thinkers, such as imitation, have revived because of the discovery of neuronal mechanisms, or through fMRI studies. The article reviews the history and discusses the implications of current work for the reconsideration of traditional social theory concepts. It is suggested that certain kinds of bridging work with neuroscience would enable us to answer many questions in social theory that empirical sociology has failed to answer.

American Sociology has changed radically since 1945. This volume traces these changes to the present, with special emphasis on the feminization of sociology and the decline of the science ideal as wel

The relation between the sociology of knowledge as a formal area of study and the sociological study of science has a complex history. Pre-disciplinary sociology of knowledge operated in two conflicting ways. One with an error theory of knowledge, in which failure was explained sociologically, but success was explained by cognitive factors. The other was one in which science was treated as part of a total ideology that itself could be explained sociologically. The latter was associated with Marxism. Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge avoided science; early academic sociology of science, exemplified by Robert Merton, avoided scientific knowledge. This was challenged by a tradition within science that opposed Marxism but addressed scientific knowledge. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was the culmination of this tradition. It led to the relativistic 'Strong Programme' in the sociology of science and to Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory, which ultimately foundered on the problem of truth under the pressure of the climate change controversy and affirmed such concepts as genuine expertise and returned to a kind of error theory.

Webers Charisma-Konzeption löste bestimmte rechtsphilosophische Probleme unter Anwendung eines Begriffs aus der Geschichte des Kirchenrechts. Der ursprüngliche Begriff stützte sich auf die Vorstellung göttlichen Handelns; Webers generalisierte Verwendungsweise erforderte eine andere kausale Fundierung. Die Standarderklärungen von Charisma sind entweder kulturalistisch, indem sie die Macht des charismatischen Führers oder des Staates auf das Auftreten kultureller Erwartungen an den Führer zurückführen, oder sie sind kontraktualistisch, indem sie davon ausgehen, daß Führer Wünsche ihrer Gefolgsleute erfüllen. Keiner der beiden Ansätze trifft den fundamentalen Sinn der Idee, kulturelle Innovationen und inneren Wandel bei den Anhängern zu erklären. Der vorliegende Aufsatz unterbreitet ein neues Modell des Charakters von Charisma, welches diesen Anforderungen gerecht wird. Der Führer wird hier als eine Person angesehen, die die Wahl einer neuen Vision von (Handlungs-)Risiken und Möglichkeiten offeriert und durch seine Führung die Realisierbarkeit dieser Vision durch Unterordnung als evident erscheinen läßt. Das Beispiel Frank Lorenzos, ein Fall von Geschäftscharisma, wird detailliert diskutiert.

I recently reviewed a manuscript for a biotechnology journal I won't name. The paper was clearly written by AI. I don't mean edits or revisions here and there, I mean the entire manuscript. As if they had copied and pasted the entire contents of a certain research organization's website into ChatGPT and asked for a paper on the topic.

Today I learned about Conventional Comments ( conventionalcomments.org ) from this Bluesky post from Andrew Heiss. In my new role here at the UVA School of Data Science, I've been championing a more robust internal peer review framework, something I picked up while working serving on many proposal "red teams" during my tenure in consulting.

Abstract Weber’s comments on democracy are puzzling, and even more puzzling when they are reinterpreted in terms of what came to be called “democratic theory” in academic circles. The list of puzzling statements is long, involving such notions as nonlegitimate domination. The distinction he made between democracy and authority—which he took to be mutually incompatible concepts in their pure forms—excludes the possibility of legitimate democratic authority. The reasoning is comparable to similar claims by Hans Kelsen, for similar theoretical reasons rooted in the philosophy of law. The result is that what we regard as democracies Weber regarded as mixed or transitional forms. What he focuses on instead is the modern state as found only in the West, and its unique features, especially the form of parliamentary representation of the play of interests, but even more important, the concept of offices, whether in the state or in organized political parties.

A conversation with Stephen Turner, Distinguished Professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, USA, took place in April 2024 in his office at the university in Tampa. Professor Turner’s scientific interests in the field of philosophy of science, history of sociology allowed him to give a deep analysis and his vision of the fundamental problems of sociology, philosophy, social education, history of American sociology and its place in the global sociological community. The interview highlights the challenges within the American scientific system, sociology’s role in social sciences, and the methodologies and concerns of philosophy in examining modern existence. It uncovers the perspectives of the American sociologist on the importance of an expansive view of sociology that encompasses the social philosophies of non-Western cultures in the lexicon of worldwide sociological research.

The Liberal Theory of Science, best articulated by Michael Polanyi, held that science advanced when autonomous scientists followed their best hunches and spontaneously coordinated their efforts as a result of their mutual dependence, in a setting devoted to scientific truth with a tradition supporting it, in a quest for a comprehensive understanding of reality. Pure science was for him an international community with the characteristics of the Republic of Letters of the past. This image of science was an idealization at the time he wrote, and became less applicable as science grew and became more dependent on funding decisions, and therefore also on peer review, which compromised autonomy. From the painful attempts to make sense of these changes, particularly in the writings of John Ziman, we can reconstruct the effects of these changes: initially from a focus on discovery to the production of "reliable knowledge" for sponsors. This change made science more useful, but at a price, and made the Liberal Theory of Science increasingly irrelevant to actual science, but still useful as a basis for critique.

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this article the focus will be on conceptual schemes, a term which had a distinctive origin in Henderson that accounts for some of the ambiguities in its adaptations. Henderson spoke as a scientist speaking to philosophers rather than doing philosophy and sharply distinguished his aims from those that followed from Immanuel Kant. Henderson's model was the scheme of ancient Greek medicine, which had persisted for millennia and was replaced by modern medicine. This was differentiated from earlier neo-Kantian and later Kuhnian variations. Henderson's account was distinctive in placing the origins of conceptual schemes in intuitions about patterns formed in practice by people operating on concrete phenomena. The resulting schemes, he thought, had to be accepted on faith by students, but were, as he put it, walking sticks to enable communication and understanding rather than exclusive dogmas. Henderson was an enthusiast for Vilfredo Pareto, who was vilified at Harvard during the war by Carl J. Friedrich, which led not to the disuse of his ideas but to the erasure of their origins.

Vilfredo Pareto was given a major reputational boost by the efforts, at Harvard, of L. J. Henderson and the prominent figures he influenced. Carl J. Friedrich was close to this group, but during WWII wrote a scathing attack on his theory of elites and on Pareto generally. Although the attack was misleading, it reflected Friedrich’s own political commitments, which themselves had to be reconciled with “democracy” and anti-elitism. The critique damaged Pareto’s reputation, but is of interest as a defense of the newly emerging elite of which Friedrich was a part at Harvard. The argument Friedrich made replaced the traditional notion of democracy with one which accommodated a form of governance that depended on the shared “instinct of workmanship” of the rulers and the ruled, and avoided the question of the status of bureaucrats, which Friedrich had elsewhere regarded as the distinguishing feature of the modern state. Pareto had a response to this, which noted the admiration of the planners who had emerged during his lifetime, whom he regarded as a characteristic governing class. He commented that this was a sign of a society that was moving away from freedom. Friedrich shared this sense, but endorsed it, dismissing freedom as a nineteenth-century problem.