Max Weber Archives - Public Seminar

North America

Trump’s Charm Offensive

“You guys are the same as me”

November 1, 2024 • by Adam Koehler Brown

A #1 with a large fry, made and served by the forty-fifth president of the United States: Donald Trump was working a drive-through at a McDonald’s last weekend in Pennsylvania. He salted fries and greeted customers, a stunt meant to mock Kamala Harris and her repeated claim to have worked ...

Social Research

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its last issue

July 20, 2022 • by Social Research

The current issue of Social Research is based not on a special theme but rather on the conviction that words matter, books and ideas matter—and some books, special ones, deeply affect our lives and how we think and what we think about. To bring home this perhaps trivial truism—that books ...

Books That Matter II, the New Issue of Social Research

Podcast

What Weber and Foucault Get Wrong about Institutions: An Interview with Steven Klein about the Welfare State

Unproductive Labor Podcast, Episode 10

January 7, 2022 • by Luke Mergner and Pete Sinnott

Unproductive Labor · What Weber Gets Wrong about Institutions: An Interview with Steven Klein about the Welfare State

What Weber and Foucault Get Wrong about Institutions: An Interview with Steven Klein about the Welfare State

Democracy

Fascism or Caesarism?

How Napoleon, not Hitler, exemplifies an enduring threat to modern democracies

August 27, 2020 • by David A. Bell

As a historian, my first reaction has been to answer the question with a resounding “no.” My professional training has led me to think of fascism as a specific historical phenomenon, largely limited to the period from the early 1920s to the end of World War II, and built around ...

Feature

The Demons of Neoliberalism

Adam Kotsko’s Political Theology

September 11, 2019 • by Luke Mergner

This critique was left tantalizingly underdeveloped in The Prince of this World. How could more freedom make us less free? Neoliberalism's Demons answers this question by reading neoliberalism through the lens of political theology. The result is not a new history of neoliberalism but a refocusing on how such an economic system makes ...

Feature

On Opposing Fascism with a Reality TV Face

“Politics as a vocation,” the social condition and Donald Trump

July 20, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I am waiting, ever more impatiently, for my fellow citizens to wake up, to confront that it is happening here and now, that fascism with a reality TV face is upon us. Even though the situation appears ridiculous and often comic, it’s ominous. I am not ready to declare that “The ...

On Opposing Fascism with a Reality TV Face

Feature

Biofinance

Biological foundations of capital imaginaries

March 13, 2018 • by Marc Aziz Michael

Capitalism has been the subject of too many conflicting definitions for any of the claims that follow to have any purchase on truth -- understood as an adequation to the real. Beneath the numerous disagreements, however, a common substratum can be gleaned between the liberal Smithian, and the classical Marxist ...

Feature

How Castoriadis read Weber

Meaning, values, and imaginary institution

March 6, 2018 • by Yannis Ktenas

I. The interest Cornelius Castoriadis had in Max Weber’s work, although quite apparent and confessed by the philosopher himself, has not drawn sufficient attention by scholars and commentators. [1] It is no coincidence that the first and the last texts Castoriadis published while living both deal with Weber. The first of these was ...

Education

Media and Micro-Politics

Media, the New Authoritarianism and its alternatives from the perspective of the sociology of interaction

January 30, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I have been conducting a seminar on “media and micro-politics” in a variety of different forms since publishing The Politics of Small Things, often with my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Dayan. This year the newest member of the The New School ‘s sociology department, Julia Sonnevend, the author of a brilliant ...

Politics

Sociology of Power and Authority

Fall 2017 at University of Virginia

January 23, 2018 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The Sociology of Power and Authority was offered in Fall 2017 at the University of Virginia. It was an upper-division undergraduate seminar with 20 students, meeting for an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week. On the first day of the course, several students revealed, unprompted, that they had been ...

Feature

The Virality of Patriotic Antiracism

Combat Veterans and Geopolitical Racism

October 25, 2017 • by Amir Sadeghi

Today, however, the struggle to destabilize the institutional fabric of disenfranchisement, imprisonment, and wealth inequality risks being buried by viral images of combat veterans “taking a knee,” or the children of service members killed in combat signaling their support for the “cause.” Generally speaking, it has become patriotic to stand ...

Feature

The Politician as a Doctor

An Image of the Credibility Crisis in Chile

July 6, 2017 • by Beatriz Vega Elizondo

The presidential election in Chile is coming, and the candidate leading the polls is the businessman and former president Sebastián Piñera. He preceded the second government of the current president, the doctor Michelle Bachelet. If Piñera is elected once more, two periods of center-left governance -- presided over by a ...