Politics
tradition, charisma, and procedure?
PETER MURPHY
La Trobe University, Australia; James Cook
University, Australia
The discipline of sociology has generated few
outright political classics. The most splendid of
all of the sociological classics, Max Weber’s Econ-
omy and Society, contributed a great deal to the
understanding of political behavior. Yet it is not a
political work in the sense that Aristotle’s Politics
or Hobbes’s Leviathan is. Economy and Society
sometimes hints at but it never enumerates the
“best practical” regime. Aristotle and Hobbes had
no doubt that such a regime existed – even if they
disagreed about what it was. Weber’s compari-
son of traditional, charismatic, and procedural
authority bears a passing resemblance to the com-
parison of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy
perennially made by the great political thinkers.
But the resemblance is limited.
The discipline of politics persistently asks
“What is the best type of state?” Answers vary,
but the question is constant. The prime object of
sociological inquiry is not the state but society.
Even Weber, who was politically astute, pre-
ferred terms like “authority” and “domination” to
“the state.” Sociological categories have a much
broader application than expressly political cate-
gories like “democracy” or “monarchy.” Weber’s
discussion of legitimate authority was a major
and enduring contribution to understanding the
consensual foundations of power. But it did not
replace the older and equally enduring topic of
political regime. The limits of political sociology
are exemplified by the following. A democracy
can be traditional, charismatic, or procedu-
ral – depending on time and circumstance. Even
if we can resolve which one of these types of legit-
imate authority that we favor, and which we think
would be most feasible for a country in a given
period or situation, larger questions still remain.
Is democracy preferable to monarchy or military
rule? Which regime – stratocracy or democracy,
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer and Chris Rojek.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosp043.pub2
oligarchy or monarchy – is most compatible with
Political sociology commonly pitches modern
legal–rational authority against traditional patri-
monial authority. The story that it tells is the story
of the tension between modern and premodern
societies – and the hybrids of the two that arose
in the twentieth century. Charismatic authority,
with its emphasis on the personal authority of
the leader, accounts for periods when either
traditional or procedural authority fails and is
replaced by galvanizing leaders who may be auto-
cratic (Stalin and Mao) or democratic (Churchill).
Charisma is rule by personal example. Tradition-
alism is rule by persons. Legal–rational authority
is rule by impersonal procedures and committees.
In contrast classical political science focuses on
the number of persons who rule: the one, the
few, and the many. At the core of political science
is the exploration of monarchy, aristocracy, and
popular rule. Ever since the birth of political
science in Greek antiquity, the nature of popular
rule has been contentious. It has been variously
defined as limited (constitutional, republican,
parliamentary) or unlimited (democracy). Like-
wise monarchy has its shadow in dictatorship
and autocracy; aristocracies are mirrored by
oligarchies. In the twentieth century, totalitari-
anism confounded all of the inherited categories
of political science. It was the unlimited rule of
a single party imbued with simultaneous auto-
cratic, dictatorial, and oligarchic characteristics
and omnipresent throughout society.
While sociology is not political science reborn,
it does have a political resonance. This stems
from one decisive fact. Sociology emerges out of
the disintegration of hierarchical societies – or,
in Weber’s terms, out of the breakdown of tradi-
tional authority. At its core, sociology is an answer
to a neo-Kantian question: How is society possi-
ble without the binding agent of hierarchy? This is
a political question insofar as, until the beginning
of the nineteenth century, all states – whether they
were city-states, monarchies, or empires – were
built around social hierarchies. Political forms
turned on the social orders of master and servant,
noble and commoner, tribute receiver and giver,
2 POLITICS
citizen and free person, slave owner and slave.
Something profound began to happen in the late
eighteenth century. The traditional social author-
ity of hierarchy started to be replaced. The drive to
explain what it was that was replacing hierarchies
created sociology. This had a political spin-off.
Anyone who tried to explain the posthierarchical
social condition also had to hypothesize about
the nature of posthierarchical states.
One of the best hypotheses was Weber’s idea
that traditional authority was being replaced by
legal–rational authority. This, though, applied
as much to the business corporation as it did
to the state. It was a social not just a political
phenomenon. The rise of procedural rationality
changed the nature of businesses and associations
as much as it did the state. There was also the
question of how sociology judged procedural
rationality. Political science always operated with
the image of the best, or the best practical, state. It
might have been a monarchy or a mixed regime,
a democracy or a republic. Sociology hedged its
bets much more. Weber, for instance, equated
the future with legal–rational institutions, seeing
their sway as inevitable. Yet he had grave misgiv-
ings about procedural bureaucracies dominating
decision-making.
Muddying the waters, legal–rational bureau-
cracy produced its own kind of hierarchy. But
this type of hierarchy – organizational hierar-
chy – was quite unlike traditional social hierarchy.
Durkheim introduced the following distinction
that helps clarify the situation. The old hierar-
chical society generated uniformity. Its binding
force was “mechanical” or repressive. In contrast,
the solidarity of the new society was “organic”
or sympathetic. The shift from the old order
produced specialized, differentiated, functional
hierarchies – that is, organizations. The qualified
labor, professionals, and skilled workers who
filled these organizations cooperated out of altru-
ism and imagination – rather than because of
repressive direction. Yet Durkheim also observed
that this “organic” solidarity often failed and was
often pathological. The reason for this, Durkheim
thought, was the persistence of inequality. The
Achilles heel of the new egalitarian society that
emerged out of the old hierarchical order was a
lack of equality. This paradox was to perpetually
haunt the sociological discipline.
As traditional hierarchies crumbled, organiza-
tional ties replaced personal relations, engineers
replaced aristocrats, and political parties replaced
kings and notables. Legal–rational procedures
helped transform social classes into functional
classes. Sociology was ambivalent about whether
the new world of differentiated, functional orga-
nizations was bound together by ethics or by
knowledge. It was often unclear whether the
cooperation of differentiated organizations was
due to the knowledge-seeking of professional and
skilled classes – or whether it was due to the moral
character of those classes. Notions of professional
and vocational ethics (Durkheim, Weber) were
a hedge against the need to decide the question
definitively. Sociology thus bequeathed two inter-
related strands. One said that posthierarchical
societies were knitted together by “construc-
tive knowledge” (Comte). The other attributed
social integration to enforceable norms of con-
tractual honesty (Maine, Spencer, Tönnies) or
the social ethics of trust (Fukuyama, Putnam).
These replaced the loyalty, faith, and obedience
of hierarchical orders.
Often posthierarchical society was seen as the
product of an epochal transition – from meta-
physical to positive knowledge (Comte), militant
to industrial society (Comte and Spencer), con-
sumer to producer society (Comte), status to
contract, community to society, class to classless
society (Marx), uniformity to differentiation,
producer to consumer society, ascription to
achievement, anarchic local power to pacified
territorial power (Elias), and so on. Each of these
stage-like models was obliquely political. Each
model assumed that the evolution from martial to
industrial society also transformed state, law and
justice. This is evident, for example, in the case
of Marx. He observed that the hierarchical state
of estates was in decline. The struggle of social
classes was both the final gasp of the old order and
the first breath of a new world without masters
and servants. This was not far from the truth. A
different social order was emerging out of the
declining world of social hierarchy. Marx was shy
when talking about the shape of this new order.
His labeling of it as communism was misleading.
Yet, like many nineteenth-century thinkers, Marx
thought that this new society was being erected
on the foundations of science. Knowledge was a
bonding agent of societies that were wrenching
 POLITICS
themselves free from hierarchy. Whether this was
creative knowledge or professional knowledge
was less clear. Free time to work at the arts and
sciences and the immanent creation of socialism
out of capitalist organization were both leitmotifs
of the older Marx.
The political thinker most admired by sociolo-
gists – Alexis de Tocqueville – spoke repeatedly
of the transformation of society from hierar-
chy to equality. The outgrowth of this shift was
democracy. Democracy conceived as the off-
spring of equality first emerged in the United
States. The United States was a laboratory for
inventing the future of the world. This happened
because hierarchical ties were weak among the
American colonists (G.S. Wood). What emerged
from this crucible was a new type of society. It
still had patrimonial political bosses and chattel
slavery. But, in many of its key aspects, its social
constitution dispensed with traditional hierarchy.
American sociologists gave various names to
the kind of society that this produced. It was a
society of people who were “lonely” or “marginal”
and who constantly met other people they were
unacquainted with and consequently developed
dramaturgical skills to negotiate the expanding
public world of strangers (Park, Goffman). With
these stage skills, they learnt to “present” them-
selves in everyday public situations and manage
other people’s impressions of them. They also
learnt to move adroitly between primary intimate
relations, secondary work relationships, and
tertiary long-distance anonymous relations.
Underpinning this was the growth of a large-
scale pacified political territory in the United
States. This was akin to what Elias observed of
Europe, but it was on a much more extensive
scale. The American polity was integrated by
powerful communication networks and was
achieved by multiple wars in North America in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Comte
had schematized the evolution of society from
city-state to nation-state, and had predicted a
coming cosmopolitan order of mini-states. The
American constitutional federation of states, it
seemed, had realized a version of this before
Comte had even imagined it. The European tran-
sition from hierarchical order was rockier, more
fraught, and slower than in the United States.
Nonetheless, European sociology contributed
enormously to understanding the consequences
3
of this epochal development. The pressure on
hierarchies in Europe caused sociologists to look
closely at social clusters that did not fit into
the frame of traditional hierarchies – such as
“strangers,” “intellectuals,” and “entrepreneurs”
(Simmel, Shils, Schumpeter).
Some sociologists embraced the posthierar-
chical world enthusiastically. But most were
ambivalent about it. Sometimes the ambivalence
grew out of a feeling that equality had not dis-
placed hierarchy sufficiently. It was variously
observed that race theorists had invented new
pseudo-hierarchies to replace old ones, relations
between men and women resisted equality, and
that former European colonies embraced the
rhetoric of proceduralism but practiced patron-
age. Other sociologists wondered whether the
loss of hierarchy led to anomie and the “twilight
of authority” (Nisbet). Some asked whether pro-
cedural reason created human beings without
character. Many sociologists who pressed for
greater equality also regretted the passing of the
intimacy and warmth of personalized hierarchies.
They were often unfriendly toward procedural
social and political forms, and sometimes sur-
prisingly well disposed to collegial patrimonies.
Some also wondered whether primitive, heroic,
martial, or militant societies made better, more
lasting, and more substantial things than the
newer egalitarian societies. Democratic soci-
eties proclaimed equality but in practice were
status-obsessed. This status, though, was not the
inheritable kind typical of a hierarchical society.
It was rather the status that accrued to the con-
spicuous consumption of dematerialized signs of
display and spectacle that proliferated especially
in media-saturated democracies.
This, though, was still politics at a tangent.
Sociological anxieties generated a large literature
on race, gender, and consumption. Some of it had
some impact on legislation. Other times, though,
sociology found itself in the contradictory posi-
tion of arguing for equality but criticizing its
outcomes. Such ambivalence neutered it as a
political force. Its collective concerns never gen-
erated the kind of capital-P politics that we find in
Aristotle or Hobbes. A theory of politics invari-
ably rests on a notion of the best way of living. In
the classic political tradition there are essentially
three answers to the question of “What is the
best way of living?” Two were given by Aristotle:
4 POLITICS
(1) citizenship of the city and (2) contemplative
knowledge. The third answer to the question
originated with the Stoics and Epicureans, and
was reformulated by Hobbes: freedom from fear,
most particularly freedom from the fear of death.
Sociology, for the most part, downplayed these
classic axioms. The following examples illustrate
some of the ways in which this happened. Weber
declared the city to be a “nonlegitimate form of
domination.” Bourdieu held that the accumula-
tion of cultural and symbolic capital frustrated
equality. Beck replaced freedom from the fear
of death with the incalculable uncertainties of a
“risk society.” The skewed global distribution of
risk became the newest of the new inequalities
of the late twentieth century. Millenarianism
returned in the guise of global threats and
alarms (e.g., of rampant viruses uncontainable
by national borders). This was sociology for
transnational bureaucracies. The moral of this is
that each newly discovered inequality in mod-
ern societies leads to the creation of an expert
bureaucracy to manage it, which, in turn, creates
new inequalities. The difficulty of sociological
politics – as opposed to classical politics – is
that its value horizon (equality) is constantly in
flux. The polarity between hierarchy and equality
generates perpetual dissatisfaction. The forward
march of equality is never sufficient while the
backward glance to old hierarchies is tinged with
regret. The ghosts of the past whisper seductively
about the certainty, intimacy, community, and
immobility of the old order. The sociological
conscience worries that this is antimodern and
unprogressive, yet it is enticing. Sociologists
dream of folks, folkways, and communal mores
while the various “hidden hands” of modernity
roll on, indifferent – industrializing, urbanizing,
commercializing, and publicizing.
Just as sociology is caught between the promise
of equality and the romantic consolations of
hierarchy, it is also torn between the horizon
of politics and the demands of policy. In an
everyday sense, the state is an organization of
offices. It exists to deliver on government policies
and goals. It is animated by plans, purposes, and
processes. It interacts with other organizations
(private companies and institutions). Politics (as
opposed to politicking) on the other hand is dis-
tinct from government. It is primarily concerned
with order rather than organization. Order is
abstract whereas organization is practical. Order
represents the tacit long-term patterning of soci-
ety rather than the explicit short-term goals of
state policy. The sociology of social order is more
contemplative than interventionist. It observes
trends rather than crafting policy rules. The
pattern order of society is implicit. But it is also
powerful. In modern societies the tacit order of
society emerges from the ceaseless multifarious
daily actions of individuals in cities, markets,
publics, and industries. Governments respond to
emergent patterns either by adapting to them or
else resisting them. Social patterns are generally
closer in kind to mathematical and aesthetic
forms than they are to the purposive–rational
rules and instructions of governments. Patterns
embody power laws and mimic natural config-
urations. Qualities such as symmetry, proportion,
balance, scale, ratio, and fractal self-similarity are
exhibited in the deep background order of society
where social meaning arises.
A number of twentieth-century social theo-
rists emphasized the dynamic self-structuring
character of modern social order. The Chicago
School (Park, Burgess) saw cities as shifting
patterns (“ecologies”) of demography, cultural
contact, and transport. Friedrich Hayek con-
ceived of markets as self-ordering systems of
prices and purchases. Cornelius Castoriadis
looked at cities and publics as drivers of modern
social self-assembly in opposition to bureaucra-
cies. Cybernetics (Wiener, Ashby) anticipated
the networks, algorithms, and automata of the
information society whose image later became a
sociological icon in the work of Daniel Bell and
Manuel Castells. The information society was
a stage in the larger story of modern industrial
society. Industrial technology along with cities,
markets, and publics set in train long-term,
anonymous cycles of behavior on a large scale.
Millions of small interactions create large pat-
terns of action. These interactions principally
occur between strangers. Modern societies are
societies of strangers. The personality types
most at home in these societies are happy, con-
fident, courageous, witty, and skeptical. The
social philosopher Agnes Heller called them
Stoic–Epicurean types.
The state confused twentieth-century sociology.
The discipline absorbed assumptions about the
 POLITICS
coming of a stateless society from nineteenth-
century Marxism and anarchism. Yet it was
deeply attracted to the welfare state which deliv-
ered, via bureaucracies, roads, hospitals, payment
assistance, social security, defense, and education
on an ever-increasing scale. Sociology thus ended
up in a double bind. Its mainstream objected to
the philosophical anarchists and libertarians who
desired small government as a step toward a state-
less society. At the same time, many sociologists
were uncomfortable with the bureaucracy, waste,
and controlling impulse of the state. The promise
of public goods enchanted sociologists while the
inept self-serving reality of the Department of
Motor Vehicles and the Veterans Administration
repulsed them. Theories touched by anarchism,
such as Foucault’s, became popular – as did Jür-
gen Habermas’s communicative pragmatism that
counterposed an idealized public sphere to the
institutionalized state.
Alvin Gouldner is a good example of a soci-
ologist who graduated from institutionalism to
anarchism to pragmatism. Like P. Selznick and R.
Bendix, Gouldner’s political sociology starts with
Weber-inspired studies of America’s industrial
bureaucracies. Yet his work is colored with sym-
pathy for wildcat strikes against that bureaucracy.
The later Gouldner, like C. Wright Mills before
him, turns to John Dewey’s idea of the public
in order to resolve the tension between insti-
tutional and romantic sociology. In Gouldner’s
case, he finds his way to the pragmatic public via
Habermas. This detour is significant. For while
Dewey’s notion of the public is much closer in
spirit to Comte than to Hegel, the main currents
of twentieth-century sociology reinterpret the
idea of the public in the spirit of critical negation
rather than positive knowledge.
In the case of Habermas, the public sphere
represented a defense of communicative meaning
against institutional systems based on power and
money. Habermas idealized publics but rejected
the self-organizing order of cities, markets, and
industries. This intellectual choice echoed the
values of sociology as a discipline. In general
the discipline dislikes the purposive rationality
of the administered state and corporate organi-
zations (power). It is equally hostile to markets
and industrial technology (technics and money).
It thinks civics is outdated. So that then leaves
publics (of varying kinds) to bear the burden of
5
social and political action. That is an impossible
burden. So the state is invariably smuggled in
through the back door, as an antidote to money
and power. This is an amusing conceit given that
the state is an exemplar of power and an accumu-
lator of money. This conceit may be ingeniously
presented as constitutionalism (as Habermas
does). But a constitution (mostly) is the meta-
organization of government organizations. So the
intellectual move is a circumlocution.
The difficulty of sociology is that it ends up
both defending the state and wanting to be rid
of it. Classic political science has less of a burden
to bear. It supposes that the state is a given.
Societies (for the most part) produce states. The
political question then is not whether the state
exists but whether the state is compatible with a
larger enveloping self-organizing order. Markets,
industries, publics, and cities are all, to one degree
or other, limits on the state. At their peak, when
they function well, the patterns that they create in
their wake produce an abstract order of freedom
and beauty. The original sociological question of
whether the state serves hierarchy or equality is
an important one. Yet the value of both hierarchy
and equality depend on their compatibility with
self-assembling, morphogenetic, autocatalytic
social processes that endow a state with the spirit
of freedom and beauty. Without this spirit, the
state can turn tyrannical and destructive. Tra-
dition, charisma, and procedure by themselves
provide no inherent barrier to this happening.
States do not produce the encompassing order
that endows them with substance and durable
significance. Domination and authority get things
done but whether what is done is meaningful or
good depends on whether or not the actions of
the state facilitate or frustrate the enveloping
patterns of social self-organization.
SEE ALSO: Democracy; Domination; Political
Sociology; State
Further Readings
Aristotle (1998) Politics, Oxford University Press,
Oxford.
Castoriadis, C. (1996) World in Fragments, Stanford
University Press, Stanford, CA.
Comte, A. (1988) Introduction to Positive Philosophy,
Hackett, Indianapolis, IN.
6 POLITICS

Durkheim, É. (1969 [1893]) The Division of Labour in
Society, Routledge, London.
Habermas, J. (1976) Communication and the Evolution
of Society, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Hayek, F. (1973–1979) Law, Legislation and Liberty, vols
1–3, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Heller, A. (1985) The Power of Shame: A Rational Per-
spective, Routledge, London.
Park, R. (1975) The Crowd and the Public and Other
Essays, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Tocqueville, A. (2003 [1835–1840]) Democracy in
America, Penguin, London.
Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society, University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA.