“Bureaucracy is the ultimate rule by nobody.” – Max Weber

Today we share the words and works of Max Weber (1864-1920), a prominent German historian, jurist, and political economist widely recognized as one of the founding figures of, and whose ideas continue to shape, the fields of sociology and the social sciences.

Weber’s contributions to “the expansion of American sociology and political science in the successive research and teaching fields of stratification, industrial sociology, organization theory, political sociology, comparative and development studies, and sociology of religion” are found in his ‘Economy and Society’, according to Guenther Roth in his 2013 Introduction to Weber’s ‘Economy and Society’:

Max Weber presents us with a scholarly vision of society in his ‘Economy and Society’, which was first published (posthumously) in 1921. Considered to be the first strictly empirical comparison of social structure and normative order in world-historical depth, ‘Economy and Society’ is Weber’s only major didactic treatise. While it was intended as merely an introduction, ‘Economy and Society’ is “in its own way the most demanding text yet written by a sociologist. The precision of its definitions, the complexity of its typologies and the wealth of its historical content make the work, as it were, a continuous challenge at several levels of comprehension,” as stated by Roth.

The Big List Of Max Weber Quotes

Quotes are gathered from Max Weber’s ‘Economy And Society’, Volume 1 and 2, published by University of California Press in 2013, featuring a foreword by Guenther Roth, and edited by both Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. This part of the blog post is divided into two sections – one for each volume of Weber’s work.

‘Economy And Society’ – Volume 1

“Social action, like all action, may be oriented in four ways. It may be: (1) instrumentally rational, that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings;… (2) value-oriented, that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success; (3) affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states; (4) traditional, that is , determined by ingrained habituation.”
“The social relationship… consists entirely and exclusively in the existence of a probability that there will be a meaningful course of social action…”
“… social action… may be guided by… the existence of a legitimate order.”
“The legitimacy of an order may be guaranteed in two principle ways: (1) The guarantee may be purely subjective, being either affectual; value-rational; or religious… (2) The legitimacy of an order may… be guaranteed… by the expectation of specific external effects, that is, by interest situations.”
“An order will be called (a) convention so far as its validity is externally guaranteed by the probability that deviation from it within a given social group will result in a relatively generally and practically significant reaction of disapproval; (b) law if is is externally guaranteed by the probability that physical or psychological coercion will be applied by a staff of people in order to bring about compliance or avenge violation.
“The validity of a social order by virtue of the sacredness of tradition is the oldest and most universal type of legitimacy.”
“A social relationship which is either closed or limits the admission of outsiders [is] called an organization when its regulations are enforced by specific individuals.”
“An association’s enacted order may be established in one of two ways: by voluntary agreement, or by being imposed and acquiesced in.”
“The constitution of an organization is the empirically existing probability, varying in extent, kind, and condition, that rules imposed by the leadership will be acceded to.”
“Rules which govern organized action constitute an administrative order. Rules which govern other kinds of social action and thereby protect the actors’ enjoyment of the resulting benefits [constitute] a regulative order.”
“Continuous rational activity of a specified kind [is] called an enterprise; an association with a continuously and rationally operating staff [is] called a formal organization. An organization which claims authority only over voluntary members [is] called a voluntary association.”
“A compulsory political organization with continuous operations [is] called a ‘state’ insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds its claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”
“From a purely technical point of view, money is the most perfect means of economic calculation.”
“All economic activity in a market economy is undertaken and carried through by individuals acting to provide for their own ideal or material interests.”
“Experience shows that in no instance does domination voluntarily limit itself to the appeal to material or affectual or ideal motives as a basis for its continuance.”
“… every body of law consists essentially in a consistent system of abstract rules which have normally been intentionally established… administration of law is held to consist in the application of these rules to particular cases; the administrative process in the rational pursuit of the interests which are specified in the order governing the organization within the limits laid down by legal precepts and following principles which are capable of generalized formulation and are approved in the order governing the group, or at least not disapproved in it.”
“The following [are] fundamental categories of rational legal authority:
- (1) A continuous rule-bound conduct of official business.
- (2) A specified sphere of competence (jurisdiction). This involves (a) A sphere of obligations to perform functions which have been marked off as part of a systematic division of labor; (b) The provision of the incumbent with the necessary powers; (c) That the necessary means of compulsion are clearly defined and their use is subject to definite conditions. A unit exercising authority which is organized in this way [is] an ‘administrative organ’ or ‘agency’.
- (3) The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy; that is, each lower office is under control and supervision of a higher one.
- (4) The rules which regulate the conduct of an office may be technical rules or norms. In both cases, if their application is to be fully rational, specialized training is necessary. It is thus normally true that only a person who has demonstrated an adequate technical training is qualified to be a member of the administrative staff of such an organized group, and hence only such persons are eligible for appointment to official positions.
- …
- (7) Administrative acts, decisions, and rules are formulated and recorded in writing, even in cases where oral discussion is the rule or is even mandatory. This applies at least to preliminary discussion and proposals, to final decisions, and to all sorts of order and rules. The combination of written documents and a continuous operation by officials constitutes the ‘office’ (Bureau) which is the central focus of all types of modern organized action.”
“The purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff.”
“The whole of administrative staff under the supreme authority… consists, in the purest type, of individual officials who are appointed and function according to the following criteria:
- (1) They are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations.
- (2) They are organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.
- (3) Each office has a clearly defined sphere of competence in the legal sense.
- (4) The office is filled by a free contractual relationship. Thus, in principle, there is free selection.
- (5) Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications. In the most rational case, this is tested by examination or guaranteed by diplomas certifying technical training, or both. They are appointed, not elected.
- …
- (10) He is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office.”
“Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization… is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks.”
“Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational. This consists on the one hand in technical knowledge which, by itself, is sufficient to ensure it a position of extraordinary power. But in addition to this, bureaucratic organizations, or the holders of power who make use of them, have the tendency to increase their power still further by the knowledge growing out of experience in the service. For they acquire through the conduct of office a special knowledge of facts and have available a store of documentary material peculiar to themselves.”
“In traditionalist periods, charisma is the great revolutionary force.”
“Class-conscious organization succeeds most easily (a) against the immediate economic opponents; (b) if large numbers of persons are in the same class situation, (c ) if it is technically easy to organize them, (d) if they are led toward readily understood goals…”
“Every status society lives by conventions, which regulate the style of life, and hence create economically irrational consumption patterns and fetter the free market through monopolistic appropriations and by curbing the individual’s earning power.”
“The broad mass of the participants act in a way corresponding to legal norms, not out of obedience regarded as a legal obligation, but either because the environment approves of the conduct and disapproves of its opposite, or merely as a result of unreflective habituation to a regularity of life that has engraved itself as a custom.”
“As long as there is a chance that a coercive apparatus will enforce, in a given situation, compliance with… norms, we… must consider them as ‘law’.”
“… it is the orientation of an action toward a norm, rather than the success of that norm that is decisive for its validity.”
“‘Law’… is simply an order endowed with certain specific guarantees of the probability of its empirical validity.”
“… we… consider as legal coercion only those actions whose intention is the enforcement of conformity to a norm as such, i.e., because of its being formally accepted as binding.”
“The sphere of public law, i.e., the norms governing the conduct of the organs of the state and other state-oriented activities, recognizes numerous rights and legal norms, upon the infringement of which a coercive apparatus can be set in motion only through compliant or through remonstrance by members of a limited group of persons, and often without any means of physical coercion. Sociologically, the question of whether or not guaranteed law exists in such a situation depends on the availability of an organized coercive apparatus for the nonviolent exercise of legal coercion. This apparatus must also possess such power that there is in fact a significant probability that the norm will be respected because of the possibility of recourse to such legal coercion.”
“… the borderline between custom and convention is fluid.”
“It is not due to the assumed binding force of some rule or norm that the conduct of primitive man manifests certain external factual regularities, especially in his relation to his fellows. On the contrary, those organically conditioned regularities which we have to accept as psychophysical reality, are primary.”
“As long as religious faith is strong, convention, the approval or disapproval by the environment, engenders, as historical experience shows, the hope and faith that the supernatural powers too will reward or punish those actions which are approved or disapproved in this world.”
“In consequence of the constant recurrence of a certain pattern of conduct, the idea may arise in the minds of the guarantors of a particular norm, that they are confronted no longer with mere custom or convention, but with a legal obligation requiring enforcement. A norm which has attained such practical validity is called customary law.”
“Where…a legal norm refers to ‘good morals’, i.e., conventions worthy of approval, the fulfillment of the conventional obligations has also become a legal obligation…”
“… the validity of law, presupposing, as we have seen, the existence of an enforcement machinery, is necessarily a corollary of organizational action… In this sense the organization may be said to be the ‘sustainer’ of the law.”
“Legal consequences attach to bona or mala fides, or intention, or moral turpitude, and a good many other purely subjective factors. Moral commandments, on the other hand, are aiming at overcoming in external conduct those anti-normative impulses which form part of the ‘mental attitude’… ‘moral commandments’ in contrast to legal commandments are, from a sociological point of view, normally either religiously or conventionally conditioned maxims of conduct.”
“It is by way of conventional rules that merely factual regularities of action,i.e., usages, are frequently transformed into binding norms, guaranteed primarily by psychological coercion. Convention thus makes tradition.”
“The mere fact of the regular recurrence of certain events somehow coffers on them the dignity of oughtness.”
“It cannot be overstressed that the mere habituation to a mode of action, the inclination to preserve this habituation, and, much more so, tradition, have a formidable influence in favor of a habituated legal order, even where such an order originally derives from legal enactment. This influence is more powerful than any reflection on impending means of coercion or other consequences, considering also the fact that at least some of those who act according to the norms are totally unaware of them.”
“The threat of physical and psychological coercion… imposes a certain mode of action and thus produces habituation and thereby regularity of action.”
“Only a limited measure of success can be attained through the threat of coercion supporting the legal order… Even the most drastic means of coercion and punishment are bound to fail where the subjects remain recalcitrant.”
“… the economy is usually… influenced by the autonomous structure of social action within which it exists.”
“… purely ideological group existence is a less effective lever than economic interest.”
“… voluntary organizations tend to transcend their rational primary purpose and to create relationships among the participants that may have quite different goals: As a rule, an overarching communal relationship attaches itself to the association.”
“… associations… as a rule admit nobody who is personally objectionable to the members. This very fact legitimizes the new member toward the outside, far beyond the qualities that are important to the group’s purpose. Membership provides him with advantageous connections, again far beyond the specific goals of the organization. Hence, it is very common that persons belong to an organization although they are not really interested in its purpose, merely for the sake of those economically valuable legitimations and connections that accrue from membership. Taken by themselves, these motives may contain a strong incentive for joining and hence enlarging the group, but the opposite effect is created by the members’ interest in monopolizing those advantages and in increasing their economic value through restriction to the smallest possible circle. The smaller and the more exclusive such a circle is, the higher will be both the economic value and the social prestige of membership.”
“Common customs may have diverse origins.”
“The objectification of the power structure, with the complex of problems produced by its rationalized ethical provisos, has but one psychological equivalent: the vocational ethic taught by asceticism.”
“An increased tendency forward flight into the irrationalities of apolitical emotionalism in different degrees and forms, is one of the actual consequences of the rationalization of coercion…”
“… the characteristic forms of the capitalist employment of wealth have been state-provisioning, tax-farming, the financing of colonies, the establishment of great plantations, trade, and moneylending.”
“Money creates a group by virtue of material interest relations between actual and potential participants in the market and its payments. At the fully developed stage, the so-called money economy, the resulting situation looks as if it had been created by a set of norms established for the very purpose of bringing it into being.”

‘Economy And Society’ – Volume 2

“… one might define public law as the total body of those norms which regulate state-oriented action, that is, those activities which serve the maintenance, development, and the direct pursuit of the objectives of the state, objectives which must themselves be valid by virtue of enactment or consensus. Correspondingly, private law would be defined as the totality of those norms which, while issuing from the state, regulate conduct other than state-oriented conduct.”
“In its widest sense, the expression ‘public administration’ includes not only legislation and adjudication but also those other residuary activities which… we call ‘government’.”
“Government can be bound by legal norms and limited by vested rights. In these respects it resembles legislation and adjudication.”
“… in a positive sense, government must have a legitimate basis for its own jurisdiction; a modern government exercises its functions as a legitimate jurisdiction, which means legally that it is regarded as resting on authorization by the constitutional norms of the state… in a negative sense, the limitations on the power of the state by law and vested rights create those restraints upon its freedom of action to which it must adjust itself.”
“… government… aims not only at acknowledging and enforcing the law simply because the law exists and constitutes the basis of vested rights, but also in that it pursues other concrete objectives of a political, ethical, utilitarian, or some other kind.”
“To the government, the individual and his interests are in the legal sense objects rather than bearers of rights.”
“… public law is directly connected with criminal law; at any rate, public law, criminal law, criminal procedure, and sacred law do not begin to be systematically treated unless there are at least some rules which are recognized as factually binding.”
“… not every restraint possesses normative character. Now there are two kinds of restraints, viz., (1) limitations of power, and (2) separation of powers.”
“… it was only through the separation of powers that the very concept of public law was made possible.”
“… the activities of political organization fall, as regards law, into two categories, viz., lawmaking and lawfinding, the latter involving execution as a technical matter. Today we understand by lawmaking the establishment of general norms which in the lawyers’ thought assume the character of rational rules of law. Lawfinding, as we understand it, is the application of such established norms and the legal propositions deduced therefrom by legal thinking, to concrete facts which are subsumed under these norms.”
“The norms to substantive rationality accords predominance include ethical imperatives, utilitarian and other expediential rules, and political maxims, all of which diverge from the formalism of the ‘external characteristics’ variety as well as from that which uses logical abstraction.”
“… legal science…proceeds from the following five postulates: viz.,
- first, that every concrete legal decision be the application of an abstract legal proposition to a concrete ‘fact situation’;
- second, that it must be possible in every concrete case to derive the decision from abstract legal propositions by means of legal logic;
- third, that the law must actually or virtually constitute a gapless system of legal propositions, or must, at least, be treated as if it were such a gapless system;
- fourth, that whatever cannot be construed rationally in legal terms is also legally irrelevant; and
- fifth, that every social action of human beings must always be visualized as either an application or execution or legal propositions, or as an infringement thereof, since the ‘gaplessness’ of the legal system must result in gapless legal ordering of all social conduct.”
“Law can… function in such a manner that… the prevailing norms controlling the operation of the coercive apparatus have such a structure as to induce, in their turn, the emergence of certain economic relations which may be either a certain order of economic control or a certain agreement based on economic expectations.”
“… law consists of legal propositions, i.e., abstract norms the content of which asserts that a certain factual situation is to have certain legal consequences. The most usual classification of legal propositions distinguishes, as in the case of all norms, between prescriptive, prohibitory, and permissive ones; they respectively give rise to the rights of individuals to prescribe, or prohibit, or allow, an action vis-a-vis another person.”
“Every right is… a source of power of which even a hitherto entirely powerless person may become possessed. In this way he becomes the source of completely novel situations within the community.”
“Privileges are of two main kinds: The first is constituted by the so-called freedoms… The second type of privilege is that which grants to an individual autonomy to regulate his relations with others by his own transactions.”
“In an economy where self-sufficiency prevails and exchange is lacking, the function of the law will naturally be otherwise: it will mainly define and delimit a person’s non-economic relations and privileges with regard to other persons in accordance, not with economic considerations, but with the person’s origin, education, or social status.”
“‘Freedom’ in the legal sense means the possession of rights, actual and potential, which, however, in a marketless community naturally do not rest predominantly upon legal transactions but rather directly upon the prescriptive and prohibitory propositions of the law itself.”
“Economic situations do not automatically give birth to new legal forms; they merely provide the opportunity for the actual spread of legal technique if it is invented.”
“The development of legally regulated relationships toward contractual association and of the law itself toward freedom of contract, especially toward a system of free disposition within stipulated forms of transaction, is usually regarded as signifying a decrease of constraint and an increase of individual freedom.”
“New legal norms… have two primary sources, viz., first, the standardization of certain consensual understandings, especially positive agreements, which are made with increasing deliberateness by individuals who, aided by professional counsel, thereby demarcate their respective spheres of interest; and, second, judicial precedent.”
“Formal justice guarantees the maximum freedom for the interested parties to represent their formal legal interests… formal justice, due to its necessarily abstract character, infringes upon the ideals of substantive justice.”
“… a separate political community is constituted where we find (1) a territory; (2) the availability of physical force for its domination; and (3) social action which is not restricted exclusively to the satisfaction of common economic needs in the frame of a communal economy, but regulates more generally the interrelations of the inhabitants of the territory.”
“The modern position of political associations rests on the prestige bestowed upon them by the belief, held by their members, in a specific consecration: the legitimacy of that social action which is ordered and regulated by them. This prestige is particularly powerful where, and in so far as, social action comprises physical coercion, including the power to dispose over life and death. It is on this prestide that the consensus on the specific legitimacy of action is founded.”
“… the basic functions of the ‘state’ are: the enactment of law (legislative function); the protection of personal safety and public order (police); the protection of vested rights (administration of justice); the cultivation of hygienic, educational, social-welfare, and other cultural interests (the various branches of administration); and, last but not least, the organized armed protection against outside attack (military administration).”
“The ‘masses’… have nothing concrete to lose but their lives. The valuation and effect of this danger strongly fluctuates in their own minds. On the whole, it can easily be reduced to zero through emotional influence.”
“… emotional influence does not, in the main, have an economic origin. It is based on sentiments of prestige…”
“The significance of the nation is usually anchored in the superiority, or at least the irreplaceability, of the culture values that are to be preserved and developed only through the cultivation of the peculiarity of the group.”
“The structure of every legal order directly influences the distribution of power, economic or otherwise, within its respective community.”
“… economic power, and especially ‘naked’ money power, is by no means a recognized basis of social honor. Nor is power the only basis of social honor. Indeed, social honor, or prestige, may even be the basis of economic power, and very frequently has been.”
“A sense of dignity is the precipitation in individuals of social honor and of conventional demand which a positively privileged status group raises for the deportment of its members.”
“When the basis of the acquisition and distribution of goods are relatively stable, stratification by status is favored.”
“Without exception every sphere of social action is profoundly influenced by structures of dominancy.”
“Wherever it exists, direct democratic administration is unstable. With every development of economic differentiation arises the probability that administration will fall into the hands of the wealthy.”
“[When] all functionaries are integrated into a hierarchy culminating in one single head… predominance of the members… rests upon the so-called ‘law of small numbers’. The ruling minority can quickly reach understanding among its members; it is thus able at any time quickly to initiate that rationally organized action which is necessary to preserve its position of power. Consequently it can easily squelch any action of the masses threatening its power…”
“A circle of people who are accustomed to obedience to the orders of leaders and who also have a personal interest in the continuance of the domination by virtue of their own participation and the resulting benefits, have divided among themselves the exercise of those functions which will serve the continuation of the domination and are holding themselves continuously ready for their exercise. This is what is meant by ‘organization.’”
“… ‘organizational structure’ [is the] way of distributing the powers of command.”
“… the continued exercise of every domination always has the strongest need of self-justification through appealing to the principles of its legitimation.”
“The validity of a power of command may be expressed, first, in a system of consciously made rational rules (which may be either agreed upon or imposed from above), which meet with obedience as generally binding norms whenever such obedience is claimed by him whom the rule designates. In that case every single bearer of powers of command is legitimized by that system of rational norms, and his power is legitimate insofar as it corresponds with the norm. Obedience is thus given to the norms rather than to the person.”
“Rationally regulated association within a structure of domination finds its typical expression in bureaucracy.”
“Characteristics of Modern Bureaucracy – Modern officialdom functions in the following manner:
- I. There is the principle of official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, that is, by laws or administrative regulations. This means:
  - (1) The regular activities required for the purpose of the bureaucratically governed structure are assigned as official duties.
  - (2) The authority to give the commands required for the discharge of these duties is distributed in a stable way and is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coercive means, physical, sacerdotal, or otherwise, which may be placed at the disposal of officials.
  - (3) Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these duties and for the exercise of the corresponding rights; only persons who qualify under general rules are employed.
  - In the sphere of the state these three elements constitute a bureaucratic agency, in the sphere of the private economy they constitute a bureaucratic enterprise.
- II. The principles of office hierarchy and of channels of appeal stipulate a clearly established system of super- and sub-ordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones. Such a system offers the governed the possibility of appealing, in a precisely regulated manner, the decision of a lower office to the corresponding superior authority. With the full development of the bureaucratic type, the office hierarchy is monocratically organized.
- III. The management of the modern office is based upon written documents (the ‘files’), which are preserved in their original or draft form, and upon a staff of subaltern officials and scribes of all sorts. The body of officials working in an agency along with the respective apparatus of material implements and the files makes up a bureau. In principle, the modern organization of the civil service separates the bureau from the private domicile of the official and, in general, segregates official activity from the sphere of private life. Public monies and equipment are divorced from the private property of the official.
- IV. Office management… usually presupposes thorough training in a field of specialization.
- V. When the office is fully developed, official activity demands the full working capacity of the official, irrespective of the fact that the length of his obligatory working hours in the bureau may be limited.
- VI. The management of the office follows general rules, which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be learned. Knowledge of these rules represents a special technical expertise which the officials possess. It involves jurisprudence, administrative or business management. The reduction of modern office management to rules is deeply embedded in its very nature.”
“Whether he is in a private office or a public bureau, the modern official… always strives for and usually attains a distinctly elevated social esteem vis-a-vis the governed.”
“The development of the money economy is a presupposition of a modern bureaucracy insofar as the compensation of officials today takes the form of money salaries. The money economy is of very great importance for the whole bearing of bureaucracy… without a money economy the bureaucratic structure can hardly avoid undergoing substantial internal changes, or indeed transformation into another structure.”
“… the relative optimum for the success and maintenance of a rigorous mechanization of the bureaucratic apparatus is offered by an assured salary connected with the opportunity of a career that is not dependent upon mere accident and arbitrariness. Taut discipline and control which at the same time have consideration for the official’s sense of honor, and the development of prestige sentiments of the status group as well as the possibility of public criticism, also work in the same direction.”
“… the basis of bureaucratization has always been a certain development of administrative tasks, both quantitative and qualitative.”
“The decisive reason for the advance of the bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization… Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration, and especially in its monocratic form… as far as complicated tasks are concerned, paid bureaucratic work is not only more precise but… it is often cheaper than even formally unremunerated honorific service… Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations.”
“Bureaucracy is the means of transforming social action into rationally organized action… Under otherwise equal conditions, rationally organized and directed action is superior to every kind of collective behavior…”
“… bureaucracy… is a precision instrument which can put itself at the disposal of quite varied interests, purely political as well as purely economic ones, or any other sort.”
“The democratization of society in its totality… is an especially favorable basis of bureaucratization…”
“The power position of a fully developed bureaucracy is always great, under normal conditions overtowering.”
“Only the expert knowledge of private economic interest groups in the field of business is superior to the expert knowledge of the bureaucracy.”
“… miscalculations in a capitalist enterprise are paid for by losses, perhaps by its existence.”
“Only with the bureaucratization of the state and of law in general can one see a definite possibility of a sharp conceptual separation of an objective legal order from the subjective rights of the individual which it guarantees, as well as that of the further distinction between public law, which regulates the relationships of the public agencies among each other and with the subjects, and private law which regulate the relationships of the governed individuals among themselves.”
“… religious cleavage cuts vertically through all strata.”
“If we were to attempt a definition in purely economic terms, the city would be a settlement whose inhabitants live primarily from commerce and the trades rather than from agriculture… A further characteristic… might have to be a certain multiplicity of the trades practiced… A further characteristic is required for us to speak of a ‘city’: the existence of a regular, and not only occasional, exchange of goods in the settlement itself, an exchange which constitutes an essential component of the livelihood and the satisfaction of needs of the settlers – in other words: a market… Accordingly, we shall speak of a ‘city’ in the economic sense of the word only if the local population satisfies an economically significant part of its everyday requirements in the local market, and if a significant part of the products bought there were acquired or produced specifically for sale on the market by the local population or that of the immediate hinterland. A city, then, is always a market center.”
“Collaboration is by no means essential for the concept of consensual action.”
“Democratization and demagogy belong together…”

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“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” – Max Weber