Between Charisma and Domination: On Max Weber's Critique of Democracy

Prominent strands of contemporary democratic theory, by figuring genuine democratic agency as fundamentally disruptive, present conventional social and political institutions merely as sites of calculation and normalization. This article challenges such a view by tracing its origins in Max Weber's theory of domination. Even as many democratic theorists repudiate the political consequences of Weber's thought, they fail to fully confront the sociotheoretic categories underpinning his vision, such that these categories continue to structure conceptions of democratic agency and horizons of practical possibility in democratic theory. Here, I argue that Weber's democratic skepticism arises not, as is commonly thought, from a philosophical repudiation of the concept of legitimacy, but rather from his analysis of the origins of value systems in extraordinary ruptures with everyday experience. To move beyond Weber, democratic theorists must challenge both his distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary and his reduction of institutional politics to domination and technical control.