Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 17 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

Max Weber analyzed politics from the perspective of Chancen for actors, and he never separated world politics from domestic politics. The “Westphalian balance” between great European powers shaped Weber’s views on international polity. However, he also regarded Western individualism, human rights, and parliamentary democracy as necessary qualities to possess in order to be recognized as a great power. This vision provided the basis for his wartime critique of the expansionist tendencies in German foreign policy and for his demand for the parliamentarization of German politics. After the end of World War I, Weber used Woodrow Wilson’s idea of the League of Nations as the basis for a proposal on new treaty legislation on war guilt. By doing so, he also identified chances for introducing supranational elements to world politics. The final part of the chapter applies a Weberian political imagination to the interpretation of the United Nations and the European Union as supranational institutions.

Keywords: world politics, international polity, Westphalian balance, wartime journalism, League of Nations, supranationalism, United Nations, European Union

Kari Palonen

Kari Palonen is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His books deal with the concept of politics (A Struggle with Time, 2006), the principles of conceptual history (Politics and Conceptual Histories, 2014), textual analysis of politics (Debates, Rhetoric and Political Action, 2017, with Claudia Wiesner and Taru Haapala), and parliamentary procedure and rhetoric (Parliamentary Thinking. Procedure, Rhetoric and Time, 2018). His Weber books include Das Webersche Moment (1998), Eine Lobrede für Politiker (2002), Objektivität als faires Spiel (2010), A Political Style of Thinking (2017), and the collection Max Webers Begriffspolitik (2019).

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.