That sentence alone makes Anter’s book look ridiculous to any careful reader of the existing English language translation of Weber’s principal text Economy and Society. Anter writes - “Neither here nor in any other part of Weber’s writings can we find a positive assessment of impersonal rule”. The most recently published major English language book on Weber - Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State by Andreas Anter, which is a 2014 translation of Anter ’s German original published 1995 - is similarly dismissive and critical of the impersonality concept, and utterly misleading in its interpretation.
Richard Swedberg’s influential Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology mentions impersonality only twice, and dismissively. All these submissions pointed out the weaknesses in Douglass North's work on institutions.Īs I discuss in my book (pp 37-8), the theory of institutional impersonality was ignored even in the most prestigious writings on Weber. With the exception of Max Weber (possibly also Gianfranco Poggi and one or two other partial exceptions) I am not aware of any scholar who made impersonality the centrepiece of a developmental model in the way I attempted to do publicly since 2003 in individual submissions to top flight UK and USA academic publishers.
As I am sure even Mansfield would admit, it was hardly a comprehensive or deep analysis of state impersonality. Yet, other than Douglass North’s Violence and Social Orders, Harvey Mansfield’s short chapter is the one and only modern citation Francis Fukuyama provides for the theory of institutional impersonality which constitutes the entire conceptual framework for his 2014 book Political Order and Political Decay! But Mansfield only flags the impersonality concept in a brief and context-specific 14-page chapter on Machiavelli.
Harvey Mansfield may be the most notable example. At a general level the impersonality or depersonalisation of the state had often been included in writings on philosophy, political science, history, and so on.
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