Race and its reformulation in Max Weber: Cultural Germanism as political imperialism

Abstract

Weber rejected the notion of race founded on innate characteristics, and instead developed one based on cultural and political factors. The importance of Weber’s distinctive characterization of race cannot be appreciated when consideration is given only to his treatment of minorities. Examination, however, of Weber’s account of the German people as a Herrenvolk, master race, consolidated by shared cultural values and realized through the expansive practices of a Machtstaat or power-state, indicates a complex ethnonational conceptualization of race. Weber’s approach to race as an ethnonational manifestation is important for understanding his sociology as well as his commitment to German imperialism.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s forgotten sociology of morality: Contesting the foundations and informing the future of the sociology of morality

“…Du Bois’s primary and overarching contribution to studies of morality, which allows his work to make a contribution to contemporary sociologies of morality that Weberian and Durkheimian frameworks do not, lies in his centralisation of the relationship between racial power, histories of oppression and moral status. As recent post-colonial critiques have argued, while race and colonialism were implicit to the ‘founding fathers’ accounts of the development of (Western) modernity, ‘there is little extended discussion of race in Weber’s writing’ (Barbalet, 2022, p. 1) and ‘Durkheim barely mentioned colonialism’ or the effects of slavery in his social and moral theories (Bhambra & Holmwood, 2021, p. 143). Just as the spectre of colonialism, at once ‘intrinsic’ and yet ‘rendered unseen’, has had consequences for how sociology in general has been formulated (Bhambra, 2007, p. 21), so too has this had consequences for the sociological study of morality.…”