This chapter discusses the most famous hypothesis about the development of property law: that Western social evolution was determined by a passage “from slavery to feudalism,” from the ownership of humans in the slave economies of Antiquity to the ownership of land in the feudal economies of the Middle Ages. That hypothesis was embraced by Marx, Weber, Bloch, and many others, but has been rejected today, because it rested on claims about economic history that have been proven dubious. The chapter argues that there was truth in the classical hypothesis, but that it should be reinterpreted as an account of transformation in the legal imagination. The chapter investigates the origins of the classic theories, and makes the case that the classic thinkers erred by mistaking the imaginative orientations in the legal sources for the economic realities.

The chapter examines the methodological conundrums of producing knowledge about past traditions through present-day realities, a dilemma we navigate using the “progressive-regressive” method, a term first articulated by Marc Bloch. But beyond the study of the past, the study of the non-Western world poses particular challenges, which we explicate using Joan Cocks’ concept of neo-cosmopolitanism. The Islamic world, while culturally and historically distinct, has always operated within global circuits of economic and political exchange and has shared social imaginaries with the universal civilization of a given time. Where necessary we transcend the limits of three epistemic postures: Enlightenment liberalism, Orientalism, and postmodernism. We examine the status of “science” in the Abbasid world in relation to Ghazālī’s distinction between profane natural knowledge and sacred signs (āyat). Political fragmentation and economic change overlapped with Islam’s encounter with foreign scientific traditions. Ghazālī intervened to differentiate ẓāhir (the apparent) and baṭin (the hidden) as reconcilable components of knowledge, rendering these encounters theoretically coherent.

The Epilogue argues why it matters that we understand how the first formulation of a Reformation modernization theory emerged in Enlightenment public debate in order to understand the ways in which nineteenth-century thinkers actively confronted or recast an Enlightenment intellectual construct. The Epilogue shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, the emphasis on the epochal turning point to modernity had slowly shifted from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. The Epilogue looks at four perspectives of German thinking about the Reformation and Protestantism: history, religion, philosophy, and culture (including the Kulturkampf and Kulturprotestantismus) and points to the ways forward for German thinking about both the Reformation and the Enlightenment after the Second World War.

This chapter evaluates previous scholarship on charismatic leadership in the ancient world, pointing out the lack of a definitive analysis of Max Weber’s actual statements on charisma and its routinization. It includes a discussion of the routinization of charisma from scholars in organizational leadership as well as political science. It also examines the transition of power after the death of Augustus. Although our sources are problematic, we can see Tiberius trying to simultaneously imitate Augustus’ actions in 27 BC while also declaring his reverence for his predecessor and his own inferiority.

In this chapter I return to the classics of bellicist theory to formalize their insights and derive concrete observational expectations for nineteenth-century Latin America. I first look at the work of Otto Hintze and Max Weber, who suggest a more holistic approach to the effects of war on the process of state formation which combines both pre-war and post-war phases in a single overarching theory. I then use the more modern concepts and logics of historical institutionalism to generate clearer predictions from their theories. I propose that, in a pre-war phase and when hostilities are taking place, mobilization will trigger taxation and repression—i.e., the extraction-coercion cycle. Yet, war outcomes will determine whether those contingent policies will become institutionalized after the critical juncture of war. While victory will consolidate a trajectory of state formation, defeat will render state institutions illegitimate and set losers into a path-dependent process of state weakening. Finally, I discuss actors and mechanisms specific to nineteenth-century Latin America and lay out the observational implications of my argument.

Tracing the trajectory of journalism fields in Africa from the 1700s to the early to mid-2000s, this chapter highlights the tensions between the political and journalism fields in postcolonial Africa. It focuses on the numerous ways political fields sought to assert control over journalism through colonial-era laws and using their financial muscle to cajole the fields. It shows that ideas about the role of journalism fields were contested both within and outside the field, with some in the field agreeing with the political field with regard to a limited approach to journalistic freedoms. It shows how political elites were keen on controlling journalism fields upon independence primarily because they were aware of the fields’ enormous potential to challenge their legitimacy after using them to push for independence.

Max Weber understood how democracy in the seventeenth century was tied to Calvinist individualism and the rejection of external forms. Thomas Hobbes hated the consequences of puritan rule and argued that politics needed to accept the principle of the mask in order to create social order. The lawyer William Prynne in his Histrio-mastix portrayed theatre as the root of all evils in the royalist regime, but he himself proved a masterly performer in working to undermine the regime. The most radical democratic thinking came from the ‘Levellers’ who harked back to the Garden of Eden and natural human innocence. Shakespeare interrogated the ambivalent myth of Eden in Henry VI Part Two, as did Milton in Paradise Lost. The Putney debates constitute the main focus of this chapter. Common soldiers with Leveller views argued with their generals about constitutional principles. Close analysis of the debate reveals the complications that followed from claims to sincerity, couched as insistence that because God had spoken to them speakers were following their consciences, avoiding rhetoric or hypocrisy. The religious context in fact allowed a high level of democratic exchange.

Since 1979 I have developed the M/M approach. This book answers 10 critics. It is strucured in three parts Culture, Structure and Agency according to SAC, held necessary to any explanation in the social order

This chapter covers the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Sering’s professorship in Bonn, the Althoff System, Bismarck, and Colonialism. It also explores the expulsion of Poles and Jews from eastern Germany in 1885, the involvement of Sering, Schmoller, and Tiedemann in the writing of the memorandum for the creation of the Program of Inner Colonization, and how the program began in 1886. It discusses Sering’s time as a professor in Bonn during 1884 to 1889, and the publication of his book on the North America trip, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas in Gegenwart und Zukunft. Landwirthschaft, Kolonisation und Verkehrswesen in den Vereinigten Staaten und in Britisch-Nordamerika (The Agricultural Competition of North America in the Present and Future. Agriculture, Colonization, and Transportation in the United States and in British North America) in 1887. Sering became a professor in Berlin in 1889. Inner Colonization during the Caprivi Era is discussede, alongside Hugenberg and Schwerin. In 1893, Sering published The Inner Colonization in Eastern Germany. Max Weber, who was rabidly anti-Polishm, supported Sering. Sering’s second journey to America was in 1890, where he attended the World’s Fair in Chicago. The chapter also covers the Frederick Jackson Turner Frontier Thesis, Hohenlohe, Werner Sombart, and Socialists of the Chair.

In Chapter 3, I address religion as a moral foundation for capitalism by discussing the lives and writings of Max Weber and R. H. Tawney. Classical economists after J. S. Mill limited the motivations of economic man to narrow self-interest and increased the mathematical formalism of their discipline, which tied their hands in arguing for capitalism. I begin by discussing the narrowing of arguments for capitalism in the nineteenth century by classical economists and the resistance to this narrowing by historical economists in Germany. Next, I discuss Max Weber and his broad critique of capitalism which included important social and moral issues as well as economic considerations. Given their opposing views, I contrast Weber’s critique of capitalism with that of Karl Marx. I then discuss the British economist R. H. Tawney and his critique of capitalism as a devout Christian on the political left. Tawney’s attempts to address the social injustices of the British industrial revolution led him to support the British Labour Party, but he rejected Marx’s anti-religious views and his emphasis on class division. This sets up a discussion of the role of religion in the development of capitalism based on Weber and Tawney’s two seminal works.

This chapter is an account of my experiences as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia between 2004 and 2012. It describes the role of the dean and the structural position of the Arts and Sciences and the relationship between graduate teaching and research and undergraduate programs and units. It then goes on to characterize conflicts and controversies around the politics of the Middle East, questions around academic freedom and the place of political speech inside and outside the classroom, controversies over ethnic studies, core curricula and debates over “general education” and the “liberal arts” as well as about the relationship between core courses and ideas about the primacy of “western civilization,” university rankings, university budgets in relation to the financial crisis, relations between administration and faculty, and questions concerning intellectual as well as political purity and responsibility.

I argue that moral intuitions are guided by social heuristics, which are not distinctive from other heuristics in the adaptive toolbox. One and the same heuristic can solve problems that we call moral and those we do not. That perspective helps explain the processes underlying moral intuition rather than taking it as an unexplained primitive. While moral psychologists debate over whether our moral sense is reflective and rational, as in Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory, or intuitive and nonrational, as in Jonathan Haidt’s theory, I believe that any assumed opposition and ranking is a misleading start. Both intuition and deliberation are involved in moral behavior, as they are in decision-making in general. The result of deliberation may become automized over a lifetime or generations, or intuitive judgments may be justified post hoc. If Darwin is right that the function of morality is to create and maintain the coherence of groups, then social heuristics are the tools towards that goal. This adaptive view explains apparent systematic inconsistencies in moral behavior and takes the phenomenon of moral luck seriously. Virtue is found not only in people, but also in environments.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, members of an established, English-speaking middle class built a new category of work for themselves. This book uses US, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand occupation statistics, archives, professional journals, and newspapers to understand what the history of nursing, accountancy, teaching, medicine, law, engineering, journalism, and social work can tell us about class in the ‘long twentieth century’. This chapter gives a historical and theoretical introduction to the rise of the professional class as a distinctly transnational event. The Anglo world is not a matter of comparative ‘case studies’, but a network of English-speaking communities that were regionally distinctive but operated as part of a shared cultural and economic world. It was a world built on Indigenous dispossession. Settlers brought their moral frameworks to bear on the ‘civilizing’ that they believed they needed. The virtues that they built into each profession, such as duty, probity, and charity, were performed as real, embodied work in every settlement. Their morality was made material and invested for social and economic profit. They became virtue capitalists.

The outcome of the Great War shook to its foundations the idea of the Westphalian state, which existed primarily for itself and its own security. This chapter explores three alternatives to the Westphalian state, at the intersection of political and intellectual history. A ’Wilsonian imperium’ posited a world governed by a transnational community of liberal citizens that would regulate state behaviour. The state would remain an institutionalised locus of sovereignty, but all states would be guided by a common moral compass. At first, a ’Bolshevik imperium’ envisaged world revolution, which eventually would be able to dispense with the Westphalian state altogether. However, in the process of winning the civil war, the Bolsheviks began to turn the former imperial Russia into a unique species of imperial state, which never wholly renounced the ideological goals of the Bolshevik imperium. The successor state appeared to resemble the Westphalian state, in its fixation of borders and security. However, it rested on new and unstable foundations – the imperative to maximise and naturalse both ethnic and historical boundaries. In complementary ways, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt opened up a space in the theory of successor state sovereignty that could be occupied by the race, or Volk. No reimagining of state sovereignty after the Great War did more to disrupt and ultimately overthrow the interwar international system.

Throughout his life, Martin Buber insisted that his dialogical thinking was “not the result of reading but of personal experience.” This emphasis on his own generative experience does not vitiate the fact that, as Buber likewise acknowledged, “in all ages it has undoubtedly been glimpsed that the reciprocal essential relationship between two beings signifies a primal opportunity of being, and one, in fact, that enters into the phenomenon that the human being exists.” Although historical antecedents pointed toward Buber’s dialogical thinking, its crystallization occurred during the tumultuous years of the First World War, when he underwent a conversion, personal as well as intellectual, from the mysticism of his prewar writings to his signature postwar dialogical thinking.

This chapter starts to analyse the institutional frameworks of different international courts and tribunals in comparative perspective. More importantly, it introduces the invisible army of legal bureaucrats (clerks, registry and secretariat officials, and arbitral secretaries) who assist international adjudicators in their daily duties. The story focuses on their backgrounds, their modes of recruitment and promotion, their relationship with the judges and arbitrators they are called to serve, and the ambiguities inherent in that relationship. From here onwards, the role of bureaucrats in the judicial process will come into sharper relief. Their duties typically include: summarizing the parties’ arguments for the benefit of the adjudicators, conducting legal and factual research on the disputed issues, circulating internal memoranda that suggest options on how to solve the case, assisting in the preparation of oral questions for hearings, attending deliberations, and drafting the final judgments or awards.

Part I, “Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule,” comprises one chapter. It stipulates the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings for the organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy to challenge the view that British colonial bureaucracy did not have a set of distinct institutional forms and theories of administration. It proposes that “looking over the shoulder of the bureaucrat” from the perspective of colonial officials provides a set of organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy that were not in and of themselves, but rather served as sources of power. It generates a synthetic model of this type of bureaucracy to provide scaffolding for the analysis of how explicitly racialized practices and a perpetual state of emergency affect bureaucratic organization and practice.