ABSTRACT
Randall Collins remarks that Max Weber's 'theory of the development of the state is to a considerable extent an analogy to the Marxian theory of the economy'. The underlying principle of sociopolitical organization and change in this analogy is the mode of warfare instead of economic production. The author believes Weber's critical view of modern Western civilization's path of formal rationalization has become singularly pertinent today in view of developments in the nuclear strategic sphere. Indeed, each of the three analytically possible post-Cold War strategic courses he have considered, multipolarization, conventionalization and abolition, manifests in its own way a new and momentous Weberian disjuncture between formal and substantive rationality occurring in that sphere. The longstanding abolitionist premise of nuclear weapons' inherent moral absurdity has been losing the historical foundation of its formally rational cogency, when the distinction between the danger flowing from an adversary's nuclear arsenal and from one's own was effectively blurred.
