ABSTRACT
The chapter takes as its point of departure the passing of the “Weberian moment” in mid-20th-century social science, characterized by unified narratives of modernization and secularization, an emphasis on broad historically based cleavages, and a focus on the Nation-State as the decisive arena for political decision-making. There are, however, resources in Weberian social thought that allow us to interpret elements of the political present in insightful ways: the chapter explores three. The first is the operation of systems of non-legitimate domination, such as the Medieval Italian City-States, to understand the contemporary crisis of authority of most democratic regimes. The second is the operation of charismatic communities, especially as concerns the online dimension of political sociability, in order to explain the leadership dynamics that obtain in challenger parties and populist movements. The third (and most crucial) is the normative claim in favor of a politics of responsibility and its historical aporias, especially in a phase characterized by pervasive mistrust of all social authorities, in which the attribution of authorship of any political fact is a thoroughly fraught endeavor that calls into question the possibility itself of collective political subjectivity.
