Notes on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ In ‘From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology”

“politics comprises…independent leadership in action”
-	specifically “the leadership, or the influencing of leadership of a political association of a state” (p.77)

this prompts the questions – ‘what is a political association?’ ‘What is a state?’

a state can be defined “only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it” (p.78)
-	that specific means is FORCE
-	“today the relation between state and violence is an especially intimate one” (p.78)

the following definition therefore applies:

“a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a give territory” (p.78)

“note that territory is one of the characteristics of the state”

in practice “the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it” (p.78)

“like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by the means of…legitimate violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be” (p.78)

What are the “inner justifications” or “basic legimations of democracy”?

-	traditional- what has always been, and so continues
-	charismatic- a leader of “extraordinary and personal” qualities (p.79)
-	legal- “the belief in the virtue and validity of legal statute” (p.79)