Marx, Max Weber, Social Theory

Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline. Conversely, sociology plays a very limited role in IR, particularly in the large, mostly US-based mainstream. Even when IR scholars take ideas and theories from sociology, they are neither particularly interested in this fact nor capable of recognizing the significance of sociology for the history of the discipline as a whole, being as they are generally uninterested in intellectual history, as discussed in the first section. Despite the difficulty that the scarcity of relevant literature represents, in section two we identify some occasionally important traces of social theory on the IR mainstream, which encompasses both a neorealist and a neoliberal paradigm. By contrast, sociology is intrinsic to most IR scholarship outside the mainstream, which is considered here to be part of a third " reflectivist " paradigm, examined in the third section. Here the focus is set on the sociological elements identifiable in IR constructivism, Marxism, and critical theory, as well as in some European national traditions of inquiry. The conclusion buttresses these arguments with some empirical evidence and makes suggestions for further research. Sociologists have traditionally paid scant attention to International Relations (IR) as a social-scientific discipline 1. A small, but telling piece of evidence on sociologists' lack of interest in IR is the absence of an article on this subject in the fifteen-volume International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Sills 1968). The successor edition, extended to twenty-six volumes, included only two entries on IR and a few more on area studies (Smelser and Balter 2001); the most recent edition ignored IR altogether, containing not a single entry on the discipline, but included area studies (Wright 2015). This evidence suggests not only that sociologists' ignorance of IR is widespread but also that it has remained fairly constant across time. At least some IR scholars are conscious of their lack of impact on other disciplines in the social sciences, and regret this situation. Almost twenty years ago, in an unsubstantiated remark, two senior authors admitted that IR employs theory and other ideas from sociology, economics, and political science, but has " little impact on debates in the other social sciences " (Buzan and Little 2000, 3). These regrets were not new, though. Fifteen years earlier, another noted British IR scholar had already admitted that in terms of theory, IR had been " an absorber and importer, not a producer in its own right " (Halliday 1985, 408). These claims were based on intuitions, but their pessimism is symptomatic of a " principle of mutual ignorance " whose existence can be demonstrated. 1 The chapter benefitted from critical comments from Tine Hanrieder and Klaus Schlichte. Magdalena Jetschgo generously helped us with the bibliometric research. We would like to thank them all. However, the sole responsibility for the chapter is ours.

While there has arguable been a partial reception of Weber in IR, we argue here that his ideas have either been misunderstood or neglected. In order to highlight the most valuable Weberian insights, we focus on two topics of crucial importance for IR. First, in our view, Weber’s crucial contribution to the study of states is not his alleged emphasis on the monopoly of violence, but his concern with the problem of legitimacy, which is the key to understanding why individuals actually orient an action towards belief in the idea of a state. Second, Weber conducted seminal historical investigations on religion, the rationalisation of economic ethics, and on organisations that show that the diffusion of institutions has little to do with supposedly uninterested and persuasive scientific and professional associations. Instead, more attention should be paid to rational domination and less to reified concepts such as John Meyer’s ‘rationalized otherhood”. These arguments are also examined empirically.