Weber and politics

the essay deals with several political aspects of weber's ideas, stressing both their continued interest for current debates in political science and the difficulties and negative consequences of some of them. in the first section, weber's model of bureaucracy, recently attacked from a so-called "managerial" perspective, is defended from both the point of view of efficiency and of democracy. the next section, after relating weber's views on legitimacy with certain assumptions and embarassments of the rational choice approach, his ideas on the market are elaborated with regard to their analytic and doctrinaire contribution to an appropriate conception of political development and to the model of a pluralist society. in the last section, the discussion turns around weber's confusions and inconsistencies on the themes of rationality and ethics.