HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 5 No.

3
© 1992 SAGE (London, Newbury Park and New Delhi) 19

Max Weber’s Nietzschean

conception of power
MARK E. WARREN

Max Weber defined power as ’the probability that one actor within a social

relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance,
regardless of the basis on which this probability rests’ (Weber, 1978: 53). While
Weber’s concept of power is not universally accepted, two key elements are
replicated in virtually every definition of power as a potentially conflictual
relationship between dominant and subordinate individuals (e.g. Oppenheim,
1981: 29-31 ). The first element is an understanding of power as an expression of
the wills and capacities of individuals. The second is a distinction between
relations of power and other social relationships in terms of a conflict of interest
between individuals.
Most social scientists have found Weber’s definition congenial. On the one
hand, his definition refers power in institutions and structures to individuals and
the relations between them. That is, it seems consistent with methodological
individualism, and thus seems to accord with a mainstream consensus about
what counts as an explanation. On the other hand, his definition has a normative
bearing on liberal-democratic politics. Because it distinguishes power relations
from other kinds of social relations - consensual and voluntary ones, for example
-

it can help to identify social relations that, just because they are relations of
power, we may wish to structure by means of political rights and protections. In
contrast, definitions of power so broad as to include all social relations -
Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s cosmological definitions are examples - would seem
to devalue rights and protections because they fail to distinguish between power
and other kinds of social relations.
In this article I take issue with this conventional understanding of Weber’s
approach to power and offer an alternative account. The problem is not with the
supposed advantages of Weber’s definition. He did value explanatory con-
creteness (Hekman, 1983). And he quite explicitly fashioned his sociology to

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20

understand the limits and possibilities of individual capacities for a self-directed

life, a key justification of liberal-democracy (Warren, 1988a). The problem is that
Weber’s definition of power has too often been assimilated to patterns of
explanation that he himself rejected, patterns that also involve more general
inadequacies. Weber’s general formulation - that power consists in A’s ability to
impose his will on B despite B’s resistance - has typically been elaborated by
means of behavioral or rational choice methodologies. Although apparently

consistent with Weber’s intent, these elaborations in fact undermine his

approach and produce conceptual paradoxes.
Behavioralists focus on overt conflicts between actors in which one actor can
be observed to prevail. The premium here is on observation: behavioralists rely
on self-reports of the interests in terms of which conflicts are defined, and on
observable outcomes of conflict situations. Weber rejected behavioral expla-
nations, however, because he viewed observations as underspecifying expla-
nations owing to the fact that a given behavior can be motivated by a variety of
meanings and intentions (Weber, 1978: 4-24).
Rational choice approaches model conflict by attributing to individuals the
desire and capacity to maximize preferences in a universe of finite satisfactions.
Actors have power when they have disproportionately more means to pursue
their preferences, and ~hey hold these means at the expense of others. This
methodology emphasizes the heuristic power of attributing to individuals a
capacity to pursue their self-interest. Weber, however, saw such attributions of
rationality - already typical of contemporary economics - as reflections of
culturally specific complexes of meaning which themselves need explaining (as he
attempted in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). He viewed the
use of such rational models as interpretative reconstructions of intentionality
rather than general models of agency (Weber, 1949: 83, 89-90).
These departures from Weber’s interpretative sociology would not be very
important were it not for the fact that they introduce paradoxes into Weber’s
concept of power that would not otherwise exist. The paradoxes stem from the
assumption in the standard appropriations of Weber that power originates, as it
were, in agents who are transparent to themselves and autonomous in their
identity and capacities. Power relations are assumed not to alter this transparency
and autonomy.
One difficulty is that reading Weber through this assumption results in
relational definitions of power that cannot also explain the organization-building
qualities of power. On the face of it, social relations that build on conflicts of
interest between autonomous agents would seem to be unpromising ways of
coordinating complex collective actions that require a positive engagement of the
capacities of individuals. As the jargon of management suggests, superiors
’motivate’ their subordinates to do their jobs by appealing to their interests.
Command by threat produces clumsy and half-hearted performances.
Because of such difficulties some social theorists reject the relational view of

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power (’power over’) in favor of a conception that emphasizes the collective

capacities of organizations. Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt, for example,
argue that we should conceive power in terms of the abilities of organizations to
align and coordinate the actions of individuals. As Parsons puts it, power is a
general social resource ’used in the interest of collective goals’ (Parsons,
1960:181;cf. Arendt, 1969).
It is commonly and correctly noted, however, that because the organizational
approach does not include a relational dimension (’power over’), it cannot
identify conflicts of interest, thereby losing the normatively critical function of
the concept. In contrast, the relational approach (’power over’) includes the
normative intuition that the concept of power ought to sort out genuinely
consensual from conflictual relations. Some such critical function surely is
necessary if a concept of power is to have any use for, say, democratic theory. Yet
if the concept is to be useful for explanation, it certainly needs to anticipate the
generative capacities of social organizations. Indeed, this is a central point of
Foucault’s view that in the modern era power is increasingly ’productive’: power
relations develop and discipline the capacities of individuals and align them with
organizations (Foucault, 1983). Likewise with Weber: one of his key explanatory
concerns is with the increasing dynamism and inertia of organizations based on
’rational domination’. Standard appropriations of Weber’s conception of power
seem to exclude this concern with the generative capacities of power - a concern
Parsons and Arendt address only by dismissing critical distinctions between
interests in power relations. We are thus left with a paradoxical trade-off between
explanatory and normative adequacy.
The second paradox is closely related: the relational definition identifies
power in terms of conflict of interest, but turns out to be insensitive to what
Weber took to be the most stable and pervasive form of power, domination,
that is, the kind of power relation in which the compliance of subordinates is
voluntary, or at least not understood by them as a conflictual relation. Indeed,
the paradox shows up in Weber’s definition of domination as ’the probability
that a command with a given specific content will be obeyed by a given group
of persons’ (Weber, 1978: 53). Limiting domination to the ’authoritarian
power of command’ within hierarchical social organizations produces this
elaboration:

[D]omination will thus mean the situation in which the manifested will
(command) of the ruler or rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or
more others (the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that
their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made
the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own
sake. (Weber,1978: 946)

Notice the apparent contradiction: on the one hand, Weber refers to the

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intentions of agents, some of whom issue commands, and others of whom

willingly obey these commands. On the other hand, his wording suggests that
what defines domination is that the ruled obey commands because they find
them meaningful, acting as if they had made ’the content of the command the
maxim of their conduct for its very own sake’. As Dennis Wrong notes of Weber
and his followers, there is a ’genuine paradox ... in the fact that submission to
legitimate authority is voluntary and yet at the same time experienced as
mandatory or compulsory’ (Wrong,1980: 38-9). Domination is a kind of power
relation in which individuals voluntarily acquiesce, but which they do not
experience as conflicting with their interests.
It appears, then, that mainstream appropriations of Weber’s definition of
power fail in at least three ways. First, they fail to explain how capacities of
organizations are generated by power relations. Second, they fail to explain
’deep’ forms of power, domination. Third, they fail normatively: if power
relations cannot be adequately identified, then the rights and protections that
define distributions of power in liberal-democracies may not relate to the
political realities they are supposed to regulate.
We can trace these failures to the models of agency into which Weber’s
definition of power is appropriated. Standard appropriations of Weber hold, in
effect, that individuals can identify their interests apart from the social relations
within which they are embedded. The point is methodologically rather than
theoretically justified: power relations can be identified only if there are ways of
identifying conflicts of interest. And the only alternative to attributing interests
to individuals is to rely on self-reports, or ’revealed preferences’. For reasons of

method, according to this argument, we must assume that individuals are

transparent enough to themselves that they can understand their interests and
judge their social relationships in terms of these interests. Rational choice theory
makes this assumption a priori. Behavioral methodology does not make the
assumption explicitly - indeed, there is no a priori attribution of rationality. But
the methodology dictates the assumption that interests are transparent to the self,
because to hold otherwise would be to attribute non-observable (and hence
non-verifiable) interests (Connolly, 1983: Ch. 3; Lukes, 1974). Thus, by default,
individuals are conceptualized as autonomous agents, self-contained units who
command resources that are external to their self-constitution in order to
maximize preferences.
Certainly part of the reason for relying on ’revealed preferences’ is that we like
to think of individuals as being the best judges of their own interests. The
mainstream appropriations of Weber, however, transform this normatively
desirable but socially contingent capacity into a methodological principle. This is
something that Weber did not do, and when we understand this, the apparent
paradoxes in his thinking about power - indeed, the paradoxes in thinking about
power more generally - will seem less intransigent.

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NIETZSCHE’S INFLUENCE

One way of getting Weber right on this issue is to interpret his conception of
power in light of his Nietzschean inheritance, for this is where we find the most
radical questioning of conceptions of agency. Weber is reported to have written
in a letter that ’one can measure the honesty of a contemporary scholar, and
above all a contemporary philosopher, in his posture toward Marx and
Nietzsche’ (Mitzman, 1970: 182). Marx’s influence has never been much of a
mystery: Weber was always in contact with contemporary socialists, and it is not
difficult to see his sociology as an alternative to Marx that also incorporates him.
It is different with Nietzsche. While most now agree that Nietzsche was an
important figure, there is little agreement as to what his importance was. Thus we
are less sure what he might have meant to Weber. To be sure, there are some clear
lines of influence. Most obviously, Weber’s concern with modern disen-
chantment and the increasing meaninglessness of rationalized culture and
institutions is Nietzschean to the core (Hennis, 1988: Ch. 4; Scaff, 1984: 196;
Schroeder, 1987).
But we have not yet appreciated the extent to which Weber was influenced by
Nietzsche’s rejection of modern understandings of agency. We find this
influence above all in the ways Weber poses his questions: his sociology takes no
particular kind of individuality or personality for granted, but instead asks how
different kinds of agents, personalities, configurations of desire and interpre-
tation come into being. He puts the question in part by asking how individuals’
experiences, social creations, goals and reflexive capacities are formed within
interpretative systems of value. As Hennis has put it, Weber is interested in the
’forms of moral constitution’ of the self (Hennis, 1987:73).’ This is a
Nietzschean problematic. Nietzsche’s critique of modern culture is a result of
pursuing the metaphysics of Christianity and rationalism into modern concep-
tions of subjectivity, so that his critique of modern values is also a critique of
modern conceptions of agency. ’Metaphysical’ conceptions of subjectivity
involve attributing a unity to the self in terms of its interests, goals, values,
meanings, or capacities. But although we may experience the self as a unity, such
unity is not, in Nietzsche’s view, guaranteed by transcendental certainties or by
substantive unity within the self. Rather, unity is given by a projected moral ideal
which is in a constant state of achievement, and the form of unity reflects the
conditions under which the moral ideal is incarnated. What distinguishes
modernity, Nietzsche held, is that the contingency of the self becomes apparent
as a matter of sociocultural fact. He called the experience of this awareness

’nihilism’, because with the disintegration of the moral identities it had taken for
granted, the self loses a meaningful orientation toward the world.
Under these circumstances, Nietzsche thought, we can no longer make do
with the modernist approach of using the self to measure and morally judge the
world. Nietzsche’s most important innovation lies at this juncture: he asks a new

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kind of question, and from this question follows virtually the entirety of his
philosophy. His question is: How are selves - ’types’ as he calls them - forged
out of the practices, interpretations and conditions that make up a form of life?
Practices produce the self, in Nietzsche’s view, according to general existential
demands for meaning - demands, as it were, for agent-unity, a center out of
which the self might act with effect. We do not forge the self under conditions of
our own choosing, however. Indeed, existing social relations of power present
the self with dilemmas for its unity and direction, so that the kind of unity the self
achieves will retain an imprint, as it were, of the power relations under which it is
forged. The kind of self that results from historically contingent practices - a
Christian soul, an ascetic, a rational calculator, a romantic - will have much to do
with the conditions under which the practices are generated. If these conditions
include oppression, power relations can become an essential part of the narrative
through which the self locates its own agent-unity, in this way becoming
essential to self-identity. This is, in effect, the pattern of explanation we find in
Nietzsche’s analysis of the ’slave type’ he viewed as endemic to Christian culture:
he conceives a kind of self that finds power relations essential to its identity just
because it achieves identity through a scriptural narrative that developed in
response to slave conditions of life. Nietzsche, in other words, provides an
analysis of domination, one that Weber borrows, refines and expands in his
Sociology of Religion (Warren, 1988b: Ch. 1; Weber, 1946: Ch. IX). This
analysis, we shall see, provides a template for understanding Weber.
Nietzsche does not generalize his example into a concept of domination,
leaving us to extract it from a single sustained example: his analysis of priestly
power in his critique of Christianity in On the Genealogy of Morals and The
Antichrist. The example is interesting not because Nietzsche gives a full account
of the sociology of Christianity (Weber is much more sensitive to its historical
variations), but because it provides the model of analysis upon which Weber
relies, and which Weber refines and elaborates, notwithstanding his somewhat
disingenuous critique of Nietzsche.’ Nietzsche’s account is well known: he
portrays Christianity in terms of its interpretative constitution of the self, a
constitution that permits and justifies the domination of the Church, while
defining individuals in such a way that their self-identities can be maintained only
by accepting the power of the Church. He looks for the origins of ’the
Christian-moral hypothesis’ and other ascetic ideals in the existential interest
situation of those who suffer, especially at the hands of others (Warren,
1988b: Ch. 1). Suffering is not, in Nietzsche’s view, problematic in itself, but
rather when it is senseless, without meaning (Nietzsche, 1968a: 503-5). Meaning
is not, however, a problem of representing or discovering meanings that are
inherent in the world; it is not a problem of truth as traditionally understood.
Instead, Nietzsche understands meaning as an experience given by individuals’
abilities to interpret their situations in ways that allow them to form a ’will’ - an
orientation toward conditions of self-reproduction. Demands for meaning

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become estranged from practices and are idealized as the problem of ’truth’,
however, when, for reasons of experience or cultural mapping, practices become
so disjoined that individuals can no longer plausibly interpret them as effects of
their ’will’. It is not that humans always connect meaning to will-formation.
Rather, suffering produces the problem of meaning because the ’will’ that one
would have formed through traditional orientations, habitually and without
thinking (’instinctively’, in Nietzsche’s terminology), is no longer possible. This
is why humans ’would rather will nothingness than not will’ (1968: 533).
Suffering at the hands of others produces a problem of meaning because it
violates an existential need for will-formation - a point that Nietzsche seems to
have borrowed loosely from Hegel, and bequeathed directly to Weber. The key
to both Nietzsche’s and Weber’s analyses is that suffering structures interest
situations subject to interpretation.3 Christianity addresses these interest situ-
ations by offering an image of the world that permits a unity of the will by
providing a goal - that is, a projected (and transcendentally protected) identity in
terms of which the unity of the self can be secured over and against worldly

suffering. The Christian narrative about sin, punishment, the need for obedience,
and behavioral conditions of salvation draws much of its strength from its
internal coherence. It makes contact with the world only with respect to a few
painful experiences, experiences that help to underwrite the Christian devalu-
ation of the world. Indeed, this is a condition of its success: the Christian
narrative serves those who subscribe to the story precisely because it inverts the
world. Oppressors will be punished rather than saved, the ’will’ that is lacking in
practice is restored to individuals as children of God, the community missing on
earth will exist in an afterlife, and the suffering that one experiences is nonetheless
a just consequence of human sin (Nietzsche, 1968a: 482-8).

Because the projection is ’imaginary’, however, it must be preserved in large

part by intellectual means. This allows interpretative skill to become a means of
cultural distinction, and thus for a monopoly over interpretative resources by a
strata of priestly intellectuals (cf. Schluchter, 1981 : 23). The priest explains
otherwise meaningless experiences through a Christian schematic, in terms of
which they come to make sense, and can be integrated into a sensible life-plan. In
this way, Christians become dependent upon the priest’s exegesis of the world
for their self-identity.
The structure of the Christian world-view is uniquely suited to the kind of
interpretative privilege that the priest claims for himself. The reason for this,
Nietzsche points out, is that Christian interpretations - in contrast to earlier
magical, mythical and philosophical modes of thought - remove all criteria of
truth from the sensible world of everyday experience, with the exception of
experiences of hardship and bad conscience that serve as evidence of guilt and sin.
The other-worldly structure of Christianity allows priests to create the view that
all natural events are conditioned by invisible laws, causalities and forces to
which they alone have access (Nietzsche, 1954: 627-9 ; 1967: 88-91). ’When the

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natural causes of a deed are no longer &dquo;natural&dquo;, but thought of as caused by the
conceptual specters of superstition, by &dquo;God&dquo;, by &dquo;spirits&dquo;, by &dquo;souls&dquo;, as if they
were merely &dquo;moral&dquo; consequences, as reward, punishment, hint, means of

education, then the presupposition of knowledge has been destroyed’

(Nietzsche, 1954: 630; cf. 1967: 115-16; 1982: 58). The narrative that reads all
’natural’ or experienced events in terms of a shadow world of invisible actors and
fictitious happenings produces a conceptual incapacity to engage reality, and
thus deepens whatever de facto, politically maintained incapacity already exists.
This, Nietzsche claims, is the priest’s ’greatest crime against humanity’
(Nietzsche, 1954: 630).
The priest’s intellectual authority resides not only in his ability to locate causal
agents in a non-empirical, metaphysical world but also in his interpretation of
suffering and bad conscience as empirical evidence for his exegesis. Since
suffering produces a hope for redemption from suffering, the priest increases the
likelihood that his interpretative authority will be accepted by tying the promise
of redemption to acceptance of his exegesis. In this way, control over the
resources of self-identity becomes a means of power.
We can see how Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity provides an analysis of
power that does not find its way neatly into standard definitions. Clearly the
relationship between the Church and its followers is not one of oppression, as in
the case of master and slave. Slaves do not harbor illusions that their interests are
the same as their masters’. Rather, the relationship is one of domination: priests
exercise power through their interpretative role in defining the wills of
individuals. They control, as it were, the cognitive life of individuals - not
directly, of course, but through their strategic location in reproducing a system of
thought against a background of needs for meaning that are heightened and even
induced by oppression and suffering. In exchange for obedience, the Church
provides access to means of salvation (or, as Weber adds in discussing Protestant
variants, means of legitimating good fortune). What makes this particular kind of
power relation one of domination - a value-rational form of legitimate
domination, in Weber’s terms - is that although it is not exercised ’against the
wills’ of subordinates since their ’wills’ are shaped by the relationship, this
relationship nonetheless has a compulsory quality: priests have control over the
means of salvation, and this control is used to secure obedience (Nietzsche,
1968a: 561-5; Weber,1978: 490-2; cf. Nietzsche,1974: 304-10).
At the same time, Nietzsche’s critique builds on, or at least presupposes, a
counterfactual account of interests. The ’willfulness’ of the obedience does not
mean that the power relationship is in the interests of subordinates. According to

Nietzsche, the priestly rulers of the Church do not simply minister to the
sufferings of their followers. They exploit suffering in such a way that they gain
control over the capacities of sufferers to sustain their sense of subjectivity.
Nietzsche views the priest ’type’ as an ideologist who employs politically
produced sufferings to solidify his interpretative authority, while destroying the

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autonomy of his followers by disconnecting reason from worldly situations

(Nietzsche, 1954: 595-8; 1968a : 561-5 ; 1982:48). This is why he can claim in
discussing Pauline Christianity that ’with morality it becomes easiest to lead
mankind by the nose’ (Nietzsche,1954: 621 ). What is wrong with priestly power
is that it disconnects self-identity from self-directed practices. Power relations
that do not allow individuals to identify themselves in terms of a consistent
pattern of effects in the world must develop imaginary identities - and this is
precisely what allows for and defines a relationship of domination. The
counterfactual account of interests follows: humans are in a pathological
condition when their identities are not the residuals of their practices - that is,
when their practices are controlled by others, and their identities are tran-
scendentally guaranteed. This is, as it were, an analytic account of Nietzsche’s
most important normative distinction between ’strength’ and ’weakness’.
Domination secures weakness in the form of a self-interpretation disconnected
from practices.
Before summarizing Nietzsche’s contributions to Weber’s approach, we need
to consider briefly Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power. The problem is this:

if, Nietzsche argues, the world is will to power, does this not make any
as

particular analysis of power beside the point? The answer is no: the analyses
operate on different, although interrelated, levels in Nietzsche’s thought. I have
argued extensively elsewhere that in characterizing the world as will to power,
Nietzsche develops a general relational ontology of practices (Warren,
1988b: Ch. 4). The concept simultaneously denotes the motivation to form a
will, the interpretative structures within which wills are identified, and
experiential conditions and resistances. Wills, Nietzsche argues in an important
aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil, are ex post interpretative identities that
reflect a narrative continuity of practices (Nietzsche, 1968b: 215-17). One
interprets consistent effects of practices in terms of a unified origin, which
evolves into the interpretation ’I’. Domination, however, is based on a broken
link between practices and self-identity; identities that reflect domination are, in
Nietzsche’s terms, ’pathological’ developments of will to power.
We find, then, the distinctions necessary to a relational definition of power
within Nietzsche’s general ontology of power. He chooses to call all practices
’power’, but then distinguishes some of these as ’pathological’ - that is,
configurations of practice that displace self-identity into a realm of non-
contingent, transcendental identities. Nietzsche’s analysis thus fits the relational
definition of power. It does so, however, without producing the two paradoxes
of the standard elaboration. First, we can see that the fact that there is a conflict of
interest does not mitigate the organization-building qualities of power. The
instability of master-slave relations as compared to the stability of the Church
testifies to this. But we can also see why conceptually: hierarchical relations that
engage the wills of subordinates are less costly for the dominant. Obedience
secured voluntarily does not require police, guards, or overseers. It does require

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28

guidance, discipline and codes of conduct. But these are internalized as part of the
same interpretative structure that provides the payoff in meaning and identity for

subordinates, and so is relatively easy to enforce. The power holder becomes a

source of comfort, a guide to secure the promised rewards. As we shall see, it is
for parallel reasons that Weber understands the power relations of bureaucracies
- ‘rational domination’ - to be productive and dynamic: there is no overt conflict
between the wills of subordinates and the tasks to which they are assigned in
bureaucratic organizations. The personalities of bureaucrats are formed through
their ’calling’, which they understand in terms of the role they serve in a
rationalized organization. Although Weber recognizes that the Protestant sense
of ’calling’ has long since disappeared, that we no longer have a choice but to
work for rationalized organizations, these organizations still mold identities in
ways that motivate. Every good manager knows that the essence of ’productive’
power relations lies in inducing subordinates to do their best with guidance,
recognition and the promise of future upward mobility. In exchange, managers
gain loyalty, a proper attitude, a productive team player. In Foucault’s terms,
power becomes productive.
From this perspective, we can also see that the second paradox of the standard
definition dissolves - the fact that domination involves obedience that is
experienced as simultaneously compulsory and voluntary. One obeys because
doing so provides meaning, an identity, a place, a purpose. In this sense, the
obedience is essential to self-identity, and one ’willingly’ obeys because the will
depends on it. At the same time, the consequences of disobedience - loss of
salvation, security, meaning and place - are so obvious that one may experience
the same commands as compulsory, in the sense that to do otherwise is
unthinkable.

WEBER’S ANALYSIS OF DOMINATION

Let ustake a closer look at Weber’s conception of domination to see whether it

really takes the Nietzschean form I am suggesting. Clearly Weber does not
attempt a general ontology of power, as does Nietzsche. Weber’s view of the
world does, of course, include many of the attributes that would follow from
holding a Nietzschean ontology. For example, he views his objects of
explanation as contingent practices (’actions’). And his explanations of social
structures, types of individuals and historical logics refer back to these
relationships. Weber is careful not to project metaphysical conceptions of
subjectivity into individuality, nor an intrinsic logic into society or historical
development (Warren, 1988c: 465-71). To do so would be to circumvent their
explanation, by projecting conceptual origins rather than by locating contingent
constellations of events. Finally, like Nietzsche, he views conflict as endemic to
social life, even if it is channelled into peaceful pursuits and friendly rivalries.

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What I am concerned to show here, however, is that Weber’s comments on

that subset of power relations he calls ’legitimate domination’ express the
Nietzschean insights I have outlined. This is clear even in his initial definitions,
where Weber identifies limiting types of domination in terms of how individuals
understand the relationship between their interests and the powers that structure
their lives. Thus Weber distinguishes between

... domination by virtue of a constellation of interests (in particular: by

virtue of aposition of monopoly), and by virtue of authority, i.e., the
power to command the duty to obey.... The purest type of the former is
monopolistic domination in the market; of the latter, patriarchal, magis-
terial, or princely power. In its purest form, the first is based upon
influence derived exclusively from the possession of goods or marketable
skills guaranteed in some way and acting upon the conduct of those so
dominated, who remain, however, formally free and are motivated simply
by the pursuit of their own interests. The latter kind of domination rests
upon alleged absolute duty to obey, regardless of personal motives or
interests. (Weber, 1978: 943)

In both cases, individuals enter into power relations ’willingly’ and this is why
Weber describes these relations as domination rather than, say, oppression. The
difference between the two, however, turns on the extent to which an
individual’s subjectivity is defined by the relationship. In the ideal type of market
domination, individuals remain cognitively competent; they can distinguish their
interests from the interests of those they serve. In this sense, they remain, in
Weber’s terms, ’formally free’. In the second case, however, interests are defined
through the relationship itself, and individuals lose, as it were, the cognitive
competence to identify their distinctive interests. Their subjectivity is molded in
the image of the power relation.
These are, of course, limiting types, so that the ’borderline between these two
types of domination is fluid’ (Weber, 1978: 943). Indeed, they interact. Weber
uses the example of an economic monopoly: a monopoly over goods in the
market will allow a dominant party to dictate terms of trade to those who need
the goods and have no alternatives. Once such interactions are established,
however, domination in the market can evolve into domination by authority.
For example, a dominant firm will guarantee its monopoly by integrating
suppliers and retailers into the organization, so that they become part of a
hierarchical bureaucracy (Weber, 1978:943-6). The relation of domination is no
longer based solely on material interests, but also on recognized authority.
Indeed, Weber holds that domination will tend to evolve in this direction, so that
even the formal freedom of market domination will tend to produce bureaucratic

domination, which involves, among other things, a loss of the ability to

distinguish one’s own subjectivity outside of relations of domination.

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Such a situation is expressed in Weber’s more narrow and explicit definition of

domination as
... the situation in which the manifested will (command) of the ruler of
rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (the ruled)
and actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to a socially
relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of the command
the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake. (Weber, 1978: 946)
It is clear in this definition that Weber does not polarize agency and relations of
power, but internally relates them as does Nietzsche. This shows up, for
example, when Weber argues that coercion and legitimate authority interact,
rather than being opposite kinds of power, as they are often understood to be
(Wrong, 1980: 38-40). In many instances coercive relations form the background
conditions of legitimate authority. In the case of market relations, for example, a
subordinate party is forced to accept the terms of trade of the dominant party.
These will be ’guaranteed’ in some way affecting the subordinate party’s conduct
-

by a legal code that secures and enforces private property, binding contracts
and the like. Thus the legal structure both lays out a framework of formally free
exchanges between juridically free and equal subjects, and routinizes these
exchanges in ways that come to define the subject parties: retailers become
branch offices of monopolistic distributors; workers become integrated into
hierarchical chains of command. Free exchanges evolve into organizational
hierarchies which coordinate individuals through rules, disciplines, codes of
conduct and offices. They become, as it were, a way of life for the parties to the
exchange, engaging and defining identities in ways that go beyond the initial
motivations and add a layer of determination to the structural conditions of the
exchange. Routines allow the coercive backgrounds of these exchanges to recede
as individuals become integrated into the exchange in such ways that they no

longer experience overt conflicts of interest. Thus for Weber, unlike most
contemporary social scientists, coercion and legitimate authority are often two
sides of the same coin. Here we can see that the paradox involving willing
acceptance of coercive relations is not really a paradox at all, but instead describes
two complementary moments of power relations that have insinuated them-
selves into individual identities.
Weber does not conceive individuals subject to domination as passive victims.
The insinuation of power into self-identity can occur only because individuals
struggle to satisfy what Weber sometimes calls ’ideal’ interests through the
relations in which they find themselves entangled.’ This is not always clear in
Weber’s writings because he does not always use the term ’interest’ carefully.
Often, as in the above definitions of domination, the term simply refers to
material gain. But he also makes use of a broader conception of interests,
sometimes insisting that interests are never just ’material’, but also affective, ideal,
rational and so on (e.g. Weber,1978: 499). It is this broader conception of interest

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that is implied in his definition of social action as behavior oriented toward other
persons to which the actor ascribes a meaning (Weber,1978: 4). Indeed, Weber’s
ontology of social action builds on an assumption that ’meaning’ is a general
human need, one closely linked to the reflexive constitution of the self. It is in this
sense that interests are not only material, but also what Weber sometimes calls
’ideal’: they are closely linked to a person’s reflexive constitution of the self from
within available material and cultural resources. This is why Weber argues that
domination by virtue of material interests is much more likely to be experienced
as oppressive than domination by authority, even though the latter usually

includes and goes beyond the former (Weber, 1978: 946). And it most certainly
explains why Weber claims that relations of domination founded on ’constel-
lations of [material] interests’ alone are unstable bases of organization: material
interests are never enough to constitute ’meaning’, that is, to orient/constitute the
self in such a way that institutional practices can and do continue.
This same idea appears in the seemingly odd and ironically Kantian wording of
Weber’s definition of domination as conduct that ’occurs as if the ruled had made
the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake’
(Weber, 1978: 946). This means that subordinate parties obey because their ’ideal
interests’ are engaged and defined through the system of attributions that
legitimizes the power relation. From this perspective we can see that Weber’s
well-known types of legitimate domination - traditional, charismatic and
rational - are distinguished by the different ways in which the subordinate parties
define their identities.’ Each constitutes different kinds of selves according to the
actions that are required of them: as a member of a family or a tribe; as an
instrument of God, the nation, or a leader; as an official, a legal-juridical person
with rights, and so on. Insofar as subordinate parties orient their activities and
explain their lives through these identities, the power relation is legitimate and
justified. In each case, self-definition is integrated into the practices required by
the power relation, and the stability of the power relation depends on ’meaning-
fully’ constituted practices within the relationship such that agent-identities are
formed. This point is reinforced by our intuitive understanding that a power
relationship that comes into question - that is, identified as a power relation by
subordinates - is less powerful and stable than one accepted without question.
One of the many things that Weber seems to have learned from Nietzsche and
integrated into his conception of power, then, is that ’meaninglessness’ is an
untenable situation. Humans need to explain to themselves and others their
social fortunes and misfortunes, which also means that they need to ascribe
meaning to themselves as social subjects. This is true not just for those who are
dominated, but also those who dominate. With respect to a dominating group,
for example, Weber comments that

...
justification of its legitimacy is much more than a matter of theoretical
or philosophical speculation; it rather constitutes the basis of very real

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differences in the empirical structure of domination. The reason for this

fact lies in the generally observable need of any power, or even of any
advantage of life, to justify itself.
The fates of human beings are not equal. Men differ in their states of
health or wealth or social status or what not. Simple observation shows that
in every such situation he who is more favored feels the never ceasing need
to look upon his position as in some way ’legitimate’, upon his advantage as

’deserved’, and the other’s disadvantage as being brought about by the

latter’s ’fault’....
This same need makes itself felt in the relations between positively and
negatively privileged groups of human beings. Every highly privileged
group develops the myth of its natural, especially its blood, superiority.
Under conditions of stable distribution of power and, consequently, status
order, that myth is accepted by the negatively privileged strata. (Weber,
1978 : 953)

Similarly in his sociology of religion Weber claims that with the rise of rational
religions, general ’religious needs’ (that is, needs for meaning) are transformed
into a ’need for an ethical interpretation of the &dquo;meaning&dquo; of the distribution of
fortunes among men’ (Weber, 1946: 270, 275). Weber’s formulations imply that
subordinates are never passively ’constituted’ as subjects by external relations.
They may accept a ruling ’myth’ that legitimizes domination, but they do so only
when they can define their own identities in and through it, and they often
transform these myths in the process, providing a key impetus for cultural
evolution.
In terms of Weber’s ontology of social action, such needs are not external to
social action, but part of what makes it an ’action’ rather than a mere behavior.
Every act has a more or less explicit set of reasons and justifications attached to it
that are so fundamental as to situate the individual qua subject/agent in relation to
existing material and cultural resources. Indeed, for Weber, it is not proper to
speak of social action at all prior to the emergence of capacities involving an
individual’s reflexive monitoring of conduct in social situations, as in the case of
purely traditional and affective behavior (Weber, 1978 : 25). As Charles Taylor
has argued, this process of monitoring one’s own motives and the ability to give a
meaningful account of one’s conduct is what defines agent capacities (Taylor,
1985: Chs 1-2). It is here that we find Weber’s counterfactual account of
interests: he conceptualizes the need for meaning/subjective identity in a way
that assumes the possibility of agency. The guiding normative proposition of his
studies is that there is a general interest in directing and affecting one’s life, an
interest that is both cultivated and undermined within rationalized cultures. This
interest is realized in a personality constituted by the ’consistency of its inner
relationship to certain ultimate values and meanings of life, which are turned into
purposes and thus into teleologically rational action’ (Weber, 1975:192; cf.

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L6with, 1982:45-6; Portis, 1978; Schluchter, 1979: 73-4). A person has a ca-
pacity for agency when he or she can combine a consistent system of values

(upon which the of

stability identity and the meaningfulness of actions depends)
with actual behavior, connecting values to worldly effects (Schluchter, 1979: 76-
92). We see, then, that Weber has a conception of what kinds of interests are
violated within power relations. In this sense, Weber’s account of power, like
Nietzsche’s, retains its critical edge, distinguishing social relations in terms of the
kinds of individuals they constitute.
Much of Weber’s substantive work involves studies of these relations in terms
framed by this normative potential. Rational domination displaces a potential for
a value-rational monitoring of conduct which is, as it were, the progressive

moment of rationalized culture. Bureaucratic rationalization in particular is

problematic because it represents a potential for rational agency that is under-

mined by the social formations within which it developed. Thus, while bu-
reaucracies provide identities for their members through status, offices, rational
codes of conduct and the like, these identities are not integrated into the content
and goals of their actions. Their actions serve the ends of the organization -
making products and delivering services, for example. These are dictated by
processes over which the bureaucrat has little control, such as political leaders
and markets. Weber’s concern with this bifurcation of interests and actions is that
it destroys capacities for responsible agency by divorcing the rationality of means
and the rationality of ends (Weber, 1946: Ch. IV; 1978: Appendix II). It is in this
sense that domination within bureaucratic hierarchies violates an interest in, and

potential for, rational agency, and why Weber saw bureaucratic power relations
as the most urgent problem for western societies. Weber did not believe, of

course, that bureaucratic domination could be eliminated from modern societies.

For this reason he limited the goals of his political theory to containing bureau-
cratic rule through liberal and pluralist institutional devices, a topic I have
discussed elsewhere (Warren, 1988a).
We can see, then, that Weber retains the normative thrust of the relational
conception of power, that is, its concern with identifying power in terms of
conflicts of interest. But he also conceptualizes power relations deeply, in terms
of the ways they constitute individuals’ self-understandings. This is what allows
Weber to span the other great divide in standard conceptions of power: whether
power should be understood ’negatively’ as a conflictual relationship between
individuals (’power over’), or ’positively’ as an emergent organizational capacity
(’power to’). From Weber’s perspective, we can see that power becomes ’pro-
ductive’ (to use Foucault’s terms) just when it becomes domination proper- that
is, when it begins to work through defining subjective meanings and identities.
Intuitively, we can see that unless a subordinate is motivated to do something
there cannot be power over his or her capacities of agency. Without this, power is
no longer a social relation. The capacities of agency of one person are not enlisted

by another, and the relation loses its organization-building qualities.

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34

This point is clear even in the most obvious kind of power, the threat to use
violence against a subordinate (Wrong, 1980: 26). The use of violence signifies
that the dominant party has become powerless because it has failed to engage the
subordinate’s will, and thus cannot make use of the capacities of the subordinate
as an agent. This is no doubt why Hannah Arendt, an advocate of the view of

power as an emergent organizational capacity, argues that ’power and violence

are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears
where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s
disappearance.... to speak of non-violent power is actually redundant’ (Arendt,
1969 : 56). What Arendt misses and Weber does not, however, is that the threat of
violence, or coercion, is a background condition of all relations of power,
including organizationally productive ones. What distinguishes violence and
power in Weber’s perspective is not that they are opposites, but that where
power is only coercive, ’ideal’ interests will not be engaged, and the subordinate’s
will cannot be oriented toward the organizational tasks at hand. This is why
coercive relations by themselves are unstable bases for organizations. Indeed, a
power structure that does not engage ideal interests may find that these interests
are satisfied with alternative identities that undermine the power structure. A

person might rely on identities provided by the Church, by labor unions, by

resistance movements, by ethnic or racial identities, and so on, each of which
provides a point of resistance. Interestingly, considerations such as these are
embedded in Gramsci’s notions of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultures:
a hegemonic culture develops identities that reinforce relations of coercion, while

a counter-hegemonic culture develops identities that are outside of these re-

lations. In the latter case, prevailing power relations are ’stripped down’ to
coercion, and this is what renders them vulnerable to change.’

CONCLUSION

We can see, then, why the standard appropriations of Weber’s relational defi-

nition of power are wrong: they ascribe a transparency to agents in order to

identify overt conflicts of interest. In so doing, however, they miss two import-
ant dimensions of power manifest in two paradoxes. The first paradox is that this
view requires that we hold that relations of overt conflict can produce organiz-
ational power. Yet, on the face of it, organizational power seems to depend on
cooperative relations. The second paradox is that the most effective power
relations elicit voluntary obedience, an obedience which is (paradoxically) as-
sured by coercive means. Both paradoxes dissolve when we look at Weber’s
understanding of power in light of his Nietzschean problematic. Weber, like
Nietzsche, focuses on how relations of domination form the identities of the
individuals involved. A relationship of domination is not one that takes place
between two pre-constituted agents. Because self-experiences of agency depend
on social resources, forms of agency develop within these relations themselves.

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This is why experiences of agency that depend on a power relation can actually
reinforce the relation against the interests of the subordinate party. Yet Weber’s
critical insight - one expressed by Gramsci, hinted at by Foucault and picked up
by Habermas - is that relations of domination can also develop capacities for
agency through (ideological) legitimations. These become promises which are
materialized in expectations, often to the point of rendering relations of
domination vulnerable. Neither Nietzsche nor Weber develops his conceptions
of power in this direction, but they do both provide us with some of the critical
resources for doing so.

Department of Government
Georgetown University, Washington DC
NOTES
1 Taylor (1990) argues in a similar vein that an intrinsic relationship exists between moral
identity and human agency.
2 Weber (1946: Ch. XI; 1978: 499) mistakenly reduces Nietzsche’s account of the origins
of salvation religion to his account of ’ressentiment’.
3 Compare Weber’s discussion of the causality of religious ideas: ’Not ideas, but material
and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the "world
images" that have been created by "ideas" have, like switchmen, determined the tracks
along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interest. "From what" and "for
what" one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, "could be" redeemed,
depended upon one’s image of the world’ (Weber, 1946: 280).
4 See note 3 above.
5 ’Psychologically, the command may have achieved its effect upon the ruled either
through empathy or through inspiration or through persuasion by rational argument,
or through some combination of these three principal types of influence of one person

over another’ (Weber, 1978: 946).

6 Weber occasionally draws conclusions that are not unlike Gramsci’s. For example, he
writes that under ’conditions of stable distributions of power’ justifying myths are
accepted by the ’negatively privileged strata’. ’Such a situation exists as long as the
masses continue in that natural state of theirs in which thought about the order of

domination remains but little developed, which means,

as long as no urgent needs
render the state of affairs "problematical"
. But in times in which the class situation has
become unambiguously and openly visible to everyone as a factor determining every
man’s individual fate, that very myth of the highly privileged about everyone having
deserved his particular lot has often become one of the most passionately hated objects
of attack’ (Weber, 1978: 953); emphasis added.

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