UC Davis

This thesis examines the renewed use of Max Weber’s political thought in contemporary analyses of threats to the modern state. It focuses specifically on Hanson and Kopstein’s recent work The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future. Their work uses Weberian concepts such as patrimonialism and legal-rational rule to analyze the global threat posed by patrimonial leaders. Although Hanson and Kopstein provide an impressive theoretical lens through which to identify the erosion of what they refer to as the “rule of law,” they insufficiently account for Weber’s third form of legitimate rule: charisma. I argue that in their disregard for charisma, two main problems arise. First, they miss, or at the very least under-theorize, a possible key mechanism in the movement from legal-rational authority toward patrimonial authority. Second, their account of the movement to patrimonial authority in contemporary politics risks overdetermination by ignoring the ways in which charisma disrupts simple unidirectional change. Recovering charisma strengthens their theoretical account of the patrimonial threat to the modern state and reduces the risk of treating contemporary politics deterministically.