Terry Maley

Prof. Terry Maley is an assistant professor in York’s Department of Political Science and a CCGES faculty affiliate. In this paper he will argue that there is a complexity in Weber’s view of democracy that has been obscured in the recent Anglo-American reception of Weber as a liberal defender of rights.  There is a tension between two sides of Weber’s view of the political, one which sought to defend liberal-democracy against more reactionary political forms, and the other which sought to contain the radical left and the ‘unruly’ ‘politics of the street’ that accompanied the revolutionary turmoil in Germany right after WWI. Weber struggles to include both, and to defend capitalism, in his ‘realist’ model of parliamentary democracy, a struggle that is prescient today as both his model and capitalism (freed from the Protestant Ethic) falter in the west.

This talk is co-presented by CCGES and the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought.

Location: 749 York Research Tower
Time: 12:30-2:00 pm