Quote

A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Max Weber

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Max Weber
Age: 56 †
Born: 1864
Born: April 21
Died: 1920
Died: June 14
Anthropologist
Economist
Historian
Jurist
Lawyer
Musicologist
Philosopher
Politician
Sociologist
University Teacher
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian Weber
Max Vemper
Maks Veber
Makesi Weibo
Weibo
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber
Institution
Holds
Institutions
Violence
Politics
Use
Government
Legitimate
Monopoly

More quotes by Max Weber

Image
Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .
Max Weber
Image
Laws are important and valuable in the exact natural sciences, in the measure that those sciences are universally valid.
Max Weber
Image
All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.
Max Weber
Image
Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized act.
Max Weber
Image
In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.
Max Weber
Image
However many people complain about the red tape, it would be sheer illusion to think ... continuous administrative work can be carried out in any field except by means of officials working in offices.... The choice is only that between bureaucracy and dillettantism.
Max Weber
Image
The decisive means for politics is violence.
Max Weber
Image
Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.
Max Weber
Image
Social economic problems do not exist everywhere that an economic event plays a role as cause or effect - since problems arise only where the significance of those factors is problematical and can be precisely determined only through the application of methods of social-economics.
Max Weber
Image
Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.
Max Weber
Image
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.
Max Weber
Image
The organization of ofices follows the principle of hierarchy ... each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one
Max Weber
Image
It is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.
Max Weber
Image
Daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity.
Max Weber
Image
Puritanism carried the ethos of the rational organization of capital and labor. It took over from the Jewish ethic only what was adapted to this purpose.
Max Weber
Image
Either one lives for politics or one lives off politics.
Max Weber
Image
The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.
Max Weber
Image
The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.
Max Weber
Image
Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.
Max Weber
Image
[In] the realm of science, ... what we have achieved will be obsolete in ten, twenty or fifty years. That is the fate, indeed, that is the very meaning of scientific work. ... Every scientific fulfillment raises new questions and cries out to be surpassed rendered obsolete. Everyone who wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this
Max Weber