Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline

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Max Weber believed that discipline underpins modern rationalized society. For Weber, modern discipline is the quality that gives a population the capacity to coordinate action across vast expanses. But modern discipline also requires individuals to shape their very psycho-biological being to fit the larger socio-economic system, be it a military unit, factory, bureaucracy, or other unit of modern society. This book explores how Weber developed his ideas using examples from Ancient Egypt to the modern world and asks how his description of a habitus of discipline informs understanding of modernity not just in Europe, but in places that continue to befuddle well-educated and well-paid modern economists, strategists, and politicians in places like DR Congo and Myanmar/Burma. There are the areas that as Weber would have said, are still governed by traditional authority, rather than then the legal-rational authority brought by the modernizing outsiders. In doing this, Max Weber and the Modern Problem of Discipline challenges development economists, foreign service officers, government officials, administrators, and development workers to rethink modern discipline, and the costs modern legal-rational rule imposes on traditional societies. By doing this, the book goes beyond standard prescriptions for good governance, free markets, and property rights which underpin modern development planning. To describe modern discipline, Waters also draws on more contemporary work of Karl Polanyi, James Scott, Goran Hyden, Teodor Shanin, and James Ferguson among others. Each describes how and why independent peasantries ignored and even resisted the blandishments and trinkets proffered by development bureaucracies to sell their traditional rights in the modern marketplace. Waters takes these writers a step further by agreeing with them about farmer resilience. But he takes the argument a step further by pointing out that Weber was proposing a general theory of a disciplined modernity, not one focused on just one particular society.