Plebiscitary Politics and the Threats to Legality

In recent times we find many plebiscitary acts that seek to democratically legitimize political processes in any direction. They have in common that they interrupt the normal routine of representative democracies to a certain degree and create an extra-daily state of affairs, which entails not only direct but also indirect consequences. The text attempts to systematize some of these mechanisms from a Weberian perspective using Brexit as an example. After a brief overview of Weber’s short-term politically inspired statements on plebiscitary democracy, the text systematizes Weber’s understanding of the state as a bureaucratic apparatus that requires any kind of leader to be controlled. Subsequently, the text discusses the relationship between domination, legality, and rationality in order to finally point out the danger of erosion of truth and legality through the emergence of competing consensus communities in the face of competing conceptions of order.

Bureaucracy · Democracy · Economics · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Law and economics · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Principle of legality · Rationality · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Computer Science · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory