THE CONCEPT OF DEMOCRACY IN MAX WEBER: A CONFLICTIVE INSTITUTIONAL ARCHITECTURE
Democracy; legitimacy; Max Weber
The objective of this paper is to analyze modern democracy from the writings of the German thinker Max Weber. Our hypothesis is that Weberian democracy is sustained by a system of checks and balances among three fundamental institutions: the rational bureaucracy, the representative parliament, and the plebiscitary president. Weber has a view of the conflict of values as insoluble in modernity, and such institutions can give flow to such conflict without, however, overcoming or suppressing it. After all, it is the dynamics between these institutions that equates the irrational will of the electoral masses, on the one hand, and the rational demands of the modern state, on the other. Therefore, we intend to contribute to the theoretical debate about democracy, a disputed and highly topical issue, especially for the Brazilian reality.