Weber: Religion, nation and empire

Abstract

Colonialism figures in the work of Max Weber in multiple forms. While in his professorial address he supported internal colonialism as the antidote against the threat represented by the immigration of foreigners, in the writings on world religions colonialism appears as displacement, amnesia and Freudian slip. Colonial subjects in particular are portrayed as personalities unable to develop the mentality that would help them to free themselves from what Weber regarded as the chains of a communitarian, gregarious and subaltern life. In the end, I argue that Weber’s work contributed, albeit contradictorily and not always explicitly, to spread an idea of colonial violence as a force of progress and a racist idea of colonial others as backward.