Max Weber,modernity and the project of international organization

In this essay I discuss programmatic proposals for international organization in the light of Max Weber's account of modernity. I argue that the authors known in international relations (IR) as ‘functionalists’ have pursued the extension of the modernization process that Weber analysed in national societies into the international sphere. Between 1900 and 1945, functionalists advocated a transformation of international politics, at that time still the domain of a lot of jingoism and aggression, into rational public administration. In the first part of the article I outline Weber's account of societal modernization with a focus on the sharp contrast between politics and bureaucratic administration. In the second section I engage with the writings of three political scientists who represent the early ‘functionalist’ tradition in IR: Paul Reinsch, James Arthur Salter and David Mitrany. I show how they planned to modernize IR by establishing a technocratic mode of governance and hence a Versachlichung der Gewaltherrschaft, that is, a depersonalization and rationalization of authority. The turn to international organizations in the early twentieth century thus can be seen in the context of the universal process of societal modernization as rationalization that Weber analysed.