![]() “Authority” is central not only for Arendt, but also for Hans-Georg Gadamer. This ‘in-between space’ is where relations that obtain between rector, actor, and other are subject to tremendous historical variation.” (Reed, 2020: 71) I would venture that the mention of Hannah Arendt here is significant, and invites a slightly different reading of the book than Binder has pursued, particularly since, while Weber usually demurred from using the term Autorität, the same cannot be said for the hermeneutic tradition in social thought more broadly. It is from grappling with this textual fact-and with the different English translations of Weber that have shaped American sociology for more than eighty years-that I arrived at the idea, expressed early in the book, that “somewhere between Arendt and Weber lies something quite interesting: the grasping of power in hierarchy that is not reducible to violence but creates more resistance to itself (and perhaps precipitates the reversibility of power relations) than does pure authority. In this regard, it seems worthwhile to note that while Weber wrote with great perspicacity about legitime Herrschaft, he rarely used the term Autorität. Thus, my book asks its reader to carefully consider why and how “power” seems to mark out not only a point of focus for critical theory, but also, disturbingly, the limits of its thought and so my text opens onto understandings of authority-including critiques of rectitude itself (Cavarero 2016)-that exceed what is easily grasped in the sociology of power. ![]() In this sense, the theory presented in part I of Power in Modernity is a theory of power, grounded in a language game that opens onto a broader, more supple, and yet-to-be-developed theory of violence, power, and authority. That is to say that, because the theory is designed to account for struggles for recognition and redistribution as always already struggles over authorship and the recognition of authorship, the neologisms of the theory are intended to allow for the empirical study of this intertwining, while refusing to reduce authority to only the legitimation of power. However, I would like to note that my language of rector, actor, other, and project opens onto-though does not, as of yet, fully articulate-a theory of the variable intertwining of power and authority. Binder is also correct that my understanding of the English term “power” owes a great deal to Weber’s Herrschaft (which I suppose I would translate as “rule”) and to Hegel’s dialectic of Herr and Knecht, in my pursuit of a cultural version of Weber’s probabilistic approach to power. Indeed, it might even be fair to call my position “heterodox Weberian.” Binder correctly grasps the amendments or reforms to Weber’s theory that I propose: first, an analytical addition of the discursive and performative dimensions of power (as well as the modified discussion of materiality that Binder reconstructs) second, a different account of modernity, one whose emphasis bends away from rationalization and disenchantment and towards the fragmentation-and continuation, perhaps even proliferation-of the sacred in the making and unmaking of power in modernity third, a proposed synthesis between a political sociology of rule and logistics, and those accounts of power that understand alterity as constitutive of power relations. Max Weber was such an important reference point for the text that his work suffuses the entire question of “power” as I understand it. Our theoretical differences having been laid bare, some differences in the diagnosis of the present can be articulated as well. Here, the subtlety and generosity with which Binder has reconstructed the theory in the book create a (perhaps rare) academic opportunity for significant and even sharp debate amidst a very high level of mutual understanding. The research for the book had been ongoing for most of the second decade of this century, but its writing took its final form in the between 20 in Charlottesville, Virginia, immediately after the “Unite the Right” rallies and violence. ![]() Though he may not have intended this, in so doing, Binder has contextualized my book in terms of the environs of its author, in a way that I myself could not. Having explicated the Hegelian and Weberian backgrounds for the terms of art I deploy, and registered his objections, Binder turns to contemporary political culture in the USA and in Europe-specifically the rise of populism and conspiracy thinking.
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