About Professor Breiner

Peter Breiner received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley and his PhD from Stanford University. His research and teaching focus on the field of political theory, both canonical and contemporary. His published work has dealt with the relation of political theory to political sociology, especially with regard to Max Weber and his use of political sociology for political judgment. He is the author of Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Cornell University Press 1996) and numerous articles on the work of Max Weber as well as work comparing Weber with Karl Mannheim. He has also published on Machiavelli and will be writing additional work on Machiavelli in the future. Recent work in political theory rotates around the pressure that the contexts of political conflict exert upon political language and the ways that political language itself informs our understanding of these contexts. At the moment, he is working on two books each of which address this problem in a different way. The first seeks to put the concept of political equality in the contexts of political struggle in which the concept is fought out. It understands political equality not just as an "essentially contested" concept but as an expansive one as well, relentlessly taking in new spheres of state, economy, and society, new groups and classes. The book specifically focuses on the struggle between citizenship and the market. The second book seeks to address the role of political examples in shaping and directing the political generalizations that political theorists draw from their arguments. Additional work focuses on the relation of political theory to political ideology.

Selected Publications

• “Machiavelli’s ‘New Prince’ and the Primordial Moment of Acquisition” in Political Theory (February 2008)
  
• “Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Hypothetical Account or Historical Explanation of Capitalism?” included in a special issue of The Journal of Classical Sociology on Weber’s Protestant Ethic. 5.1 March, 2005:  11-30.
  
• “‘Unnatural selection’: Max Weber's Concept of ‘Auslese’ and His Criticism of the Reduction of Political Conflict to Economics,” 18.3 International Relations, September, 2004: 289-307.
  
• “Translating Max Weber: Exile Attempts to Forge a New Political Science,” European Journal of Political Theory, 3.2 April, 2004: 133-149.
  
• “Ideal Types as ‘Utopias’ and Impartial Political Clarification: Weber and Mannheim on Sociological Prudence” in Laurence McFalls, ed., Max Weber's  Objectivity  Revisited, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).