Max Weber, whose reputation as a methodologist and social thinker grows over time, offers in these pages a precise analysis of the internal superstructure and infrastructure of political communities, the characteristics of the so-called expansive great powers, and, particularly, the distribution of power in the era of the global advance of capitalism and public and private bureaucratization. The sociological discussion that Weber employs here, based on his expository method, brings together both the historical comparison of various social formations and the subtlety of the search for comparative terms that allow for the identification, equating, or differentiation of political structures of domination.
The discussion proposed by Weber extends, on the one hand, to the comparison and dynamics of the distribution of power among social groups and sectors, and, on the other, to the meaning of the charismatic authority that political communities engender within themselves, whether in periods of conflict and mass exaltation or as a reaction against the presumed impersonality of bureaucratic discipline and organization.