Francisco Roa Bastos

France – University of Strasbourg

Research area: European studies, party politics, democracy and political theory, Weber’s political sociology, epistemology of social sciences.

‘I first became (really) interested in Max Weber’s work during my Ph.D. in political science, while studying the issue of the legitimation of political systems (with an early focus on the European Union, and then more broadly). With a group of Ph.D. colleagues, we founded a research workshop dedicated to the study of legitimation processes (the «Atelier légitimation») and Weber quickly imposed himself, obviously, as a central reference. At that time, we were especially interested in the difficulties and subtleties of the notion of «charisma», and that led us to organize a symposium on the matter, which became a collective volume: «Que faire du charisme? Retours sur une notion de Max Weber» (PUR, 2014). Since then, I’ve kept reading and working on Weber, which is in my view paradoxically one of the best-known and at the same time one of the least-read social scientists. His work is for me the best and most lasting example (and perhaps the only real one) of a real interdisciplinary and universal study of human societies and behavior. We need to keep building on the kind of comparative and historical sociology he championed if we want to get a chance to better understand our contemporary world, and ourselves.’

Find me on Academia.edu!