Decolonizing Weber ANDREW ZIMMERMAN Max Weber was an imperialist, a racist, and a Social Darwinistic nationalist, and these political positions fundamentally shaped his social scientific work. Weber did not merely absorb the imperialism, racism, and nationalism of his era: he consistently found himself a lone voice at the right of many of the organizations to which he belonged, including the Verein fu ¨ r Sozialpolitik , the National Social Party, and even the Pan-German League. This political basis for Weber’s work has been obscured through selective readings and translations in order to colonize and exploit his name to justify liberal scientific and political agendas. The primary point of this essay is not to prove that Weber subscribed to illiberal political ideas. Wolfgang Mommsen has already established this in his unsurpassed treatment of Weber, and Weber himself made no secret of his own views. 1 Rather, it is to consider how Weber developed these ideas into a social scientific approach to race and labor and a prescient theory of empire that still finds wide application today by politically influential theorists like Samuel Huntington. Decolonizing Weber means, above all, ceasing the work of repression 2 required to make his thought support political and social scientific positions that were not his own, and studying Weber instead as a political-philosophical specimen far more interesting, dangerous, and rewarding than the gutter ideologues often scrutinized by students of imperialism and colonialism. Max Weber was perhaps the first theorist of what Etienne Balibar has called ‘neoracism,’ a racism that denies the importance of biological race while working out a system of cultural differences that functions as effectively as race as a means of underwriting political and economic inequality. Balibar writes: ‘culture can also function like a nature , and it can in particular function as a way of locking individuals and groups a priori into a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable and intangible in origin.’ 3 Weber developed this cultural racism in studies of ethnic minorities within imperial metropoles rather than of conquered populations without. His earliest social scientific writing treated the cultural, racial, and economic properties of Poles living in Germany. Later, he developed a similar interest in African Americans. This interest in internal minorities led Weber to anticipate the neoracist thought that became prevalent only after decolonization, which reversed, as Balibar explains, population movements between metropole and colony. Whereas the era of overseas imperialism and explicit racism had Europeans conquering supposedly racially inferior others, the era of decolonization had individuals of apparently incompatible cultures immigrating to former colonial metro- poles. Neoracism invites a flexible approach to others, now regarded as ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/06/010053  /27 # 2006 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/13668250500488827 Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 53 /79, 2006