My belated introduction to Lisa Wedeen’s work came in 2009—a decade after Ambiguities of Domination was first published—on the recommendation of a friend and trusted source on Middle East politics. By that time, Wedeen already had published groundbreaking books on Syria and Yemen and was a leading scholar of comparative politics. Thus, I was not surprised to find in Ambiguities an innovative interpretive method and a probing analysis of how autocracy works, grounded in years of ethnographic research and a deep understanding of Syrian politics and society. What was more surprising, at least at the time, was the discovery of a profoundly theoretical work and a new model for the reintegration of the social sciences. I devoured Ambiguities as I also had done with the works of Barrington Moore, Reinhard Bendix, Charles Tilly, and James Scott, all part of a great tradition of comparative political science that furnished the larger discipline with core concepts and basic theories of politics. I viewed Wedeen’s work as the rebirth of this tradition and its significant reworking for a generation of scholars shaped by ordinary language philosophy, democratic theory, Marxism, poststructuralism, and postcolonial criticism. Ambiguities restored contact between the empirical and theoretical sides of the discipline and suggested a new type of political theory, rooted not in texts and traditions but rather in the symbols and signs of everyday life.

Wedeen seems to depart from the classic tradition of comparative politics in one critical respect: her attitude toward Weber. She challenges Weber’s emphasis on legitimacy, showing that political authority can be secure without being legitimate or seeking legitimacy. On one level, then, ambiguity is an anti-Weberian concept. On another level, however, the whole of Ambiguities is an exercise in Weberian analysis. This is the position that I develop in this article: that Weber is more significant to the implicit argument of Ambiguities than its explicit argument and the more frequent references to cultural Marxism and poststructuralism suggest. Indeed, what is striking about Ambiguities is how the lessons of Althusser, Foucault, and Žižek are fastened to what is basically a Weberian view of the state. The picture of Syrian politics is that of a charismatic authority vested in the leadership of Hafez al-Asad. Wedeen marvels that the Asad cult is “shabby” and more like an “anxiety-inducing simulacrum” of charisma than the real thing (Wedeen 1999/Reference Wedeen2015, 3). However, this still interprets Syrian autocracy according to its (faux) charisma. The principle of ambiguity, although it replaces legitimacy, is still meant to anchor a theory of political authority. Stated another way, Ambiguities is the critical reconstruction of Weberian social science to render it more capacious and compatible with Marxism and other methods. I note that this procedure also is integral to the classic tradition of comparative politics.

The risk in my reading is that Wedeen’s extraordinary empirical observation and acumen, her ethnographic detail and interpretive insight, all become secondary to a set of theoretical considerations. I impose the same disciplinary divisions onto a book that so effectively dismantles them. However, Ambiguities puts methods and interpretations in the service of a theory of autocracy: what it is, how it works, what distinguishes Syrian autocracy from other forms, and what distinguishes all forms of autocracy from representative government. I suggest that this theory owes more to Weber than Wedeen admits and that the precepts of Weberian social science are so foundational to the discipline that they are assumed by even its dissident voices. What she writes in her most recent book on Syria, that ideology can be “lived implicitly before it is embraced explicitly,” also might be said of the social sciences (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2019, 151). The question is whether Weber is serving an ideological or a scientific purpose.

To be clear: Ambiguities furnishes a critique of Weber that is powerful and persuasive. The argument, simply stated, is that legitimacy is the improper measure of political authority. Obedience is what matters. “Asad’s cult is a strategy of domination based on compliance, rather than legitimacy,” Wedeen writes. “The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and those who consume them” (Wedeen 1999/Reference Wedeen2015, 6). Against the assumptions of Weberian social science, which defines the state as the legitimate monopoly on force, Wedeen defines Syrian autocracy as the ambiguous control of appearances. The regime is stabilized not by the use of force nor by the powers of persuasion but instead by ritual participation in its symbolism and rhetoric. Symbolic power permits the regime to saturate and overwhelm public life.

Symbolic power is demonstrative, not deliberative. It reinforces dominance not by seeking agreement but rather by setting the parameters of the permissible. Wedeen notes the phoniness of the Asad cult, its overused and exaggerated imagery, and its manifest failure to convince. However, where the regime fails at legitimation, it succeeds at producing complicity and compliance. Where it cannot secure belief, it settles for behavior. This is precisely what makes Syrian autocracy distinctive and instructive. Observers—especially those limited by frames of reference to Western political systems—are prone to mistake the public dissimulation of loyalty for private belief. The point is not that the regime has no real support among its subjects but rather that participation in Asad’s personality cult is no reliable measure of that support—and real support may not be the regime’s goal anyway. Complicity may be more reliable than active support. Even the most cynical participation in Syrian politics reinforces the regime’s dominance and delimits the possibilities for transgression and resistance. Lightly critical or derisive jokes about the leader still have the effect of enlarging his image and enhancing his supremacy. Public spectacles of reverence and loyalty to Asad consolidate the regime’s power as that of a “primary obviousness”—to use Althusser’s (Reference Althusser2001, 116) description of ideology—which also is a patent spuriousness. That the official rhetoric of the regime is so clearly fictitious is both the source and the sign of its strength.

Cultural Marxism and poststructuralism provide Wedeen with resources for making sense of how Syrians are conscripted into “a politics of pretense in which all participate but few actually believe” and how the regime uses symbolic power to discipline a diverse and divided population (2019, 19). She cites Bourdieu’s notion of the “logic of practice” and Foucault’s account of disciplinary power, but Althusser’s theory of ideology is probably the most important source for Wedeen’s treatment of symbolic power and informs the argument on many levels. It is in Althusser’s sense that she pursues a “materialist” social science, in which what men and women do matters more than what they believe. Or, rather, following the Pascalian formula cited by Althusser (i.e., “kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”), believing is the effect of doing, not the other way around (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2019, 14). Ideology is a practice. This is what the Syrian regime—with its politics of pretense—seems to understand that Weberian social science—laboring under the concept of legitimacy—misses. It uses the cult of personality to enforce participation, not to command belief. For that reason, the cult serves as an “ambiguous” but powerful instrument of social control. The problem with legitimacy is not only that it is idealist and subjectivist, that it confuses causes and effects, but also that it obscures those powers that do not depend on the use of violence or art of persuasion.

For Weber, legitimacy is the principle that separates authority from force. Both authority and force are mechanisms of command and control, or the “imperative coordination” of social actors and institutions (Reference Weber, Henderson and Parsons1964, 324). This is something that is missed in more sociological interpretations of Weber—for example, in the work of Talcott Parsons. Authority is a political relationship of command and obedience. Where authority is unlike force is in “the particular claim to legitimacy [that] is to a significant degree and according to its type treated as ‘valid’” (Weber Reference Weber, Henderson and Parsons1964, 327). That is, authority is a legitimate command and control. Weber (Reference Weber, Henderson and Parsons1964, 325–26) highlights a “voluntary involuntariness” as the basis of this relation. It might be argued that there also is ambiguity at the foundations of Weber’s theory of authority.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of slavery, in which Weber says “the subjection to authority is wholly involuntary” (1964, 326). How, we might ask, is the slave master an authority in Weber’s distinctive sense if that term is defined by a “valid” claim to legitimacy? How is a “wholly involuntary” subjection also legitimate and for whom? Whose belief matters in this relationship? Is belief what really matters? My point is simply that legitimacy is a slippery concept in Weber. The separation between force and authority falls apart in the “limiting case” of slavery, but it is everywhere strained. The example of slavery also suggests a Weberian approach to authority that is not so far from Wedeen’s, in which subjective belief might be secondary to coordinated social practice—practice that still is coordinated, in large part, by force. Some Syrians talk about how ordinary life under the regime is a type of slavery, in which subjects are constantly reminded of the state’s willingness to use violent repression. Does Wedeen’s approach to Syrian politics tend to underestimate the role of force in securing obedience? “Voluntary involuntariness” might be an appropriate way to think about Syrian autocracy.

The Weberian concept of legitimacy may be more ambiguous than Wedeen allows, but she is correct to demand that the social sciences move beyond it. She notes in her 2015 preface that her extensive fieldwork in Syria confirmed that “regimes can do without legitimacy” and even more that they “often do not attempt to cultivate it” (Wedeen Reference Wedeen2019, xii). Understanding Syrian autocracy requires deciphering a personality cult that solicits from the broadest strata of society—not active support but rather passive complicity. She describes an “as if” attitude engendered by the regime, in which real obedience is predicated on not believing and the ritual dissimulation of loyalty substitutes for real belief. The surprise is that this autocracy would be somehow stronger for its flagrant fictions and falsehoods, made more secure by the superficiality of its support and the performative nature of Syrian politics. It is a fascinating and foreboding case, especially in the context of democracy’s current legitimation crisis.

However, the very idea of the personality cult—even when that cult is seen from below and interpreted in its ambiguity—is essentially Weberian. This is not only insofar as it sets material conditions and class conflicts aside but also to the extent that power is seen to constellate around a charismatic leader and his authority. Wedeen anticipates this interpretation, arguing that charisma is the wrong concept for apprehending a leadership cult that makes no divine or transcendent claim, that does not care what subjects believe as long as they obey. She compares Asad in this respect to Frederik the Great. Does this mean that Frederik was not a charismatic figure? More to the point, would a study of the politics of eighteenth-century Prussia that turned chiefly on the idealized representation of the monarch in popular culture not tend to reinforce that charisma?

Authority always comes in alloyed forms. Weber says of the three ideal types that they are combined in myriad ways across time and place. However, beyond a view of charisma as one form of authority and one source of legitimation among three, Weber acknowledges the charismatic element in all authority, the peculiar hold it has on its subjects. In a recent book, Mazzarella (Reference Mazzarella2017) revives a project in speculative anthropology to account for what he calls the “mana of mass society”—as seen in advertisement, mass media, and contemporary politics. Wedeen’s reflections on how advertising techniques have been used by both the elder and the younger Asad resonate with this project. Yet, Wedeen does not want to call this charisma because, for her, this concept conjures an authenticity and revolutionary fervor absent in Asadism. However, would we not expect charisma to be transformed by the politics of the spectacle and the logic of the market? Gold-plated charisma still looks shiny.

Charisma for Weber has a “limiting case” of its own: Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, who is either a genuine charismatic or “a very sophisticated type of deliberate swindler” (1964, 359). What if this distinction, between genuine belief and the sophisticated swindle, is what breaks down in certain forms of authoritarian politics? What if the problem is that the most sophisticated swindler tends to believe his lie and his most vulnerable victims already know the truth? Where does advertising fit in this dichotomy? What if the problem is not that social science cannot access the interiority of belief but rather that authoritarian politics—like the modern advertising image—works on the interiority of needs and desires, to which our avowed beliefs also are responsive? Would this not suggest the need for a psychoanalytic perspective on politics, a working concept of the unconscious? Can a concept of ideology do without it?

One strand of critical theory unmentioned by Wedeen is that of the early Frankfurt School and its studies of authoritarianism, many of which comment on the pseudo-charisma of the authoritarian leader and the cynical forms of detached attachment that it fosters.Footnote ¹ Scholars such as Horkheimer (Reference Horkheimer1987), Adorno et al. (Reference Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson and Sanford1950), and Lowenthal and Guterman (Reference Lowenthal and Guterman1949)—also cross-disciplinary in their research and interpretive in their methods—argued that late capitalism and bourgeois rationality produce authoritarian personalities and a politics of hucksterism, conspiracy, and superstition. I imagine there is much in this research program that Wedeen would view as misguided, but the Frankfurt School believed the personality cult was a potent force in modern politics. We could say that they were Weberians in this respect.

Althusser, conversely—cited by Wedeen as a primary touchstone for a theory of ideology—found the concept of the personality cult wholly inadequate to an understanding of Stalinism, the crisis of Marxism, and politics in general. Although it “cannot be ‘found’ in Marxist theory,” Althusser (Reference Althusser and Lock1976, 76) said of the personality cult, “it can perfectly well be ‘found’ elsewhere: in bourgeois philosophy and psycho-sociological ideology.”Footnote ² Of course, Wedeen does not endorse everything in Althusser, but it is important to consider the costs of extracting the Althusserian theory of ideology from the Marxist project of which it is a part. The concept of the state implied by the idea of the personality cult, for Althusser, is bourgeois (anti-proletarian), psycho-social (anti-political), and ideological (anti-scientific). It is true that Althusser is addressing the legacy of Stalinism and its impact on Marxist theory and politics, and Wedeen intends to set Asad apart from Stalin and the other more infamous personality cults of the twentieth century. Yet, Asad is still treated in these terms and the Syrian state still appears in its separateness from productive forces, class relations, and conditions of class struggle, on the one hand, and the structure of law and the state, the tensions between the state and its nations, factionalism with the Ba’ath party, and the wider geopolitical currents on the other. This is what Althusser thought so misguided in view of Stalin’s regime as personality cult: it obscures both the infrastructural and superstructural conditions that made Stalin’s rightist “deviation” possible and tends to produce and participate in the very cult it claims to discover. The problem is not only that the idea of the personality cult betrays a humanist theology of “man” at its heart; it also is that the state appears as something singular and subjective. From an Althusserian perspective, it is not only the concept of legitimacy or charisma that must go; the whole idea of the state as personified in the leader and reproduced in and through his cult must be discarded as well. This idea is the state’s own ideology.

Althusser’s critique of the idea of the theory of the personality cult is useful for considering some of the political and theoretical limits of Weberian social science and its reliance on a charismatic model of politics. For Althusser, this model cannot serve a scientific concept of the state because it is precisely the ideology of the state in its subjective form. Although I do not share Althusser’s precise investments in Marxist science, I am concerned that a critical theory of the state does not reproduce its ideology, which might enable its violence and leave the subjects of autocratic regimes with fewer resources for resistance.

Admittedly, these reflections have not done sufficient justice to Wedeen, to Weber, or to the great tradition of comparative political science that links them. I view Ambiguities as one of the discipline’s finest examples of the integration of critical political theory and the social sciences. This article aims to show some of what that project still owes to Weber, as well as its potential pitfalls.