C/P/12. Is Max Weber's conception of modern politics is still relevant today?

"Triumph" of democratic governance on the ruins of the Cold War in the late 1980s was so optimistically received in some academic quarters as to prompt discussions on the alleged "end of history". With the last great antagonistic ideology - communism - now completely and utterly defeated, what could possibly impede the worldwide acceptance of "democratic values" (necessarily in the Western liberal tradition)? Ten years beyond history, tyrannies still abound under the banners of the "will of the people", and the bright flowers of liberalism, planted on infertile soil, have wilted in the face of economic stagnation, fundamentalism and whatnot. And so, the prophetic words of Max Weber, German sociologist, economist and political philosopher still ring true: the "will of the people", he wrote, was a fictious concept, and if anyone harbored such illusions, he "still had great disillusions to suffer."