 Such an ethical subtext is legible even in Weber’s stark realism that permeates his political sociology – or, a sociology of domination (Herrschaftssoziologie) as he called it [for the academic use of this term in Weber’s time, see Anter 2016, 3–23]. For instance, utterly devoid of moral qualities that many of his contemporaries attributed to the state, it is defined all too thinly as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” [Weber 1919/1994, 310]. With the same brevity, he asserted that domination of the ruled by the ruler, or more literally, “lordship” (Herrschaft), is an immutable reality of political life even in a democratic state. That is why, for Weber, an empirical study of politics cannot but be an inquiry into the different modalities by which domination is effectuated and sustained. All the while, he also maintained that a domination worthy of sustained attention is about something far more than the brute fact of subjugation and subservience. For “the merely external fact of the order being obeyed is not sufficient to signify domination in our sense; we cannot overlook the meaning of the fact that the command is accepted as a valid norm” [Weber 1921–22/1978, 946]. In other words, it has to be a domination mediated through justification and interpretation in which the ruler’s claim to authority, not mere threat of force or promise of benefits, is the reason for the obedience, not mere compliance, by the ruled. This bipolar emphasis on the factuality of coercive domination at the phenomenal level and the essentially noumenal nature of power (à la Rainer Forst) is what characterizes Weber’s political realism [Forst 2012].