Max Weber is said to have made the following remark to one of his students: "The honesty of the scholar of our day, and even more of the philosopher of our day, can be judged on the grounds of how he defines his relationship to Nietzsche and Marx. He who denies that he would have been unable to achieve the most important parts of his own work without the work of both of them deceives himself just as much as the others. The world in which we live as intellectual beings bears largely the imprint of Marx and Nietzsche."

Marx and Nietzsche, together with Schopenhauer, are the great unmaskers of history: without them, social and political science as we conceive of it would not exist. Ultimately, the questions they raise and the uncomfortable answers they give regarding the human condition and modern social dynamics are indispensable for the emergence of a new form of objectivity: the notion of a value-free social science.

Like Nietzsche, Weber's writing is simultaneously fragmentary and systematic. While Nietzsche deliberately engaged in an aphoristic mode of writing, a clear unity nonetheless underpins it. Like Marx, however, Weber strove for something far more complete; yet because of his own unique position in history - one of immense sociopolitical and historical change - he was compelled to constantly adapt and revise. Weber's "fragments" are highly conceptual in nature. For instance, Weber thought it impossible to define the state in terms of its purposes, since each state in each period pursues different ones. But this did not mean that no conclusion could be drawn as to what the state fundamentally is. Instead, the state had to be identified by its means - in this case, physical force and command - which are common to all states. Whether one speaks of a welfare state, a constitutional state, a total state, or any other form, their substance varies enormously, yet all are united in action.

By focusing on the means of the state, Weber implies that the state also has ends - ends that all states, whatever their character, act to realise. As Andreas Anter put it: "The use of the ideal type makes it possible for Weber to resolve a central problem for the theory of the state, making it possible to conceptualise 'the state' in all its complexity, abstraction, heterogeneity and historical mutability: he excludes all the 'mutable' aspects from the complex, heterogeneous, historical and contemporary phenomenal forms and preserves what is constant and common to all states. In doing this, he constructs the state as an empirical type."

Yet despite all this, Weber never fully committed a complete theory of the state to paper, nor did he ever fully formulate a theory of democracy. Despite these gaps, and certain tensions and inadequacies in his thought, Weber may rightly be called the social scientist par excellence. If the honest scholar of Weber's day was to be judged on the grounds of how he defined his relation to Nietzsche and Marx, then in our own time the scholar should be judged by his relationship to Nietzsche, Marx, and Weber as well.

Ultimately, the Marx–Nietzsche–Weber triad, mediated through Carl Schmitt, culminated in the thought of Panajotis Kondylis: the greatest successor of all four.

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