Near the end of his famous lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” delivered in 1918, written in the wake of the collapse of Germany and the rise of Bolshevism, Weber delivered an eerie prognosis: “not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness….” Two years later Weber was dead, a victim of pneumonia but also perhaps its beneficiary, a nationalist kindly relieved of the burden of seeing Germany sink into an “icy darkness” beyond any he could have conceived. He was perhaps the most important social theorist of the century, a legal thinker, historian of law and economics, student of religion, and much more. Weber left behind an extraordinary legacy: a methodology of ideal types, brilliant studies of religion and politics, and conceptual innovations that have pervaded our language and our thinking. To the degree that we cannot see the world without the vocabulary of charisma, bureaucracy, disenchantment, and rationalization, we cannot see the world without Weber. And yet, as rational and scientific as he was, committed to empirical and historical work of detail and comprehensiveness, he was also sensitive to the spiritual and creative dimensions of life. It is no surprise to learn that at the same time that he was writing the lecture on politics as a “calling,” in which he examined the modes, qualities and ethic of political leadership, Weber was also turning for solace to the Book of Job and the prophetic writings of Jeremiah, and in his own way he was venturing his personal prophecies of a foreboding future.
Like the world that he lived in, Weber’s own life was torn apart. Born in Erfurt, Thuringia, on April 21, 1864, Weber grew up in Berlin and took a degree in law at Heidelberg. He wrote his thesis on trading companies in the Middle Ages and his habilitation, which had to be in a different area, on agrarian institutions in ancient Rome. In the fall of 1894, Weber accepted a position at Freiburg in economics; in 1896 he returned to Heidelberg, where he met the historian of the Church, Ernst Troeltsch, who became a close friend and intellectual companion. Blessed with an extraordinary gift for languages and a sense for detailed historical research, Weber established himself as a student of law and economics.
But in 1897 Weber’s father died, and shortly thereafter Weber collapsed. It is likely that his physical and psychological problems were the outcome of an exhausting regimen, coupled with strain and the guilt about his father’s death. For the rest of his life, he suffered from bouts of depression and worse; for much of the next two decades he was unable to teach. The initial years of illness lasted until 1903. By 1904 he was working again, and in that year he was invited to the United States to give a paper as part of the Universal Exposition in St. Louis. After his enthusiastic and illuminating trip, Weber resumed work as an independent scholar in Heidelberg, completing his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was published in 1905–1906. From 1906 until 1918, Weber was the center of an intellectual circle in Heidelberg that met weekly to discuss current events, art, literature, politics, and more. This circle included figures such as Wilhelm Windelband, Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, Emil Lask, and Friedrich Gundolf, as well as younger scholars such as Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács. When the war broke out, Weber’s initial enthusiasm quickly dissipated, and he was an outspoken critic of the Kaiser and the failure of leadership in Germany.
By the fall of 1916 Weber was studying the Hebrew prophets, as part of his interest in charismatic leadership and in preparation for what would become Ancient Judaism, published in 1917, a year after his sociological studies of the religions of India and China. In 1918 he accepted a position at the University of Vienna, his first regular teaching position in nearly two decades. After moving to Munich to become the Chair of Economics, Weber died of pneumonia on June 14, 1920.
In many ways, Weber was a thinker whose towering intellect was drawn to profound, powerful tensions. He had a spiritual and almost religious sensibility without being a religious person, and yet he was devoted to the empirical, scientific, and extensive examination of legal, economic, social, and political conduct. In his view, individual agents are the ultimate subjects of examination, but the comparative analysis he engaged in yielded generalizations configured into what he called ideal types. He was a dedicated, almost fanatical scholar and intellectual, and yet he was also a prominent and engaged public figure, deeply involved in the political affairs of Germany in the years around World War I. His work evidences broad and detailed knowledge of history and institutions, and, at the same time, extraordinary moments of insight and creativity. It can be said that the centerpiece of his sociology and theory of history is the principle of rationalization and bureaucratization; he saw everywhere ways in which magical and religious influence was being replaced by rational structures. Yet, at the same time, the initiators of such rationalization, the original agencies of it, are ultimately special individuals with a distinct kind of authority—what he calls “charisma”—whose reforms, once instituted, become routinized and organized. Thus, Weber is able to understand historical, social, and political developments as the dialectical developments of moments of charismatic revolution with periods of bureaucratic institutionalization.
But perhaps the most poignant tension in Weber’s thought concerns what he calls, in “Politics as a Vocation,” that of two ethics, the ethic of ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility. As he makes clear, we all live with this tension, between a commitment to ultimate ends and a commitment to the means to accomplish such ends, for life is such that what we aim at and hope for, what we value most, often requires of us actions that conflict with those very goals. Politics, he tells us, concerns the legitimate use of violence, for the state is the institutional locus of the monopoly of force in a given territory. Built into politics—and built into life—is the tension between violence and the good. But the fault of the tension does not lie all on one side; nor is it a tension that is all bad. After all, as Weber sees it, the vocation or “calling” of politics requires a commitment to responsibility, to appreciate the results or consequences of one’s actions; also, ideals without regard for life can be just as destructive as life without the governance of ideals. In the pages of the famous lecture printed here we find challenging reflections and comparative analysis coupled with a special kind of poignancy, in part born out of this tension and the dark times that Weber saw on the horizon.
Recommended Readings
Bendix, Reinhard. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. New York: Anchor Books, 1962.
Breiner, Peter. Max Weber and Democratic Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Goldmann, Harvey. Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Lehman, Hartmut, and Guenther Roth (eds.). Weber’s “Protestant Ethic”: Origins, Evidence, Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Mitzman, Arthur. The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1971.
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984.
Roth, Guenther, and Wolfgang Schluchter. Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Scaff, Lawrence A. Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
Schluchter, Wolfgang. The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Schluchter, Wolfgang. Paradoxes of Modernity: Culture and Conduct in the Theory of Max Weber. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Tribe, Keith (ed.). Reading Weber. London: Routledge, 1989.
Turner, Stephen P., and Regis A. Factor. Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value: A Study of Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.