Democracy & the Political in Max Weber's Thought 9781442695948

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Bureaucracy versus Democracy?
2. The Politics of Realist Democracy
3. Democracy and the Political
4. The Puritan Sects and the Spirit of Democracy: The Memory of the Political in the Protestant Ethic
5. Science as a Vocation, or the Politics of Science
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

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Terry Maley

Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2011  Toronto Buffalo London  www.utppublishing.com  Printed in Canada

 ISBN 978-1-4426-4336-9    Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. _________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Maley, Terry Democracy and the political in Max Weber’s thought / Terry Maley. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4336-9 1. Weber, Max, 1864–1920. 2. Democracy. 3. Political science. I. Title. JA76.M34 2011  306.2  C2011-903710-6 _________________________________________________________________

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For Patricia McDermott, whose love, support, and solidarity are an inspiration

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 29 2 The Politics of Realist Democracy 52 3 Democracy and the Political 77 4 The Puritan Sects and the Spirit of Democracy: The Memory of the Political in the Protestant Ethic 121 5 Science as a Vocation, or the Politics of Science 146 Conclusion 176 Notes 205 Bibliography 265 Index 283

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Acknowledgments

When this project was a dissertation, Edward Andrew and Ronald Beiner were crucial to its completion. I want to thank them both for their unfailing support and generosity and for the many insights into, and conversations about, Weber and modern political thought. Mark Warren, who also read the manuscript in thesis form, deserves my thanks for his thoughtful comments on Weber and democratic theory and for his many helpful suggestions. To Asher Horowitz, now a colleague, I want to acknowledge my sincere appreciation for his ongoing encouragement and for our many discussions about Weber and Critical Theory. Thanks also to Alkis Kontos, who first introduced me to Weber as a political theorist. I also want to acknowledge my appreciation for the comments made by the anonymous reviewers; they have contributed much to the end result. I would also like to acknowledge the group at UTP that helped bring the project to fruition, particularly my editor Daniel Quinlan. His assistance throughout was invaluable. Thanks also to Wayne Herrington and Matthew Kudelka for their careful editorial work. A special note of thanks to Gillian Faulkner is in order for her preparation of the index. The project was supported by a York University Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies Research Grant.

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Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

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Introduction

What lies immediately ahead of us is not the flowering of summer but a night of icy polar darkness and hardness . . . and when this night begins to recede . . . what will have become of you all inwardly? Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’

In his occasional political writings, speeches, and interventions during and after the First World War, Max Weber argued strenuously that the existing, and crumbling, autocratic monarchical regime ruled by the Kaiser should be replaced by a parliamentary democracy based on equal suffrage. In his arguments for political renewal in a time of crisis, Weber was calling for a national yet liberal-democratic political community in postwar Germany; in doing so, he was confronting political opponents on both the right and the left. Controversially and publicly, he called for heroic leaders to run the new democratic system; those who had a ‘calling’ for politics should step into the political void and rescue Germany now that it had been shattered by defeat. A key issue for Weber was how his new ‘model’ of democracy, as I will call it, could create those binding moments of commonality that constitute a political community in the midst of the postwar collapse and (more philosophically) the competition between the diverse and often irreconcilable values of modern culture that were emerging in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. In his political writings, his historical sociology, and even his methodology, Weber saw value competition and plurality as characteristic of the modern world, of capitalism, and of democracy. The German elites and middle classes, of whom Weber was highly critical for failing to provide political leadership even before

4 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

the war, had embraced capitalism as Germany industrialized but not democracy. The dilemma of Weber’s liberalism was how to make the new kind of democratic politics proposed in his model meaningful in the absence of binding, universal religious values and cultural norms as well as a homogeneous national identity. I want to look closely, and in different parts of Weber’s work, both within and beyond his political writings, at how he combines democratic politics – the democratic if unequal struggle over public resources controlled by the state – with the political – the collective activity or public decision-making power of the demos. My interest lies in how Weber situates the political within his model of democracy; which actors have the agency to bring it into effect; and where that agency is located in his proposals for a new liberal-democratic polity. The problem Weber tried to resolve is fundamental to all modern liberal-democratic polities; and its significance extends well beyond the historically specific kind of representative democracy that Weber tried to found in Wilhelmine Germany after the First World War. It has often been suggested that Weber did not try to resolve what I call the ‘problem of the political’ from ‘below,’ in participatory ways that would empower the demos or activate subordinated classes in moments or practices of collective self-determination. Rather, he sought to encapsulate the political in the compelling image  –  famous among both Weber scholars and political theorists who have engaged Weber’s political thought  –  of the charismatic political hero who could lead the nation. Weber in this way pushes the political ‘up’ to the level of party leaders and elites who run the state and tries, I argue, to contain it there. I agree with commentators such as Mark Warren and David Dyzenhaus when they note that Weber’s resolution – to have elites rule and citizens participate only minimally – is problematic because of the way it splits democratic agency in two and generates forms of exclusion within the model of parliamentary democracy. Building on this view, I am specifically interested in two things. First, there is a central paradox or tension in Weber’s view of modern democracy: on the one hand, he seeks to expand the arena of democratic politics; on the other, he contracts the political, restricting the re-creation or renewal of the political to heroic vocational politicians. There is a tension in Weber’s model that produces this gap between the demos and leaders.1 One might look upon it as a version of what political scientists have called the ‘democratic deficit’ in Western liberal democracies today – the gap between political representation, defined narrowly and

Introduction 5

channelled through parties and their leaders; and more diffuse kinds of citizen participation and conflict in civil society beyond the boundaries of the state. This tension is still present in Western liberal democracies at the beginning of the twenty-first century, one hundred years after Weber developed his model under very different historical circumstances and pressures. Second, in advocating for his model, Weber uses a justificatory and at times polemical strategy of argument: he alternates between seeing the prospects for democracy caught between certain developmental tendencies of modernity (i.e., the seemingly inevitable rationalization and bureaucratic domination of the key institutions of modern politics and the economy), on the one hand; and historical contingency or possibility, on the other. I will argue that when Weber uses arguments regarding the inevitability of developmental tendencies in modernity, he does so in ways that implicitly and also strategically set the participatory boundaries of modern liberal democracy. When he deploys the historical contingency argument, it is to emphasize the realm of possibility, action, and change. My contention – which will be controversial for some Weber scholars – is that Weber alternates between the two arguments when it suits his various purposes politically, methodologically, and in his substantive historical studies. The arguments and examples that are integral to Weber’s model of democracy are found in his ‘occasional’ political writings. But they also often arise from concepts borrowed directly from his historical and political sociology, and even from his methodological essays. I try to document this through Weber’s varying uses of his famous ideal types: the ideal type of bureaucracy (chapter 1); his political sociology of the state and the vocational politician (chapter 3); his study of the Protestant Ethic (chapter 4); and his discussion of ideal types themselves, which we encounter at the heart of his methodological essays (chapter 5). I try to show how Weber’s shifting strategies of argument and his uses of the ideal types are implicated in his arguments for the establishment of parliamentary democracy. In the Weber literature, the political and the methodological or scientific have often been separated from each other.2 Following leads in this direction by Peter Breiner, Peter Lassman, and Ronald Speirs, I will argue that Weber did not hesitate to put many of his sociological concepts to more polemical and political uses when making his case for democracy against his partisan political opponents, even while vehemently maintaining the distinction between partisan politics and science in his social

6 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

scientific work. As Lassman and Speirs put it in the introduction to their collection of Weber’s political writings: ‘Weber himself often felt torn by the conflicting demands of scholarship and political involvement. It can be argued that political concerns run through all his academic work and that these concerns alone endow it with the unifying theme so many interpreters have sought in vain.’ I do not take up the exceedingly complex issues involved in determining whether Weber had a central or ‘unifying theme’; having said that, my position on Weber is much closer to the idea that ‘political concerns run through all of his academic work.’3 The boundaries, even those which Weber tried to maintain between the political and the scientific, often become blurred.4 Weber never produced an explicit normative political theory. His comments on politics and the state are scattered throughout his work, including his formal political and historical sociology; they can also be found in his occasional lectures and newspaper articles.5 He did not produce his own version of Rousseau’s Social Contract or Plato’s Republic. He did not leave us with an explicit treatise on the political, a view of human nature, or a philosophy in which we can locate an ultimate meaning or universal truth of politics. It is precisely because he never produced a normative political theory in the traditional sense that we must reconstruct Weber’s model of democracy and its strategies of argument from his political writings and from various parts of his oeuvre. The result of this reconstruction in some ways resembles Weber’s own construction of ideal types. It resembles his ‘method’ (perhaps loosely) to the extent that it involves retrieving and accentuating a one-sided view which emphasizes the political that is partial, necessarily incomplete, and self-reflexively aware of its own presuppositions and limitations.6 Once we reconstruct Weber’s model of democracy against the backdrop of some of his better-known sociological and methodological concepts, we can see the clear outlines of an implicit political and democratic theory – one that speaks to and challenges us in the early twenty-first century, besides being situated in and historically bound to its own time and place. As a political theorist, my way of proceeding is not as historically or textually exegetical as that of many present-day Weber scholars.7 The complex layers of context and background – historical, personal, political – for Weber’s work and his politics continue to be documented and commented on exhaustively. I will not be adding to these highly fruitful efforts. Instead, my ‘one-sided’ intervention/accentuation will seek to follow the vicissitudes of the political through Weber’s work as

Introduction 7

he deploys his sociological concepts in order to define the boundaries of democratic politics in his discussions of bureaucracy; in his model of democracy; in his discussion of agency and the political in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’; in his image of the origins of that agency in The Protestant Ethic; and in his grounding of that agency in a non-teleological, open-ended temporality in his social scientific methodology. In this pursuit, I work at the level of critique, trying to follow and ‘deconstruct’ the internal logic of Weber’s strategies of argument. I do not offer up a full-blown normative model of my own, though its implicit outlines run through my critique of Weber’s model as well as the conclusion to this book. From the perspective of the historical sociologist, historian, or Weber specialist, my interpretive procedure runs certain methodological risks. To some it may seem illegitimate to generalize beyond Weber’s own historical context, circumstances, and politics. As noted, much of the new Weber literature has uncovered layers of historical, personal, political, social, and intellectual context for Weber’s work, and in doing so has enriched our understanding enormously.8 But the strength of this kind of approach can also be its limitation. This largely historical and often highly illuminating research has, unfortunately, also shielded Weber from current debates in democratic theory and from critique or more explicit normative reassessment. If we were to limit Weber inquiry largely to his historical context, no connection across time would be possible; political theory as an enterprise would be impossible if we could not comment somehow on certain common features of, say, modern Western democracies over time, evaluating them not only in their own (admittedly important) historical situations, but theoretically, normatively, and critically as well. Thus, the argument and approach taken will probably resonate most with political theorists. My critical re-evaluation of Weber’s democratic thought is animated by the following notion spelled out by Lassman and Speirs. In their commentary on Weber’s political writings, they note: ‘The essays and lectures collected here possess a dual character. Although they were occasioned by current events and problems, they also point beyond their immediate context towards much wider considerations [my italics] . . . Weber’s discussion of the fate of politics in Germany, however intense its immediate engagement, always has implications for our fundamental understanding of the politics of the modern western state.’9 In this regard, a remark by Frank Cunningham, while not specific to Weber, nonetheless captures the spirit of my inquiry: ‘There are limits to how far a narrowly

8 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

historicist reading can help to understand or evaluate [my italics] democratic theories.’10 Throughout the book, I will move back and forth between these two interrelated levels. Reconstructing and evaluating the logic, or internal argumentative dynamic, of Weber’s model of democracy certainly requires paying close attention to the historical context, but we must not focus solely on that context. I am acutely aware that in the following pages I will be walking a fine line between ‘locating’ Weber’s democratic thought – and what I take to be its controversial notion of the political – within its historical context while also commenting, in the Conclusion, on its implications for debates in liberal-democratic theory today. In doing so, I will be striving not to dehistoricize Weber’s model of democracy. I do, however, want to reassess it critically. My aim is to work on two ‘levels’ at the same time, moving back and forth between the historical and the critical, without negating either one. Approaching Weber’s thought in this way will also allow me to see his realist model of democracy as the precursor to theories later popularized by Joseph Schumpeter and (the early) Robert Dahl. That model, its basic structures and problems, and the modern state form are with us to this day. The legacy of the model in the West has been problematized in recent democratic theory. In this and other respects, Weber has a distinct and specific connection to current debates and issues in democratic thought. One can, of course, argue that Weber’s model confronted different problems and paradoxes, not the same ones as those that exercised later twentieth-century Anglo-American democratic theorists such as C.B. Macpherson and Sheldon Wolin. Yet I think there is much more that connects them, even if their solutions to the problem of how to construct or revive a more democratic political are different. But it does not follow that we cannot look at Weber’s model and its presuppositions critically, or at least partially through the lens of our own concerns and issues. To further clarify my intentions as well as the sources that have influenced my reconstruction of Weber’s model of democracy, and how I situate that model in relation to current discussions in the Weber literature and democratic theory, let me add a few layers of context and qualification. There are three contexts in which I want to situate the discussion. The first is what we might call the revival in Weber scholarship that has gained momentum since around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The second is the way Weber’s issues relate to current debates in democratic theory around the issue of the political; and the third (a subset of the second) is a kind of counter- or sub-tradition of

Introduction 9

political theorists who have taken up Weber’s issues and challenges but who remain largely outside the mainstream Weber literature. There is still no consensus in the burgeoning literature of the Weber revival regarding the significance of his work as a whole, or what his ‘central’ substantive theme is, or what ‘objectivity’ or value-neutrality are, or what his political or democratic thought means in the context of his oeuvre. Across the social, political, and human sciences in AngloAmerican academe there continues to be intense debate over Weber’s work, from his most famous study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, to his lesser-known political and methodological writings. For many years after the Second World War, Weber – along with Marx and Durkheim  –  was viewed as a founder of sociology.11 During the Cold War and into the 1970s, Weber was seen, due to the hegemonic status of Talcott Parsons’s view, as the founder of a ‘value-free’ or ‘ethically neutral’ social science. His chief rival in Anglo-American social science was Marx. Marxists were critical of both Weber’s liberalism and his apparent value-neutrality; others, though, saw Marx and Weber as having been closer, or more complementary, in some of their substantive historical concerns and analyses – of capitalism, for example – than suggested by Parsons, who had introduced Weber to the Anglo-American audience with his 1930 translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.12 When Marx was (momentarily?) ‘set aside’ by social theory in the West after the collapse of communism, interest in all aspects of Weber’s work underwent a huge resurgence.13 Now, twenty years after the Weber revival began, Weber scholar Sven Eliaeson recently noted that the renaissance in Weber studies ‘still seems to be going strong.’14 The editors of a new volume of essays on Weber’s social scientific ‘objectivity,’ sensitive to the complex historical ‘reception histories’ (Rezeptionsgeschichte) of his work, remind us that in the social sciences, Weber’s methodological work is still widely used – albeit hotly contested and debated in various national and disciplinary contexts – both by Weber specialists and by the growing ranks of social, political, and policy scientists who have been influenced by his work in myriad ways.15 In the social sciences and sociology, there has been a proliferation of published work that covers much of Weber’s oeuvre at different levels and for different audiences. Besides new translations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism16 that marked its hundredth anniversary in 2004, there have been anthologies of and companions to Weber, introductory books for the undergraduate and more general social

10 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

science audience, and edited collections and monographs produced by those specialists who straddle the vast Weber literature in English and German. At a time when the global financial system is showing signs of collapse, Weber studies is a growth industry in the social science academy. One commentator has noted that ‘now with its own journal, Max Weber Studies,’ the Weber juggernaut ‘steams along.’ Largely dominated by social theorists and historical sociologists, the interest in numerous aspects of Weber’s work continues to grow.17 This revival has produced contested images of Weber.18 His reputation as a liberal thinker has long been established but is still being debated, mirroring the critiques of liberalism that have followed from postmodernists’ attacks on the metaphysics of presence and modern subjectivity, which we will take up shortly. But a fuller recognition of Weber as a political theorist  –  and especially a democratic one  –  has yet to occur. Wolfgang Mommsen famously called Weber’s charismatic leadership politics ‘decisionist’ and initially argued that his views helped pave the way for Hitler.19 Wilhelm Hennis has argued that two of Weber’s key themes are Menschentum and Lebensführung, or how the ‘fate of man in modernity’ (the conduct of life and the formation of personality) are shaped by the modern life orders. He traces these themes in Weber’s work back to Aristotle, Plato, and Machiavelli in the Western tradition of political thought.20 A recent issue of the journal Max Weber Studies devoted itself to the discussion of ‘Max Weber’s Relevance as a Theorist of Politics.’21 Yet in the Anglo-American literature, discussions of Weber’s political thought have been restricted more to elaborations of his historical/political context, and/or they have compared him to a handful of (mostly liberal) theorists.22 In some of the recent literature on Weber by political theorists, one can discern a shift in focus toward the meaning of democracy in his thought. This reflects the idea that, as Weber himself said, ‘the light cast by the great cultural [and political] problems has moved onward.’23 Kari Palonen, in his discussion of Weber’s ideas of freedom and democracy, sees Weber as a theorist of contingency. Sung Ho Kim’s Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society reconstructs Weber’s theory of democracy to emphasize the role played by civil society associations as the crucible of citizen and leadership training that tests and legitimizes the disciplined self. Peter Breiner’s Max Weber and Democracy and his subsequent discussions are some of the most promising works on Weber’s democratic thought that have emerged from the resurgence.

Introduction 11

Breiner focuses on the role of judgment and how it is situated between historical contingency, on the one hand, and Weber’s view of the irreversibility of modern bureaucracy, on the other. I extend Breiner’s analysis, which provides the theme that a coherent argument runs through Weber’s work. Breiner’s strategy exploits the tension between the political judgment of the individual actor and the irreversible developmental tendencies Weber saw in modernity, captured in the famous metaphor of the iron cage, or ‘steel-hard casing’ (stahlhartes Gehäuse), encountered in substantive works of historical sociology such as the Protestant Ethic.24 I mobilize this line of argument, which underpins in important ways my analysis of the relation between politics and the political in Weber’s thought. The emerging reception of Weber as a democratic theorist parallels debates in Anglo-American political theory over the past decade about the meaning of the political now that the term  –  and its distinction from politics – has been (re)introduced by Claude Lefort.25 Recent discussions of the political provide the second context in which we need to re-evaluate Weber’s democratic thought. Seyla Benhabib’s wellknown collection, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, signalled the migration of the idea of the political from Continental theory. The problem of the political became a major theme in democratic theory in the 1990s, at a time when theorists of Western liberal democracy were struggling with what liberalism and democracy actually mean in the post-communist era.26 This is not to suggest that there is one definition of the political – let alone a consensus about what constitutes it – any more than there is consensus about Weber’s political thought. Recently, a number of political theorists have followed Hannah Arendt and Lefort in attempting to argue for one version or another of a renewed political. The search for a new political has emerged on a number of fronts, philosophically and politically, in part as a result of the growing recognition that the realist or competitive-elitist model of democracy, as C.B. Macpherson called it – the model that both described and pre­scribed the self-understanding of what democracy meant in the West for a generation after the Second World War – has perhaps reached its limits, or at least has run into serious difficulties.27 The model made famous by Schumpeter and later by Dahl, which wedded the capitalist economic system to a liberal-democratic system of representative government, has come under critical scrutiny lately for its continuing political limitations

12 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

and exclusions, for its failure to fully live up to its promises, and more recently for its inability to control runaway global capitalism. Just as Weber and his generation of modern theorists addressed the ‘epochal transformations’ of the early twentieth century,28 so the assumptions of the realist model have been thoroughly challenged now that the post–Second World War Keynesian consensus is unravelling under the changes wrought in the global political economy by globalization and neoliberalism. The postwar order and the assumptions on which it was constructed have been subjected to sustained and often withering critique from both the left and the right. The welfare state and its entitlements have been criticized and cut back under concerted pressure from the vanguard of the corporate right, as well as from a disaffected citizenry in the liberal democracies of the global North. In the process, the political-economic and symbolic order of the postwar compromise, which had been accepted for forty years, or as long as the economy delivered the goods to the working and middle classes, has been challenged and shaken at its core. The image of a passive citizenry or demos that the realist model sought to describe and validate empirically is increasingly being rejected or at the very least problematized by citizens globally in the name of new experiences and new kinds of democracy. As Robert Antonio has noted, sharply divergent perspectives on both the left and the right now ‘imply that, even when the old postwar party names remain, convergent mass politics [or brokerage politics under the realist model] no longer provide alternative sociopolitical visions.’29 The components of the model that are seen to generate those limits and exclusions are as follows: elite/expert control of the state and political parties; the specialized and hierarchical bureaucratization and organization of those institutions; and the capitalist economic system in the democracies of the global North that the realist model assumes and validates as necessary. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Weber already saw these as inexorable or inevitable aspects of the ‘business side’ of modern democratic politics. The resurgence of the idea of the political in democratic theory problematizes them again. The distinction between the political and politics, with a renewed emphasis on the political, has been critical to debates in Continental theory and Anglo-American political and democratic theory since the fall of the Berlin wall – precisely, and perhaps not coincidentally, the period of the Weber ‘revival.’ Since it is also crucial to my reinterpretation of Weber’s democratic thought, I want to outline that term’s recent past

Introduction 13

and then focus on how and why I end up deploying one version of it –  Sheldon Wolin’s – in my interpretation of the ambiguities, paradoxes, and tensions in Weber’s democratic thought. The distinction between politics (la politique) and the political (le politique) in French, or die Politik and das Politische in German, involves – as Fred Dallmayr, Robert Antonio, Jeremy Valentine, and others have pointed out – a critique of representative notions of truth and the ‘metaphysics of presence,’ the assumption that truth is fully present in phenomena as empirical or historical reality. Closely aligned with the critique of representative truth has been a critique of modern subjectivity –  for political theorists, the critique of the modern liberal (originally Hobbesian) subject and (mostly) his constitution as a ‘possessive individual.’ In the early and influential liberal social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke, that subjectivity and its competitive, market-driven proclivities, desires, and fears were taken to be given by nature, though not necessarily by God. Twentieth-century liberalism and its socialist critics dispensed with both God and the ‘natural rights’ of man (Weber is an exemplary modern liberal in this respect) that had been the legacy, in the West, of the French Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution, and other historical developments associated with modernity. This critique is now so familiar in Continental and AngloAmerican academe that students of political and social theory, regardless of their orientation, will be broadly familiar with its outlines. I will return very briefly here to one of the first versions to migrate from Continental thought to Anglo-American academe in the late 1980s and early 1990s in order to provide a context for the fractious discussions of the political that have been the not-so-absent subtext in recent democratic theory. Then, to provide further context, I will look briefly at some of the debates that followed Lefort’s intervention, before talking about how I see the relationship between Wolin’s version of the political and Weber’s democratic thought. According to Lefort – an early and astute participant in discussions of the political as they were turning political theory toward new, more postmodern problematics – modernity ushered in the critique of representation along with new notions of democracy.30 Ideas of democracy were critical of representations of sovereign power that were located in the ‘body’ of the king, which represented all identities and classes under him in the body politic. Rousseau’s notion of the General Will, for example, outlined in The Social Contract of the 1760s, replaced the sovereignty of monarchs with the sovereignty of the people, the demos,

14 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

after they constituted themselves democratically into the General Will. In addition, monarchical representations of sovereignty were, under the ancien régime, deeply bound up with religious symbolism, the connection between throne and altar. Never far from these were the intimate links among sword, the use of force or violence, and the throne.31 For Lefort, modern democracy signified ‘the dissolution of markers of certainty,’ the foundations of political legitimacy in universal and/or religious notions of truth.32 They also signalled a sharp break with the past in terms of the political, in the sense of a shift of power to an ‘empty site’ or place that defies universal, natural, or supramundane representation in the form of one exclusive, permanent ‘body.’ The democratic critique involved questioning the fundamental grounds of legitimacy of a hegemonic, religiously grounded system of belief and meaning that had been seen to represent the Truth. Democracy was now open to perpetual contestation rather than definitive resolution based on ‘selfevident’ truths that certain groups or persons had the exclusive right to articulate. The idea of democracy, and the struggles to establish it against the ancien régime, thus had epochal significance, constituting a ‘paradigm shift’ – in the terminology of later twentieth-century social science. Yet the modern systems of representation – those influenced by the Enlightenment  –  that replaced those of the ancien régime were themselves inspired by universal ideas of truth. The modern versions of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and ‘philosophy of consciousness’ – that natural phenomena were immediately, or with training and education, accessible to the consciousness of individuals – were closely associated with the Enlightenment, with modern liberal and socialist ideals, such as the individual, the working class, the ‘people,’ and the iconic modern ideas of freedom, liberty, and equality.33 According to Lefort and subsequent critics, liberal and socialist paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were based on assumptions of ‘presence.’ As Antonio has noted, theories purportedly relying on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and claiming the legitimacy of universal ‘macrosubjects’ (of whatever description) as agents of historical change have been subjected to relentless, withering critique as foundationalist and essentialist. His discussion captures the range of these critiques in relation to the idea of the political, as well as their differing inflections and what is at stake in each case. In his categorization of competing views of the political, Valentine is also interested in locating both the specificity of the term and how recent discussions have sought to situate it in

Introduction 15

relation to politics. Since it provides a good shorthand account for those who might not be immediately familiar with the various positions in recent debates, I will run through it (quickly) before returning to Weber and one of the key participants in these discussions, Sheldon Wolin. The distinction between politics and the political serves, Valentine argues, to ‘designate a difference between on the one hand “normal,” ordinary and routinized activities which are occupied by the production and distribution of power . . . including the contested and disputed nature of these activities, and on the other, that which is supposed to ground, explain or distinguish and locate these activities as a specific sphere of thought and action.’34 Dallmayr previously referred to the distinction in similar terms: the political, for him, designates ‘a regime or paradigmatic framework,’ whereas politics is seen as ‘concrete decisionmaking’ or an ‘action orientation.’35 Dallmayr sees the difference as that between ‘policy’ and ‘polity.’ He and Valentine both cite Ernst Vollrath, who in the late 1980s also saw politics as concrete decision making and the political as the ‘specific modality’ that defines ‘events, persons or actions and institutions . . . as to their political quality.’ Vollrath was interested in the kind of ‘rationality’ specific to political phenomena, asking: ‘Where does it reside so that it can be grasped from there?’36 Valentine, in turn, asks two further questions: (1) How is the political distinct from other ‘spheres,’ such as the social and the economic? And (2) how does the political condition or shape politics? As we can see in these remarks, the distinction between the two terms also highlights the difference between the empirical and the conceptual. Seen this way, the distinction is as old as the Western tradition of political theory itself. It can be seen, for example, in the way Plato saw the difference between the rational, objective stability of the Forms and the fluid, ephemeral, contingent nature of lived experience and the emotions. But the political has not just changed historically; it is not always empirically or historically visible from within the present. Valentine calls on Schürmann here as he explains: ‘That is because the self-grounding of the political is understood in the sense of principium, which refers to the coincidence of the order of authority derived from a prince and the order of intelligibility derived from a principle, both of which are observed without question in a given epoch.’37 Different conceptions of the political rule hegemonically, or seemingly naturally, during different epochs, and they are ‘self-grounded’ when they are accepted as the (relatively) unquestioned truth or ground that underpins how everyday politics work.

16 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

In terms of our previous discussion of the competitive-elitist or realist model of liberal democracy that was the successor to Weber’s model, we could say that its assumptions about the liberal state, the competitive, rational individual, and the beneficence of the capitalist market economy were integral to the relatively unquestioned (in the global North, at least) self-understanding of both elites and the population generally in Western democracies for almost forty years after the Second World War. Yet during periods of epochal historical change, the ground shifts and basic assumptions are questioned, criticized, and contested much more sharply and effectively than during periods in which those assumptions appear more stable or ‘self-grounded.’ The increasing ‘noncoincidence’ between the exercise of ‘legitimate’ authority, the carrying out of policy through the exercise of power in the distribution of the resources of the political community, and the grounding of the political in certain principles considered universally valid or true, signals the internal failure, or even the crisis, of the political project of an epoch. Valentine cites two different sets of examples that may be useful in outlining the range and complexities of recent debates over the meaning of the political and its relation to liberal-democratic institutions and routine practices that continue to define the sphere of formal, electoral politics that fall within the sphere of the state in the global North. The first set of examples deals with assumptions about the political made by thinkers from the social-democratic left and from the right; it focuses on the internal failure of the political project of modernity. The second set shifts to ‘post-foundational’ views that, in varying ways, reject the modern political project altogether. Jürgen Habermas tries to ground the political in the legitimacy of legal norms reached through rational, deliberative discussion in an ‘ideal speech situation.’ In his work, Habermas has tried to ground the political project of modernity in norms of communication that are accessible to all citizens in the public sphere. If all citizens can participate in the deliberative procedures that exclude no one, then these practices can, in the public sphere, hopefully balance off the domination of the lifeworld – that is, the state and the market economy, which are governed by the forces of instrumental rationality outlined famously by Weber. For Valentine, Habermas’s view of rational discussion /deliberation that results in consensual agreement presupposes what it argues for – namely, a full-fledged notion of modern citizenship. The ideal of a fully realized citizenship assumes a ‘well-ordered polity,’ one that has been ‘blocked or undermined by something non-political, but which

Introduction 17

nevertheless registers a series of political effects.’ For Valentine, in Habermas’s argument ‘the political is always missing, corrupted, dominated by or subordinate to something else . . . Thus from the point of view of rational deliberation the failure of the political is always the fault of something else: the market, the mass media . . .’38 For Valentine, Habermas’s attempt to rescue the modern project with a theory of communicative action does not critically question the fundamental assumptions of that project itself. Those assumptions include social democratic notions of subjectivity, the entitlements of the modern European welfare state, and a European public sphere in which those rights would be constitutionally recognized.39 From the radical, anti-modernist right, both Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss serve as examples of how the political has been blocked by modernity. For Strauss, ‘the political is a style of discussion about human action codified as Socratic dialogue.’ Valentine notes here that ‘the political is denied through the success of relativism, which Strauss attributes to the influence of Weberian sociology.’ What modern ‘relativism’ and social science deny Strauss is objective knowledge of the Good, or a certain version of it based on Strauss’s reading of ancient texts. Regarding Strauss’s objectivist view of the political, Valentine pointedly says: ‘The political is no longer a matter of the tribe gathering under an old tree to draw lots for combat, sacrifice and the exchange of women. It’s more a matter of the elimination of such scenes and the ways in which that is resisted.’40 For Schmitt, the political is instantiated as the moment of exception that creates the ‘friend–enemy’ distinction and that seeks to subsume the unity of the people in the person of the leader, whose decisionist authority is unquestioned. The political, for Schmitt, is defined against modern liberalism and pluralist democracy; these twin forces threaten to prevent the true political from emerging. In their views of the political, both Strauss and Schmitt share a ‘pre-modern nostalgia’ for a polity defined by hierarchical and organic, or natural, unity. An equally disturbing recent offshoot of the pre-modern nostalgia of Strauss and Schmitt is the resurgence of the European New Right and its return to what Antonio, after Betz and Immerfall, has called a ‘Weimar-era politics’ of radical conservatism.41 Those on the radical right, just as they did in Weber’s time, reject all that the modernist left and Weber’s liberal realist model stood for. They also reject much of what the new, postmodern, post-Marxist and feminist and anti-racist social movements stand for. Radical right conservatives such as Benoist

18 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

take up aspects of Schmitt’s and Strauss’s critiques of democracy and liberalism in their totalizing condemnations of modernity. For Benoist, the collective identities of ‘tribes’ are the only alternative to the liberalleft ‘levelling’ represented by the welfare state and the realist model of democracy. Those levelling tendencies are manifest in late modernity in the Western democratic notions of universality, abstract equality, redistribution, and multiculturalism. Neoliberalism and the market economy are also implicated as they exert strong homogenizing pressures on unique cultures. Democratic and neoliberal market equality (or sameness) erodes the cultural, national, or ethnic particularity that Benoist and the radical right seek to validate. As Antonio puts it, ‘only homogeneous ethnically unified communities are capable of sustaining the type of collective identities needed to resist neo-liberalism’s grim reaper’ and the decadence of Western capitalist culture. The cultural differences represented by these homogeneous yet hierarchically organized communities ‘cannot be mediated communicatively or regulated by common norms.’42 In this sense, they represent what Schmitt had longed for; the return of the political in a unified, almost mythic national/ethnic entity.43 Antonio aptly terms this ‘reactionary tribalism.’ Tribalism here refers to ‘a neo-populist resurgence of group identities anchored in ethnic community.’ It is ‘based on linguistic, religious, racial and other cultural differences.’44 This socio-historical complex has come to the fore in a turbulent period of global economic, political, and cultural transformation –  not completely unlike the Weimar era, of which Weber, who died in 1920, saw only the beginnings  –  marked by the decline of American global political and economic hegemony, the resurgence of cultural and religious politics in the global South that reject the American empire, tectonic shifts in the international system of states, and the intensification of global capitalism. It is an extreme form of collective identity politics that blends ‘one-sided Nietzschean views with a one-sided, deeply pessimistic appropriation from Weber that transmuted rationalization into homogenization.’45 Returning to Strauss and Schmitt, Valentine goes on to pose a key question in these debates for democratic theory, as well as for my reinterpretation of Weber: ‘Yet if the pre-modern nostalgia option is not satisfactory, is it possible to extract some sense of the political from within modernity itself?’46 In both sets of cases (the social democratic and pre-modern nostalgia views), modernity is implicated in either blocking the political  –  the realization of its own potential  –  or in blocking

Introduction 19

a fundamentally different, pre-modern vision of the political. In both cases, for Valentine, ‘an account of political modernity can only be obtained from a relation to its failure.’47 The questions of what ‘sense’ of the political can be retrieved ‘from within modernity itself,’ and/or the possible failure of the modern political project, have vexed the second set of thinkers canvassed by Valentine. These he calls thinkers whose notions of the political are ‘post-foundational’ and who wish to avoid the ‘assumption of presence.’ Antonio refers to these thinkers as the ‘post-modern left,’ many of whom, especially ‘strong-program’ postmodernists, have also engaged in totalizing critiques or rejections of modernity. Though Valentine focuses his remarks on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (an example of poststructuralism), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe ( post-Marxist), and Sheldon Wolin (radical democrat), one can think of a wide range of others who have contributed to recent debates in democratic theory and who could have been included in this diverse and very broad ‘category.’ The voice of Jacques Derrida runs in the background of Valentine’s discussion, but there are others as well: not only Claude Lefort, but also Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Ulrich Beck.48 Though not all situated on the terrain of deconstruction or ‘strong program’ postmodernism, for these thinkers, ‘disintegration of the polity on an epochal scale . . . reveals the absence of a substantial ground.’49 The resurrection of any kind of essentialist foundation is pointless, for Nancy; there is no commonality that can legitimately act as the foundation of the political. Instead, he calls for an ‘ethic of openness’ and alterity in which modernist assumptions about subjectivity are no longer privileged. Like ‘strong-program’ postmodernists such as Lyotard, Nancy rejects ‘meaning’ generated by the individual subject of modern liberalism altogether, believing that a new, more democratic political cannot emerge from either the mechanisms of compromise described by the liberal-realist model or from the more social-democratic deliberative models that seek to build the political through rational consensus and agreement between modern subjects. For strong-program postmodernists, both liberal and socialdemocratic alternatives are self-interested and driven by power, as are all state-centred processes. There is thus a rejection, in toto, of the state as the site of the political. This has been accompanied by ‘deconstructions’ of the privileged status of the great ‘macrosubjects’ of modernity, agents – such as the liberal or social-democratic individual, or the Marxist working class (mostly male) – once thought to be the principle

20 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

bearers of progressive historical and social change. What these critiques have sought to do is ‘deconstruct’ the grounding of something called the political in higher, universal principles that were once thought to have had the status of truth in modernist discourses, in theories of agency or subjectivity that emerged from or were influenced by the Enlightenment.50 The debates about ‘metanarratives’ over the past twenty years have sought to displace and debunk notions of truth, universality, and objectivity, seen as different versions of ‘essentialism’ associated with modernity, patriarchy, liberalism, and capitalism. Like the discussions in democratic theory, these debates have moved along a track parallel to, but almost entirely separate from, the Weber revival. The object of the critique of Laclau and Mouffe has been the ‘macro­ subject’ of Marxist theory, the working class. They reject the Marxist view of the working class as the ontological ground of a comprehensive critique of capitalism and a potentially new, post-capitalist political. In their theory of hegemony, Laclau and Mouffe ‘deny the foundational dimension of any polity,’ be it pre- or post-capitalist.51 Instead, the hegemony of any political is historically constructed, contingent; hegemony is thus always contested and is therefore inherently unstable. Hegemonic relations of domination can only appear as a coherent political project  –  or principium in Schürmann’s terms  –  when the coincidence between policy and polity makes policy (what I call politics) appear necessary, inevitable, universal, or natural. Weber has occupied a relatively marginal place in these debates, yet they provide another one of the contexts in which we must reread his democratic thought today. Through my reading of an implicit distinction in Weber’s work between politics (or policy) and the political (or polity), I want to retrieve his place in the tradition in relation to the current discussions.52 My purpose is thus not primarily to situate Weber’s democratic thought within the epochal crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead, I want to look at how we can track Weber’s struggles with the great issues of modernity, and with the ambiguities and tensions in his model of democracy, through his notion of the political. I want to make the case that Weber’s struggles and issues resonate today in democratic theory. By re-examining Weber’s model of democracy, with these political and theoretical contexts as a background, we can also indirectly join his thought to contemporary discussions about the need to broaden democratic participation, citizen control over decision making, and the meaning of modern citizenship. I argue that a critical reassessment of

Introduction 21

Weber’s model today can help us clarify the limits and possibilities of democratic participation, inclusion, and pluralism in Western democracies at the dawn of the new millennium, at a time when that model is under attack from critics on both the right and the left and when its economic underpinnings are in crisis. It challenges those on the right to maintain and protect modern basic rights, including those of workers – for which Weber argued – and minorities, and to protect social and cultural diversity.53 It challenges those on the left to remake the case for how democracy can be made more participatory, egalitarian, and inclusive in Western polities dominated by huge, bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions in both the state and the global market economy. In the end, I argue that the tensions we find in Weber’s model reveal some of the limits of Western liberal democracy in late modernity. In these limits we can see the warning signs of the current disillusionment with Western democracies.54 These limits and this disillusionment can also challenge citizens in the global North to go beyond the restrictions of Weber’s model and to continue to search for the outlines of a new democratic political ourselves. I would like to proceed by returning to Sheldon Wolin’s notion of the political, keeping in mind the context of the current debates, which I have just outlined. I then want to deploy Wolin’s notion both as a connection to Weber and as a way of reading him, with these debates and issues as a backdrop. To critically reassess Weber’s model of democracy, I engage and extend Sheldon Wolin’s version of the distinction between politics and the political. For Wolin the political emerges when ‘moments of commonality’ are democratically created by ordinary citizens, the demos or the people, in diverse and pluralist Western liberal democracies.55 Wolin’s conception of the political captures the tensions between the notions of difference, identity, and inequality analysed by some postmodern, multicultural, radical-democratic, and political-economy theories, on the one hand, and what citizens in modern Western polities still have in common as a public, on the other. This is a more fundamental or higher-order politics. The political, for Wolin, also thus involves an attempt to articulate ‘the constitutive, quasi-transcendental matrix of political life,’ as Dallmayr has put it; it attempts to define the ends of politics.56 Yet Wolin is acutely aware that the creation or revival of the political  –  including the implicit notion that I argue we find sketched out unevenly throughout Weber’s sprawling oeuvre – takes place in a disenchanted world that has been made meaningless by the awesome

22 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

powers of the modern state, bureaucracy, and capitalism as well as by the science and technology that have come to dominate these spheres of life. Set against his discussion of the meaning of the political, which we will try to extend in the conclusion to this book, Wolin’s notion provides the prism through which I interpret Weber’s attempt to redefine a liberal-democratic version of the political. Wolin’s own notion of the political is not incontestable;57 nonetheless it allows us to problematize and look normatively at the assumptions that ground Weber’s model of democracy and the institutional form of politics that he proposed for it. This is something not often done in the Weber literature, where the tendency has been to focus on the historical and other contexts of Weber’s politics without assessing the substantive implications of his view of democracy very critically.58 In contrast to the political, Wolin sees politics in liberal democracies as the ‘legitimized public contestation  . . .  by organized and unequal powers’ over collective public resources.59 The idea of politics adds the crucial dimensions of economic and political power – and their bureaucratic organization and routinization – to the discussion of what citizens have in common despite their differences. It also provides – critically for Wolin – the institutional form within which the political is reproduced and contained. For political scientists, politics comprises the stuff of more empirical studies that take in, for example, electoral and voting behaviour, agencies of the state, the justice system, and the like. This kind of politics is often studied by those whose interests, quite understandably, lie in how aspects of the state actually work. The theme of how politics is related to the political is thus used to structure my analysis of Weber’s model of democracy, the logic of which I reconstruct from Weber’s political writings, his historical sociological studies, and his writings on the methodology of the social sciences. I argue that the logic of Weber’s argument inevitably leads to the establishment of a modern liberaldemocratic state that nonetheless requires moments of contingent, charismatic leadership in order to re-create a new political as an alternative to a reactionary past (which in Weber’s context meant the Wilhelmine Kaiserreich or a socialist future patterned on the new Soviet Union). This attempt on Weber’s part is closely related to Wolin’s notion of the memory of the political. In my reinterpretation, the memory of the political becomes a key term in what I see as a politics of temporality in Weber, one that links the procedural politics of routinized mass democracy governed by huge institutions to the political. For Weber, the political involved the realm of future possibilities and actions that had been nurtured by the

Introduction 23

recollection of images of the heroic agency of the past. The notion of the memory of the political also allows me to see the tension between politics in the present and past and future images of the political in Weber’s thought more sharply – a tension that, I argue, he does not resolve. Political thinkers who ( like Wolin) are not Weber scholars or specialists have been drawn to comment on Weber at some point in their careers because of the ‘profoundly political impulse’60 that runs through his work and that transcends Weber’s occasional political writings. It also propels Weber’s thought beyond the confines of its own immediate historical context in Wilhelmine Germany. Peter Lassman and Irving Velody have identified this undercurrent of commentary by those political theorists who are outside the mainstream of Weber literature. They refer to these commentators, who come from a wide range of ideological and philosophical positions, as Weber’s ‘political critics.’61 These critics have been sensitive to the political and philosophical implications of Weber’s work. They have commented not only on Weber’s politics and his immediate historical situation, but also, either implicitly or explicitly, on how the political is related to modernity, to history, and to the social and cultural sciences. In this way they locate Weber in the Western tradition of political thought. This line of inquiry goes back to Weber’s contemporaries: it then ran through the work of Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, C. Wright Mills, and Jürgen Habermas; a diverse range of AngloAmerican theorists such as Sheldon Wolin, Fred Dallmayr, Mark Warren, Wendy Brown, and John Gunnell; and others who have not made their careers within the Weber ‘industry.’62 My inquiry is part of this tradition, as well as that line of political thinking that hopes to keep the memory of the political, and the central place of democracy in it, alive in today’s fractious theoretical and political world. In relation to Weber’s political critics, my underlying purpose is one of retrieval. In my critical (and at times perhaps even polemical) reassessment of what I refer to as Weber’s model of democracy, I am also interested in retrieving this more politicalphilosophical branch of Weber’s necessarily unfinished ‘receptionhistory’ (Rezeptiongeschichte). This strand of commentary, which connects Weber to political theory, has been lost to some degree during the Weber revival. I thus also want to situate the tensions and ambiguities in Weber’s model of democracy within the field of political-philosophical commentary that has grown out of critical engagements with his work. In this, my approach is first and foremost that of a political theorist. My reconstruction of the logic of Weber’s attempt to define a new, liberal political begins in chapter 1 with an exploration of how he

24 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

applies his sociological analysis of bureaucracy to his political writings. Bureaucracy is, as Weber said, the ‘foundation of all order’ in the modern West.63 But its encroachment must be contained lest the autonomy of the political be compromised. Weber feared that this would happen if alternatives proposed by the ruling aristocratic Junker class or revolutionary socialists were to prevail in the debates over a new political system in Germany during and after the First World War. Weber uses arguments about the inevitability of certain developmental tendencies in the West – all related to bureaucratic rationalization – in his criticisms of the left in German politics; and arguments about historical contingency – that is, Prussian control of the bureaucracy – in his criticisms of the right. Chapter 1’s argument is that in his political writings, Weber uses bureaucracy not as a ‘value-neutral’ sociological ideal type but rather as a shifting, strategic term and weapon against his political opponents. I also argue that by deploying bureaucracy in this way, Weber, crucially, tries to set the limits or boundaries of all modern democratic politics, including the extent of citizen participation in a democracy (chapter 2), and which actors are capable of creating a new political (chapter 3). In chapter 1, I build on Breiner’s perceptive analysis of the irreversibility of bureaucracy in Weber’s sociology of domination, comparing Weber’s view of bureaucracy with those of nineteenthcentury theorists John Stuart Mill and Georg W.F. Hegel. Having deployed his sociological analysis of bureaucracy to criticize proposals for constitutional and political change by the right and the left in Germany, Weber next outlines a system of parliamentary democracy in terms of what I call (after Wolin) the level of institutional politics. That system is the focus of chapter 2. Weber argued for universal suffrage and formally equal citizenship; yet his proposals for a new system of parliamentary and then constitutional democracy were, as David Dyzenhaus has noted, based on minimalist notions of popular consent and participation.64 For Weber, equal citizenship did not extend to civil society, nor did it extend to the economy. Regarding civil society’s relationship to democratic politics, I critically examine Sung Ho Kim’s recent argument concerning the role that voluntary or civil society associations play in Weber’s democratic thought.65 Chapter 2 outlines two conceptions of politics in Weber’s model of democracy. The first, or ‘negative’ view, can be found in his scathing critique of how politics, or policy, worked during Bismarck’s era. The second, which Weber calls ‘positive,’ and which he counterposes to the old system, is found in his own proposals for a new system of parliamentary democracy.

Introduction 25

Weber assigned a privileged role to party leaders in his model of parliamentary democracy. I argue that he limited his proposals for the institutional form of democratic politics in this way in order to clear the stage for his famous description of the charismatic, heroic agent in his lecture ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ Chapter 2 analyses the limitations and boundaries built into Weber’s realist model of democracy. His model, defined by universal suffrage, competitive parties and leadership selection, and a ‘thin’ notion of formal equality between citizens,66 is one of the first descriptions of the institutional form within which modern, Western democratic politics in the twentieth century was to take place. The model was later popularized as the competitive-elitist or realist model of democracy by Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl. I build on the work of C.B. Macpherson, a well-known critic of the realist view, as well as Dyzenhaus and Weber scholars Sven Eliaeson and Kari Palonen, in a critical examination of the assumptions underpinning Weber’s early version of the realist model. As a counterpoint, I also compare Weber’s view of democracy with more radically egalitarian notions of democracy in the Western tradition but outside of both English liberalism and German Idealism, such as that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the volatile circumstances of 1919, Weber added an even more prominent role for leaders to his model, calling for heroic agents to redefine the political in a liberal-democratic direction. Yet these leaders were to work within and possibly rescue the system of parliamentary democracy; they were not to replace it.67 I argue in chapter 3 that for Weber, leadership figures were to be the primary agents or vehicles through which the political could be redefined, which it badly needed to be as the old authoritarian system collapsed after the war. In my reconstruction of the political in Weber, I also see his heroic leaders – such as those discussed in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ – in a way that has not been emphasized in previous discussions of Weber’s ‘decisionism.’ Leaders are also agents whose job it is to balance the needs of diverse and conflicting constituencies, interests, values, and social classes. Weber hoped this would be so under a new democratic system created by the Weimar constitution that was to include a war-weary and potentially revolutionary working class. His redefinition of the political also included, I argue, defining new boundaries of citizenship, of inclusion and exclusion. Both were to be defined, for Weber, within the boundaries of the modern democratic state. Yet as Palonen has noted, Weber was also a theorist of contingency. In modernity neither the political nor the state can be grounded in nature or universal truths. Thus, resolutions fashioned in the ongoing

26 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

definition of a new political can never be permanent or timeless. In chapter 3 I also argue that Weber’s concept of the political, embodied in heroic leadership, was designed to forge contingent moments of commonality within diverse, pluralist Western societies. Those contingent moments of commonality were to both define difference and contain it. In the same chapter, I problematize Weber’s restriction of these moments of the political to the state and its leaders. In chapters 2 and 3, I also argue that we can begin to see the distinctive outlines of the memory of the political in Weber, and how it links his model of democratic politics (outlined in chapter 2) to his notion of heroic leadership (discussed in chapter 3). In myriad, complex ways, Weber’s discussions of these issues, though clearly bound by their own temporal and political exigencies, also speak to concerns beyond their own historical moment. In chapter 4, I argue that in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism we find in Weber’s thought the foundational and ethical core of both the heroic political agent and the memory of the political. Here we find the roots of Weber’s image of the vocational politician, who (see chapter 3) is to be the bearer of a new political. In the recent Weber literature on the Protestant Ethic, the focus has shifted from discussions of the historical validity and antecedents of the heroic Puritan to more specific assessments of the Puritan sects in America. Commentators such as Kim have seen the early American Puritan communities as the basis for associational groups in modern American civil society. Kim notes that the Puritan sects were important for democracy because they constituted a community of equal yet chosen individuals who shared a common ethical vision  –  a vision, furthermore, that had enormous consequences for modern democracy and capitalism. I am critical of Kim for focusing almost exclusively on the ethical vision of the (male) chosen few and for not paying much attention to (a) the effects of that vision on the rest of the community (i.e., women), and (b) the kind of capitalism that emerged from that vision. I also disagree with Kim’s attempt to defend Weber’s fusion of democratic and aristocratic elements in his discussion of the Puritan sects. The sects were an authoritarian model of bourgeois propriety, or conduct of life, within which difference was not tolerated and from which outsiders were excluded. Thus, there are tensions in Weber’s view of the Puritan sects and their relation to democracy that are not brought out sufficiently in Kim’s account. I argue that in the Protestant Ethic and against the backdrop of his analysis of the diversity of modern culture, Weber projects a vision of ethical coherence and ‘unity’ of the acting liberal subject into a past that

Introduction 27

he knows cannot be re-created. Yet Weber knew that the homogeneous community of the Puritan sects was an ideal typical reconstruction of the past. I argue that he re-created a semblance or echo of that ethical coherence in the figure of the politically heroic agent of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ Here I introduce the notion that there is a complex politics of time in Weber’s account of the agency of the Puritan hero. This notion of contingent historical temporality was designed, I argue, to counteract the developmental tendencies of which Weber was critical, but which he accepted as necessary and inevitable in his model of democracy. This dynamic notion of time receives its first and most selfconscious articulation in Weber’s methodological writings. In chapter 5, I take up Weber’s methodology and its relation to his model of democratic politics and to the political. The focus is on Weber’s famous methodological device, the ideal type out of which the Puritan hero was constructed. In the literature, the ideal type has been seen as a heuristic device serving the purposes of clarification. My argument is that ideal types are not simply value-neutral social scientific conceptual tools. Looking back on Weber’s uses of the idea of bureaucracy (chapter 1), the political hero (chapter 3), and its roots in the Puritan hero (chapter 4), we find that Weber used these ideal typical constructions in his political writings to buttress his arguments for a limited democracy and for heroic leaders who could define its ends. I examine some of the key assumptions that Weber makes in order to be able to construct the ideal types in the first place. I argue that in his methodology essays, Weber offers us – against theoretical rivals – an image of contested, open-ended, and contingent historical time or temporality in which the social scientist, like the vocational politician, can make choices, exercise agency, and act. This open-ended temporality makes it possible for social science  –  which Breiner sees as a prudential and sociologically informed political theory68  –  to contribute to new definitions of the political, including ones that might be critical of given, hegemonic notions such as those embedded in Weber’s realist model of democracy. This striking sense of time, found in the heart of Weber’s methodology essays, has been neglected in the literature. I think it is intimately related to the memory of the political in Weber’s thought, as well as to democratic possibilities in a future that is never completely defined by the interiority of a steel-hard casing, or the self-grounding of the political understood in the sense of a self-referential principium.69 On another level, the social scientist is also the product of a modern world dominated by science, technology, bureaucracy, and capitalism.

28 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

All of these spheres and the kinds of persons they produce are, for Weber, governed by specialization. Both the politician and the social scientist are coherent, specialized personalities acting out of a sense of conviction as well as responsibility for consequences. Weber sought to confine the possibility of doing social science and renewing the political to these very specific persons. By privileging such actors over civil society activists, revolutionaries, pacifists, and feminists, Weber limited the possibilities of participation in politics and the agency of those who were capable of shaping the political and who were entitled to do so. In light of the discussion of the political in Weber’s thought, I look, in the Conclusion, at some of the paradoxes of the realist model of democracy as they have emerged in discussions of political and democratic theorists who are, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, still implicitly engaged in a dialogue with Weber’s ‘ghost.’ Instead of assessing the broader sweep of democratic theory in the conclusion to a book on Weber’s thought, I choose instead to look at two Anglo-American democratic theorists who are not Weber specialists but whose work has been profoundly influenced by some of the dramatic paradoxes and tensions that are central to Weber’s thought. I look to Mark Warren in a discussion of democratic participation in late modern democracies, and ask whether more democratic, participatory notions of the political – now often seen to be operating outside the state in Western democracies  –  have challenged Weber’s realist model and its successors. Having relied on Sheldon Wolin as a template for assessing the vicissitudes of Weber’s vision of the political, I end this book by commenting on Wolin’s own heroic notion of the agency of the demos, or the people, and its relation to the memory of the political, seeing Weber’s view and Wolin’s as poles of the political in late modernity.

1 Bureaucracy versus Democracy?

The Politics of Theory I begin by suggesting that Max Weber’s sociological analysis of bureaucracy plays an important and sometimes polemical role in his political writings and in his model of democracy. There are also overlapping political contexts for reading Weber’s sociology of domination, in which his best-known discussion of bureaucracy is found. According to Weber, bureaucracy and democracy  –  already intertwined historically in the modern West – were becoming increasingly inseparable in the early twentieth century. For his contemporaries, the ‘iron cage,’ or ‘steel-hard casing,’ of bureaucracy was one of Weber’s most compelling political thematics.1 I begin with it because it frames the discussion that unfolds in the following chapters. Weber’s agitation for democracy, his argument for political heroes, and his controversial view of the methodology of the social sciences all respond to, and would not make sense without, the way he frames and deploys his sociological analysis of bureaucracy. In Weber’s thought these arguments are internally related to his at times quite politicized uses of the ideal typical model of bureaucracy. Commentators from Karl Löwith and Wolfgang Mommsen onwards have seen bureaucracy as the antithesis of freedom in Weber’s work. In the reassessment offered in this chapter, I want to follow the lead offered by Peter Breiner in Max Weber and Democratic Politics. Like Friedrich Tenbruck and Wolfgang Schluchter, Breiner sees Weber’s sociological analysis of bureaucracy as part of his larger discussion of the world historical process of rationalization. But instead of elaborating on the theme of rationalization, drafting it for the purpose of reconstructing

30 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

modernity, as Jürgen Habermas has done, Breiner focuses on how Weber uses an apparently objectivist notion of rationalization to argue that bureaucracy – the epitome of modern rational organization –  cannot be historically reversed. Weber then uses the argument about the irreversibility of bureaucracy, derived from his sociology of domination, against rival political and ideological claims. He does so especially, but not only, in his running battles with left-leaning views, with which he disagrees so vehemently. In his famous lecture ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and in his wartime political writings, Weber’s argument against socialist alternatives to both capitalism and parliamentary democracy is that they are not feasible in light of the historical irreversibility of modern bureaucracy. The hierarchical, disciplinary structure of modern bureaucratic organization, which defines the modern economy as well as the state, cannot be made more democratic or egalitarian. If this is so, then progressive positions that advocate more equal participation in decision making by citizens, or more democratic control over the state or the economy, are unrealistic. For Weber, bureaucratic administration is the indispensable mechanism through which power is exercised in the modern state. This situation cannot be radically altered, let alone eliminated, regardless of what kind of political system bureaucracies are meant to serve. Breiner’s insight into Weber’s politicized uses of the ideal type of bureaucracy is important.2 The various uses to which Weber puts his key sociological concepts is a theme we will develop throughout the book. It will surface again in our discussions of Weber’s view of democracy in chapter 2, in the carefully constructed nature of the political and Protestant heroes of chapters 3 and 4, and in relation to Weber’s agonistic methodology in chapter 5. In each of these chapters I will look at the way Weber puts his concepts to use in relation to his ideas of politics and the political. I want to begin to elaborate on his insight in this chapter, in the discussion of Weber’s uses of the idea of bureaucracy. This strategy of argument – the self-conscious use of social scientific categories in a polemical yet authoritative way – falls within the orbit of what Sheldon Wolin has called the politics of theory. In Wolin’s view, the politics of theory (which we will take up further in the discussion of Weber’s social science in chapter 5) refers to ‘the critical activity of defeating rival theoretical claims . . . This politics is conducted by means of strategies (e.g. the Socratic method . . .) and intellectual weapons (various logics, conceptions of “facts”).’ In a similar vein, Weber deploys various strategies of argument, including ones that involve his sociological

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 31

analysis of bureaucracy, against rival political claims. These strategies are part of what Wolin calls a ‘“profane politics,” one that is different from a “higher,” ontological politics,’ or the political.3 The former kinds of arguments or strategies used against opponents are also part of what Wolin sees as politics. Politics involves ‘the legitimized and public contestation, primarily by organized and unequal powers, over access to the resources available to the public authorities of the collectivity.’4 The current chapter and the next explore the strategies and ‘weapons’ that Weber uses to make his case for the indispensability of bureaucracy to his view of politics. Examining how the limitations that constitute bureaucracy are internally related to politics lays the groundwork for the discussion of democracy in chapter 2, and of the political leader with a calling who represents the ‘higher order’ level of the political in chapter 3.5 Weber was engaged in ‘profane politics,’ slugging it out with rival views, methods, and political positions for his entire political and professional life. He continually fought this conceptual trench warfare using similar intellectual weapons on different fronts: in his occasional political writings and speeches, in his historical sociology, and even in the methodological debates in which he was embroiled over the status of modern social science. In all of these battles he enlisted strategies and ‘weapons’ as he deployed the term bureaucracy against opponents. Breiner’s contribution is to critically examine the language Weber uses, on the level of what I call politics, in his strategic portrayal of modern bureaucracy as the irreversible outcome of an ‘objective’ and virtually inexorable historical process of rationalization. Weber deploys his sociological analysis of bureaucracy and its attendant notion of rationalization against socialists; the conservative Junkers; intellectual opponents such as Gustav Schmoller, who defended the German Beamtenstaat against parliamentary democracy;6 and even the capitalist cartels that played such an important role in German politics in the Wilhelmine era. In addition, there are two other arguments, which operate on the level of politics, embedded in the way Weber uses the term ‘bureaucracy’ against his political rivals. First, Weber’s view of the irreversibility of bureaucracy is actually an ambivalent and complex argument about the limits of modern democratic politics and about what kind of citizen agency and what kind of state can exist within those limits. As I argue in the next chapter, Weber’s advocacy of parliamentary reform after Germany’s defeat in the First World War assumed, and took place within, those limits.7 Yet at other times, Weber reacts to the very irreversibility of the bureaucratic limits

32 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

he has outlined and uses that reaction to make arguments about the need for leadership of the state, which is to some degree autonomous from bureaucratic domination. These are counterarguments that Weber levels against bureaucracy, yet they are intimately related to it; there is a tension between the two uses. In chapter 3, I will argue that Weber’s counterarguments are personified in the image of the political hero or statesman, who must define a new political yet who can never fully overcome or transcend bureaucracy’s limitations in the process of transformation. Bureaucracy is thus the boundary condition of all modern democratic politics as well as a challenge to be overcome. It is, as Weber said, the Grundlage aller Ordnung, the foundation of all order, in modern occidental civilization.8 The second implication is that Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy against political opponents has a class dimension. Weber couches his arguments for the inevitability of bureaucratic domination in apparently neutral social scientific terms. Yet when one looks more closely at the same sociological characterization of bureaucracy, one finds a very specific class differentiation in his political uses of the concept that makes it anything but ‘neutral.’ Weber’s argument that bureaucracy is irreversible has implications for a not so hidden politics of class that is internally related to his liberalism. Both these observations lead me to think that on the level of politics, bureaucracy is a shifting, elusive, and strategic term in Weber’s political writings, and not simply a value-free sociological ideal type or the antithesis of individual freedom. In his political texts, Weber strategically deploys his sociological analysis of bureaucracy on a variety of fronts.9 In Weber’s hands the term becomes a multifaceted weapon in his very public attempts to clear the ground for his own model of democracy in his battles with political opponents on both the left and the right. Before we can flesh out this theme in its specificity, we need first to recall Weber’s discussion of modern bureaucracy as a form of rational-legal domination and the concept of Herrschaft on which it is constructed. Herrschaft is the term Weber uses to describe a variety of forms of domination. Its most basic element is the willing and at least minimal acceptance of commands or rules on the part of those subject to them. Weber takes this acceptance to indicate the legitimacy of forms of domination. In the literature, two points are emphasized repeatedly in discussions of Weber’s notion of legitimate domination. First, ‘forms of “legitimate domination” are “understood” typically from the vantage point of Zweckrationalität [purposive rationality], and not value or substantive

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 33

rationality.’ In each of Weber’s three ideal typical forms of legitimate domination – traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational – there are different grounds for the obedient behaviour of the subject agents. Second, the ‘validity of the grounds for obeying is not the basis for understanding “legitimacy.” All that matters is that  . . .  commands and the form of domination in which those commands are given are “believed” to be valid.’ The subordinate or the ruled act ‘as if’ they had made ‘the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake.’10 Weber does not claim to assess or evaluate the validity claims of obedience or the particular form of domination that exacts that obedience from agents in his notion of Herrschaft. Briefly, Weber characterized the three types of domination as follows. The first is traditional domination, which derives its legitimacy from ‘the authority of the “eternal past,” of custom, hallowed by the fact that it has held sway from time immemorial and by a habitual predisposition to preserve it.’ It is ‘exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of the old type.’ The second is charismatic, and rests on ‘the authority of the exceptional, personal “gift of grace” . . . the entirely personal devotion to . . . revelations, heroism, or other qualities of leadership in an individual.’ In the third form, ‘submission under legal authority is based upon an impersonal bond to the . . . duty of office . . . The jurisdictional competency is fixed by rationally established norms.’ Legal-rational authority is, historically, the most recent, comprehensive, and stable form of domination, and the one that is distinctly modern.11 Weber locates modern bureaucracy within the orbit of rational-legal domination. Though bureaucracy is certainly not new historically, it is the prototypical form of purposive or instrumental rationality in modernity. Its primary modality consists in the calculation of the most effective means that can be used to achieve a given end or goal. Weber’s catalogue of bureaucracy’s defining characteristics is well known. Bureaucracies are organized along lines of functional efficiency. Business is conducted, as it is in the market, impersonally, ‘sine ira et studio’ (without scorn and bias), as Weber liked to say.12 It is also conducted according to fixed rules. Decisions are made and commands are given according to written rules and explicit formal procedures. Offices are organized hierarchically and follow a chain of command. The organization itself consists of a specialized, hierarchical division of labour. It is staffed by experts or trained specialists who are hired according to merit rather than patronage, loyalty, or other non-functional or personal attributes.

34 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

Weber notes that some features of bureaucracy were present in earlier eras. ‘But,’ he adds, a rational, systematic and specialized pursuit of science, with trained and specialized personnel, has only existed in the west in a sense at all approaching its present dominant place in our culture. Above all this is true of the trained official [den Fachbeamten], the pillar of both the modern state and the economic life of the west . . . No age has known, in the same sense as the modern Occident, the absolute and complete dependence of its whole existence, of the fundamental political, technical and economic conditions of its life, on a specially trained organization of officials.13

The predominance of trained experts means that bureaucracies can create and mobilize specialized knowledge (Fachwissen) and knowledge of the facts (Tatsachenerkenntnis) in ways that more informal organizations or individuals cannot. Bureaucracies exercise a kind of rationalen Wissensherrschaft, a ‘rational domination through knowledge,’ as Breiner has put it.14 They can thus conduct administrative business with unprecedented efficiency and predictability. For Weber, ‘the main inner foundation of the modern capitalist business is calculation.’ It is precisely the same for bureaucracy, which functions ‘in a rationally calculable manner according to stable, general norms, just as one calculates the predictable performance of a machine.’15 Weber’s concern was that in modern society this technically efficient, machine-like apparatus threatened to overwhelm or displace the subjectively defined ends of individuals. A host of commentators after him who do not necessarily agree with Weber’s version of liberal politics, from the Frankfurt School to Jacques Ellul and more recently Habermas, have shared this concern.16 In the wartime article ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order,’ Weber provocatively posed the following question: ‘In view of the fundamental fact that the advance of bureaucratization is unstoppable, there is only one set of questions to be asked about future forms of political organization: How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of “individual freedom”  . . .  in any sense, given this all powerful trend towards bureaucratization?’17 He then asked a related question: ‘In view of the growing indispensability and . . . power of state officialdom . . . how is democracy even in this restricted sense to be at all possible?’18 We see Weber’s liberal valuation of individual autonomy in the questions he posed in relation to bureaucracy. In anticipation of our

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 35

discussion of Weber’s view of the tensions involved in trying to define the autonomy of citizens and the political hero, it may be useful to turn briefly to Kant. In the modern liberal tradition, the central ideas of moral autonomy and individual freedom are intimately bound up with our ability to use our reason to define self-chosen ends. In What Is Orientation in Thinking? Kant says that ‘to employ one’s own reason means simply to ask oneself, whenever one is urged to accept something, whether one finds it possible to transform the reason for accepting it, or the rule which follows from what is accepted, into a universal principle governing the use of one’s reason.’19 Here Kant echoes his categorical imperative, in which the autonomy of the will is emphasized. For Kant, the categorical imperative tells us to ‘act according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’20 To be able to act according to that maxim which you would wish others to adopt as a universal law is to be able to use one’s reason publicly as an autonomous agent. As Kant says in ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ the public use of reason by autonomous agents who are free from dependence on external, heteronomous forces is a sign of maturity. Mark Warren has noted that the public use of reason, for Kant, meant ‘freedom from the powers of nature as well as those of feudal hierarchies.’21 In Kant’s view, ‘freedom of thought signifies the subjection of reason to no laws other than those which it [reason] imposes on itself.’22 By contrast, ‘immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’23 It is only the free, unconditioned exercise of the will that allows individuals to emerge from a state of immaturity and to become self-legislating, autonomous moral beings, to reach the ‘Kingdom of ends.’24 Individuals can realize the kingdom of ends by following the three maxims or standards for the proper use of reason, which Kant outlines in Critique of Judgment: unprejudiced thought, enlarged thought, and consistent thought. I will only briefly touch on the first two. Unprejudiced thought is the ability to reason independently, ‘without the guidance of another.’ Kant’s notion of enlarged thought returns us to the idea of a universally shared moral identity, in Bernard Yack’s terms.25 The maxim of enlarged thought tells us that we can learn ‘the mental habit . . . of detaching ourselves from the subjective and personal conditions of our judgement, which cramp the mind of so many others, and reflect upon our judgement from a universal point of view which we can only do by adopting the view of others.’26 This notion of ‘enlarged thought’ is what

36 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

commentators such as Warren have referred to as a ‘broad’ conception of reason.27 In the instrumentally rational bureaucracies whose domination Weber saw as ‘unstoppable,’ this broad notion of reason is threatened. Weber shared this concern about bureaucracy with nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill. Tocqueville and Mill feared the ‘tyranny of the majority’ in modern mass democracies while accepting its inevitability. Nor were they fans of bureaucracy. Like Mill, Weber’s concerns focused largely on the negative relationship between bureaucratic organization and individual autonomy. We can get a sense of the political threat to this notion of autonomous reason by examining Weber’s view of bureaucracy and its historical incarnation in the modern democratic state. This in turn lays the groundwork, in subsequent chapters, for an exploration of Weber’s model of democracy, his view of the political hero’s capacity for autonomous political action, and the possibility of an autonomous social science. Weber saw an intimate relationship between the bureaucratic structures of the capitalist firm and the modern state. One of the two defining features of the modern state, for Weber, is that it is bureaucratic, like the modern capitalist enterprise. Weber refers to both the state and the capitalist firm as a Betrieb, or enterprise.28 Bureaucratic organization is indispensable to the functioning of modern states, democratic or otherwise. It is also the epitome of that efficiency which defines the capitalist firm. For Weber, bureaucratization is the constituent feature of both the modern state and the capitalist economy: Just as the so-called progress towards capitalism has been the unequivocal criterion of economic modernization since the Middle Ages, so the equally unequivocal criterion for the modernization of the state has been progress towards a bureaucratic officialdom based on recruitment, salary, pension, promotion, professional training and functional division of labour, well defined areas of jurisdiction, documentary procedures, hierarchical suband super-ordination – has been the equally unambiguous yardstick for the modernization of the state, whether monarchical or democratic.29

Weber notes that the most decisive way in which bureaucratization of the state parallels the development of capitalism is that ‘in the contemporary state . . . the “separation” of the administrative staff, of the administrative officials, and of the workers from the material means of administrative organization is completed.’30 The commentary of a

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 37

previous generation that had rediscovered the relationship between Marx and Weber emphasized the separation of both the worker and the bureaucratic official from their respective means of labour and administration. In the work of Karl Löwith, Hans Gerth, and C. Wright Mills, Weber was seen to have extended Marx’s insight regarding alienation in the labour process to the institutions of the modern state and culture as a whole.31 This discussion has been taken up again, and not only by commentators interested in Weber’s historical sociology or his dialogue with the ‘ghost of Marx,’ but also by those who are interested in the relation between the universality of this separation in modernity and Weber’s political writings.32 Breiner has drawn our attention to the origins of this process, tracing its roots to the expropriation of political means and their consolidation in the hands of the state. The expropriation of political and administrative means was for Weber the precursor to the now universal separation of the modern specialized official and worker from their means of survival. This process, on which the efficiency of the modern bureaucratic state has been built, has its beginnings in the actions of the prince, the political forerunner to the modern captains of industry. Weber wrote: The development of the modern state is set in motion everywhere by a decision of the prince to dispossess the independent, ‘private’ bearers of administrative power  . . . That is all those in personal possession of the means of administration and the conduct of war, the organization of finance and politically deployable goods of all sorts. The whole process is a complete parallel [my italics] to the development of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the independent producers.33

The subsequent consolidation of administrative power in the hands of princes and monarchs gave rise to the nation-state in Europe. Weber’s prince was an entrepreneur, as was Marx’s capitalist, only now an expropriator of political and administrative rather than economic means. The next step in the consolidation of bureaucratic power happened when control over administrative means passed from the personal authority of the prince (seen in the famous comment of Louis XIV, ‘l’État c’est moi’) to the state as an impersonal institution. The modern outcome of this process of expropriation, for Weber, is that ‘the modern specialized official comes to predominate . . . Wherever the trained, specialist, modern official has once begun to rule, his power is absolutely unbreakable, because the entire organization of providing even the most basic needs

38 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

in life then depends on the performance of his duties.’34 The result of this potent combination of factors, which came together historically in the West, is that ‘in a modern state real rule, which becomes effective in everyday life neither through parliamentary speeches nor through the pronouncements of monarchs but through the day-to-day management of the administration . . . inevitably lies in the hands of officialdom.’35 In Weber’s discussion of parties and democracy, the ‘separation’ thesis applies not only to workers in the private and public realms, including party officials, but also to citizens. They are divorced from the means of politics through which they could realize their moral autonomy in the modern state: ordinary citizens are separated from the means of citizenship and participation. This alienation is, for Weber, the inevitable outcome of the concentration of the means of administration in the hands of permanent officials. It is a universal feature of modern democratic states, be they capitalist or socialist. Ronald Beiner has reversed what would have been the order of priority for Weber and asked instead about the ends of citizenship, or what citizenship is for in modern liberal polities.36 In doing so, he poses a question that Weber did not think it possible to answer definitively, a question about the nature of the political. In his discussion of bureaucracy and the state, however, Weber does not separate or distinguish any notion of the ends of political life from the means of their realization. Political ends and administrative means simply require each other. No program, conviction or campaign, no matter how compelling, can be realized without resources, staff, funding, all the stuff of routine, disciplined political organization and modern administration. For Weber, this state of affairs and the process of expropriation – which he traces in the state, the army, the bureaucracy, the university, indeed, in all of the public institutions of modern liberal democracies – cannot realistically be reversed. Weber thought that the world was being engulfed by bureaucratic forms of organization that slotted people into a rigidly defined division of labour, turning them into cogs in a giant impersonal mechanism, a ‘living machine.’ Many of Weber’s most famous passages are full of foreboding regarding the potential for bureaucracy to permanently diminish the sphere of individual action and freedom. The unchecked spread of bureaucracy will produce a ‘shell of bondage’ in which people will be ‘as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt.’37 Or, as Weber says dramatically at the end of the Protestant Ethic: ‘No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 39

development [of capitalism and bureaucracy] entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas, or, if neither, mechanized petrification . . . For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might truly be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.” ’38 Some Weber scholars have recently argued that his ‘views on the universal tendency towards bureaucratization were clearly overdramatized.’39 Yet I think there are considerations that can help us understand Weber’s view, even if it seems exaggerated today. First, while the Western nation-state was not new, the huge, rationalized bureaucracies of the kind that Weber saw emerging in the German state and in the large firms in the capitalist West were historically significant. What Weber saw in his ideal type was one historical possibility, in its most rational form, for the development of bureaucratic domination. Yet his view of bureaucracy was also a counterargument and a blunt antidote against what he saw as naive notions of progress and liberation through science and technology. What is now, to citizens of the industrialized world, the commonplace reality of large bureaucracies and the institutional form of the state in modern liberal democracies was to Weber and his contemporaries a relatively new and foreboding development.40 As Breiner has noted, this image of inexorability reflects one side of a tension in Weber’s notion of rationalization. At times Weber seems to see rationalization as an objective historical process that appears inevitable. Yet at other times, in his methodological discussions of the ideal type or in his defence of the Protestant Ethic thesis, world historical developments are seen to be the result of multiple and contingent historical logics and causal factors, depending in part on the subjective emphasis or criteria of selection singled out by the social scientist. If this is so, then the ‘steel-hard casing’ may not be completely closed; the seeming irreversibility of bureaucracy may, at some future point, be subject to new historical forces and contingencies.41 Commentators have noted Weber’s tendency to slide back and forth between a subjective perspectivalism and an ‘agentless objectivity.’ Weber often argued ‘for and practiced a resolute multicausalism yet at times lapsed into claims to be providing objective causal laws of social action.’42 Yet in his critiques of rival political positions, Weber sometimes sets aside the multidimensional, contingent, and subjective construction of causal chains of historical analysis on which he based his sociology of domination. When battling political opponents, Weber repeatedly invokes the universality, necessity, and irreversibility of modern

40 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

bureaucracy to deny the feasibility of competing claims, in Breiner’s apt phrase.43 Like capitalism, bureaucracy will likely be around ‘until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.’ He then uses the argument of irreversibility to discredit alternative projects and political programs, be they socialist, Marxist, feminist, or pacifist (during the war) as unattainable. If one cannot reverse the centralization and specialization of means that has resulted in their concentration in the state apparatus and the party system, then hopes for a more democratic, egalitarian, and participatory state, or politics, or economy, are merely utopian. Weber did not hesitate to deploy his sociological concept of bureaucracy in defence of his argument for a limited democracy. Breiner argues that, for Weber, this ‘is not a mere oversight on his part but rather a strategy of argument,’ a version of what Wolin has called ‘the politics of theory.’44 I would now like to show specifically how Weber deploys the argument about irreversibility in his running battles with his main political opponents, the socialists and the reactionary Junkers. This will lead me to argue that Weber uses the irreversibility of bureaucracy not only to discredit political rivals but to do two other things as well. First, while Weber is always ready to use his arguments about bureaucracy to beat down opponents, he is, as we have noted, critical of bureaucracy as well. In his critique of the stifling effects of bureaucracy on individual freedom, Weber sets the table for an argument for the autonomy of the political and of those political leaders whom he hopes will redefine it. Second, within Weber’s argument for the autonomy of the political lies a subsidiary claim about the autonomy of the state from class interests. I want to show (a) how both of these flow out of Weber’s use of ‘irreversibility of bureaucracy’ arguments; and (b) how they act as the foundations, in Weber’s political writings, for the way he limits the boundaries of politics in order to create a space for the autonomy of the political. Weber slides back and forth between the more general, objective use of bureaucracy and its historically specific and politically problematic configurations, depending on the political argument he is making. He does this not only in his critique of socialism but also in his polemics against political opponents on the right – the aristocratic, agrarian Junker class, which controlled the state apparatus after Bismarck founded the unified German nation. To understand how Weber’s model of democracy was a reaction to the Junkers’ hegemony, we need to look at the way he constructs his argument about what he saw as the bureaucratic usurpation of politics by the Junkers – that is, the way in which the political realm and the state were dominated by the bureaucracy under the Junkers.

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 41

When Bismarck resigned in 1890, he left behind as his legacy the Obrigkeitsstaat, which is Weber’s critical term for the ‘authoritarian state.’45 It was run by the Prussian-dominated bureaucracy, whose leading officials were drawn from the agrarian, conservative Junker class. It was headed by the constitutional monarch, the Kaiser. He in turn appointed the (again) unelected Reichskanzler (chancellor), who ruled autocratically, set the policy direction for the state, and chose unelected officials from within the bureaucracy as cabinet ministers. The two houses of Parliament, the Reichstag and the Bundesrat (or Federal Council), were constitutionally separate. Bismarck had seen to it that only the Bundesrat, composed of the heads of individual states, had executive powers. The executive power effectively remained in the hands of the Hohenzollern monarchy. These arrangements ensured that the elected members of the Reichstag could not be responsible ministers in the legislature. This removed what for Weber was the one guarantee of accountability: the assurance of personal responsibility. This state of affairs, perpetuated by the Junker class under the patronage of the Kaiser after Bismarck’s departure, was disastrous for German politics and liberalism. In Weber’s withering attacks on the Junkers, he objects to their exclusive control of the state bureaucracy and ministerial portfolios in the Bundesrat, as well as their backward-looking conservatism, which was rooted in an idealized vision of an organic, agrarian past. For Weber, the Junkers stood in the way of what he and other liberals saw as the national interest. Under the yoke of Junker rule, the bureaucracy – predominant in modern Western nations in any event – assumed an explicitly political role that it should not have had. For Weber, the Junker-dominated bureaucracy had played an exaggerated and profoundly regressive role in German politics. In his critique, Weber applied his sociological analysis of bureaucracy to the historically specific situation of German politics. Weber accepted bureaucracy as the parameter within which modern democracy must develop; but he did not accept what he saw as the historically contingent or current bureaucratic usurpation of politics by the Prussian bureaucracy. He argued that the historically specific domination of politics by the bureaucracy should end; it was therefore subject to change and not irreversible. His strenuous advocacy for parliamentary democracy would not make sense without this assumption. Weber conceded that German ‘officialdom has passed every test brilliantly wherever it was required to demonstrate its sense of duty, its objectivity and its ability to master organizational problems in relation to . . . official tasks of a specialized nature.’ But when referring to those unaccountable ministers of the Reich, Weber was emphatic that the ‘the rule

42 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

of officials has failed utterly whenever it dealt with political questions.’46 Under Bismarck, parliament had been reduced to ‘the reluctantly tolerated rubber-stamping machine for ruling bureaucracy.’47 Weber’s attack was relentless: ‘Ever since Bismarck’s resignation, Germany has been governed by men who were “officials” (in mentality) because Bismarck had excluded all other political minds besides his own.’48 With biting sarcasm, Weber commented that ‘the Germans  . . .  developed to a virtuoso degree the rational, bureaucratic organization of all human associations of rule, on the basis of expertise and the division of labour, whether in the factory, army or state.’49 To support his critique of the bureaucratic usurpation of politics, Weber invoked a distinction with which later generations of students of public administration would become familiar – the one between politics and administration. The distinction begins to hint at the centrality of struggle, a theme that emerged more forcefully in Weber’s model of democracy and his discussion of the political hero who alone is capable of founding a new political realm. To guard the realm of democratic politics against bureaucratic domination, Weber calls for a sharp distinction between the role of the bureaucrat and that of the politician: the politician fights passionately for causes, whereas the bureaucratic official is a technically trained expert whose duty it is to stand above the fray of politics. Weber very carefully delineates the role of the official: ‘The true official . . . should not engage in politics but should administer, and above all he should do so impartially.’50 Weber’s outline of the role of the bureaucratic official conforms closely with the politics/administration model that had been current in the Anglo-American academic public administration literature since Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 essay ‘The Study of Administration.’ Wilson argued that ‘the field of administration is a field of business. It is removed from the hurry and strife of politics . . . Administrative questions are not political questions.’51 Students of modern public administration will recognize this immediately as the doctrine of political neutrality.52 In this view, bureaucracy strives to be neutral, or objective, in the way it applies rules equally to all cases. Like the market, it functions – so Weber tells us – ‘sine ira et studio’ (without scorn or bias).53 Also for Weber, the political neutrality of bureaucracy was closely related to the fact that bureaucrats had middle-class professional training and education. Almost a hundred years before Weber, Hegel had also thought that the culture and leadership of the bureaucracy was that of the educated middle classes. As he noted in the Philosophy

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 43

of Right, ‘civil servants (and the members of the executive) constitute the greater part of the middle class, the class in which the consciousness of right and the developed intelligence of the mass of the people is found.’54 Their distinctive characteristic, for Hegel, was their objectivity  –  that is, their ability to rise above the narrow particularism of class interests. In addition, because of their training, ‘the highest civil servants . . . necessarily have a deeper and more comprehensive insight into the nature of the state’s organization . . . They are more habituated to the business of government and have a greater skill in it’ than the political representatives of specific class interests.55 Mill’s view of bureaucracy is also closer to Weber’s, though in a different way. In Considerations on Representative Government, he compares bureaucratic to democratic forms of government. For him, bureaucratic government is where ‘the work of government has been in the hands of governors by profession; which is the essence and meaning of bureaucracy.’56 Governors by profession are the educated middle classes. He continues: ‘And here it must be acknowledged that a bureaucratic government has, in some important respects, greatly the advantage. It accumulates experience, acquires well-tried and well considered traditional maxims, and makes provision for appropriate practical knowledge in those who have the actual conduct of affairs.’57 Unlike Hegel, however, Mill has serious reservations about the predominance of bureaucracy  –  reservations that anticipate some of Weber’s own. For Mill, ‘the disease which afflicts bureaucratic governments . . . is [routine] . . . Whatever becomes routine loses its vital principle, and having no longer a mind acting within it, goes on revolving mechanically through the work it is intended to do . . . A bureaucracy always becomes a pedantocracy.’58 Mill’s complaint is at once aristocratic and liberal. It foreshadows similar concerns on Weber’s part (discussed in chapter 3). Government, encased in bureaucratic routine, ‘bears down the individuality of its more distinguished members.’ In such circumstances, it is difficult for ‘the man of original genius . . . to prevail over the obstructive spirit of trained mediocrity.’ This ‘man of original genius’ represents that element of ‘outside freedom’ that in Mill’s view is necessary for free government. As we have seen, Weber was similarly critical of how the steel-hard casing of bureaucracy clamped down on ‘individual freedom,’ reducing functionaries as well as political actors to ‘cogs in a giant machine.’ Hegel and Mill would both have agreed with Weber’s assessment that ‘the way the modern state and economy are organized ensures that

44 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

a privileged position is permanently given to specialized training.’59 The specialized training that produces the bureaucratic official can be seen from another perspective, however. Strong has also noted that Weber’s ‘neutral’ bureaucracy, the image he erects to counter Junker control of the German state, is actually staffed by the educated middle classes. For Strong, the bureaucracy, in its day-to-day functioning, is managed by the administratively trained wing of the bourgeoisie. Weber simply assumes this in his discussion of the professionally trained specialists who run large modern bureaucracies. The implication of seeing bureaucracy this way is that it is not as ‘neutral’ as Weber or Hegel, for their different reasons, made it out to be.60 Weber himself seems to recognize this when he writes: ‘The propertyless masses especially are not served by the formal “equality before the law,” and the “calculable” adjudication and administration demanded by bourgeois interests . . . In their eyes justice and administration should serve to equalize their economic and social-life opportunities in the face of the propertied classes.’61 Bureaucracy treats those who are socially and economically unequal as equals, as ‘demanded by bourgeois interests.’62 Here we find an explicit recognition by Weber that formal ‘equality before the law’ in the modern bureaucratic state is not always an effective counterweight to market inequalities. This has been a tension inherent in liberalism since John Locke stated that people were equal, free, and rational in the state of nature, but were allowed to be unequal under a regime of private property that was guaranteed by the liberal state.63 Still, Weber accepted this as preferable to the state of affairs under the Junkers, in which the distinction between politics and administration, or the state bureaucracy and the class interest of the once-dominant Junker aristocracy, had collapsed completely. Modern commentators have argued that few bureaucracies actually conform to such a politically neutral, ‘value-free’ ideal type.64 Nor is bureaucracy a neutral term in Weber’s hands. Weber deploys the notion of the political neutrality of the bureaucracy in his arguments against the hegemonic influence of the Junkers over the bureaucratic machinery of the German state. He holds up bureaucratic neutrality as an ideal and then mobilizes it in his invectives against the usurpation of the state by the conservative Junkers. We now turn to Weber’s critique of socialism, in which we also see a critique of bureaucracy at work. In ‘Socialism,’ a speech he gave to Austrian soldiers in Vienna in 1918, Weber displays considerable familiarity with, and some sympathy toward, the ideals of the Communist Manifesto. He has a good grasp of how

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 45

German social democracy had struggled with the implications of Marx and Engels’ analysis of capitalism, and how it had revised its own program in light of debates around electoral participation during the First World War. He is also critical of Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation of 1878 that had crushed the German labour movement’s opposition to his autocratic rule. After this, however, Weber proceeds to systematically dismantle the program of the Communist Manifesto and the assumptions of the socialist critique of capitalism. Bureaucracy plays a key role in the assault, which has two main planks. In one of his best-known discussions of socialism, Weber deploys his critique of bureaucracy in the following way: ‘If private capitalism were eliminated, state bureaucracy alone would rule alone. Private and public bureaucracies would then be merged into a single hierarchy, whereas now they operate alongside and, at least potentially, against one another, thus keeping one another in check. The situation would resemble that of ancient Egypt, but in an incomparably more rational and hence more inescapable form.’65 Public and private bureaucracies would merge, Weber goes on to say, producing a lifeless ‘dead machine’ that is ‘in the process of manufacturing the housing of that future serfdom to which, perhaps, men may have to submit powerlessly . . . if they consider that the ultimate and only value by which the conduct of their affairs is to be decided is good administration and provision for their needs by officials [Weber’s italics].’66 This is Weber’s first objection. He refers to this scenario as ‘the fabrication of the “shell of bondage.” ’ He asks: ‘Who would deny that some such possibility lies in the womb of the future?’67 This would be ‘inevitable’ if socialism were to triumph over capitalism. The ground has shifted here from Weber’s ‘sociological’ view of bureaucracy outlined in his theory of legitimate domination. There, as we have noted, it is hailed as the most efficient, rational modern form of organization. Under socialism, bureaucracy may be just as rationally efficient, but it is even more stifling than it is under capitalism. This is consistent with Hugo Preuss’s view, published in the Berliner Tageblatt in November 1918, that a new socialist state, modelled on the Soviet Bolshevik experiment, would simply lead to a ‘reversed authoritarian state’ or umgedrehter Obrigkeitsstaat.68 It is ironic that Weber assumes that under socialism, private and public bureaucracies would ‘fuse.’ Marx’s argument is the obverse of this. Under capitalism, the state and its bureaucracies support capital accumulation and the domination of politics by the capitalist classes. None of the socialist leaders or thinkers of Weber’s time  –  Kautsky, Bebel,

46 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

Luxemburg, Lenin, or Gramsci – would have accepted Weber’s highly negative characterization of socialism. Kautsky, Bebel, and Lenin all accepted a bureaucratic state under socialism, but without the Weberian consequences. Furthermore, none of Weber’s socialist contemporaries or opponents would have accepted the way he emptied socialism of substantive content, or ends, reducing it to a simple matter of ‘technically superior administration.’ Wendy Brown has noted that Weber chose to paint the most unflattering picture of socialism possible, one that does not begin to capture the range and depth of either its aspirations or its feasible and historically diverse possibilities.69 Weber can only do this by divorcing the bureaucratic means of politics from any discussion of the ends of a socialist political. Weber’s ‘bureaucratic critique’ of socialism’s feasibility highlights a key point also made by Breiner: that for Weber, the ends, beliefs, and ideals of those who run the state only have a contingent relation to politics. In his critique of socialism, Weber’s primary criterion of evaluation was the feasibility not just of means but of the desirability of those means. Breiner has noted perceptively that ‘desirability criteria are collapsed into feasibility criteria.’70 Furthermore, the assumption on which Weber’s ‘fusion of bureaucracies’ critique is based is itself questionable. It is not at all clear that in the model of parliamentary democracy Weber put forward as the liberal alternative to socialism, public and private, state and market bureaucracies would actually check and balance each other to the degree Weber thought they would. Instead, Weber used the bureaucratic ‘fusion’ argument to elaborate an entire critique of socialism. Weber’s second objection to socialism follows from the first. If the organization of labour were to be ‘collectively’ determined by a state bureaucracy, the ‘tyranny of work’ would be even worse than it is now under capitalism. Weber asks whether the advent of socialism would result in ‘the destruction of the steel frame of modern industrial work.’ His answer is an emphatic ‘No!’ Here he raises the issue of the discipline of factory work, Taylorism, and the new organization of the labour process in a modern economy that is destined to be capitalist and highly bureaucratized ‘for the foreseeable future.’71 Weber thought that the organization of the economy under socialism would also inevitably have to be based on the industrial discipline of factory labour. In this way the bureaucratic, hierarchical, and disciplinary ‘material organization’ of industrial work that Weber saw in its most advanced form in American Taylorism would trump socialism’s high ideals of freedom,

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 47

equality, solidarity, and social ownership of the means of production. The organization of the state itself could not be more democratic or egalitarian in any event, even under socialism. This is because, as we have seen, the state is a political Betrieb or bureaucratic enterprise for Weber, ‘just like a factory.’ In Weber’s view, which predated Lenin’s acceptance of Taylorism, the principles of scientific management defined the future of both capitalism and socialism.72 In particular, Weber attacks the notion of ‘expropriating the ex­ propriators’ –  the idea that the workers, having wrested control over the means of production from the capitalist class, can usher in an era of equality and freedom, thereby democratically transforming production. As we have noted, Weber saw the expropriation of the means of economic production and organization under capitalism as irreversible. The bureaucratic structure of the capitalist economy could not be turned back any more than the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. This means something else: that private property, having been institutionalized and concentrated in large capitalist bureaucracies, and protected and regulated by a huge state apparatus and the routine administration of the law, cannot be expropriated either. Gone is Locke’s naivety regarding the initial equality of property in a ‘state of nature’; gone as well is Marx’s view that private property could be abolished in the post-capitalist, socialist state. In the legal-rational modern state, liberal property rights will be as entrenched as the state and capitalist bureaucracies themselves. All of this leads to Weber’s pessimistic assessment that ‘in everyday life, in the worker’s economic struggles, the sense of honour and comradeship produces the only decisive moral forces for the education of the masses, and that these forces must be given free rein. From a purely political point of view, this and this alone is what social democracy means in an age which will inevitably remain capitalist for a long time to come.’73 As Günther Roth and David Beetham have shown, Weber was sympathetic to the plight of the working class, and he keenly followed the ‘social question’ in political debates.74 But he was steadfast in his view that socialism was utterly impossible. For Weber, the irreversibility of the expropriation of economic and administrative means meant that there was no prospect that radical or substantive social change would come from the working class. He disagreed completely with Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg and his friend George Lukács that collective social transformation is possible (or desirable) through revolutionary praxis. For Weber, socialism’s ideals of social justice, equality and

48 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

solidarity, collective self-determination, and ownership of the means of production were examples of the Enlightenment’s naive dream of universal freedom through ever-increasing progress.75 The only ‘progress’ of which Weber seemed certain is the extension of bureaucracy into ever more areas of life. For him, it is not possible to realize socialism’s metaphysics of revolutionary change when confronted by the ‘inevitable fact’ of bureaucratization, be it in a capitalist or a socialist economy. In fact, there is an irony in any attempt by the state – even a democratic one – to create greater social or economic equality for the ‘mass’ of citizens. Weber captures this in his notion of passive democratization. Passive democratization has accompanied the arrival of mass democracy everywhere. The more the state tries to extend equality by expanding entitlements, the more it must rely on rational-legal bureaucracy based on der bureaukratischen rationalen Wissenherrschaft (rational domination through specialized knowledge).76 Weber thought that this process would also accompany socialist attempts to create a more egalitarian political or economic system. The same notion would apply to the kind of political participation that Weber had viewed as a ‘precondition for political judgment’ in his critique of Bismarck. Like entitlements, democratic participation in the state could only be formulated and regulated by specialized officials working in concert as part of an extensive bureaucratic apparatus. For Weber, the inevitability of passive democratization means that again, democracy cannot be made more substantively egalitarian, even under socialism. He concurred in this view with his friend Roberto Michels, whose famous study of the German Social Democratic Party led to the formulation of the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’ That is, even organizations that explicitly intend to be democratic end up being structured hierarchically and being run by full-time, trained specialists or by political professionals. Socialism and democracy go together no more readily than democracy and capitalism. In both cases, the limits of democracy are not ideological. For Weber they are found in the organizational imperatives of the modern bureaucratic state, political parties, and the economy. Weber’s critique of socialism shares elements of his critique of the Junker domination of the German bureaucracy. He attacks both the left and the right because, in different ways and for different reasons, both collapse the separation between politics, or the bureaucratic means of administration, and the political, or the version of the ends of politics that is integral to Weber’s model of liberal democracy. For Weber, the

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 49

implication, or unintended consequence, of either the left or the right taking over the state after the debacle of the First World War would be that an all-encompassing bureaucratic politics would trump and displace the political. In both cases the result  –  which Weber announced with such alarm in his political writings – would be a mode of governance that stifles ‘any remnants of individualist freedom,’ threatening to engulf the political and to rob it of its autonomy. Yet the arguments that Weber levelled against bureaucracy under socialism are also different from those he used against the Junkers. The main difference lies in the temporal trajectory of bureaucracy’s nefarious influence. Where socialism, with its ‘fusion’ of public and private bureaucracies, stood as a bulwark against democracy and individual freedom in the future, the domination of German politics by the Junker bureaucracy bore the crippling imprint of Bismarck’s founding of the nation in the past. It was the ghost of the past whose dead hand constrained the present. Under the Junkers, bureaucracy became a weapon against democracy in the hands of a backward-looking, reactionary class. With this in mind, Weber saw bureaucracy and the usurpation of politics under the Junkers as historically contingent and therefore as subject to change. Yet at the same time, in his critique of the revolutionary left, he saw bureaucracy as the ‘steel-hard casing,’ as an unalterable developmental tendency that would only get worse in the socialist future. Weber used the same argument even when capitalist interests were involved. While both the Junkers and big industrialists in Germany were vehemently opposed to the extension of democracy, others argued for a corporatist, tripartite model of representation based on the old estates system. Regarding the proponents of corporatism, Weber wrote: They imagine that the state would then be the wise regulator of the economy. The reverse would be the case! The bankers and capitalist entrepreneurs they hate so much would then have unlimited and uncontrolled command over the state! For who on earth is the ‘state,’ as distinct from this machinery of large and small capitalist cartels of every kind into which the economy is supposed to be organized, if the formation of the state’s own will [Willensbildung] is to be placed in the hands of precisely these ‘co-operative’ organizations.77

Wherever bureaucratic domination threatens the autonomy of the political, Weber is characteristically scathing. Under a corporatist arrangement, ‘the interests of capitalist producers and profit-makers

50 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

represented by these cartels would itself then rule the state exclusively, unless that organization of producers’ interests is confronted by a power strong enough to control and steer them as the needs of the population require.’78 In all three cases, the argument about bureaucracy has subtly shifted from the bureaucratic domination of politics generally to the idea that the state could be dominated by a single class interest. It is now the hegemony of a predominant class – to be more precise, the hegemony of a dominant class with which Weber does not agree – that would undermine the autonomy of the political. Weber’s characteristic response is, as we have seen, to argue for a system of checks and balances, for the separation of administration, or politics, from the political. Corporatism would leave the state dominated by the most powerful and well-financed estate, which was also the sworn enemy of democracy, ‘the ruthless barons of heavy industry.’ In his wartime articles in the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, Weber attacked them relentlessly. As we will see in the following chapter, Weber uses each case  –  the Junkers, socialism, and corporatism  –  as foils, as ‘negative’ arguments for equal suffrage and parliamentary democracy.79 Because Weber blends his sociology of domination with his critique of political opponents, it is impossible to strictly separate his view of a single class interest dominating the state from his critique of bureaucratic domination. But how can Weber make an argument for the autonomy of the political realm if the state, as we have seen, is also a Betrieb, an enterprise organized ‘just like a factory’? Here Weber makes two different arguments for two different purposes. When he sees the liberal state threatened by class domination, he invokes the separation of powers or, more specifically, competing bureaucracies. This is to counter his ‘objective’ analysis of the comprehensiveness of bureaucratic domination. Weber wants to argue for a new political that is as autonomous as possible from both class interests and (to the greatest extent possible) from bureaucratic domination. Yet Weber defines politics as encompassed by the state. The problem underlying his shifting use of the term ‘bureaucracy’ relates to this question: If politics is confined to the state, and the state is irretrievably bureaucratic, then how can the political ever be autonomous in any meaningful sense? How can Weber carve out an area of ‘individual freedom,’ or autonomous action, in a state dominated by bureaucracy? In the following chapter, on Weber’s model of democracy, we will see how he struggles with and tries to resolve the tension between democracy and the challenges posed by the perception that

Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 51

modern bureaucracy is inevitable. Then in chapter 3, on the political in Weber, we will examine the idea that only the heroic actor is capable, even if only momentarily, of transcending or steering the bureaucratic machinery of the state in the service of a new vision, or calling. In that dynamic tension between the heroic actor who might be able to redefine the political and the bureaucratic machinery of modern democratic politics, the passive role Weber assigned to the demos is noteworthy. In his critiques of both the Junkers and socialism, the demos hardly makes an appearance. In the next chapter we look at how Weber tries to define and limit political action and autonomy within the confines of a democratic politics that is highly bureaucratic and that involves the ‘legitimate contestation over public resources’ in a parliamentary system. There the demos must be included; but as we will see, its role is highly constrained and subordinate.

2 The Politics of Realist Democracy

In his wartime and postwar political writings, Weber argued strenuously for a system of parliamentary democracy based on equal suffrage. In those writings, besides responding to the political issues of the day, he provided the outlines of a model in which he thought modern democratic politics could be ordered and contained. This outline provided the basis on which a new political, higher-order endeavour could be reconstructed from the chaos of a failed system.1 While Weber’s advocacy for democracy was clearly a response to the immediate political and constitutional crisis precipitated by the Kaiser’s disastrous prosecution of the war, I approach his writings about democracy, politics, and the political from the perspective noted by Lassman and Speirs, who maintain that Weber’s political writings ‘possess a dual character. Although they were occasioned by current events and problems, they also point beyond their immediate historical context towards much wider considerations.’2 Examining this duality in Weber’s political writings offers us another perspective on the tension between the developmental inexorability of bureaucracy, on the one hand, and its historical contingency, on the other. Having introduced this tension in the first chapter, I next want to examine how it plays itself out in his model of democracy. More specifically, I want to explore it through the prism of the distinction between politics and the political that has been made in recent democratic theory. In this chapter I use the idea of politics to frame my discussion of Weber’s model of democracy. Then in chapter 3, I consider Weber’s famous notion of charismatic leadership as a vehicle for the creation of a new political. As we noted in chapter 1, Sheldon Wolin, taking up the distinction drawn by Claude Lefort, refers to politics as the public contestation, by

The Politics of Realist Democracy 53

organized and unequal powers, over access to collective resources.3 My  contention is that Weber’s model of democracy, like his idea of bureaucracy, fits this description of politics. Casting Weber’s model in this light also allows us to see it a precursor to the mid-twentiethcentury competitive- or pluralist-elitist model made famous by Joseph Schumpeter and later by Robert Dahl.4 Their versions have been problematized, almost as famously, by C.B. Macpherson, Mark Warren, and others.5 I will rely on Macpherson, and to a greater extent on Wolin, in my discussion of Weber’s model of democratic politics. I now want to consider how Weber, in the political battles he waged to establish a system of parliamentary democracy during and after the First World War, envisioned the boundaries within which a new democratic politics would take place. Weber’s model of democracy, his attempt to rebuild the institutional framework of politics, only makes sense against the backdrop of the two positions he was arguing against – namely, the reactionary Obrigkeitsstaat, or authoritarian obedience state that Bismarck had bequeathed to Germany a generation earlier, on the one hand, and socialism, on the other.6 I want to elaborate Weber’s critique at some length in order to understand its relation to his notion of a ‘positive politics,’ which is captured in his advocacy for parliamentary democracy. The authoritarian Obrigkeitsstaat and the Hohenzollern monarchy it supported were the real centres of power in Wilhelmine Germany. Together they constituted Weber’s main political enemy prior to the First World War. Weber was deeply frustrated with the specific political circumstances, and the depleted state of liberalism, in Germany after Bismarck’s departure as chancellor in 1890. By the time Weber became politically active in the 1890s, Bismarck’s crippling of parliamentary government and his domination of the bureaucratic apparatus of state had effectively destroyed the possibility of a liberal public realm in Germany. Weber’s response, in a climate in which academic colleagues such as Werner Sombart and Gustav Schmoller actively opposed equal suffrage and democracy even before the First World War,7 was to launch a sustained critique and then campaign publicly for the establishment of parliamentary democracy in Germany. In his article ‘Bismarck’s Legacy,’ Weber readily acknowledges that the  ‘Iron Chancellor’ was ‘a giant in stature.’8 Bismarck’s crowning achievement was the unification of Germany. While admiring Bismarck’s enormous talent and statesmanship, Weber was deeply disturbed by the political ‘presuppositions’ that Bismarck had given the

54 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

new German nation as its founder. Bismarck had autocratically introduced what we now recognize as the modern welfare state. Weber recognized that from Bismarck, we were given pensions for the sick, the injured, the war-disabled, and the old. That was certainly admirable. But we were not given the guarantees which are necessary above all else to . . . make it possible for the strong and healthy [i.e. the working class] to represent their interests [ Weber’s italics] in an objective and confident way, the interests, in other words, of precisely those people who mattered most in purely political terms.9

And what Bismarck gave with one hand he took away with the other. From 1872 to 1878 he had waged a political war against German Catholics and their party, Zentrum. The Kulturkampf was a ‘misguided attempt to enforce loyalty to the new Reich.’10 In 1878 he enacted anti-socialist legislation that outlawed the Social Democratic Party and crushed the unions. Finally, he co-opted and browbeat the National Liberals, the only party in the Reichstag that in Weber’s view had provided leadership in establishing national institutions such as the Reichsbank and a codified legal system. In short, Bismarck tolerated no opposition; he allowed no autonomous parties or leadership to develop, thwarting attempts at democratic reform at every turn. He left the new nation with a truncated political realm in which no opposition was tolerated and in which the clash of parties, platforms, and ideas did not determine government policy. For Weber, Bismarck’s ‘enormous prestige had the purely negative consequence of leaving parliament utterly without power.’11 The negative result was the bureaucratic and undemocratic usurpation of politics by the Obrigkeitsstaat. The powerless Reichstag was one of Weber’s constant targets. The Reich established by Bismarck had a three-tiered electoral system based on how much one (if one were male) paid in taxes. The explicit idea was to weight the system in favour of the wealthy property owners, the Prussian Junkers, while providing minimal representation to the working and middle classes. The three-tiered system of universal male suffrage remained in place until 1918.12 Weber was one of its staunchest critics. Weber notes that in modern democracies, ‘the right to control the budget, the power to determine the manner in which the state procures its finances, has been parliament’s decisive instrument of power.’13 Unlike the British Westminster system that Weber, Hugo Preuss, and

The Politics of Realist Democracy 55

other German supporters of the bürgerliche Rechtsstaat admired,14 in the Reichstag elected members and parties had no power to initiate budgetary expenditures or financial legislation, for the ministers who did so did not sit in that chamber and were therefore not responsible to it. Executive powers were split between the Kaiser and his ministers and the Bundesrat, or Federal Council. Weber notes caustically that when an effort was made to alter this regressive arrangement, ‘he [the Kaiser] had rejected the National Liberals’ demand that the right of the Reichstag to approve government expenditure be safeguarded  . . .  on the grounds that this legitimated “parliamentary rule.” ’15 To legitimate ‘parliamentary rule’ in the form of the bürgerliche Rechtsstaat was precisely what Weber wanted to do. But others who did not, such as Thomas Mann, and later Schmitt, had considerable political support.16 The ministers and the heads of individual states who sat in the Bundesrat were not accountable to members of the popularly elected Reichstag. Weber noted that so long as parliament’s only means of lending weight to the population’s complaints about the administration is to deny government finances, to refuse its assent to legislative proposals and to put forward motions of its own that lack binding force, parliament is excluded from participating positively in political leadership. It . . . will only be engaged in ‘negative politics,’ confronting the leaders of the administration like some hostile power.17

Weber uses the term ‘negative politics’ to describe the Reichstag’s purely reactive role. It could not initiate money bills or budgets, or social policy legislation, and was thus reduced to making criticisms that had no effect on government policy. The Reichstag very much resembled a parliament that had only the powers of the Official Opposition in the Canadian or British parliamentary systems today. The executive branch of government, controlled by the Kaiser, his appointed Reichskanzler (Chancellor), his appointed ministers, and the Bundesrat, was almost completely autonomous from the Reichstag, or lower chamber. By crippling parliament in these ways, Bismarck had seen to it that ‘his rule led the nation to lose the habit of sharing responsibility, through its elected representatives, [ Weber’s italics] for its own political fate.’ This ‘sharing of responsibility,’ Weber goes on to say, echoing John Stuart Mill, ‘is the only way a nation can possibly be trained in the exercise of political judgment [my italics].’18 Having effectively institutionalized the

56 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

exclusion of the working and middle classes from effective control over government through a differential, class-based franchise,19 Bismarck had ‘left behind a nation accustomed to submit passively to whatever was decided on its behalf.’20 Weber continues: ‘It was in this area that the most severe damage by far was done. In no sense did the great statesman leave behind a political tradition [my italics].’21 The results of Bismarck’s rule were debilitating: ‘Nowhere else in the world has even the most unbounded admiration for the personality of a politician led a proud nation sacrifice its own, objective convictions so unreservedly.’22 Bismarck’s legacy was that citizens had no meaningful democratic representation in the Reichstag. This prevented the development of political judgment in elected officials and potential leaders that a functioning parliament would have produced. Bismarck had created a regressive state formation that institutionalized the Junkers’ pre-liberal political values and their control of both the state and the economy. In Aristotle’s terms, Bismarck had created a degenerate regime.23 With regard to the Junkers’ perpetuation of Bismarck’s legacy, Weber asserted: There are only two choices: either the mass of citizens is left without freedom or rights in a bureaucratic, ‘authoritarian state’ which only has the appearance of parliamentary rule, and in which the citizens are ‘administered’ like a herd of cattle; or the citizens are integrated into the state by making them its co-rulers. A nation of masters [Herrenvolk] – and only such a nation can and may engage in ‘world politics’  –  has no choice in this matter.24

Under Bismarck, neither citizens nor parliamentarians elected to the Reichstag were ‘co-rulers in a nation of masters.’ Weber would warn that if democratization continued to be blocked, ‘all the energies of the masses would then be engaged in a struggle against a state in which they are mere objects and in which they have no share.’25 In one of his most important wartime essays, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order,’ Weber framed the problem this way: ‘The one and only question one can properly ask about the future ordering of the state in Germany is, How is parliament to be made capable of assuming power? [Weber’s italics] Anything else is a side issue.’26 In light of Bismarck’s legacy, it is not surprising that Weber, as a liberal, would want to argue for parliamentary democracy as the royal road to state power. Democracy was the only vehicle

The Politics of Realist Democracy 57

through which the liberal middle classes might gain control over the state. Weber’s model of parliamentary democracy sought to make politics once again a contested affair and not simply the exclusive preserve of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the Junker-dominated bureaucracy. Equal suffrage was central to the model of parliamentary democracy that Weber argued for in his wartime political writings and journalism. He wrote that ‘there is good sense in making parliamentary suffrage into something of an equivalent weight, so as to counterbalance those other factors by making the ruled in society (who have a numerical advantage) the equals of the privileged strata at least when it comes to electing the body which exercises control and functions as the place where leaders are selected.’27 Those ‘other factors’ included the inequality of status and privilege that had defined the monarchical tradition, as well as the relatively newer class inequalities produced by Germany’s rapid industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and its transformation into a modern market economy. In Weber’s model, equal suffrage was an important counterweight to both kinds of inequality. Weber was fully aware that the inequalities produced by capitalism could be just as tenacious as those produced under previous, more feudal social structures. Against both, Weber called for a ‘positive politics’ in which ‘equal voting rights means . . . simply this: at this point of social life the individual, for once, is not, as he is everywhere else, considered in terms of the particular professional and family position he occupies, nor in relation to differences of material and social situation, but purely and simply as a citizen.’28 This notion of a formal political equality that balances out the inequalities of the market and social status might seem like a distant echo of Rousseau’s discussion of equality in The Social Contract. It may be contentious to say that Rousseau provides a radically democratic counterpoint to Weber, one from within the Western tradition but outside of both Anglo-American liberalism and German Idealism. Yet one can still say that Weber and Rousseau had a similarly profound understanding of the issue of equality, though from very different perspectives, conditioned by very different circumstances. Rousseau thought that in the state of nature, prior to culture and the appearance of reason in human history, all human beings were naturally equal. It was culture and civilization – the products of humanity’s highly developed capacity for rationality – that had created social inequality and the institutions of private property and government.29 In modernity it was the ‘masterless slavery’ of capitalism, as Weber once called it, that had produced

58 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

the deeply rooted social inequalities that are still a pervasive feature of modern market societies.30 Rousseau and Weber both saw the difficulty of eliminating inequality. And both settled, in different ways, for a version of formal political and legal equality. Yet Weber and Rousseau differed profoundly regarding the nature and extent of the equality of citizens. Rousseau sought to make citizens more than formally equal, to extend equality socially and economically in the direct democracy of the General Will. Instead of representation through the ballot slip, Rousseau called for a more thoroughgoing, comprehensive equality of social, political, and economic conditions. His version of a new social contract was highly critical of existing social and economic inequalities. According to Asher Horowitz, Rousseau’s critique is far-reaching, moving beyond liberalism in its appeal to direct democracy and its assumption of the fundamentally social and historical nature of citizens/individuals.31 Rousseau’s critique lies behind the notion of the equality of the political that underwrites the radically egalitarian nature of the General Will in The Social Contract. Weber disagreed with Rousseau’s critique and his vision, seeing not a radical and collective democracy in the General Will but rather a kind of religiously inspired, authoritarian compulsion captured in Rousseau’s famous comment that if members of the community did not follow the laws that they, as citizens, had made, they would be ‘forced to be free’ by the General Will, or the collective will of the citizens as a sovereign and unified body.32 As a post-Nietzschean, Weber dismissed such notions of equality and collectivity, be they natural or historical. Neither nature nor historical teleology was to be found in Weber’s conception of formal political equality through the ‘ballot slip.’ Nor did he think that any notion of natural equality or natural law could be called upon in a critique of social or economic inequalities. The conclusion Weber drew was that ‘as long as anything resembling the prevailing social order persists – and it has a very stubborn hold on life – the inequality of the outward circumstances of life, particularly of property, may be mitigated . . . but it can never be eliminated altogether.’33 Equal suffrage, based on this non-teleological notion of equality, would act as a counterweight not only to the market but also to bureaucracy. Weber noted that ‘the way the modern state and economy are organized ensures that a privileged position is permanently given to specialized training.’ In ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ written with the soldiers at the front in mind, Weber argued that ‘in the face of

The Politics of Realist Democracy 59

the leveling, inescapable rule of bureaucracy, which first brought the modern concept of the “citizen of the state” into being, the ballot slip is the only instrument of power which is at all capable of giving the people who are subject to bureaucratic rule a minimal right of co-determination [my italics] in the affairs of the community for which they are obliged to give their lives.’34 In Weber’s argument for equal suffrage, the main avenue for citizen participation was now the ballot box. The ballot would fulfil the function of the ‘minimal right of codetermination.’ This idea of codetermination was a substantial improvement over the three-tiered system under the Kaiser; even so, it was ‘thinner’ than the more robust idea of democratic participation found in Rousseau’s General Will. This more restrictive view of democracy would still need a veneer of legitimacy, however. As Weber saw it, ‘modern parliaments are assemblies representing the people who are ruled by the means of bureaucracy. It is, after all, a condition of the duration of any rule, even the best organized, that it should enjoy a certain measure of inner assent from at least those sections of the ruled who carry weight in society.’ In a modern democratic state, ‘parliaments  . . .  are the means whereby this minimum of assent [my italics] is made manifest.’35 Recall that Weber had defined and qualified his idea of participation when he said that citizens participate in the affairs of the nation through their elected representatives. The role of deputies (MPs) was, for Weber, to be strictly limited and disciplined: ‘The entire broad mass of the deputies functions only as a following for the “leader,” or the small group of leaders who form the cabinet, and they obey them blindly as long as they are successful. This is how things should be.’36 The same principle was to apply to the party rank and file. In his assessment of the prospects of the revolution in Bavaria in 1919 that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Weber was characteristically blunt: ‘For it is one of the conditions of success in this, as in any apparatus subordinate to a leader, that things must be emptied and made into matter-of-fact [Versahchlichung], and the following must undergo spiritual proletarianization, in order to achieve discipline.’37 This restriction of the role of deputies, or elected officials, and the ‘psychic proletarianization’ of the demos, set the stage for the next phase of Weber’s argument regarding how politics should work in his proposal for democratic reform. Having set boundaries around both parliamentary parties and the minimum consent required for indirect participation/representation in a system based on equal suffrage,

60 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

Weber inserts the component of leadership into his model, arguing that the real function of a parliamentary system is to train potential leaders. Parliament’s most important and overriding function, for Weber, is as a ‘forcing house’ for training and selecting party leaders. Weber’s comments on the training and discipline that a functional parliament affords potential leaders are instructive: ‘Only qualified professional parliamentarians who have been through the school of intensive committee work in a working parliament can give rise to responsible leaders, as opposed to mere demagogues and dilettantes.’38 This training focuses the ‘power instincts’ of potentially successful politicians and makes them aware of the tremendous responsibility they bear as future heads of government. Underlying Weber’s vision of leadership in a system of responsible parliamentary government is the assumption – which he held consistently for more than twenty years – that ‘the essence of politics – as we will have to emphasize time and again  –  is struggle, the recruitment of allies and of a voluntary following. The career of an official in the authoritarian state [Obrigkeitsstaat] simply offers no opportunities to practice this difficult art.’39 Political leaders can be developed only in the struggle for power that begins within the party. He argues that ‘it is not possible to eliminate party conflict as such without thereby destroying the existence of an active popular assembly [Volksvertretung].’40 This struggle for power, which Weber sees as unending, is a guarantee against the bureaucratic domination of politics. By contrast, ‘the official should stand “above the parties,” which in truth means that he must remain outside the struggle for power of his own. The struggle for personal power and the acceptance of full personal responsibility for one’s cause [Sache] which is the consequence of such power – this is the very element in which the politician and the entrepreneur live and breathe.’41 The argument Weber makes is heightened by the exigencies of war, during which leaders, as heads of their parties or governments, ‘must have unrestricted authority to take important decisions, or at least be able to obtain such authority in the space of a few hours from committees capable of being summoned at any time.’42 To defend Weber on this issue, leaders are not to have ‘unlimited authority’ in any absolute sense, but only within the clearly defined boundaries of a parliamentary system.43 We find textual support for this in Weber’s article ‘The President of the Reich,’ published in the Berliner Boersen Zeitung in February 1919.44 This article coincided with the revolutionary fervour

The Politics of Realist Democracy 61

in Munich as well as Weber’s service on Hugo Preuss’s committee for drafting the new Weimar constitution. Fearing a resurgence of the right and, at the same time, the prospect of what he thought would be a verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat should a socialist state be established, Weber was lending his support to the idea of a Reichspräsident chosen directly by popular referendum or plebiscite. The article shows Weber’s emphatic insistence on the rule of law and its relation to democracy: ‘Let us ensure that the President of the Reich sees the prospect of the gallows as the reward awaiting any attempt to interfere with the laws or to govern autocratically. Let us also debar all members of the [Junker] dynasties from this office in order to prevent any restoration by means of a plebiscite. But let us also put the Presidency of the Reich on a firm democratic footing of its own.’45 This argument regarding the role of party leaders is connected to another one regarding their ‘unlimited authority.’ The ‘ “principle of the small number” (i.e., the superior political manoeuvrability of small leading groups) always rules political action. This element of Caesarism is ineradicable (in mass states).’46 Weber sees this as another guarantee of accountability: ‘This element alone guarantees that responsibility toward the public, which would evaporate within an assembly governing at large . . . rests with clearly identifiable persons. This is especially true of a democracy proper.’47 In modern democracies, leaders must have the ability to act and must also be accountable to the public that elects them. Weber assumes both of these things when he says that ‘it is politicians who must provide a counterbalance to the rule of officialdom.’48 Leaders, the active citizens, now join the citizens who elect them and make up their following as partners, both acting as a counterweight against bureaucracy. Weber here is placing parliamentary democracy as a middle term between leaders and the state bureaucracy. It is this system that makes leaders personally accountable. This kind of accountability and personal responsibility were absent under the Kaiser’s Obrigkeitsstaat. Accountability would ensure that political oversight would be exer­cised by parliament, by elected leaders and ministers, and not by the unelected bureaucratic officials who had ruled the Kaissereich after Bismarck. For Weber, the fundamental problem with the Wilhelmine Kaissereich had been not the lack of a great leader of Bismarck’s stature, but the lack of any independent political leadership that was accountable to parliament. As he says in ‘Parliament and Government,’ ‘What was lacking was the direction of the state by a politician – not by a political genius,

62 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

to be expected only once every few centuries, not even a great political talent, but simply by a politician.’49 Weber is suggesting that even within the structures of the bureaucratic state and party politics, there should have been – and could be in a state in which politics were more democratic – some kind of leadership agency. Here, in his critique of the Obrigkeitsstaat, Weber is arguing that having accountable leaders who are not necessarily ‘great political talents,’ but simply ordinary politicians, would be preferable to the prevailing situation. As I will argue in the next chapter and the Conclusion, there is a tension between this more democratic or egalitarian view of leadership that we see at times in Weber’s political writings, and the more heroic image of charismatic leadership we see in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ Weber sets all of these components of modern ‘democracy proper’ – the emphasis on parliament as a training ground for leaders, the reality of bureaucratic party machines that have a disciplined following, leadership by small groups that are clearly identifiable – against an earlier, ideal-typical model of direct democracy that has its roots in the ancient polis. Direct democracy of the type envisioned by Rousseau represents ‘the most extreme type of the anti-authoritarian forms of collective rule insofar as, in its most genuine forms, its members are “free from domination” [herrschaftsfreie unmittelbare Demokratie].’ As Regina Titunik notes, ‘all of the members are regarded as equally fit to discharge public duties and some system of assuring members a share in governance [my italics] – such as rotation, lots or elections – is in place.’50 Direct democracy is only possible, for Weber, in small communities such as ancient Athens, where social cohesion is high, the number of citizens is small, and tasks are general enough that they can be performed by any citizen and do not need to be performed by officials with specialized training. Weber refers to American town hall meetings and Swiss cantons as examples that have survived into the modern era.51 For Weber, though, these are fleeting, precarious historical remnants that are generally no longer possible in large modern states and capitalist economies, in which most citizens, the demos, have to work because they are separated from their means of livelihood, and in which politics and governance have become highly specialized as citizens became separated from the means of administration. In his well-known letter to Roberto Michels, Weber said that egalitarian, direct democracy was not achievable under the conditions that define and limit modern politics: the state and mass parties.52 As Titunik puts it, echoing Breiner’s terminology that we encountered in chapter 1, Weber ‘did not think it was

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feasible for citizens to participate in public life on a continuous basis’ in the modern democratic state.53 Weber’s advocacy for democracy, outlined in newspapers such as the Frankfurter Zeitung, was integral to his attempt to help reconstitute the collapsed public realm in Germany, to found a new institutional framework within which national politics could take place and a new political could be defined. The new norms that could give direction to national politics were to emerge from the competition between leaders and their parties on the electoral battlefield, which had been so sorely absent from the political system that Bismarck had imposed on the nation after its unification. In his attempts to convince the German public of the necessity of electoral competition and a multiparty system, Weber was to some extent a founder of modern liberal democracy, part of a broader movement for democratic reform that swept Europe in the postwar and interwar years.54 Weber’s argument for democracy was paradoxical and has produced differing reactions in the recent wave of literature that once again views Weber – as Michael Greven has put it – as a Homo politicus.55 Some commentators have noted that democracy was a strategic alternative for Weber, not necessarily desirable on its own merits. Weber did not accord democracy a normatively superior or ontological status. As Sven Eliaeson has observed, Weber ‘had no sentimental [or moral] attachment to either democracy or parliamentary reforms.’56 For Weber, democracy did not inevitably or naturally improve mankind, expand liberty, or realize human freedom. His model of democracy was not a means to develop or enlarge the moral autonomy of citizens. Like Kant, Weber saw the need for a stable order under the rule of law. He thought that a democratic politics would provide the context for this. But for him, democracy itself had no inherently moral qualities that made it preferable or superior to other political systems.57 His was a formal rather than a substantive conception of democracy. Yet this did not temper the vehemence with which Weber argued for his model of parliamentary democracy in the debates over a new constitution and political system in Germany during and just after the war. Weber was a passionate advocate for universal suffrage, workers’ and women’s rights, social welfare reform, and many of the changes that came to be taken for granted in Western liberal democracies later in the twentieth century. Others, such as Titunik, have come to Weber’s defence, referring to him as a liberal democrat who was concerned about protecting individual

64 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

freedoms from bureaucratic encroachments and who employed the same implicit standards of freedom and equality in his sociological categories as he did in his political writings. She tells us: ‘Along the lines of the classical theorists of the liberal tradition, Weber implicitly took the condition of free and equal human beings as the starting point or touchstone for considering relationships of rule. In the liberal view, the condition of equal freedom represented the most genuine human condition . . . and the imposition of will in the form of rule, however necessary, represented a deviation from this fundamental state.’58 Thus, when Weber writes that ‘the fates of human beings are not equal,’59 or when he points to the inequalities of wealth and status that equal suffrage is supposed to balance out under a system of democratic politics, he is referring – in Titunik’s view – to the ‘deviations’ from this implicit standard that constitute the forms of legitimate domination, rule, or authority  –  legal, traditional, and charismatic  –  outlined famously in Economy and Society. These deviations are historical but can also assume – like the rational-legal form of domination in occidental modernity or Weber’s uses of the term bureaucracy – the guise of a developmental tendency that takes on an aura of inexorability. Weber puts it this way in his essay ‘On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia’: ‘The world will see to it, only too certainly, that the trees of democratic individualism will not grow up into the heavens. All our experiences teach us that “history” is unremitting in spawning ever new “aristocracies” and “authorities” to which anyone can cling if he (or the “people”) needs to do so.’60 Seen in this light, ‘the political concept of democracy, deduced from the “equal rights” of the governed,’ aims both to ‘minimize the power of bureaucracy’ and other forms of hierarchical domination, and to provide spaces in which precarious, ‘fugitive’ forms of individual freedom can survive in the modern world. Titunik calls this the ‘voice of apprehensive democracy’ in Weber.61 The question is whether this developmental/inexorable tendency, linked to the need to cling to new ‘authorities,’ is only a powerful historical tendency or whether it constitutes a more fundamental aspect of the human condition. If that were the case, there would then be two implicit standards: one positing the fundamental ( liberal) equality of human beings, the other the fundamental need and historical tendency for hierarchical forms of organization and rank ordering, or what Weber called forms of legitimate domination. The tension between the two possibilities animates Weber’s thinking on the uncertain prospects for modern democracy. As he put it: ‘We are “individualists”

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and partisans of “democratic” institutions “against the tide” of material constellations.’62 Some of Weber’s ‘political critics’ on the left have read his view of democracy differently. His thoughts on plebiscitary leaders, and on the disciplined role of both elected representatives and members of mass parties within a democratic system, have given rise to the view that Weber ‘saw no real role for the mass of people in shaping their political destiny.’63 Mark Warren has criticized Weber’s emphasis on leadership and the split between demos and leaders as a fundamental challenge to liberal principles. As David Dyzenhaus has argued, the people (or the demos) are largely limited to acclamation.64 Weber’s version of unified, national popular sovereignty was built on a bifurcated notion of citizen agency and participation in which active leaders emerged from parliamentary elites and the majority of the demos were relatively passive followers. The question that even liberal supporters of Weber’s model of democracy ask is ‘whether, given his analysis of the limitations on selfdetermination, Weber envisaged any role for ordinary people in the political process other than as “occasional politicians” at the ballot box.’65 The above suggests that Weber’s model, which had as its slogan ‘leadership democracy with a machine’ (Führerdemökratie), is a more leader-oriented version of what C.B. Macpherson has called the ‘pluralelitist model of liberal democracy.’66 Though Weber specifically emphasizes the role of leadership, rather than the more generic ‘elites’ of later versions of the model, his proposal for parliamentary democracy conforms closely with what Macpherson has called ‘model 3,’ or the pluralist-elitist model popularized by Joseph Schumpeter and later by Anglo-American political scientists such Robert Dahl.67 According to Macpherson, the plural-elitist model ‘starts from the assumption that the society which a modern democratic system must fit is a plural society . . . a society consisting of individuals each of whom is pulled in many directions by his many interests.’ It is elitist because ‘it assigns the main role in the political process to a self-chosen group of leaders.’68 The model assumes, first, that ‘democracy is simply a mechanism for choosing and authorizing governments, not a kind of society nor a set of moral ends,’69 as it had been for Mill and the English ‘social liberals.’70 Were we to substitute the term ‘leaders’ for governments, Weber would have agreed. Second, ‘the mechanism consists of a competition between two or more self-chosen sets of politicians (elites), arrayed in political parties, for the votes which will entitle them to rule until the next election.’71 A

66 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

central assumption of the model is that ‘the voters’ role is not to decide political issues [my italics] and then choose representatives who will carry out those decisions: it is rather to choose the men who will do the deciding.’ The voters choose their representatives not to be ‘constituency delegates’ but rather to be ‘trustees,’ to use the terminology of modern texts on democratic government.72 Macpherson notes that model 3 incorporated key assumptions from liberal equilibrium economic theory. Competition was natural, and voters were rational, utility-maximizing consumers in the political marketplace. But for Weber the interplay between self-chosen leaders and utility-maximizing citizens does not produce an equilibrium in which the demands made by competing interests will ever be balanced in an optimum state. Parliaments, when they are working properly, can ‘make it possible to achieve the “best” solution (relatively speaking) by a process of negotiation and compromise.’73 In general, though, competition and struggle are endless. Nor is there any suggestion in Weber’s model that democracy necessarily produces universal public goods. Apart from these differences, the family resemblance between the two models is striking. With these assumptions in hand, the model defines democracy as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.’ Macpherson summarizes these elements of the model in the following way: ‘Model 3 deliberately empties out the moral content which [Mill’s developmental model] had put into the idea of democracy. There is no nonsense about democracy as a vehicle for the improvement of mankind. Participation is not a value in itself, nor even a value for the achievement of a higher, more socially conscious set of human beings.’74 In fact, as Macpherson has said, in model 3 ‘democracy is simply a market mechanism: the voters are the consumers; the politicians are the entrepreneurs.’75 Given the explicit emphasis on leaders, Weber’s can be seen as a more top-down version of model 3 in which the voters, instead of merely being consumers of political goods packaged by elites, are formally equal citizens who dutifully follow elite leadership. As David Held has noted, in the competitive-elite model ‘the role of ordinary citizens is not only highly delimited, but it is frequently portrayed as an unwanted infringement on the smooth functioning of “public” decision-making.’76 Though Weber wanted to establish equal suffrage as a central component of his proposed system of parliamentary democracy, the role he assigned to ordinary citizens beyond voting

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conforms to this view quite closely. Held portrays Schumpeter’s view together with Weber’s in the following remark: Along with Max Weber, Schumpeter too hastily closed off the exploration of other possible models in democratic theory and practice, beyond those posed by the control of public affairs by all citizens or by competitive elites. Along with Max Weber, he registered significant trends in modern politics –  the development of the competitive party system, the ability of those in power to set agendas, the domination of elites in national politics – and uncritically cast them into rigid patterns: a basis for the claim that, ultimately, only one particular model of democracy is appropriate to the contemporary age.77

The ‘rigid patterns’ referred to by Held are the developmental, seemingly inexorable tendencies I discussed earlier. Those tendencies, dominant in Weber’s view of bureaucracy, came to be built into his model of democratic politics and assumed in later twentieth-century versions of the plural-elitist model, Macpherson’s model 3. Yet there are still tensions in Weber’s view among those seemingly inexorable ‘rigidities,’ their historically contingent forms (i.e., bureaucratic rule under the Hohenzollern monarchy), and the dynamic leadership that could act as an agent of change. Even if Weber saw the relations among these factors as imbalanced in modernity, and even if he thought that the inexorable trends were winning out, the tension was still there, signifying some space for independent action in democratic politics. Wolfgang Mommsen has identified this tension as an aspect of the ‘antinomian structure of Weber’s theory of democracy,’ a structure in which Weber pushed the opposing (historical) tendency of formal, bureaucratic rationality, on the one hand, and the liberal principle of individual selfdetermination, on the other, to their logical or ideal-typical extremes, while continuing to combine them in his model of democratic politics.78 This tension disappears from later versions of the plural-elitist model, which came to assume the complete victory of those developmental forces that Weber viewed with so much ambivalence, and that replaced Weber’s view of charismatic leaders – and any discussion of their genealogy or origins – with the more generic notion of ‘elites’ that are simply accepted as a given. As Breiner says, Anglo-American political science after Schumpeter ‘finds the origin of this figure [the heroic leader] in modern politics to be unproblematic . . . what this move did for political science . . . was enable it to bypass the need for an historical

68 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

genealogy of political leadership of the kind Weber provides.’79 We will take this up more extensively in chapter 3; for the moment, let us note it as a later evolution of the realist model that became predominant in Western liberal democracies after the mid-twentieth century. Another assumption informs the plural-elite model in Macpherson’s analysis. While model 3 assumes a liberal view of democracy, the meaning of liberalism is ambiguous, or paradoxical. As Macpherson notes, ‘liberal democracy can mean either . . . the right of the stronger to do down the weaker by following market rules; or it can mean equal effective freedom for all to use and develop their capacities. The latter freedom is inconsistent with the former.’80 While the plural-elite model seeks to minimally combine the two aspects of liberalism, in Macpherson’s view the market principle usually trumps the principle of the equal freedom of citizens to develop their social capacities in Western liberal societies that have institutionalized a variation of Weber’s model of constitutional democracy based on equal suffrage. The tension identified by Macpherson, which finds a place for a critique of the capitalist market dimension of liberal democracy and its ‘possessive individualism,’ has been underplayed or ignored by many of Weber’s more recent liberal-democratic defenders.81 Titunik’s reading of Weber, for example, emphasizes his defence of democratic freedoms while neglecting the more market-based dimension of Weber’s liberalism and its unintended consequences. Weber’s own more ambivalent view of capitalism – as Mommsen notes, he sees it as exemplifying the developmental tendency of formal, freedom-limiting rationality – does not appear in Titinuk’s discussion. Instead, she emphasizes Weber as a (much less problematic) defender of the liberal-democratic right to equal self-determination. Macpherson’s sense of this tension in the liberal tradition has been lost in the desire to see Weber as a liberal democrat who heroically battled the forces of the right and the left in an effort to establish his own early version of the plural-elitist model. Weber’s model of democratic politics embraces equal suffrage; yet at the same time, it accepts the older strand of the liberal tradition to which Macpherson refers, one that goes back to Locke’s defence of private property. This older view of liberalism is more openly market based and accepts its inequalities as inevitable, as Weber does. It is not concerned with equal individual development in Macpherson’s more comprehensive, substantive, and relatively democratic sense, and it accepts liberal, individual property rights as a given. Weber may have been a ‘partisan of democratic institutions,’ but he was also, however

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ambivalently, a defender of the market economy. This was related to his model of democracy in the following way: when the field of democratic politics and participation is limited to electoral competition that results in control over the state, the unequal outcomes of the market are excluded from discussions of democratization. Throughout his work, Weber fully recognizes and accepts this. Yet capitalism, for Weber, was also a form of bureaucratic domination and rationalization that truncated individual self-determination. The difference between the formal rationality of capitalism and the institutions of parliamentary democracy is that the formal equality of democratic politics – delivered through the mechanism of equal suffrage – is absent from the relations between formally free workers and capitalists when they meet contractually in the market. Workers may be formally or legally ‘free,’ but they are not equal in the giant ‘cosmos’ of the modern capitalist economy. As Weber was well aware, this formal market freedom – the freedom of liberal private-property relations discussed by Macpherson  –  presumed the inequality of the contracting parties. Thus the various inequalities – economic and social – are to be ‘balanced out’ by Weber’s model of democratic politics, but not the inequalities themselves, within their own spheres (i.e., the capitalist economic market). Notwithstanding Weber’s view of how equal suffrage balances out inequalities created by the ‘purse,’ or the market, he thought that a formally democratic political system can, and should, live alongside capitalism and the highly unequal outcomes it had produced as Germany industrialized. But Weber goes even further than this. He thought that despite its substantial disparities, only the intensification of capitalist economic activity in Germany could provide the working class with an improved standard of living and thus fend off both the socialist threat and the resurgence of the old monarchical right. However, in drawing such a sharp distinction between formal democratization within the parliamentary system, and the unequal outcomes of the market economy, Weber was defining democratic politics narrowly.82 The proximity of Weber’s model to the plural-elite view has other implications as well. Democracy, defined as the formal struggle for support and votes within a parliamentary system, does not extend itself beyond the formal electoral, parliamentary arena. Having defined the conditions required for the durability or social cohesion of political domination organized under the banner of parliamentary democracy, Weber adds another qualification to his case for equal suffrage,

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one that further limits the scope of democratic politics. In ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ Weber draws another boundary around his argument for a new democratic system: ‘Here we shall be concerned not with the problem of social democratization [my italics], but only with the issue of democratic, which is to say equal, suffrage and its relation to parliamentarism.’83 Weber prefers, he says, to ‘leave aside the question of whether political democratization would really result in social democratization.’84 In fact, he is emphatic that democratization of the political realm would not lead to the democratization of civil society. This is another limit of the argument in which Weber suggested that the ballot slip could act as a counterweight to bureaucratic domination. As strenuously as Weber fought for a formally democratic system based on equal suffrage, he clearly stopped short of the democratization of civil society and the market economy. As he argues in his famous essay ‘Class, Status, and Party,’ the struggle for power and recognition is carried out not only in the political arena proper, but also in civil society by groups seeking to establish or solidify their status and power, socially as well as economically. Rousseau had wanted a more thoroughgoing social equality. He thought that the only way to achieve this was to have some collective limitation on the right to accumulate private property. By contrast, for Weber it is only in the arena of parliamentary politics that those struggles would be subject to the formal but minimal levelling of the democratic process under a regime of equal suffrage.85 Wolin has argued that for Rousseau’s predecessors, the early social contract theorists Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, once citizens established formal political equality by entering into the social contract to form government, social categories and their past inequalities were suspended but not abolished. They were suspended because, emerging out of the fictional state of nature in which all are equal, ‘the individual who contracts or covenants is . . . an artifact, a constructed being whose attributes appear unconditioned by the kind of resentments at past offences which were and are the accompaniments’ of social inequalities.86 For Wolin, equal citizenship on the basis of the social contract was a fiction that maintained the power of the rising bourgeois class and the inequalities of the market from which they derived their privilege. Thus ‘the trick for the contract theorists was to get equality to serve the ends of inequality.’87 Weber did not share the rationalist assumptions of the social contract theorists. The intentions behind his proposals were different and certainly more democratic. While clearly not identical, there

The Politics of Realist Democracy 71

is still a connection in the liberal tradition between the early contract theorists’ view of property and Weber’s. For Weber, ever the realist, there is no pretence that social and economic inequalities will ever be ‘suspended’; but he does want to see them ‘counterbalanced’ by universal suffrage. The equality at the ballot box that Weber advocated also had as its goal the displacement of the monarchical system. Yet besides implying the future predominance of the bourgeois middle classes politically, this also implied the necessarily privileged place – taken from his sociological analysis of bureaucracy – given to the specialized functionaries who run the modern state and the acceptance that the commanding heights of the economy would be controlled by the newer elites of the capitalist classes. Even with this in mind, we can still say that Weber bifurcates democratic politics into parliamentary and extraparliamentary ‘spheres.’ By his definition of democratic politics, more substantively egalitarian notions and democratic practices beyond the boundaries of an orderly parliamentary system become fugitive, to use Wolin’s provocative term.88 Participatory or direct democracy in Macpherson’s sense becomes a fugitive, orphaned impulse in Weber’s proposal for parliamentary democracy. To put it more strongly, in Weber’s model democracy becomes a fugitive under its own name. Issues of social justice, substantive democracy, and economic democratization are relegated to the margins of legitimate political discourse. Extraparliamentary forms of participation, democratic organization, and activism are rendered marginal in Weber’s model. This is largely because, as Breiner notes, in Weber’s proposal for a parliamentary system, ‘the development of a stratum of vocational politicians [and specialized functionaries] excludes [my italics] the mass of democratic citizens from regular participation in politics and renders all non-professional politicians dilettantes.’89 This is especially the case when those ‘non-professional’ interventions occur outside the party/electoral system and outside the state. The extent to which the voices of the marginal, the dispossessed, and those without institutional access would be heard in Weber’s conception of democratic state power – which is dominated by highly bureaucratized party machines and by political operatives/specialists and leaders – remains an open and problematic question. Weber accepted the restrictions of his model – the exclusion of civil society actors and issues from the sphere of what was considered legitimately democratic; the disciplined, subordinate role of the working class; and the conditions of minimum consent of ‘the mass’  –  as the

72 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

price he was willing to pay to correct the regressive state form that was Bismarck’s legacy. Weber was just as interested, however, in preventing more radical forms of democracy from emerging from below, from an angry and excluded working class, which he wanted to both include and contain in a new model of representative, parliamentary democracy that would emphasize equal suffrage and the role of leaders and party machines. He was willing to pay this price because, on his reading of the political crisis that followed from Germany’s defeat, he thought that parliamentary democracy was the only possibility if liberalism was to survive. Yet in limiting democracy’s scope, Weber was sacrificing more substantive notions of democracy that might have been more proactively shaped by citizens as well as more broadly participatory. The result was a thin model of democracy with limited substantive or participatory depth because it focused largely on the restrictive, bureaucratically controlled mechanisms for selecting party leaders, whose job it was to run the state.90 What differentiates Weber’s position from the current debates over whether democracy is deliberative or agonistic is that more broadly based democratic agency and substantive equality were not central issues. He wanted to establish the institutional form of democracy while limiting its substantive depth. Weber was an elite liberal, and his reaction to Bismarck and the Kaiser was to give Germany a model of democratic politics that featured universal suffrage in the context of a parliamentary system, but without the participatory institutions and practices – the ‘thick’ democratic structures and moral justifications –  that could sustain kinds of democracy that have the deeper roots for which current critics of liberal-democracy are calling. Weber wanted, within the boundaries of his model of parliamentary democracy, some of the outcomes of a more substantive notion of democracy, but not the extensive participation necessary to produce them. In the outline of his model for a new system of democratic politics, Weber again casts bureaucracy in the shifting, contradictory role we encountered in the first chapter. On the one hand, bureaucracy – in its historically contingent form under the Kaiser and the Junkers  –  was a barrier to the formal democratization for which Weber argued. On the other hand, bureaucracy was not only the institutional context, but also the ‘inescapable form of rule.’ Weber here was casting bureaucracy as the inexorable form within which democratic politics – defined as politics contained within the structures of the party system and state – must take place in modernity and not just in post-Wilhelmine Germany. Thus,

The Politics of Realist Democracy 73

Weber was not arguing for a new kind of state, since the modern state, be it wedded to democracy or to capitalism or socialism, is invariably bureaucratic. Rather, in the context of post-Wilhelmine Germany, he was arguing for a new kind of democratic politics in which bureaucracy could serve more democratic ends provided that both the bureaucracy and leaders of political parties were accountable to a functioning parliament based on universal suffrage. Seeing bureaucracy as the inevitable institutional setting, or boundary condition, for politics does more than render direct, participatory democracy infeasible in modern democratic states. There is an irony here: the growth of the bureaucratized democratic state allows for the expansion of democratic politics, which we earlier defined as the struggle over public resources by unequal parties and groups; yet it is precisely this system that at the same time contracts the political – the collective, self-determined activity of the demos  –  restricting it to the activity of leaders who control the bureaucratic apparatuses of party and state. In this way, Weber’s model of democracy prevents the political from fully encompassing the collective power of the demos. Weber’s model was among the first in the twentieth century to establish the restrictions that were later built into the plural-elite model – namely, its reliance on a narrow form of representation and elite leadership. In the analysis of Weber’s realist model of democracy presented here, we have seen how he tried to create a new system of democracy based on equal suffrage in which agency would be concentrated at the top of political parties and facilitated by bureaucratic processes of leadership selection within them. We have discussed its key components in this chapter on the level of what, after Wolin, I have called politics. The basic elements of the model are these: elite control of political parties; their hierarchical bureaucratization and organization; and, to complicate matters, the capitalist nature of economic activity in the Western pluralist societies that the realist model describes. As we have noted, Weber’s proposed model was not designed to develop extensive agency or participation from ‘below,’ in more participatory ways that would empower the demos or activate subordinated classes in moments or practices of collective self-determination. I will argue in the next chapter that Weber sought to contain the democratic energies of a fractured and divided demos by pushing political agency ‘up’ to the level of leaders, capturing it in the image of the charismatic political hero who could lead the nation. This heroic agent, whom Weber places in charge of the modern state, was given the responsibility of

74 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

resolving and accommodating deep social and economic divisions in a moment of national crisis. For Weber, it was a matter of compelling urgency that the heroic actor create a new political. The creation of a new political presumed that the boundaries of politics could be re-created, that the institutional form of politics could be re-established along the lines of Weber’s model of parliamentary democracy. The model would then provide the orderly, contained contestation over public resources by unequal powers in a more bureaucratically routinized way. But the creation of a new political also involves something else that is a crucial link between the political and politics. Instead of seeing democracy as, or restricting it to, an institutional form of politics, we can see it – Wolin has suggested this, elusively – as something else, as a ‘mode of being’ or experience that entails the ‘memory of the political.’91 This is a complex idea having to do with collective social and political memory and recollection and their uses in the contestation between competing visions of the political. I will introduce it here and develop it in the following chapters, and even further in the Conclusion, in a more detailed discussion of memory and the past in Wolin’s own vision of fugitive democracy. Weber’s non-teleological model of formal political equality in a system of parliamentary democracy already contains, I would argue, an implicit notion of the memory of the political, one that becomes explicit in his discussion of the agency of the heroic actor whom Weber nominates to steer the ship of state (next chapter) and that has its foundations in the powerful, ideal typical imaginary of the Puritan founder of capitalism from the Protestant Ethic (chapter 4). Weber’s model for parliamentary democratic politics, and the new formal equality that is its centrepiece, simultaneously involves remembering and forgetting, or a new balance between them.92 It represents a kind of selective political forgetting, or displacement of past markers of inequalities, injustices, and suffering. Among the examples we have discussed so far are these: the divisions inscribed in the three-tier voting system that had been institutionalized under Bismarck to exclude women and the working class from holding power; Bismarck’s outlawing of the Social Democratic Party; the Kulturkampf against Catholics of 1878;93 the inhumane conditions of the working class in Berlin and elsewhere; and the shattering experiences of starvation, immense suffering, and loss that were endured by workers, peasants, and women and children during and after the First World War – experiences that were captured in the searing paintings, etchings, and sculptures of Käthe Kollwitz.94 It

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was the memory, or acknowledgment by Weber, of those injustices, underscored by the sight of defeated soldiers returning from the front, that had led to proposals for parliamentary reform in the first place. Weber’s proposals represented a liberal-democratic attempt to correct these injustices in the present and for the future, to relegate them to the past and provide a more routinized, permanent liberal-democratic political resolution to the ‘social question’ and issue of the exclusion of the working class. The formal political equality in Weber’s model also responded to the demands of the German women’s movement for the vote. Gender inequity is also addressed by Weber’s model (it is worth noting that Marianne Weber was deeply involved in the German women’s movement as an activist and later a leader).95 For Weber, equal suffrage meant equal, universal voting rights not only for the middle and working classes but also for women, who had been kept from the ballot box before the war. Thus, a kind of recognition and amnesia are both present in the proposal for equal suffrage. The new voting scheme was designed to rectify past inequalities of gender and class and could counter, Weber thought, at least the most flagrant exclusions of women, the urban working class, and the rural peasantry from power and government. Recalling Weber’s insistence that equality at the ballot box would not eliminate all forms of social or economic inequality, his proposals for equal suffrage might be seen as a partial erasure of the markers of past exclusions. There is thus another layer to Weber’s proposals than the more neutral-sounding ‘counterweight’ to bureaucratic domination. Weber’s model holds within it the possibility of a new beginning for a more democratic politics. But this is a reformist project, not a revolutionary one. Weber’s new beginning does not try to turn back the historical clock, or wipe clean the present day’s social, economic, or political slate. It is not an attempt to start from year zero. Weber recognizes this in the way he leaves both civil society, with its inequalities of status and prestige, and the market economy, with its inequalities of property ownership and distribution of wealth, intact and unaffected by the institutional arrangements governing democratic politics in a parliamentary system. His proposals were for a new contract for democratic politics, not a completely new social contract in the way envisioned by the earlier social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and (more radically) Rousseau. It is a proposal without the explicitly normative assumptions about reason and human nature of the sort one finds in earlier liberal contract theorists such as Locke.96

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The establishment of universal suffrage and a parliamentary system, with its hope that the bourgeois middle classes might some day come to power, also implied the founding of an alternative political history to that of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the official history of the Prussian state. Weber’s model held within it the promise that, through the democratic participation of all citizens in electing their representatives to government, it might be possible to rewrite the more authoritarian version of the nation’s past perpetuated by the Junkers, the officer class, and the monarchists who controlled the state before the war. The hegemony of the ruling version of history was already being seriously challenged by the fact that the Social Democratic Party had come to dominate the Reichstag before the war. Weber wanted his model to be an alternative to both the Social Democrats on the left and the monarchists and Junkers on the right. The institutional or bureaucratic precondition for creating a new memory of the political began, for Weber, in the creation of a new form of democratic politics. In the next chapter, we will explore the central agent to whom Weber gives the job of creating a new political (and its memory): the heroic actor of the famous lecture ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ Then, in chapter 4, I will argue that the link in Weber’s writings between his model of democratic politics and the agent of the political, between the procedural and the heroic, can be found in the ideal type / historically reconstructed memory of the Puritan hero of the Protestant Ethic.

3 Democracy and the Political

In this chapter I want to look at why and how Weber strategically adds the idea of the charismatic political hero to his model of democracy. He does so most forcefully in his well-known lecture ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ In a detailed analysis of the logic and style of argument of that lecture, I will argue that Weber’s heroic political actor is a problematic emblem of what Sheldon Wolin has called the political. For Wolin, ‘The political . . . is an expression of the idea that a free society composed of diversities can nonetheless enjoy moments of commonality when, through public deliberations, collective power is used to promote or protect the well-being of a collectivity.’1 I want to argue that the political is that place in which the contingent reconciliation of class and other differences, or what passes for commonality in the modern disenchanted world, occurs in Weber’s democratic thought. The political involves, as we have noted, constitutive or ‘quasi-transcendental’ though not philosophically objectivist attempts to define the ends of political life.2 This is a more fundamental, or onto­ logical, yet still historically contingent, higher-order politics. It acts as the ‘“quasi-” transcendental presupposition’ of Weber’s notion of personality or character and as the ‘foundation’ for heroic leadership outlined in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ This notion of the political becomes the foundation on which a new kind of democratic politics can be built by exceptional politicians.3 It is also the arena in which Weber thought that the gifted political actor could fleetingly reconcile a number of things discussed in the lecture as crucial for democratic politics: the modern developmental tendencies toward bureaucracy and rationalization with historically contingent agency and action; the struggle between unequal socio-economic

78 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

classes; and the tension between Weber’s two famous ‘ethics,’ the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility; as well as the tension between reason and emotion. All were part of the cultural and philosophical discussions of modernity that also contextualized the lecture.4 As we have noted, for Weber the bureaucratic rationalization that is characteristic of modern democracy, the state, and capitalism cannot be permanently overcome. But this does not mean that meaningful (and for Weber, heroic) action that could redefine the political is utterly impossible.5 For Wolin, ‘politics is continuous, ceaseless, and endless’ because it involves the ongoing struggle over the allocation of public resources. By contrast, ‘the political is episodic, rare,’ because it involves the more delicate business of forging bonds of commonality in the context of diverse liberal (or even non-liberal) societies in which there is no overarching agreement on ‘ultimate’ values.6 For Wolin the political is different from politics because it involves a kind of modern soulcraft. A disparate group of commentators – political theorists but not all Weber experts, Wolin prominent among them – view Weber’s work as located in a fundamentally political discourse that revolves around this kind of ‘politics of the soul.’7 The striking passage to which commentators have been drawn is actually not from ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ but from Weber’s 1917 methodology essay, ‘The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality.” ’ Referring to the end of the Plato’s Republic,8 Weber says: ‘Every single important activity and ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to run on as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul – as in Plato – chooses its own fate, the meaning of its activity and existence.’9 For Plato, souls chose their own fate in the after/before life. For Weber, choosing is exclusively a this-worldly endeavour. As we will see, choices involving the political in Weber have a stark existential quality for two reasons. First, the consequences of such choices are irrevocable: it does no good to ‘say you’re sorry,’ as Weber said, because the implementation of choices that flow from a certain view of the political can and often does involve the use of force as one of the means of politics. Second, choices over the political involve decisions about ultimate values. Choices involving ultimate values often have far-reaching consequences that can determine the fate of a community or a nation. This can be the case for choices that seek to maintain or accept the status quo, reform it to some degree, or fundamentally change it in a

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revolutionary break with the historically given reality and its forms of oppression, exclusion, and domination. For Weber, choices around the political are closely bound up with the meaning and possibility of autonomy in a disenchanted modern world dominated by bureaucracy and animated by the irreconcilable plurality of values, or what he called ‘the warring gods.’ The moment of the political, of commonality or reconciliation, is embodied in the complex figure of the heroic actor in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ who has a calling for politics. But the actor on whom Weber calls to re-create binding norms or values for the community does not offer salvation or redemption. Precisely because we live in a ‘steel-hard casing’ of bureaucratic administration, Weber’s hero is not a charismatic prophet of biblical proportions. He cannot offer up an ‘ethic of the sermon on the Mount,’ by which Weber means ‘the absolute ethic of the gospel.’10 Rather, he is the ‘sober’ but gifted leader who combines charismatic appeal with judgment and distance, or the ‘trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life’ that modern democratic politics requires. This means that Weber’s heroic actor must possess something like Aristotle’s notion of prudence.11 He is both charismatic and practical; he is a hero and a statesman. While his personality is forged in the struggle to make difficult choices among irreconcilable values and commitments, his chief virtue or asset in this struggle is cool-headed judgment. Those leaders who are gifted, when called to the vocation of politics, will in rare moments temporarily transcend the administrative routines of a highly bureaucratized politics and competitive party politics and will be able to place their hands on the ‘wheel of history,’ transforming and galvanizing the community and redefining the political. The reason for the hero’s emergence in Weber’s discourse of the political, the complex configuration of circumstances he is meant to deal with, and the kind of person he needs to be will now be explored with a focus on the strategies of argument that Weber uses to make the case for a specific kind of agent capable of reviving the political. The question arises: Why did Weber need to add the dimension of the political in the form of heroic leaders to his model of democracy? There are both more immediate historical reasons and more ‘philosophical’ ones related to the political. Philosophically, Weber’s perspectivism led him to ascribe no higher meaning or substantive value to the institutional form of democracy; rather, he saw it, in Macpherson’s terms, as simply instrumental. But as the notion of the political suggests, politics does have to have meaning, it does need to be grounded in something

80 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

that is not simply routine, even in the disenchanted age of huge, complex bureaucracies, massive state apparatuses, and complex party machines. If Weber’s model of democracy cannot supply meaning on its own, then it is up to leaders to do so. Before laying out some of the tensions in Weber’s account of the charismatic hero and how he personifies what I take to be Weber’s view of the political, I want to briefly set his discussion against the backdrop of the extraordinary circumstances of political collapse in which Weber formulated the idea. Postwar Collapse Having leaders who could define a new political became particularly important for Weber in the context of the collapse of the old monar­ chical political system (and society) immediately after the First World War. The Kaiser’s disastrous prosecution of the war led to his abdica­tion after Germany’s defeat. In November 1918, the Social Democrats formed a provisional government led by the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert and established a Council of the People’s Commissars. An Assembly of Representatives consisting of soldiers and workers was formed, and in the following months a democratically elected Constituent National Assembly came into being, meeting for the first time in early February 1919. The task of the National Assembly was to oversee the drafting and implementation of a new constitution. As soon as Ebert had formed the provisional government, he asked Hugo Preuss to form a committee to begin drafting a new constitution. Weber was asked to serve on the committee. At the time Weber delivered ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in late January 1919, he had just finished working on Preuss’s draft of the new constitution, which was published in the Reichsanzeiger on January 20.12 The prospect of establishing parliamentary democracy was, for Weber, beset by threats from both the right and the left. The threat from the left came in the form of the worker’s revolution in Munich – a threat that Weber alluded to in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ For Weber and other liberals, the failure of the revolutionary upheaval signalled the possibility of the return of the Junkers, who would attempt to re-establish the hegemony that had crumbled after the war was lost. Weber’s fear of the radical right was prescient. In the decade after Weber delivered his lecture, Carl Schmitt, in his criticisms of parliamentary democracy, argued ominously for a different kind of democracy from the right. Schmitt saw the political vacuum and the

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ensuing constitutional crisis as an opportunity to argue that ‘the distinctive position of a “constitution-making” assembly, which convenes after a revolutionary elimination of the pre-existing constitutional laws, is best designated a “sovereign dictatorship” ’13 For Schmitt, the ‘sovereign dictatorship’ would be the moment of exception that would usher in a ‘true’ democracy and unify the people under a strong leader as the head of state. In his obsession with a unified state, Schmitt was highly critical of the pluralism and even the limited formal equality implied in the Weimar system of parliamentary democracy based on equal suffrage and the rule of law, which Weber had advocated in 1919. For Schmitt, parliamentarism, with its acceptance of plurality and the representation of varied interests, was inconsistent with democracy. For him, democracy meant the unity not necessarily of a homogeneous people, but rather the unity of political will embodied in the leader and exemplified by the ineradicable and natural difference between friends and enemies.14 For him, the distinction between friends and enemies was constitutive of the political. That is, it constituted a fundamental and permanent antagonism in the notion of the political that could not and should not be overcome or reconciled by rational discussion or consensus. In the immediate postwar climate, it was not clear to reform-minded political observers in Germany that democracy would survive. While liberalism had slowly, though not fully, come to accommodate representative democracy in England and North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the same was not true in Wilhelmine Germany. More than twenty years after Bismarck’s resignation as chancellor, there were still powerful reactionary forces that strenuously opposed the universal franchise. Weber was clearly aware of the danger when he warned that ‘parliamentarisation will certainly not “come of its own accord.” Indeed there is nothing more certain than that the most powerful forces imaginable are working against change.’15 More ominously, ’those large capitalist powers [particularly the most ruthless of them: the leaders of heavy industry] stand to a man on the side of the bureaucratic authoritarian state and in opposition to democracy and parliamentarianism.’16 Those forces preferred a return to the autocratic system of Bismarck’s era, one in which individual rights were restricted, unions were outlawed, and the state bureaucracy was the exclusive preserve of the Prussian aristocracy and military class. It was against this background that Weber became an advocate for an autonomous public realm that was formally democratic. The addition of heroic leaders to

82 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

parliamentary democracy was part of Weber’s complex attempt to revive a blocked or failed liberalism in Germany. As he worked on Preuss’s constitutional draft committee in the months prior to delivering ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ Weber changed his own view, adding to his arguments for equal suffrage and parliamentary democracy a provision for the direct, popular election of the Reichspräsident by referendum, or plebiscite. He did so because he thought that, in the event of a parliamentary deadlock or constitutional crisis, a president directly elected by the people would have broader democratic legitimacy than a weak, divided parliament. Weber expressed misgivings about plebiscitary demagoguery during the same period and in the lecture of January 1919 in Munich; but at the same time, he feared both a resurgence of the radical, reactionary right and the possibility of the establishment of a verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat from the left. A directly elected president could also act as a check on the parties of both the left and the right, on both those representing the forces of reaction and those inspired by the Bolsheviks’ success in Russia. Thus, in Weber’s reform proposals, and in the final draft of the Weimar constitution, one of the few spaces for direct democracy was that it would be available as a back-up, or ‘plan b,’ in order to circumvent the democratic workings of the new parliament should they become paralyzed. In ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ Weber goes far beyond the institutional mechanisms of democratic politics that we discussed in the previous chapter. In the surreal atmosphere of political collapse and instability, the lecture combines commentary on contemporary events with reflections on more fundamental themes that had concerned Weber since his Freiburg Address of 1895. With the historical context in mind, I want to now look at the strategic logic of Weber’s arguments in the lecture, at how they lead up to and construct his notion of the charismatic hero, and at what Weber wants to enable that heroic actor to do. But before considering specifically how that agent, or bearer (Träger), embodies the potentiality of a new political, I want to set the discussion against a few other backdrops. The first is the ideal-typical image of the modern state that Weber outlines for his audience, an image that at first glance seems at odds with, or at least different from, the bürgerlich Rechtsstaat of the Weimar constitution. Weber’s discussion of the state sets the stage, and provides a foil, for his discussion of one of the forces that his heroic actor/leader of modern democratic politics is up against – those developmental tendencies

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characteristic of modern bureaucratic rationalization – in his attempt to define a new political. The State Weber began ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ somewhat pedantically, with a sociological definition of the state. Yet his definition is neither pedantic nor value-neutral. Rather, it is strategic. Like his ideal type of bureaucracy, Weber used it against those forces that would seek to block the emergence of both the parliamentary system and genuine leadership. Weber immediately attaches a definition of politics to his definition of the state. Politics is understood as ‘every kind of independent leadership activity.’ The parameters of this seemingly broad definition of politics are quickly narrowed, however: ‘We shall use the term (politics) only to mean the leadership, or the exercise of influence on the leadership, of a political association, which today means a state.’17 For Weber, ‘the modern state is a compulsory association which organizes domination . . . To this end the state has combined the material means of organization in the hands of the leaders, and it has expropriated all autonomous functionaries . . . who formerly controlled those means . . . The state has taken their position and now stands in the top place.’18 In an attempt to lend the definition social scientific neutrality, or to see it through the lens of sociological realism, Weber famously suggests that ‘in the last analysis the modern state can only be defined sociologically in terms of a specific means [Mittel] which is peculiar to the state, namely physical violence [Gewaltsamkeit].’19 Weber quotes Trotsky, who had declared that ‘every state is founded on force [Gewalt].’ For Weber, the specific means peculiar to the modern state and to politics is force. He ominously notes: ‘At the present moment the relation between the state and violence is a particularly intimate one.’20 In the lecture this narrow conception of politics-as-leadership and Weber’s metaphysically stripped down conception of the modern state are welded together. For Weber, the prospect of the renewal of the political and the reconstitution of a liberal public realm hung on their union. In conjunction with the notion that even politics requires leadership, the restriction of politics to the state will, as we will see, also have implications for the boundaries Weber draws around both democracy and what he considered ‘legitimately’ political. Unlike the more progressive strand of ‘social’ liberalism in latenineteenth-century England, Weber’s conception of the modern state

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itself is stark, minimalist. As Fred Dallmayr has noted, next to earlier nineteenth-century notions such as Hegel’s conception of the state as the embodiment of Sittlichkeit, or the ‘ethical idea,’ Weber’s view seems like a cold shower, a dramatic reversal.21 For Weber, the state is –  as Nietzsche said in Zarathustra  –  ‘the coldest of all cold monsters.’22 Like democracy, the state is not transcendental; it does not stand ‘above’ civil society or anything else. It is not the embodiment of anything inherently rational, universal, or transcendent. Gone are any pretensions that the state embodies any higher purpose, or telos. It is not intrinsically involved in the moral betterment of humankind, the working class, the poor, or the individual, as late-nineteenth-century British social liberals such as Hobhouse or J.S. Mill had thought it should be. Nor is the state an instrument of class domination. It is not, as Marx and Engels had famously declared in The Communist Manifesto, ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’23 Instead, the state is a technically efficient apparatus of administrative domination characterized by Herrschaft, or the probability that commands will be obeyed. This is the state in a disenchanted world. It is the quintessential modern (dis)embodiment of those developmental tendencies that Weber saw as inexorable. Thus far, this definition of the state does not seem to correspond to the nineteenth-century German idea of the Rechtsstaat, with its normative ideal of ‘a state of laws, not men.’24 If the state has no inherent ends, then it cannot be ruled by a universal class (Hegel) or single class interest (Marx) that is naturally or ontologically suited to rule or govern. The ruling Junkers had maintained that they were the closest thing to Hegel’s universal class and that they thus represented the interests of the German nation as a whole. On Weber’s definition, however, the state cannot be assimilated to a universal notion of the Good or a single class interest. This means that Weber’s ‘neutral state’ is open to takeover by democratic parties engaged in periodic competitive parliamentary elections. Gilbert Germain has suggested – correctly, I think – that Weber gives us a neutral view of the state so that heroic individuals can capture it in electoral competition and steer it in ways that counter the stultifying effects of bureaucracy and the technical, purposive rationality that dominates it.25 Seen differently, the neutral description of the state is thus necessary for the definition of a contingent realm of autonomy, the space of the political, in which heroic leaders can act. Yet while Weber’s view of the state may appear philosophically neutral, it is not politically neutral. It is, rather, liberal in a number of specific ways.

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This is at times assumed rather than spelled out explicitly in ‘ The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ This point is important in light of Weber’s critique of Bismarck and the political context of the lecture. In the following passages from ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany’ (1917), we can see the background for Weber’s discussion in the later 1919 lecture. Weber recognizes that the modern state is founded on certain liberal procedural principles that clearly differentiate his view of the state from that of critics of parliamentary democracy such as Schmitt. For Weber, Equal suffrage is closely related to the equality of certain fates that the modern state as such creates. People are ‘equal’ before death. They are approximately equal in the most elementary requirements of physical existence. But precisely these most basic needs on the one hand, and, on the other, that most solemn and lofty fact of all are encompassed by those equalities which the modern state offers all its citizens in a truly lasting and undoubted way: sheer physical security and the minimum for subsistence, but also the battlefield on which to die.26

The modern state has created a legal system of rights and obligations that make its citizens equal before the law and at the ballot box. Equality extends from the most mundane dimensions of ‘sheer physical security and the minimum for subsistence,’ which Weber wanted for the working class, to ‘the battlefield on which to die.’27 The ‘equality of fates’ created by the modern state is closely related to citizenship. For Weber, The mechanical nature of equal voting rights corresponds to the essential nature of today’s state. The modern state is the first to have the concept of the ‘citizen of state’ [Staatsbürger]. Equal voting rights means  . . .  simply this: at this point of social life the individual, for once, is not, as he is everywhere else, considered in terms of the particular professional and family position he occupies, nor in relation to differences of material and social situation, but purely and simply as a citizen.28

This is a fundamental premise of all modern liberal states, and of Weber’s model of democratic politics as outlined in the previous chapter. The state creates a formal equality at the ballot box while accepting as a given the inequalities produced by the market, or what Weber here neutrally calls ‘differences of material and social situation.’ Today

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this would define Weber – in the language of recent debates in democratic theory – as a kind of a ‘procedural liberal.’ At the time, however, it placed him on the centre left of German politics. It allowed him to say to his conservative critics: ‘It is, after all, a piece of crude self-deception to think that even the most conservative amongst us could carry on living at all today without these achievements from the age of the “Rights of Man.” ’29 Having invoked the ‘rights of man’ in his discussion of citizenship, however, Weber qualifies the notion. The qualification can be seen in his reference to the achievements of the age of the rights of man, and not the universal nature of the rights themselves or the natural equality of individuals who are bearers of rights. This distinction is reflected in Weber’s view of the relationship between citizenship and equality. He argues that citizenship has nothing at all to do with any theory of the natural ‘equality’ of human beings [my italics]. On the contrary, its intended meaning and purpose is to create a certain counterbalance to the social inequalities which are neither rooted in natural differences nor created by natural qualities but are produced, rather, by social conditions . . . and above all, inevitably, by the purse.30

Some have pointed out that from the perspective of classical liberal theory, Weber is offering here a contradictory notion of citizenship. It is democratic, but it is not based on ‘any theory of the natural equality of human beings.’ In this regard Robert Eden has argued that ‘Weber attempts to detach liberal democracy from a standard of human rights grounded in nature.’31 Weber’s model of democratic politics, with the notion of ‘aristocratic’ leadership added on top of it, moves away from classical liberalism grounded in natural rights. Eden, a student of Leo Strauss, suggests that Weber’s aristocratic liberalism is incoherent because it is not grounded in natural rights. According to Eden, the only thing that distinguishes Weber’s liberalism from Nietzsche’s nihilism is Weber’s call for a stratum of professional politicians who have a calling for politics. David Beetham, on the other hand, does not see Weber’s liberalism as incoherent, though he agrees that ‘Weber rejected on methodological grounds the natural rights and natural law doctrines that had provided the philosophical underpinning to classical liberalism.’ For Beetham, even though Weber proposed formal political equality through the

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ballot box, Weber’s rejection of natural rights entailed something else as well: This critique . . . concealed a more substantive rejection of the egalitarian and universalistic thrust of classical liberalism, in favour of values that were anything but liberal: the primacy of the nation and national destiny, and the central importance of strong leadership to the political process. It was in those terms that Weber defended parliamentary institutions and open electoral competition for leading offices of the state.32

Weber was widely regarded by his contemporaries as one of the most acute analysts of the problems of liberalism.33 Yet as Beetham notes, his defence of parliamentary democracy on illiberal grounds has also made him a problem for liberalism.34 Eliaeson has explained the paradox of Weber’s liberalism in different terms that I think encompass the issues raised by both Beetham and Eden. He notes that Weber ‘dismissed the notion of the rights of man, though not the practices they supported.’35 This sums up, quite well, Weber’s view of citizenship in the the bür­ gerliche Rechtsstaat that he and Preuss succeeded in embedding in the Weimar constitution. It lies at the heart of Weber’s non-foundational or non-essentialist liberalism and his model of democracy. Weber continues his discussion of citizenship, only now subsuming it under the national interest. He considers both equal suffrage and citizenship not in terms of Kantian universality, but ‘purely in terms of national politics.’36 In this regard, citizenship ‘expresses the political unity of the nation [my italics] [Staatsvolk] rather than the dividing lines separating the various spheres of life.’37 This is for Weber the moment of the political that the hero/statesman tries to create out of the conflicting, competing values of a modern pluralist society. The cryptic notion that citizenship ‘expresses the political unity of the nation’ sounds almost Hegelian, only it is devoid of Hegel’s teleological/historical metaphysics.38 It is bound up with the entirely unmetaphysical reality of the modern state that creates equal ‘fates’ for its citizens, and not with a Hegelian Sittlichkeit, or a concretely ethical life in its totality.39 The term ‘political unity of the nation’ might sound conservative, or similar to Schmitt’s idea of democracy; but it is neither, because Schmitt wanted a purely decisionist Machtstaat. Schmitt had no time for anything resembling the more liberal version of the bürgerliche Rechtsstaat that Weber wanted, one that would be based on universal suffrage and the electoral struggle for state power among competing parties in a pluralist

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society. Even though Weber, in a famous letter to Michels, had said that the classical liberal notion of sovereignty based on the will of the people ‘was a fiction,’ it is important to recall that he was seen to be in the camp of those liberals and social democrats who favoured constitutionalism and democracy.40 From these passages we can see that Weber’s ‘neutral’ definition of the state is not quite so neutral. It is in fact entirely compatible with a liberal constitutional state that offers a specific notion of citizenship based on a narrowly defined idea of formal political equality and security. Clearly, Weber’s minimal definitions of equality and citizenship in the modern state precluded Schmitt’s kind of decisionism. Weber’s sociological elaboration of the nature of the modern state was thus also consistent with his model of democracy. Power and Force The state is, for Weber, as we have noted, the site of democratic politics. Politics involves a struggle for power through the competitive electoral process that leads to temporary control over the state. Politics, for Weber, also inevitably involves Macht, ‘striving for a share of power or for influence on the distribution of power, whether it be between states or between groups of people contained within a single state.’41 This definition of politics focuses on the acquisition and distribution of power, not on the realization of common public goods or ends. As Peter Breiner and Kari Palonen have noted, on Weber’s definition the relation of value-rational motives, or ends, to politics is contingent. What is fundamental for Weber is that politics – the legitimated struggle over public resources by unequal and organized social forces – is always first and foremost defined by the struggle for power. Power is a social relationship. It is also never neutral, for it will always involve actors who are defined by their relative inequality or power in the market, the state, or civil society. Actors who have unequal resources, energies, and access meet in the political arena on unequal terms, even though they all nominally share a formally equal citizenship, equal voting rights, and the other procedural entitlements of the democratic state proposed in Weber’s model. If the struggle for power has the state as its object, and if citizens, classes, or groups engage in that struggle on unequal terms, as the notion of politics suggests, then the state will not be neutral either. Even if it does not reflect the policies of the victors exclusively, it will likely come to reflect them predominantly.42

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The processes of power involve the imposition of one’s will ‘despite the resistance’ of others, as Weber famously said. This is not the Kantian respect for individuals as ends in themselves. The struggle for power will always be coercive; it will always leave a ‘remainder,’ as Jane Mansbridge has put it.43 By remainder she means that if politics is conceived in this way there will always be those who lose – decisions, referenda, elections, court decisions. Here Mansbridge brings to the surface a very Weberian and potentially problematic consequence in her discussion of the legitimate use of force or coercion within liberal democracies. In Weber’s model of democracy, which rests on his sociological view of the state, it could be necessary to bring force, or the threat of force, to bear on those who have participated in the process of public contestation and who have lost, but who have not accepted the outcome as legitimate. The threat of force, Mansbridge argues, can legitimately come into play once it becomes clear that the process of deliberation has been exhausted and that in the end the parties or contestants still disagree. Mansbridge thus draws out one of the most serious implications of Weber’s view of politics as Macht, which is that force can be exercised, even in a democracy, when consensus cannot be reached on crucial issues; and when laws, enacted by elected representatives of the people, are broken in defiance of legally sanctioned outcomes. Weber would have agreed with this, on the grounds that if the state is a neutral instrument, not dominated by a particular class or other interest, then violence or force will not be used systematically, or exclusively against specific segments of the population the way Bismarck had used it against the unions and the German Social Democratic Party. When Weber’s notion of the Machtstaat is joined to his view of politics as struggle that involves winners and losers, his view of the state loses some of its sociological realism, or neutrality. If we recall Weber’s view of the ‘minimum consent’ required for democratic participation, we could say that his view of Machtpolitik, the struggle for state power, outlined in the lecture, skips over the recent discussions of deliberative democracy in Anglo-American political theory and begins at the point that Mansbridge takes up, when consensus either breaks down or cannot be reached. This is because for Weber, reaching consensus is not what democratic politics was about. Weber’s discussion of the heroic actor/leader, whom he thought necessary for reconstructing a dysfunctional public realm in Germany, short-circuits the deliberative, participatory processes and mechanisms that have occupied much of recent democratic theory.

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Leaders must be able to seize fleeting moments of opportunity and be able to employ morally debatable means without flinching in order to achieve politically higher goals. Weber acknowledges Machiavelli’s distinction between ethics and politics. As we will see in our discussion of Weber’s ethic of responsibility, he also accepts Machiavelli’s consequentialism. He says that leaders must accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions, even if they are unintended. Using the examples of revolution in Russia and Germany, Weber refers specifically to Machiavelli to highlight the ethical paradox involved in both politics and any attempt to redefine the political: that dubious means are sometimes necessary to achieve ‘higher’ ends. This makes politics a paradoxical and potentially treacherous enterprise. In his lecture, Weber was aware of the difficulty of the issue, and he was sensitive to its urgency. But regarding his definition of the state and its relation to his notion of politics as struggle that has as its instrumental goal the capture of state power, the issue has a more lasting relevance, even in democracies, as Mansbridge has argued. The temptations of vanity or salvation and the seductions of power, including the ‘diabolical powers that lurk in all violence,’ threaten to undermine or destroy both the unsuspecting novice and the self-aggrandizing demagogue.44 As Weber tells his audience: ‘Anyone wishing to practice politics of any kind, and especially anyone who wishes to make a profession of politics, has to be conscious of these ethical paradoxes and of his responsibility for what may become of himself under pressure from them.’45 Underlying Weber’s discussion is an implied distinction between the legitimate use of force by the state or its elected officials (as long as they accept responsibility for the consequences) on the one hand, and the use of violence without regard for consequences and outside of the realm of the state, on the other. Two Revolutions The ethical dilemmas of engaging in politics applied especially to the revolutionaries whom Weber addressed in the lecture. The discussion of power, the state, and the implications of using force as a political means allowed Weber to address the issue of the use of violence by those ‘charismatic’ leaders engaged in the revolutionary attempt to overthrow the state in Bavaria in 1918. The Russian Revolution had, of course, taken place just the year before, in 1917, and its significance cannot be overstated. Weber’s discussion of revolutionary change, from his

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two 1906 articles on the prospects for democracy in Russia up to his discussion in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ in 1919, is complex and has a number of dimensions that are related to – and sometimes conflict with – his attempt to spell out the kind of sober, heroic agency that, using the tools and means of democratic politics, could redefine the political in a context defined simultaneously in Weber’s historical moment by the developmental tendencies toward bureaucratic rationalization and the collapse of the entire system of Wilhelmine politics that ushered in a possible revolutionary break with the past.46 Wolin has suggested that revolutions represent the ‘wholesale transgression of inherited forms.’47 They are about breaking boundaries and formerly institutionalized barriers of exclusion and oppression. Taking into account the complex configuration of social and cultural as well as political and military contexts and circumstances of the immediate postwar period, the revolutionary eruptions in Munich and Berlin in 1918 and 1919 can be viewed as thwarted attempts at ‘wholesale transgressions’ of the old monarchical political system and culture. For a fleeting moment – the revolution in Munich lasted a little longer than a week – it looked as if the old system might be shattered and that a radical transformation might be under way. In Bavaria in 1918, this was true of the Workers’ Soviet led by Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller and of the process set in motion by the Council of the People’s Commissars and the Assembly of Representatives. In the case of the Bavarian revolution that Weber addressed in the lecture, the very definition of a new system of government was at stake. Weber’s assessment of revolutionary change differs from Wolin’s on a number of key issues, however. To clarify these we can begin by saying that Weber’s view of revolutionary change rests on an ‘objective’ argument and a ‘subjective’ one. I want to argue that both are strategically related to Weber’s attempt to have leaders redefine the political. To take the objective argument first, Weber notes that even revolutionary movements are subject to the bureaucratic tendencies we have discussed. This influence works in a number of ways. Perhaps most decisively, the modern revolution, such as the one in Russia, ‘represents itself as a mechanical operation between the products of mental labour in laboratories and industrial plants, objectified as instrumental things, and the cold power of money, together with the perpetual tension placed on the strength of nerve of the leader as well as hundreds of thousands of followers. Everything else is . . . “technique” and a question of the iron steadfastness of nerves.’48

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According to Lawrence Scaff, this quote from Weber’s second 1906 article on democracy in Russia is ‘perhaps Weber’s single most important statement about the material and psychological conditions for modern revolutionary politics.’ It combines ‘mastery of technique (including the social technique of “organization”) plus strength of ideological commitment’ in a way that ‘already represents a purposive rationalization of “spontaneous consciousness” and all “developmental laws.” ’49 We have already encountered one dimension of this in Weber’s cri­tique of socialism. Recall that Weber argued that if a socialist revolution were to succeed, civil society and the economy would still come under the domination of an all-encompassing state administration. This would be even worse than the degree of bureaucratization that Weber already foresaw in modern capitalist democracies, which in his view at least still structurally separated the bureaucratic machinery of the state from that of the firms in private-sector capitalist markets, thus providing a minimal system of checks and balances. This is part of Weber’s effort to ‘salvage any remnants of individual freedom’ within the steel-hard casing of the modern state.50 In Weber’s remarks regarding revolution as the royal road to the socialist future, the revolutionary process (not praxis), contra Rosa Luxemburg, is also assimilated with the inexorable modern tendency toward bureaucratic rationalization.51 Even before the revolutionary process is consolidated into rationalized, bureaucratic routine, the state can and likely will continue to function during the transition to the establishment of a new order; the results of the revolution will become administratively routinized, also becoming part of that inexorable developmental tendency toward bureaucratic rationalization that is characteristic of modernity.52 As in Weber’s argument about socialism, the bureaucratic inevitability that is the outcome of the revolutionary process is a key part (though not the only aspect) of his negative characterization of the revolution. We must keep this in mind in contrast to Weber’s much more favourable view of modern, but less bureaucratically oppressive, liberal democracy in the lecture and in his political writings. The argument for bureaucratic inevitability is part of Weber’s overall view that revolution, like socialism, leads to less freedom, not more. The ‘subjective’ argument has a number of dimensions. Weber makes three different kinds of remarks about the ‘inner’ consequences and results of revolutionary change. First, he says that eventually ‘the emotionalism of revolution is then followed by a return to traditional, everyday existence, the hero of faith disappears, and so, above all, does

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the faith itself.’53 Post-revolutionary life must return to normal, and some kind of reconciliation, however tenuous, must take place among formerly antagonistic classes, parties, and civil society groups if the public realm is to be reconstructed and the new political that the revolution symbolized is to be successfully consolidated under a new hegemony. For this to occur on a democratic footing, not only charismatic leadership is required but also inclusion of the most significant classes and status groups, ideally including the ‘losers,’ or supporters of the former regime. In ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ Weber is harshly critical of the revolutionaries on two counts. First, there were those who tried to rationalize the use of force with appeals to higher principles, or ‘ethics of conviction.’54 Weber argued that justifying the use of violence solely in the name of higher, absolute ideals such as ‘brotherly love’ meant acting without regard for consequences. He saw this as irresponsible and called it politically immature. He reminded his audience and the promoters of the revolution that ‘the materialist conception of history is not a cab which may be boarded at will, and it makes no exceptions for the bearers of revolution.’55 In the lecture, Weber castigated the revolutionaries who had formed the Workers’ Soviet in Munich and who presumed to hold in their ‘hands the nerve fiber of historically important events.’ He called them practitioners of a pure ‘ethic of conviction,’ or ‘ultimate ends.’ In an oftquoted passage he said that ‘anyone seeking to save his own soul and the souls of others does not take the path of politics in order to reach his goal, for politics has quite different tasks, namely those which can only be achieved by force.’56 Violence, Weber reminds his audience repeatedly, is ‘the decisive means of politics [my italics].’57 Redemption is not possible through politics. The hard business of politics, on the one hand, and the metaphysical quest for spiritual salvation, on the other, are simply not of the same order. The former is of this world, the latter is not. In this sense, his discussion of the pursuit of an emotionally charged (revolutionary, in this case) ethic of conviction, or revolutionary faith, without regard for the consequences of action, is a warning against the excesses of an emotional/revolutionary fervour. In addition, Weber was derisively critical of what he termed the ‘politics of the street,’ which he saw in the revolutionary events in Munich. The amateurs – literati and ‘dilettantes,’ as Weber called both those on the radical left who led the revolution, and those on the far right who supported the nostalgic, reactionary ideals of the ‘society of 1914’ and

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who reacted with violence against the revolutionaries – engaged in what Weber summarized with these words: ‘the goal means nothing to me, the movement everything, [or] my kingdom is not of this world.’58 Like pacifists and other ‘utopians’ who acted out of principle but seemingly without regard for consequences, Weber identifies them as childish, immature, and ‘emotional.’ They are also outside the orderly boundaries of what Weber wanted to establish as a system of parliamentary democracy. This meant that, regardless of how utopian or amateurish they may have appeared, they posed a potential threat to Weber’s model, or at least a distraction from it. The symbolism of the ‘politics of the street’ set in motion by the revolution also potentially threatened the model of parliamentary democracy that Weber had fought for in his wartime political writings. The revolutionaries are childish because they are acting without real leaders, without the discipline and restraint of a party machine, and outside of the confines and routines of an established party system. They were not reconciled to, and did not accept, the very specific definition of ‘responsibility’ that Weber offered in the lecture because that definition implies an acceptance of the inevitability of the ‘objective’ bureaucratic domination of politics by the (modern liberaldemocratic) state. As Volker Heins has aptly noted of Weber, ‘in his political criticism of the contemporary Left he devotes much space to a rejection of its Affektpolitik.’ Heins includes in Weber’s contemporary Left a broad array of personalities, including the Munich revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the sexual politics of Otto Gross, the avant-garde, and pacifists who opposed the war. The context that provides the background to this observation is, for Heins, this: ‘The more politics is driven by unorganized masses, the more irrational, emotional and shortsighted it becomes. Affect-driven influences must be confined to the prepolitical [my italics] realm of “the street,” but kept out of official politics. Weber’s writings provide copious evidence of a critique of emotion along these fairly traditional lines.’59 Heins goes on to say of Weber: ‘It is striking to note the extent to which both his analyses and his critique of contemporary politics circle around the polar opposites of rationality and emotion.’60 This line of criticism has received scant attention in the recent Weber literature, yet it touches on something important from the perspective of elucidating the strategic arguments that Weber uses to support his notion of the political. In his criticisms we see the subtext of a dialogue that has a long history in Western political thought: the tension between emotion and

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reason. We saw a hint of that in the earlier quote regarding the ephemeral nature of the ‘emotionalism’ of the revolution: that ‘the hero of the faith’ and the revolutionary ‘faith itself’ disappear and life returns to ‘normal’ – that is, to the more settled routines of a rationally administered post-revolutionary state. Revolutionary fervour and the ongoing process that shapes a new political must inexorably give way to the objectively given, rationally ordered modern state, which the cool-headed political hero must now not only lead but also manage. Feminist theorists who have written on Weber – they include Rosalyn Bolough, Susan Hekman, and Wendy Brown –  have noted that these bifurcated views of reason/emotion and active/passive citizenship have been foundations of the Western tradition of political thought since Plato.61 Very much in line with much of the tradition, Weber ranks  these qualities hierarchically, privileging order, self-control, and rationality over emotion, which he associates with ‘disorder’ and chaos. In his model of democracy and now his image of the aristocratic formation of character, Weber hierarchically juxtaposes the capacity for rationality – self-discipline and detachment, the ‘trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life’ that an aristocratic political class supposedly breeds in its members and that the successful politician must also have – against those ‘emotional’ elements that prevail in modern mass-democratic culture and to which the working class is apparently more susceptible than an (ideal-typical, as opposed to actual, historical) ‘aristocratic’ one. In bifurcating rationality in this way, Weber assigns reason to the ideal-typical aristocratic political elite and sober political heroes; and ‘all emotional motives’ to everyone else, especially the working classes. Yet Heins also notes that ‘Weber fails to identify clear criteria for distinguishing valuable passions from worthless or harmful emotions.’62 Thus the ‘line between noble passions and ignoble emotions’ is not clearly drawn, and is perhaps more contingent, depending on the strategic purpose of Weber’s argument. The specificity of the way Weber privileges rationality over emotion appears in his arguments about both the kind of person the political hero needs to be and the kind of political class he (ideally typically) needs to come from and lead. Since Weber argues that the heroic agent must be disciplined and have a ‘cooler head’ to engage in modern democratic politics, his view of the reason/emotion dichotomy also becomes assimilated to his view of who is capable of rekindling the political. ‘Emotion,’ related to charisma, is a weaker force when pitted against the inexorable forces of bureaucratic rationalization and the discipline

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required of the heroic agent to lead the modern state. As I will argue shortly, however, the story is even more complex than that. Weber does more than privilege reason over emotion; he also simultaneously maintains a tension between them in his balance between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility. Let me return to the discussion of the ethic of conviction and the revolutionaries of 1918 –19 to follow Weber’s strategic ‘deployment’ of the reason/emotion dichotomy in his notion of the political. The dichotomous line of critique we have identified continues in Weber’s assessment of the middle class, the elites, and the working class before, during, and after the war. Weber was critical not only of the leftist revolutionaries and the monarchist right. The bourgeoisie did not escape his criticism either, and it also falls within the ambit of how Weber privileges rationality over emotion in his argument for a new political and the kind of agent he thinks capable of bringing it about. If the revolutionaries were too ‘emotional’ to lead, the bourgeoisie was no better. Weber was also scathing in his judgment of the political ‘impotence’ of the German middle classes. The German bourgeoisie and their party, the National Liberals, had, in Weber’s view, abdicated the responsibility of national leadership after German unification. They had participated in, and benefited from, the rapid industrialization of Germany under Bismarck, but they had remained politically subservient to the ‘Iron Chancellor.’ Having been excluded from power, the middle classes had not assumed the role of a leading or ‘aristocratic’ political class in Germany’s hour of crisis – a crushing failure over which Weber agonized during and after the war. Weber’s ambivalence and frustration regarding the bourgeoisie’s inability to assume a national leadership role did not begin with the war, however. In the Freiburg Address of 1895, Weber had already asked his audience the same rhetorical question that he posed in his wartime agitation for parliamentary democracy. He wanted to know ‘whether the German bourgeoisie has the maturity [my italics] today to be the leading political class of the nation, I cannot answer this question in the affirmative today.’63 Behind Weber’s bitter disappointment lay the assumption that ‘throughout history it has been the attainment of economic power which has led any given class to believe that it is a candidate for political leadership.’64 It is the ‘specific function of the leading economic and political strata to be the bearers [Träger] of the nation’s sense of political purpose.’65

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The fundamental principle behind Weber’s conception of politics is that those mature, leading classes only emerge and acquire the discipline to lead through struggle, through the contestation of ideas, policies, and Weltanschauungen in the political arena. There it is the clash of world views, ideas, platforms, and performances that gives politics its dynamism and the political its direction and meaning. The notion that politics is forged in the crucible of struggle and contestation is unmistakable even in the earliest stages of Weber’s career. In post-Bismarck Germany the exclusion of the middle classes from power, from engaging fully in politics and in the shaping of the political, had contributed to their political immaturity. This affected both liberals and those on the left. In Weber’s comments on the immaturity of both the bourgeoisie and the working class there is no mistaking the idea that without the need to test themselves on the ‘electoral battlefield,’ neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat could develop leading or governing ‘instincts,’ as Weber called them.66 We can already see Weber’s political torment in the Freiburg address, during which he unabashedly announced to his audience: ‘I am a member of the bourgeois classes. I feel myself to be a bourgeois, and have been brought up to share their views and ideals.’67 For Weber the personal was intensely political; the failure of the bourgeoisie was also his own political failure. Karl-Ludwig Ay has commented on why the bourgeoisie’s failure to develop into a leading political class was experienced as a personal catastrophe for Weber and members of the middle class: ‘Members of this educated middle-class elite [Bildungsbürgertum] held leading positions, they identified with their nation, they represented German scholarship.’68 They were ‘socially separated from the ordinary people [the working classes] by the boundary line of status honor,’ and they identified with the German Empire. Ay correctly notes that in the context of the authoritarian pre-liberal culture of Wilhelmine Germany, ‘one cannot overestimate the importance of this bourgeois and academic group for Germany.’ Even if they were not the politically hegemonic or ruling class (control of the state, or politics in the Kaiser’s regime, rested with the other two influential classes, the agrarian Junker aristocracy and the corps of military officers), they were nonetheless ‘an essential element of the social base on which imperial Germany rested.’69 They were thus also held partly responsible for the war’s disastrous outcome because of their identification with German national/imperial interests. Weber continued to identify with those interests even after

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it became apparent that the war was lost.70 His acceptance of democracy and his advocacy for equal suffrage also came belatedly, coming into full view only after the immense suffering of the returning troops became publicly apparent. Ay notes that Weber’s arguments for equal suffrage and a democratic system were ‘accompanied by a strong and growing demand for peace and by the revolutionary period from November 1918 to the spring of 1919. Defeat and revolution resulted from the people’s hunger for peace.’71 Ay’s comment stands in contrast to Weber’s charge that the revolutionaries and their ‘politics of the street’ were ‘childish.’ Weber’s political positions changed in the immediate postwar period as he struggled with both the inclusion of the working class in his proposed model of democracy and with the shifting fortunes of the bourgeoisie, the class with which his own convictions were so deeply identified. He moved from an older view of liberalism and parliamentarism to the acceptance of constitutional democracy; at one point, he even briefly ‘declared his convictions were nearest to socialism.’72 The lecture and its dramatic portrait of the heroic leader struggling to define a new political took place against the backdrop of Weber’s struggle to come to terms with what was happening to his own bourgeois values in the historically contingent moment of the decisive decline of his own social class. This context also helps explain, I think, Weber’s ambivalent but more positive view of the orderly participation of the organized working class in democratic politics and his momentary declaration that his convictions were ‘nearest’ to socialism. Weber’s concern with the social cohesion of a fragile polity in a time of revolution and crisis continues in his concern with the heroic leader’s ability to mediate class tensions and interests. While not the major theme of the lecture, it is not unimportant, either. It is never far from the surface in Weber’s political writings. Weber’s discussions of the state, democracy, and the dangers of revolutionary violence all took place against the backdrop of this concern.73 Though it has not occupied a prominent place in the recent Weber literature that deals with his democratic thought, I think that this concern is intimately related to his attempt to have leaders redefine the political. Shortly, we will see how the tension between reason and emotion rears its head again. Just beneath the surface of Weber’s discussion of the revolution was a concern over the growing power and dissatisfaction of the German working class after the war. Weber shared this concern about the

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working class  –  which was mixed with sympathy  –  with other elite liberals such as J.S. Mill. It came to a head immediately after the war, with regard to the question of the franchise for workers and returning soldiers. After the German Social Democratic Party, by then the largest party in the Reichstag, changed its position and rallied behind the war effort, workers came home to a ruined nation on the verge of political collapse. A devastated economy, no jobs, and political instability were fuelling the flames of revolution. The old system, which had excluded women and the working class, was collapsing, and the new boundaries that Weber hoped his model of parliamentary democracy would provide were not yet in place. In the absence of a leading political class that could guide the nation in a time of crisis politics, the struggle over resources and power needed new boundaries. Like J.S. Mill, Weber deemed the working class still politically immature and not yet fit to govern. Weber thought that ‘the propertyless masses, who must struggle daily for survival, are more susceptible to all emotional [my italics] motives in politics, to passions and momentary impressions of a sensational kind, as compared with the “cooler head” of the man whose wealth raises him above such worries.’74 Weber thought that the working classes – like the pacifists, anarchists, and feminists, as well as others with whom he disagreed over the legitimate boundaries of democratic politics and the shape of the new political that would guide it  –  were more ‘emotional’ because they did not have the advantage of a consciously shaped conduct of life that had produced the cooler heads of a leading political class, or ‘true’ aristocracy. In the revolution, frustrated sections of the working class, along with students, returning soldiers, and ‘the deracinated strata of an urban intellectual proletariat,’ had taken to the streets in their rage against the rulers of the old order that had blocked their enfranchisement and rights before the war and had then ordered the slaughter on the battlefield.75 Weber understood their anger against the crumbling regime, but he also saw their agitation for more revolutionary, far-reaching change as childish. In the revolutionary circumstances of 1918–19, Weber was afraid they would react out of resentment and rage and that this would have a doubly destructive effect. In ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order’ (1917), Weber had already wondered ‘whether such explosions unleash yet again the familiar and usual fear of the propertied classes; in other words, it depends on whether the emotional effect of undirected mass fury produces the equally emotional and equally undirected cowardice of the bourgeoisie’76

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Yet at the same time, he argued strenuously for their right to vote and to participate in a new system of democratic politics based on equal suffrage. In his wartime newspaper articles, Weber makes a strategic argument for the inclusion of the Social Democratic Party, as a disciplined working-class party, in his model of parliamentary democracy. Though Weber thought the working class too ‘immature’ to assume the role of a leading class, he admired the discipline and self-control of the Social Democrats’ political allies, the trade unions. He said approvingly that ‘organizations like the trade unions, but also the Social Democratic Party, create a very important counterbalance [my italics],’ not only against the right, but ‘to the rule of the street which is so typical of purely plebiscitary nations and so prone to momentary and irrational influences’77 (e.g., the revolutionaries in Bavaria). For strategic reasons, Weber is eager to solicit their participation in his model of democracy, but only if they are orderly participants in the contained struggle of the electoral process  –  in ‘official politics,’ to use Heins’s term, or what I have called democratic politics. If politics is not hemmed in by the firm walls of a (bureaucratically organized) party with a stake in the system, the workers might be pulled farther from Weber’s model of parliamentary democracy and toward socialist, anarchist, or other alternatives on the radical left. They might be incited to ‘flee the iron cage’78 of the modern bureaucratic state that inevitably provided the boundaries and context for Weber’s proposals for democratic reform, and engage instead in what he dismissively called the emotional ‘politics of the street.’ Weber approved of ‘orderly’ participation, a well-behaved kind of struggle under the auspices of electoral competition, not revolutionary, disruptive uprisings by workers, students, and disaffected intelligentsia such as those that took place on the streets of Munich in 1918. The discipline and self-control of the Social Democrats would make them an important check and balance to the ‘irrational mob rule’ of the revolutionaries. Commenting on Weber’s view of the revolution, Heins has put it this way: while the ‘political spectators, putschists and “chance demagogues” ’ of the revolution would play no role in ‘contributing to the creation of a rational organization of any kind,’79 – that is, a new, rationally bureaucratic, liberal-democratic state – the Social Democrats could. Not yet ready to govern, they were nonetheless to be drafted into Weber’s model of democratic politics as partners, supporters of the system, and counterweights not only to the ‘irrational mob rule’ of the far left but also to the equally destructive emotionality of the right-wing monarchical elites. All of this speaks to Weber’s

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ambivalence regarding the political status and role of the working class and the Social Democratic Party in his model of democracy. In this regard it is important to note another distinction made by Heins. He says that Weber’s critique of emotion is also ‘not directed against the broad mass of the people [or their parliamentary representatives such as the SPD], but against the dominant elites.’80 This is true, but it also depends on the energies of the ‘broad mass of the people’ being marshalled and contained within the structures of the rationally bureaucratic, liberal-democratic state and the competitive party system that Weber was proposing to the German public. Mired in the daily struggle for survival and still ‘susceptible to all emotional motives in politics,’ the working masses are not given the agency by Weber to take a leading role in defining a new political. On this issue Heins is also prescient when he notes that ‘Weber was unable to resolve the tension between his twin goals of both activating broader sections of the population while at the same time keeping a firm grip on them and being rather cynical about “democratic ideals.” ’81 Heins makes a good point about the ‘firm grip’ that Weber wanted to keep on the ‘masses’; including them was a double-edged sword. Their ‘emotionality’ had to be included and contained. In order to do this, Weber tried to find resolution (not salvation) in the figure whom he entrusted with the agency to reshape the political – the heroic leader. Next I again pick up the ‘rational’ side of the discussion of emotion and reason in Weber’s idea of a leading political class, to provide a contrast with the preceding discussion of the ‘emotional’ masses and to further set the stage for a discussion of the heroic actor. The context to which Ay alerts us, and which I have outlined only briefly, tells us a good deal about why Weber in his political writings would have preferred a leading or hegemonic class that could be the bearers (Träger) of a new liberal political tradition in Germany. For him, such a leading class – what Weber called a political aristocracy, one capable of producing the heroic personalities that could lead the nation – was needed but absent. In an important wartime article on the reform of the franchise, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ Weber tells us in ideal-typical terms that ‘there is no doubt that a true aristocracy can stamp an entire nation with its own ideal of distinguished conduct, for the plebeian strata imitate the gesture of the aristocracy. By combining the advantage of their “small numbers” with the benefits of a stable tradition and wide social horizons an aristocracy can achieve great political successes in the leadership of a state.’82

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For Weber, a ‘stable tradition’ and the ‘wide social horizons’ of a political aristocracy, along with the cohesion that comes from ‘small numbers,’ constitutes the best ground from which a leadership class can grow. Weber continues: ‘As far as national politics is concerned, rule by an aristocracy with political traditions has the further advantage over democratic forms of rule that it is less dependent on emotional factors [my italics].’ Leaders from such a leading class, Weber tells us, generally have a ‘cooler head [my italics] as a result of his consciously shaped conduct of life and an education directed at maintaining countenance.’83 The relation between reason and emotion is related, for Weber, to what Wilhelm Hennis has seen as Weber’s neo-Aristotelian concern with the character of citizens, their rational conduct of life, or Lebensführung, and how that conduct or their fate is shaped by the economic and cultural conditions of the different life orders or Menschentum.84 We find this concern early in Weber’s career, in his Freiburg Address. There he challenged his audience thus: ‘The question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is not the well-being human beings will enjoy in the future but what kind of people they will be . . . We do not want to breed well-being in people, but rather those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature.’85 But Weber’s notion of an ideal-typical ‘aristocratic’ political class does not stop with how a ‘stable tradition,’ ‘wide social horizons,’ and the cohesion that comes from ‘small numbers’ shape the development of character. The principle requirement for a class to ‘function as an aristocracy in the political sense of the word . . . is a life untouched by economic storms [my italics].’86 The hallmark of the ability to function politically is the removal of the leading or ruling stratum from the realm of economic struggle. This view of one of the key requirements of ruling had a long history in the pre-liberal Prussian state. We find the same idea in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.87 Commenting on the aristocracy, on ‘those members of this class who are called to political life [my italics],’ Hegel says: ‘This class is more particularly fitted for political position . . . in that its capital is independent of the state’s capital, the uncertainty of business, the quest for profit, and any sort of fluctuation of possession. It is likewise independent of favour, whether from the executive or the mob [my italics].’88 In ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and elsewhere, Weber talks of the need for those engaged in politics to be ‘economically dispensable,’ to be able to live from instead of off politics.89 Indeed, Weber

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explicitly associates the capacity for agency, political judgment and coherent, effective action with not only the ‘cooler heads’ of an aristocratic, leading political class but also with the possession of wealth. Wealth, such as that of the grand rentier, makes one independent, ‘available for political purposes, both outwardly, and even more importantly, inwardly.’ ‘Inner availability’ amounts to the economic independence that allows for distance, for detachment. But this is not simply distance per se, distance from ‘things and men.’ It is ‘distance from everyday conflicts of interest in the private economic sphere.’90 Weber admires the ‘cooler head of the man whose wealth raises him above such worries.’ Thus, only the wealthy belonging to a dispensable political aristocracy will be capable of genuine political leadership, because only they will be able to formulate ‘independent’ political convictions. In this image of the dispensable leading class, Weber provides us with an ‘aristocratic’ notion of autonomy rather than a principled one. Genuine autonomy is really only available to those few whose wealth allows them to transcend the material conditions of work and competition in the modern, rationalized capitalist economy. It is not, therefore, a universal goal of democratic politics. It is still a kind of individual autonomy, but it is not autonomy for all individuals. Here Weber gives us an ideal-typical image of a ruling class – one that has its distant yet obviously partial echo in Aristotle’s Politics. Ruling requires reason, a ‘cool head,’ property, and the attendant leisure it provides. There is an echo of Locke here in Weber’s defence of parliamentary government when he elevates property to substantial wealth.91 Against this standard neither the worker nor the entrepreneur measures up; both are ‘interested’ parties, engaged in the ‘daily struggle for existence,’ in the ‘conflict of economic interests’ in the marketplace.92 Substantial wealth ‘provide[s] support for independent political convictions.’ Contrary to much of the experience of Western liberal democracies since his time, Weber argues that ’the economic situation of the wealthy does not necessarily dictate [my italics] the direction of their political activity.’93 Who are those of substantial means? Are they the ‘ruthless barons of heavy industry’ whom Weber feared would control the state through capitalist cartels under corporatism? Their wealth had not made them independent or more rational; it had not given them ‘cooler heads,’ as Weber noted in his fear of their backlash against the revolution. And it certainly did  –  as it does to this day  –  determine the ‘direction of their political activity.’ Recall that Weber feared that they would control

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the bureaucracy and that their interests would then become identical with those of the state. Are they wealthy patrons, few in number, whose great fortunes allow them to choose their political convictions independently and then back their party of choice? Are they the wealthy burghers who supported the National Liberals, or rare cases such as the industrialist Paul Singer, who sponsored the German Social Democratic Party? Weber says of Singer that ‘his position within the party [was] to a considerable extent a function of his wealth, since this allowed him to live for the party . . . rather than to live from it.’ Weber contrasts the figure of Singer, whom he acknowledges as an increasingly rare type in the business of modern democratic politics, to the lower party functionaries who are separated from their political means of livelihood. Regarding the paid party functionaries, Weber says with a Nietzschean overtone that ‘it is easy for the party official who works hard for his living and is dependent on his salary to feel resentment towards such people [i.e., wealthy patrons; my italics].’ Even so, he continues, ‘it is a matter of great urgency for democratic parties in particular to have people in secure economic circumstances occupying leading positions [my italics] who can devote themselves to political work purely out of personal conviction.’ Weber goes on to say, in a characteristically frank moment, that ‘“political character” is simply cheaper for the man of means, and no amount of moralizing can change this fact.’ 94   Though Weber readily acknowledged that mass democracy put an end to exclusive rule by notables, this discussion, which may seem time-bound and precious now, is indicative of the tension in Weber’s model of democracy between the economic privilege that makes democratic leadership easier for wealthy elites, and the constraints of a rationalized modern economic system that produces the narrow and apparently ‘emotional’ interests of both workers and capitalists. This dimension of Weber’s aristocratic ideal type – the possession of wealth substantial enough to lift leading political actors above the fray of narrow economic interests  –  has been virtually forgotten in recent discussions of Weber’s democratic politics. In his discussion of Weber’s politics of civil society, Sung Ho Kim defends Weber’s attempt to mix the aristocratic formation of personality with democracy. Nowhere is this aspect of the ‘aristocratic’ formation of the disciplined leading citizen – the explicit requirement of great wealth as a prerequisite for political ‘dispensability’ and judgment in a democracy – mentioned in Kim’s discussion. Kim, instead, is drawn to the formation of the ethical qualities and discipline of the heroic citizen, but not to the freedom

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from economic compulsion that finds an echo in Weber’s image of a leading, ‘aristocratic’ class. On the issue of the ‘real’ aristocracy and its position in the postwar crisis, Weber, in ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1917, asked bluntly: ‘Where is the German aristocracy with its “distinguished” tradition to be found?’ Then he pointedly answers his own question: ‘It simply does not exist.’95 Weber in this way scathingly separates his ideal type of a leading political class from the political failure of the historically contingent German Junker aristocracy that ruled the Reich during the Wilhelmine years. In the absence of such a tradition, no class or stratum existed that could supply potential leadership candidates for training in the system of parliamentary democracy for which Weber had fought publicly. In discussions of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and its political and/or historical contexts, it has become customary to rehearse the (now familiar) leadership qualities found in Weber’s famous two ethics: of conviction, and of responsibility. But before I get to these and try to contextualize them differently, I want to pursue another impulse that follows from the previous discussion of Weber’s highly strategic notion of the prevalence of ‘emotion’ over rationality and the inadequacy of emotionality in the three classes vying for political supremacy in the postwar years of revolutionary turmoil. Again I follow the lead of Peter Breiner and pursue his insight into the three images of heroic leadership that Weber deploys in the lecture. As Breiner has noted, Weber in his lecture deploys three images of heroic leaders from the past.96 Each exemplifies a different aspect of heroic leadership. The first is Pericles, the demagogic hero of ancient Athens who held no public office but who led his fellow citizens by virtue of his charisma  –  specifically, his ability to sway the assembled (male) citizenry through public speech. The second type is ‘the renaissance prince who privately owns the means of power – armies, money and administration.’97 He is the condottiere and is, like Machiavelli’s Prince, a master at the acquisition and concentration of power. We discussed this type in chapter 1 with reference to the separation of functionaries from the means of administration that was a prerequisite for the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state. The third example, Gladstone, is modern; it comes from the parliamentary tradition in England, much admired by Weber as the most advanced Western constitutional liberal democracy. It is also the system that most resembled the one that, with qualifications and additions for the German context, Weber wanted to

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establish in Germany. As Breiner notes, the example of Gladstone ‘combines the political capacities of the other two types with the demands imposed by the rise of parliaments, bureaucratic parties, universal suffrage and a bureaucratic state.’98 The vocational politician with a ‘calling’ for politics who balances passion and judgment, emotion and reason, emerges from and is intertwined with this description of the three types. Yet as Breiner notes, ‘this conceptual narrative about the origins [my italics] of the vocational politician is something of a bricolage . . . there is virtually no discernable causal connection between the three political character types.’99 Instead of a being part of a ‘developmental history’ – such as the bureaucratic inevitability that characterizes rationalization of the state and capitalist enterprise that Weber repeatedly invokes in his arguments against his political opponents, and the genealogies he constructs in his ideal types and in his historical sociology  –  the ‘three types’ emerge as singular examples from different epochs. Historically disparate and illustrative, they ‘serve as a conduit through which an autonomous actor could be forged.’ Crucially, the narrative of the ‘three types’ also gives Weber a way of constructing a composite image of the heroic agent that is ‘rooted in a logic . . . that has a distinctly separate development from the professional operative and advisor,’ who are both inevitably and utterly caught up in rationalized modern machine/party politics.100 In modern liberal democracies, both these ‘types’ – ‘operative and advisor’ – work on the level of what I have called politics, while the images of heroic agency constructed from the ‘three types’ work on the more rarified level of the political. For Breiner, Weber’s ‘vocational politician is not a figure that can be historically verified but represents merely a potential driving force [my italics] of politics, much like the figure in Machiavelli’s Prince who is called upon to seize the occasion fortune has provided.’101 In fact, Breiner’s insight into the construction of Weber’s ideal-typical heroic political agent goes even further. Instead of grounding his discussion of the heroic agent historically, Weber ‘constructs a fiction of origins to project this figure into the future when the “business” of [modern, democratic mass] politics [my italics] threatens to allow only simulations of political leadership.’102 Breiner notes that with his fiction of the three types, Weber ‘gives us an alternative to the grim analysis of democratic leadership’103 that some of his American (James Bryce – leaders who superficially manipulate, or simulate) and German (Werner Sombart – mass democratic politics as fin de siècle degeneration) contemporaries had

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offered. Weber’s images of both the Betrieb of politics and the political Berufspolitiker drew from those of his contemporaries and  –  in cases such as Sombart – competed against them.104 The fictions give us, in ideal-typical form, glimpses of future possibilities instead of the ‘simulations of political leadership’ that Weber, Bryce, and Sombart thought mass democracy produced.105 Weber’s discussion of the ‘aristocratic’ nature of heroic leadership sought to provide an alternative to these superficial aspects of modern mass democracy. The fictional constructs also allow Weber to define a horizon of possibility against the other backdrop we discussed earlier; we can also see his fiction of the origins of the vocational politician as an alternative to what he saw as the grim vision of future unfreedom represented by Bolshevik socialism. I would add another layer to Breiner’s analysis. I agree with him that the three images are ‘rooted in a logic’ that is developmentally distinct from and opposed to the rationalized, bureaucratic context that defines the life of the professional party operative or politician who is caught up in the machinery of democratic politics and the state. In addition to the idea that the ‘narrative about the origins of the vocational politician [is a] bricolage,’ and that there is no apparent causal relationship between the three types, I think there is something else at work. The ‘fiction of origins’ constructed out of the three ‘types’ allows the projection of their heroic qualities into the future only because it retains and recalls positive and heroic memories of the political. I think this is where the significance of the three images lies. This is what gives them their connection or coherence in the lecture, despite their apparently discontinuous historical relations to one another. Yet as Breiner notes – and here he agrees with commentators such as Palonen – ‘the Berufspolitiker is a potential within the “Betrieb” of modern politics whose appearance is a contingent [my emphasis] matter, a projection of an actor waiting to appear but forged out of the developments producing professional politicians.’106 Unlike the developmental tendencies of modernity that seemed to produce only increasing rationalization, there is nothing necessary or natural about the historical emergence of the heroic agent: ‘for this figure is a mere possibility on the terrain of professional politics’ in modernity.107 In this regard the possibility of the emergence of an agent who is the bearer (Träger) of a new political is fleeting, contingent. Breiner sees Weber’s heroic actor, whose image is constructed from the three historically disparate ‘types’ in the lecture, as the contingent bearer of future possibilities. Unlike the

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bureaucratic organization of the modern state, this heroic agent is not historically inevitable. In the atmosphere of crisis and revolution, working-class revolt and political collapse, and with no immediate model of a leading political class to turn to in the present, Weber reaches back to images of heroic leaders from the past, images that blend aspects of ancient (Pericles) and modern (Gladstone) democracy, for the ‘mere possibility’ of finding fragments of archetypal, ideal-typical characters who can illuminate the qualities necessary for reshaping the political. Weber’s exemplary leaders, arching back across millennia to Pericles, are instances of his poignant observation, made toward the end of the lecture, ‘that what is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.’108 In the lecture, Weber offers these images of exemplary, ideal-typical leadership even though he knows they are either no longer possible (Pericles and the Renaissance prince) or rare (Gladstone) in the disenchanted world of bureaucracy, capitalism, and modern machine politics. But these ideal types, like that of the ascetic Puritan in the Protestant Ethic, hover over his discussion like a ‘ghost in the machine.’109 In fact, one might say that contra the disenchanted nature of rational, bureaucratic organization in the modern world – which Weber at once accepts and bemoans – these images, and the memory of the political that they symbolize, are meant to re-enchant the world of modern democratic politics. I think the aristocratic, heroic examples/memories of the political serve a specific function in the lecture and in Weber’s political writings, similar to the discussion of aristocracy in Tocqueville. As Wolin has remarked, Tocqueville was engaged in the ‘task of retrieving a receding aristocratic past [my emphasis] in order to counteract new forms of despotism.’110 For Tocqueville the new despotisms were the tyranny of the majority, the pressures for conformity, and the undermining of individual liberty that he thought he saw in American democracy. Weber’s concerns were different; the tyranny of the majority was not his main issue. For Weber the ‘new forms of despotism’ were not democracy, the mass of ordinary people, or even the ubiquitous presence of the modern state. Nor was he trying to retrieve an aristocratic past in any literal sense. The possibilities for tyranny that Weber envisioned in the ‘womb of the future’ were rather the prospect of the return of the monarchical elites and their reactionary rule and, beyond that, the disintegration of the working class, the revolutionary disorder in the streets, and the overwhelming domination of politics by bureaucracy under state socialism. I think

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he deployed these three powerful fictional images, recalling them for his audience alongside his call for parliamentary democracy, not only to fend off political opponents in the present and possible tyrannies in the future, but also to draw sustenance from exemplary images from the past that were receding in the face of a future that was increasingly rationalized and uncertain. In relation to these issues, Breiner’s insight is significant. He shifts the discussion of the heroic political agent away from the issue of its historical accuracy and onto the terrain of its strategic deployment. He asks the right question when he says that ‘the crucial problem is not the inaccuracy of Weber’s typification but what he is using it for [my italics].’111 It is in this light that I see the complex positioning of the fictional political heroes in the lecture in relation to Weber’s political opponents. It is against the backdrop of this complex configuration of circumstances and images that we need to understand Weber’s discussion of the charismatic political actor in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ Halfway through the lecture, Weber calls for charismatic leaders with a calling for politics to rehabilitate a dysfunctional political realm. Again following the lead of Breiner, I want to ask specifically how those qualities are related to the three fictional images of charismatic figures Weber mentions in the lecture and what their strategic purposes are. I then want to explore how and why they are related to the political. Weber spells out the qualities of heroic leadership that were formerly the product of the ‘consciously shaped conduct of life.’ Without these qualities, the political  –  that is, the possibility of those contingent moments of solidarity during which leaders can bring the (national, for Weber) community together – will not materialize. Weber thinks that only leaders with those special qualities will be able to lift the struggle over values in a democratic state above the level of politics and articulate a new political. Toward the end of the lecture, having offered the three heroic character types, Weber brings them together as he tells his audience that there are ‘three qualities that are pre-eminently decisive for a politician: passion, a sense of responsibility, judgment.’ Weber understates passion for his audience when he says that it is ‘concern for the thing itself [Sachlichkeit], the passionate commitment to a “cause” [Sache], to the god or demon who commands that cause.’112 Weber’s view of passion here may seem muted, given his own propensity for volcanic

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emotional eruptions and his emphasis on charisma as a personal inspirational quality.113 This is balanced off as a consideration for engaging in politics by Weber’s second characteristic, the ‘sense of responsibility.’ Responsibility is accepting consequences, even unintended ones, for one’s actions and for the future. But the decisive quality of the politician, for Weber, is judgment. Judgment is ‘the ability to maintain one’s inner composure and calm while being receptive to realities, in other words, distance from things and people.’114 ‘Distance’ is a cultivated ‘habituation to detachment.’ ‘What is decisive,’ Weber told his audience, is ‘the trained ability to look at the realities of life with an unsparing gaze, to bear those realities and be a match for them inwardly.’115 What distinguishes the genuine politician, one who has a calling for politics, from the political dilettante, is ‘that firm taming of the soul’ or the discipline that allows one to cultivate the ‘habituation to detachment.’ In his closing remarks, Weber says that politics ‘takes both passion and perspective.’ Recalling the ‘cooler heads’ and cultivated detachment that he attributed to the conduct of life of an independent aristocratic class, he says that ‘when responsible decisions are being taken, a cool and clear head – and it is a fact that successful politics, particularly successful democratic politics, are conducted with the head – is all the more in command.’116 It was precisely the opposite qualities – a kind of belligerent chauvinism, vanity, a purely emotional or self-aggrandizing response to political circumstances on the part of the Kaiser and the supporters of the ‘ideas of 1914’ – that had plunged Germany into the morass of the First World War. Weber sums up the politician’s paradox in this way. In contrast to the bifurcation of reason and emotion that we found both in his model of democracy and in his discussion of how each capacity was apportioned in the contestation between social classes, the discussion of the charismatic hero/statesman reframes the dichotomy, joining both in the same person: ‘The problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion [distance, judgment – my additions] be forged together in one and the same soul. Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body. And yet, devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be borne and nourished from passion alone.’117 Politics requires both passion and distance. It requires commitment to a cause and the ability to dispassionately weigh alternatives and take consequences into account. For Weber, the precarious, delicate balance between passion and distance, emotion and reason, can in the end only

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be sustained by exemplary figures. In modernity, this balance now must be sustained by the politician himself, as a heroic figure, since an actual aristocratic tradition has receded into the irretrievable past and no longer provides a template. In the absence of an aristocratic or even a middle-class tradition of leadership, and with the establishment of parliamentary democracy actively challenged by forces on the right and the left, it is up to the exemplary few to reconstitute a future political in the world of modern democratic politics. The task of the exemplary political actor is complicated by the fact that the cultural and social worlds of late modernity have no overarching value system, no unified cultural memory, to sustain them or to hegemonically structure meaning for the community as a whole in a strong sense. The world in which the heroic actor has to forge a new political is, instead, one of inexorable value plurality. The ‘polytheism of values’ created by the rationalization and fragmentation of values spheres is, as Catherine Colliot-Thélène has noted, not an anthropomorphic or trans-historical part of the human condition, for Weber, but one that is specific to occidental societies in modernity.118 Value polytheism is endemic to modernity; but it is, in my reading of Weber, both a historical and an ontological premise. This is because, for Weber, there is no transcendent hierarchical order outside of historically specific action and meaning – ideas we will explore further when examining the assumptions of Weber’s social science in chapter 4. For the moment, the ‘warring gods’ of modern culture are destined to engage in an eternal struggle on the ‘battlefield’ of the modern social order, as Scaff has argued. For Weber, the tensions among the secular and now impersonal ‘gods’ is intimately associated with how the agency of the hero is constituted in the disenchanted world devoid of any inherent, natural, or hegemonic notion of Truth. The mature hero, the only personality capable of balancing passion with judgment and of not being destroyed by the excesses of the former, can only be formed in the crucible of lifeand-death struggles with the ‘gods and demons’ – that is, the plurality of values that compete for the souls of those with a calling for politics. For Weber, the heroic personality takes form and creates his identity by engaging in these acts of choosing among what for Weber are fundamentally irreconcilable values. Only the fully formed personality, the politician who has successfully come to grips with the depth and intensity of the struggles between competing values, can feel the full weight of the consequences of choosing one course of action over another. In a passage famous in the

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literature, Weber puts it this way: ‘It is immensely moving when a mature person (whether young or old) who feels with his whole soul the responsibility for the real consequences of his actions, and who acts on the basis of an ethic of responsibility, says at some point, “here I stand, I can do no other.” That is something genuinely human and profoundly moving.’119 The reference to Luther  –  ‘here I stand, I can do no other’  –  is the decisive moment of refusal that compels the heroic politician to act. It is that point at which ‘ultimate Weltanschauungen collide, and one has to choose between them.’120 To make the stark existential and political choices that he is called upon and fated to make, the politician must be mature enough to recognize both the potentialities that lie hidden in the future and the limitations imposed on the realm of possibility by the constraints of the present and memories of the past. Recall Weber’s remark that the ‘possible would never have been achieved if . . . people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.’ But to this, Weber adds: ‘To do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word.’121 The use of the word sober at the very end of the lecture again signals a shift in emphasis from charisma to judgment in the balance between the two terms. In the historical moment that defined the lecture, Weber was reaching for one version of the impossible, a liberal one, in his advocacy of parliamentary democracy, even when he shifted his position to include a president elected by plebiscite. At the time, finding a national leader, a charismatic statesman who could view reality with ‘trained relentlessness’ and detachment and create the moment of the political to unify the nation, seemed a dim hope. Previous interpretations, concerned with Weber’s decisionism, have emphasized either the pros or the cons of the idea that only the actor possessed of a ‘trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life’ will be able to weigh the possibilities dispassionately, make cool and clearheaded choices, and act decisively. The interpretation I am proposing has a different focus. For Weber, only a heroic actor with these qualities recalled in the three images from the past can imagine a new political in the future, beyond what for Weber was the current chaos of collapse and near-revolution. Only such a leader can create those binding moments of commonality that will encompass a vision of how to balance the turbulent clash of political, class, social, and other forces in the interests of the nation. Only the ‘mature’ (i.e., responsible) political actor could revitalize the political, carving out of the hothouse of the postwar crisis

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a public arena that could retain some autonomy from the political incapacity of bureaucratic domination, from the reactionary monarchic and industrial elites, and from the workers, soldiers, and students calling for revolution in the streets. Weber thought that Germany desperately needed exemplary political actors who could transcend the postwar constitutional impasse and galvanize a new, hegemonic political vision from the chaos of conflicting values, class conflict, and the burden of a pre-liberal past represented by Bismarck’s Obrigkeitsstaat. In this image of heroic leadership and the process or trial of maturation that Weber says leaders must undergo, we can see something akin to that process of self-overcoming and then turning  –  or ‘enlightenment’  –  that exemplary leaders have had assigned to them in the Western tradition ever since Plato’s philosopher-kings climbed out of the cave and toward the sun in the Republic. Weber’s argument for the maturity of the heroic agent fits into the tradition thus described by Dallmayr: ‘All the great ethical teachers of the past, from Aristotle and Confucius to Hegel, have stressed the need of self-transcendence and transformation, that is, the need to undergo the sustained labour of formative maturation, or paideia leading to a kind of “turning” (or periagoge).’ At this point, and in most of Weber’s work, the ‘arduous labour of self-overcoming’ is restricted to exemplary leadership figures. It is not, as Dallmayr has noted of the idea in recent discussions of radical democracy and the demos, ‘an emblem of human self-transformation and maturation, of the striving for self-rule that always remains a task and a challenge.’122 For Weber, this kind of self-overcoming, learn­ ing, and change is not yet for the demos as agents of their own collective self-transformation. To complicate the task of the heroic agent, this process of selftransformation occurs, for Weber, in the context of a disenchanted modern world bereft of inherent meaning. The leader’s calling cannot, in modernity, entail the hope of ‘resubstantializing’ the political, of grounding it in objectively valid, universal truths, or in timeless, supramundane religious justifications or revelation. For Weber, the political in modernity cannot be embodied or represented (in Claude Lefort’s sense) in the body of either leaders or the people.123 The hero who is to revive the political cannot do so by grounding it in transcendental notions of the Good. Toward the end of the lecture, Weber’s citation of Machiavelli – another compelling image of the political from the past – indicates that he was looking for a heroic figure who could emerge from the paradoxes of

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politics and create new binding norms that could rise above the clash of interests: ‘Machiavelli had such a situation in mind when, in a beautiful passage in his Florentine histories (if my memory does not deceive me) he has one of his heroes praise those citizens who placed the greatness of their native city above the salvation of their souls.’124 Weber’s citation does not make him a republican, and his notion of citizenship is not the same as Machiavelli’s in The Discourses.125 But it does point to a higher purpose to which the heroic statesman is called. At the same time, Weber is interested in what would inspire politicians to rise to the challenge of leadership. Potential leaders are drawn to politics for a number of complex reasons, but ‘above all from the knowledge that he holds in his hands some vital strand of historically important events.’126 By the end of the lecture, Weber combines the ‘ethic of conviction’ with the ‘ethic of responsibility’ in his view of leadership. He says that ‘politics means slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment.’127 It requires both the ethic of conviction, or passionate commitment to a cause, and an ethic of responsibility that involves discipline, restraint, and  –  above all  –  judgment: ‘In this respect the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to one another, and only in combination [my italics] do they produce the true human being who is capable of having a “vocation for politics.” ’128 In the combination of the two ethics, we see an attempt to reconcile the tension between reason and emotion. Having separated them in his critique of the inadequacy of the three potentially leading classes in Wilhelmine Germany, Weber now reunites these qualities in the form of the heroic actor. Recall that Weber had said, in ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ that only a true aristocracy with a tradition of a consciously shaped conduct of life could have the ‘cool heads’ necessary for the proper exercise of politically independent judgment and leadership. We have also seen how neither the working class nor the bourgeoisie had, in the view that Weber held consistently for more than twenty years, been capable of ruling, of filling the role of an ‘aristocratic’ or leading class. These notions of passion and judgment are intertwined in Weber’s complex view of both the political hero and his relationship to the delicate and volatile balance of class and other forces to which Weber was so finely attuned. There is at times an almost aesthetic quality to Weber’s formulation of the heroic agent. In acting passionately yet with the clarity that allows

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the political actor to fully accept responsibility for his choices, there is, as Strong has pointed out, an echo of Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return. For Weber’s gifted political virtuosi, nothing is forgotten. As Strong has put it: ‘All the choices that one has made are to be there, once and for all. In this, the person will be given, like a work of art.’129 It is really only the gifted, heroic actor who can create and sustain the delicate balance implied in the reconciliation of passion and judgment necessary for the creation of a new political. Yet the aesthetic quality of the formulation is never far from the hardheaded liberal realist in Weber’s political writings. Weber’s heroic figure needed to balance not only the forces of passion and reason, but also the interests of the bourgeoisie, the anger of the working class now returning from the war, and the progressive women’s movement, all of which feared they were going to be politically excluded again after the war if the old Junker allies of the monarchy succeeded in regaining power. It is the charismatic yet sober hero on whom Weber counted to re-establish the boundaries of democratic politics, and the direction and meaning of a new political that would include these social and political forces that had been suppressed and excluded under the old regime. In juxtaposing the argument for heroic leaders who could provide leadership to the nation against the conditions under which women and the working class could participate in the parliamentary form of democratic governance, we get a more detailed sense  –  than is usually provided in the recent literature on Weber’s democratic politics – of some of the tensions in Weber’s liberalism as he tries to reconcile the retrieval of elite leadership with his model of parliamentary democracy. The aesthetic quality of his vision of heroic leadership, his own bourgeois values, and the threat to those values represented by the political turmoil to which we have referred, all impinged on Weber’s assumptions about the qualities that leading political agents were required to have in order to revive the political.130 The ‘location’ of these qualities in rare, heroic actors prevented him from envisioning more expansive, egalitarian forms of democratic participation and citizen engagement. These factors came together to produce Weber’s notion of political judgment, which was  –  as Breiner has said with cutting accuracy – skewed by ‘his aristocratic notion of who could take political responsibility for the nation even within democratic forms [my italics].’131 In chapter 2 we saw that Weber, in his harsh criticisms of the Wilhelmine Kaiserreich, would have preferred the rule of even an ordinary politician with a modicum of charisma to that of the Obrigkeitsstaat.132 Yet in the lecture, the assumptions Weber makes about heroic leadership seem

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closer to Breiner’s view: that sound political judgment is fundamentally ‘aristocratic.’ In his model of parliamentary democracy, in his discussion of the classes and exemplary politicians capable of leadership, Weber reproduces the opposition between cool-headed detachment and inspired passion for a cause. As I have argued, it is, for Weber, up to the political hero to reconcile the tension between hot passion and cool reason in the ethic of responsibility, as well as the historically contingent tensions among the classes that in his time were tearing the fabric of politics apart and creating the moment and possibility for a new political. This dichotomy underlies the fundamental problem with Weber’s model of democracy: the permanent and irrevocable ‘division of all citizens entitled to vote into politically active and politically passive elements,’ as he says in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’133 In Weber’s view, only the political virtuoso, the gifted leader, is capable of balancing passion and judgment. He alone is capable of creating binding moments of commonality in the modern world of competing values (more generally) and in the midst of political chaos (which describes postwar Germany more specifically). Yet underlying the specific historic circumstances, it is the permanent and irrevocable division of citizens into passive and active elements in Weber’s thought that produces the need for the heroic leader in the first place. Whether the heroic political actor, who is more than ‘decisionist’ in this complex configuration of forces, can resolve, manage, or contain calls for change during times of crisis, or momentarily ‘transcend’ class and other divisions that concerned Weber, remains an open question in a number of ways.134 Recall that for Weber, Bismarck had robbed citizens of their capacity for political judgment. Weber had seen limited participation in a parliamentary system as the key to turning passive citizens who had been administered like a ‘herd of cattle’ into engaged and informed but also orderly participants in the democratic political process. It is only this kind of citizen who can keep democratic leaders, charismatic or otherwise, accountable. By building his model of democracy around this notion of split citizenship and participation, Weber bequeathed to twentieth-century Western democratic theory a host of unresolved issues and tensions between formal equality in systems of representative democracy, and leadership. A larger issue with which Weber struggles here is that virtuosity, or gifted leadership, is unequally distributed in the other ‘spheres’ of life. This is why Weber thought that the democratization of society and

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economy was simply not possible. There have been considerable variations in the forms of domination Weber discusses in his Sociology of Religion and elsewhere. Charismatic domination, for instance, has taken a variety of forms historically.135 The difference between gifted leadership in politics and in other spheres is that in politics the consequences are different and potentially much more serious, or ‘diabolical,’ than they would be, for example, in the aesthetic realm. But for Weber, the same division has been prevalent in every sphere. It is reproduced in the political arena in sharper form; there is an inherent tension in the relationship between the gifted leader and his or her followers. Yet in the closing passages of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ Weber tells his audience that not only the gifted politician, but every citizen at some time, after weighing the possibilities of the future against the constraints of the present, may be compelled to make similar choices: ‘For it must be possible for each of us to find ourselves in such a situation at some point if we are not inwardly dead.’136 Like the emergence of gifted leaders themselves, it is only a contingent possibility that citizens may find themselves in the position of the heroic actor; that they may be called upon or are able to contribute to the creation of a new political. The passage is ambiguous, perhaps a small concession to the exigencies of the revolutionary historical/political moment. Yet there is an opening here, one that seems to run counter to the grain of Weber’s political instincts, and his analysis of modern democratic politics and those capable of agency within its confines.137 Throughout the lecture, Weber presents us with a parade of exemplary, heroic actors. It is relevant that by the end of the lecture, in the volatile, nearrevolutionary context that defined it, Weber intends his message not only for the virtuosi who could redefine the political, but for occasional politicians such as the students from the Freistudentische Jugend who had invited Weber to give the talk.138 In times of epochal political change, or historical rupture, it is not only exemplary actors but also occasional politicians or ordinary citizens who can help create or become involved in political or social movements. Examples of this are the revolutionaries Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller, whose life Weber later helped save with his testimony in court after the brief revolutionary moment of 1919 had been suppressed. ‘Normally’ obscure or marginal citizens may be called upon to make momentous choices in extraordinary circumstances. They may then find themselves in situations of historical opportunity in which the creation of moments of democratic commonality becomes possible again.

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They may be able to participate in the re-creation of the political as they experience and shape moments of collective self-transcendence, seeking out what Sheldon Wolin has suggestively called the ‘evanescent homogeneity of a broader political.’139 This could be read as an opening for the demos, a moment of possibility. Yet there remains a tension between Weber’s more heroic images of leadership from the past, and those hints – few as they are in his work – that political agency could be more ordinary, democratic, or egalitarian in the future. This tension is never completely resolved in Weber’s political writings, despite what past commentators have seen as his elitist ‘decisionism.’ We can see a further tension in relation to the possibilities for democracy in Weber’s lecture. Wolin has remarked on an irony regarding the memory of the political. It is that the memory of democracy has – in the  Western tradition at least  –  often been kept alive by its critics.140 One might ask how, in light of our discussion of Weber’s struggle to establish a system of parliamentary democracy, this insight could apply to him. He was, of course, not a critic of democracy but an advocate for it, a democratic partisan for a certain kind of parliamentary democracy that we have called ‘realist’ or competitive-elitist. Still, Weber’s model had its own limits, and in trying to establish those limits as the boundaries of democratic politics he tried to contain the more revolutionary possibilities argued for by those on the left. That containment involved, as I have argued, the inclusion of women and the working class in his proposals for a new system of parliamentary democracy. But the effort to contain more unruly, more radical and ‘emotional’ forms of democracy also involved attacking them. Some of Weber’s attacks – on Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, for example – were especially vitriolic. In an election speech on 4 Jan­ uary 1919 for the newly founded Democratic Party, Weber said publicly that ‘Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse, and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens.’141 That election stump speech was delivered about three weeks before ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and only eleven days before Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered by members of the Freikorps and their bodies dumped into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.142 The intensity of Weber’s attacks was conditioned by three things. First, the situation of political turmoil obviously heightened partisan debates precisely because the fight was not merely for the spoils of elected office – that is, politics as usual. What was at stake in that moment of cultural, historical, and political rupture, what pulsed through

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the heated debates over Germany’s postwar fate, was the articulation of a new vision of the political and how it could guide the establishment of new ground rules for politics. Second, when Weber made his case for charismatic leaders taking hold of the reins of power and the state and influencing the historical trajectory of the nation, he did not have revolutionaries like Luxemburg in mind. In this regard, Joachim Radkau asks a good question: ‘Why was he [Weber] incapable of seeing in her [ Luxemburg] the charismatic revolutionary, later widely revered as such, particularly after her murder? But the charisma of charismatics is not apparent to all their contemporaries: they seem to many like mad people. The same was true of the prophets of Ancient Israel.’143 Yet I would suggest that the ferocious nature of Weber’s attacks cannot be accounted for simply by his seeing Luxemburg as a ‘mad’ visionary. Weber’s blindness to Luxemburg’s own charismatic vision – one that was both radically democratic and staunchly anti-capitalist  –  seems more wilful; her vision of a new political directly threatened and challenged Weber’s at a time when his liberal vision of a parliamentary democracy was a tenuous, not yet established, and very vulnerable possibility. Following on this, Radkau poses a further question that is also relevant to our previous discussion of the memory of the political, of the complex role it plays in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and in various interrelated aspects of Weber’s work. Radkau asks: ‘Was it essentially the propertied Bildungsbürger who broke through in Weber’s hatred of the revolution, suppressing memories of how often he had loathed aspects of the old system? To a considerable extent, the answer is probably “yes.” ’144 If we recall our earlier discussion, from chapter 2, of Weber’s vociferous critique of the old monarchical system under the Junkers and the domination of politics by the Obrigkeitsstaat, what we see here is the politically selective nature of memory and the uses to which it is put by Weber in defence of his own vision of a new, liberaldemocratic political in competition with a more radical view – this, in circumstances where the stakes could not have been higher. Beyond the immediate political debates we can also see, in the intensity of Weber’s reaction to opposing visions, a more ‘philosophical’ recognition that even if exemplary leadership figures were to momentarily succeed in forging the beginnings of a new political out of the revolutionary moment, their reinvention of a common purpose could only be contingent. Any rearticulation of a national ‘unity’ that ‘transcended’ the social, class, and other divisions that had torn Germany apart, any resolutions, even those created by gifted actors, could not

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be philosophically or politically permanent or timeless; there was, in Weber’s view, no ultimate resolution to the key problem of modern, democratic, capitalist societies addressed in the lecture – that is, how commonality can be reconciled with diversity, pluralism, or the competition of different visions of the political. There is already in Weber a clear recognition that in the modernity of his time, previous social and religious ‘markers of certainty’ had been dissolved.145 His at once political and philosophical agony was that he wanted leading actors to shape a new political, even while he fully recognized the modern impossibility of grounding it definitively. The parliamentary democracy advocated by Weber, and the capitalist economic system that was to underpin it, were historically specific and temporally contingent and provided no blueprint for a universal commonality. It is ironic that by attacking his opponents’ visions of the political so brutally and publicly, Weber was keeping alive different and more radical memories of the political, ones that held out the possibility of historical outcomes different from that for which he argued. Wolin has remarked that ‘memory  . . .  is the guardian of difference.’146 It can be such a ‘guardian’ to the extent that it is contested, kept alive, and recalled, even in the selective arguments of opponents. Weber’s hero, constructed out of fictional images from a receding past, was meant to embody and carry forward into the future memories of the political. In the next chapter, I ask where that image has its roots in Weber’s work and what imaginary sustains it. We find the answer to this question not in the revolutionary politics of the street or in the choices that students and soldiers may be fated to make. We do not even find it spelled out explicitly in Weber’s model of democracy. Rather, Weber’s most vivid expression of the memory of political is found in the Protestant Ethic and in the personality of the complex and problematic figure of the heroic Puritan.147

4 The Puritan Sects and the Spirit of Democracy: The Memory of the Political in the Protestant Ethic

This chapter seeks to further explore Weber’s notion of the heroic agent upon whom he called in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ to recreate a new political. We find the roots of that ideal in the ideal-typical construction of the bourgeois Puritan of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (hereafter Protestant Ethic) of 1904, the revised version of 1920, and Weber’s work on the Puritan sects in America. Commentators have long noted that Weber’s ideal type of the heroic Puritan has, from its initial reception, been a highly contested concept. One hundred years after the Protestant Ethic was first published, there is still discussion of the validity of Weber’s portrayal.1 A parallel discussion, albeit not as prominent, has concerned itself not only with the historical validity of Weber’s account but also with the meaning, methodological implications, and strategic uses of the ideal type of the Puritan hero in Weber’s work and its broader political, cultural, and scientific significance.2 In the edition of Journal of Classical Sociology devoted to the hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Ethic, editor Peter Baehr contextualized both these discussions well when he wrote that Weber’s most famous work ‘has for many years been a contested symbol of sociology’s collective memory [and of] sociology’s own priorities.’3 The Protestant Ethic remains a contested symbol, and not only of sociology’s collective memory and priorities. From the perspective of political theory, an argument can be made that the image of heroic agency we find in the Protestant Ethic and Weber’s other writings on Puritanism contain an important moment in modern Western liberalism’s collective memory and its priorities at a time, one hundred years ago, when its relationship to democracy was not yet firmly established in Germany or on the European continent. The compelling image of the Puritan

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with which Weber confronts us arose in the context of European (and of course German) struggles over democracy and the meaning of liberalism that took place both before and after the First World War. Here I will argue that this complex and at times contradictory image of the heroic Puritan embodies what Sheldon Wolin has called the memory of the political.4 Yet as Wolin himself acknowledges, there is more than one view of the political. In the Protestant Ethic and the writings on the Puritan sects in America, I think that Weber was keeping alive the memory of a heroic liberal view of the political that had been blocked in Wilhelmine Germany and that, during the fateful Weimer period, was to give way to fascism little more than a decade after Weber’s death in 1920. The image of the heroic agent of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ drew sustenance from the past, from the heroic age of the bourgeoisie. In the end I offer the idea that against the backdrop of the lack of a politically leading class (over which he agonized already in the Freiburg Inaugural lecture, before writing the Protestant Ethic) and the flux and instability of the postwar period, Weber projected an almost ‘mythical’ image of heroic agency and coherence backwards in time, creating the image of an originary moment of the founding of capitalism. The backward projection of this image of coherent agency into the past allows Weber to celebrate the superior ethical qualities that he thought were lacking in the politicians likely to be produced by the routine functioning of the very system of modern democracy that he proposed. Drawing sustenance from a reconstructed past, the qualities of the heroic agent are then held out as necessary for a future alternative and possibility, however fleeting or slim. There is thus a strategically situated temporal dimension to the political that has its roots in Weber’s image of the heroic Puritan. I want to argue that the way Weber projects specific qualities of the heroic Puritans from the past into the future is strategic and selective. In the next chapter, on the politics of Weber’s social science, I explore the methodological roots of the temporality of the political. As Peter Breiner has noted recently, the way Weber locates this image – in the form of a fictional reconstruction of the origins of the ascetic Puritan, akin to the states of nature of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau  –  is both interesting and problematic. By building on Breiner’s analysis as well as that of Sheldon Wolin, I hope to reframe what was at stake in Weber’s image of the Puritan founder in relation to the notion of the political that I discussed in chapter 3. I see this as part of Weber’s attempt to keep alive the memory of the

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political at a time when his liberal-democratic view was under attack and not at all sure – as we noted earlier – of success or even survival. The view I present here thus differs from recent attempts to link Weber’s image of the social formation of disciplined agents in Puritan sects with democracy and civil society in America. To understand the points of contrast and some of the tensions in the ‘democracy and civil society’ view, I will critically examine the argument made by Sung Ho Kim in his liberal reconstruction of Weber’s view of the relationship between democracy and civil society associations.5 Kim’s discussion is important because he places democracy and its relation to civil society at the centre of his reconstruction of Weber’s view of the American Puritan sects. For Kim, the sects were democratic because each member was admitted/elected by his peers. He notes that ‘the democratic ballot is decisive for an admission to sects, for each member is seen to possess a quantum of charismatic legitimating power.’6 Furthermore, within the sects, ‘social integration depends on individuals sharing a common ethical vision’ based on the innerworldly asceticism Weber so famously discusses in the Protestant Ethic.7 In sharing a common vision, the sects practised a distinctive and religiously inspired form of the political, galvanized by the discipline and self-denial of their inner-worldly asceticism. Yet the ‘democratic’ nature of admission and the common vision shared by sect members went along with a sense of ‘aristocratic’ moral distinction. Kim claims, in sympathy with Tocqueville, that in this combination we also find the basis for an alternative vision of society in which elements of ‘aristocratic’ exclusivity are not incompatible with democratic universality.8 Here we find the roots of Weber’s desire to have a democracy based on universal suffrage but still run by elites of exemplary character. The tight-knit nature of the sect communities produced not only ethically coherent individuals who shared a common vision, but also what Kim sees as a ‘defiant and recalcitrant kind of individualism,’ a culture of charismatic and principled resistance to the (secular) powers of the state, though not to capitalism (which, of course, they helped bring into being). Kim acknowledges, as did Weber, that charisma is not a solid or permanent foundation for social cohesion in civil society, or for democracy. But he notes that it can change the direction of groups and even society at large. In the case of the Puritan sects, they changed the direction of American society and democracy by providing an ideal combination of ‘subjective ethical decisionism and objective consequentialism’

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that had profound ‘this-worldly effects.’9 The self-regulating sects were democratically constituted communities of charismatically qualified believers who controlled their own membership and individual ethical conduct, if not their own salvation. This kind of agency, democratically constituted in small, voluntary associations, is the bedrock of the associational pluralism that Kim, in his neo-Tocquevillian interpretation, sees as the foundation of American democracy. It is a positive kind of agency that can counteract the disempowering influence that bureaucracy has on citizen participation and engagement. Kim sees the kind of personality produced in the sects as the basis for a strong and vibrant civil society, which in turn is a ‘cultivating ground for citizens in the modern state.’10 Kim’s view thus emphasizes one version of one side of the duality of liberal democracy identified by C.B. Macpherson – a certain religiously inspired, ethically rigorous version of the equal right to self-development (or more accurately, the realization of God’s will on earth through the exertions of individuals in the market); and not the other – the inequality of the market based on the ‘the right of the stronger to do down the weaker,’ in Macpherson’s terms.11 An examination of the latter – of the systemic inequalities produced by the capitalism the Puritans helped bring into the modern Western world – is singularly absent from Kim’s account. Yet I am sympathetic to Kim’s attempt to find one of the origins of citizens’ resistance to the disempowering forces of the state and bureaucracy in a reinvigorated civil society, and thus to recover a lost democratic agency and sense of community in the early Puritan sects. But his view of the agency to be recovered and how democratic it is, is problematic on a number of different levels. Let me address a cluster of issues that complicate the picture given to us by Kim. I offer these considerations with the intent of showing different, problematic aspects of the Puritans’ relation to democracy – aspects that Weber himself acknowledges but then leaves behind when he strategically recasts some dimensions of the heroic Puritan to fit ‘on top of’ his own model of (heroic) democratic agency. We will then be in a position to see how Weber selectively salvages certain qualities from his ideal type of the ethically rigorous Puritan, but without the harsher, more authoritarian inheritances of the past. Running through Weber’s partly fictional re­ creation of the Puritan past are a series of paradoxical dichotomizations of experience that reappear – albeit in much weaker, less authoritarian form – in his model of democracy. In drawing attention to these antinomies, my intention is not to criticize the Protestant Ethic anew. As David

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Zaret has noted: ‘Since Weber’s death, every aspect of his thesis has been attacked by torrents of criticism.’12 Rather, I wish to point to a critique and a set of issues that have been absent from the recent literature on Weber, democracy, and civil society. The relationship of the sects to democracy was complex and contradictory. There were internal and external aspects of this relationship that are worth noting. As Kim points out, the internal organization of the sects, which admitted members based on equal religious, charismatic qualification, was often democratic. As Weber noted, ‘pure sects also insisted upon “direct democratic administration” by the congregation and upon treating the clerical officials as servants of the congregation. These very structural features demonstrate the elective affinity between the sect and political democracy.’13 Within the larger political democracy, the sects, Weber tells us, ‘must advocate “tolerance” and “separation of church and state” for several reasons.’ First, sects were not ‘a universalist redemptory institution.’ Second, a sect could not be universalist (like the modern political parties in Weber’s realist model, which were starting to appeal to the mass of citizens) but had to remain exclusive if it wanted to retain ‘its true religious identity and effectiveness.’14 As Weber says, ‘the sect is simply not concerned with outsiders.’ Yet in wishing to be left to their own devices for religious reasons, the sects thus ‘have been the most genuine advocates of “freedom of conscience.”’15 Weber himself noted the beginnings of the idea of democratic freedom of thought and expression in the demands of the Puritan sects for religious freedom.16 The Calvinists, as a new and persecuted religious minority in sixteenth-century England and later in colonial America, wanted freedom for religious minorities, and later for other citizens as well.17 Weber saw the demand for religious freedoms emanating from the Enlightenment and the idea of the Rights of Man. Freedom of conscience for Weber, following the legal scholar Jellinek, ‘is the most basic Right of Man because it . . . guarantees freedom from compulsion, especially from the power of the state  . . . The other Rights of Man or civil rights were joined to this basic right, especially the right to pursue one’s own economic interests, which includes the inviolability of individual property, the freedom of contract, and vocational choice.’ It was ‘the basic Rights of man that made it possible for the capitalist to use men and things freely . . . just as this-worldly asceticism . . . and the specific discipline of the sects bred the capitalist spirit and the rational “professional” [Berufsmensch] who was needed by capitalism.’18 To

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earlier liberal arguments, such as John Locke’s regarding the origins of private property (which we will take up shortly), Weber adds both an Enlightenment view of rights19 – including political rights to freedom of conscience – and the discipline of the sects, the Protestant spirit that gave rise to capitalism. But as Stephen Kalberg has noted, the degree of internal ‘democracy’ within the sects was not uniform and was practised more by some sects than others. In his view, ‘the diverse Protestant sects and churches varied across a wide spectrum in respect to the degree to which their internal organization was more authoritarian (Calvinism and Congregationalism) or more egalitarian (Quakerism).’20 This degree of variation is smoothed over to some extent in Kim’s reconstruction. Weber notes that in some regions of the United States, everyone wanted to do their banking with Baptists or Methodists because of their honesty. Yet in order to be admitted to the sect one had to undergo a ‘examen rigorosum which inquires about blemishes in . . . past conduct: frequenting an inn, sexual life, cardplaying, making debts, other levities, insincerity, etc.’21 Internal ‘democracy’ was overlaid with an internal, disciplinary microsurveillance of the kind discussed by Foucault.22 Those who did not meet the test were excluded from the community. The strong social integration in some of the sect communities admired by Weber and Kim came at the expense of diversity and tolerance within them. Within the communities themselves there were tensions, and internal dissent was often not tolerated, even by the qualified. James Henretta notes that when Anne Hutchinson, the charismatic wife of a prominent merchant, questioned the more communitarian ethic of John Winthrop, the leader of the ministry in Massachusetts Bay, Winthrop and other magistrates had her banned from the community. As Henretta notes, after the ‘Antimonian Controversy’ that Hutchinson’s case provoked, ‘Massachusetts Bay became an authoritarian state, a holy commonwealth on the model of Calvin’s Geneva. The laymen of the General Court curbed public religious dissent and sought to impose order on the new society.’23 What the Massachusetts Bay colonists were hoping to escape was the class system of the England they had left. They hoped to establish a more purified polity, a new, religiously inspired political, based on communal needs and a strongly shared ethic. Yet this put Winthrop’s ministry in the colony in tension with the individualism of the Calvinist doctrine of the calling. Thus the kind of ‘recalcitrant individualism’ was not evident all of the time or in all of the colonial Puritan settlements.

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There were also gender issues related to the political economy of the Puritan communities, as Reed and others have noted with regard to the most glaring example, the Salem Witch Trials.24 When some communities were not as economically successful as others, faith in predestination weakened. Some women members were then accused of witchcraft and mysticism, and were tried and convicted by the local magistrates, sentenced to death, and hanged. These instances remind us that not all of the Puritan sects uniformly gave rise to either this kind of democratic spirit or even the capitalist spirit celebrated by Weber. Eisenstadt has suggested that the more authoritarian aspects of Calvinist dogma initially slowed down the emergence of capitalism. He notes that Calvinism’s ‘determining influence . . . in the direction of modernity manifested itself after the failure of its initial totalitarian socio-religious tendencies.’ Some of the profoundly anti-democratic aspects of the Puritan world view come to light dramatically in the following instances provided by Sam Whimster in his recent book, Understanding Max Weber. One is more direct, while I infer the other from Whimster’s discussion. The standard examples in the Anglo-American reception history of the Protestant Ethic have been Ben Franklin and Richard Baxter, author of more practical Puritan works in the sixteenth century such as the popular Christian Directory. Whimster usefully reminds us that in the Protestant Ethic we also find a discussion of John Bunyan. The case of Bunyan represents the desolate loneliness and ‘spiritual isolation’ of the devout Calvinist. Bunyan was almost psychotic in the intensity of his belief and in the near delusional quality of his overly vivid projections of Heaven and Hell. In the bargain, he was also obsessed with his own salvation. Whimster notes that Bunyan was at the least extremely neurotic and probably pathologically disturbed. He was locked up by the authorities for the fervour of his beliefs. Yet he was also the author, as Weber notes, of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress, by far the most widely read book in the whole Puritan literature.’25 His belief was otherworldly, and in the historical and religious context of seventeenth-century England, his book found a fervent and growing audience. While Whimster focuses on Weber’s paradoxical discussion of the otherworldly intensity of Bunyan’s belief, its socially disruptive effects, and its popularity, I want to interpret it in a different frame, one given to us by the forgotten French social theorist Joseph Gabel. What we see in Bunyan’s world view is a rigid, Manichaean view of the world, one that is split sharply into those who are predestined to be saved and

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the damned – into good and evil. These splits reflect what Michael David Levin has described in a different context as debilitating ‘polarizations of experience that have deeply pathologized the nature and character of our experience.’26 In these polarizations of experience – and Bunyan’s religious world view is a perfect example of this – we see the reification of time, in Gabel’s terms. The reification of temporality is characteristic of transcendental views, or absolute ethics of conviction, in Weber’s terms. The struggle Bunyan had with worldly political authorities reflected the tension between this-worldly and other-worldly spheres that Weber speaks of as embedded in all religious ethics and world views. For Gabel, a reified experience is a depersonalizing one involving two things: ‘a loss of contact with duration,’ in which the fluid, changing nature of lived time becomes frozen, or static; and ‘the devaluation of persons,’ the rendering of entire categories of people into homogeneous blocks that are dichotomously, hierarchically, and simplistically seen as other – as inferior, somehow fundamentally different, or lesser. For Gabel, reification is ‘a whole way of Being-in-the-world involving two schizophrenic elements: the state of being crushed by the world and a spatialization of duration.’27 The spatialization of duration, which has been taken up in a more postmodern context by theorists such as Fredric Jameson in his discussion of the ‘cultural logic’ of late capitalism, involves the collapse of the multiplicity of possibilities that lie in the future. Possible futures are collapsed into an eternal, undifferentiated present that cannot be changed by human intervention or action. The experience of time is recast in a way that deprives actors of agency. To relate this to the discussion of Puritanism, a reified notion of time is implicit in the idea of salvation. In addition, salvation only for the chosen few deprives the rest, the demos, of agency in this world. The spatialization of time entails the unchangeability of the future, the dehistoricization of historical time and future possibilities, or openings, for change. As Gabel has noted in relation to the Puritans, ‘one thing seems indisputable: between the universe of reification and that of predestination, the analogies are too numerous and too significant to be attributed simply to chance.’ A reified world view and Calvinism both ‘consecrate the trampling down of man, by God in Calvin . . . both are inhuman and depersonalizing; a clearly deterministic orientation is common to both.’ For Gabel, ‘Puritan “value” is thus a reified value; a value of pure consistency without any precariousness’ or contingency. In the Calvinist universe, ‘no human effort – prayer, good works – could add or take

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anything away from it.’28 The result is that ‘reified consciousness and Puritan theology converge in the denial of any possibility of human action on fate; as the Puritan denies the action of prayer, reified consciousness does not admit the effectiveness of praxis,’ or action oriented toward what Gabel calls ‘axiological’ change.29 Puritan views such as Bunyan’s are thus ahistorical: they try to conquer time and contingency in the face of the uncertainty of salvation that human action is powerless to change. The irony or paradox of the Puritans’ furious devotion to the activity of capital accumulation in the service of God was that it changed the world, creating as a ‘by-product’ the ‘tremendous cosmos’ of the secular modern capitalist economic order. In addition to the rigid bifurcation of time and the demos in Bunyan’s religious world view, we also see the bifurcation of the body. In the Puritan view, one kind of body – the ascetic, disciplined body in which desire is suppressed and sacrificed to an unrelenting work ethic  –  is idealized and reified. Other bodies are demonized – indeed, sometimes exterminated in the case of the witches in Salem. As Weber notes, the Puritans directed ‘this asceticism with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer.’ Furthermore, impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism. Whimster points to a bit of feudal resistance to this in Weber’s discussion of the English kings James I and Charles I, who ‘tried to stop the Puritans’ banning of all popular pastimes on the Sabbath.’30 The following passage is also indicative: ‘The Puritan’s ferocious hatred of everything that smacked of superstition, of all survivals of magical  . . .  salvation, applied to the Christian festivities and the Maypole and all spontaneous religious art . . . The theatre was obnoxious to the Puritans, and with the strict exclusion of the erotic and nudity from the realm of toleration, a radical view of either literature or art could not exist.’31 In his comment on these passages, Whimster, sounding a bit like the early Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, notes that ‘asceticism was an attack against a universal character, the average, sensuous living human being.’32 In this regard, asceticism was an attack not only against the sensuous living human being, but also against the ordinary working human being conceived more holistically, as Marx had. Asceticism bifurcates the body, valorizing or privileging the disciplined body that works tirelessly toward the dual gods of capital accumulation and salvation, while suppressing the sensuous body, the body that

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enjoys, relaxes, reads, learns, loves, is ill, is old. It is the same ‘split’ that leads John Locke to allow the ‘industrious and the rational’ and thrifty to appropriate the labour of others as a commodity, that labour which is based on the suppression, containment, and exploitation of the sensuous enjoyment of the demos, the working, non–property-owning population. All of this again reflects Levin’s notion that the polarization of experience, the splitting of the world into dichotomous categories by Calvinism and later by the rationality of modern science and capitalism – now the bifurcated body in the logic of capital accumulation – has resulted in a massive cultural loss, or forgetting. Levin cites Lame Deer, an indigenous American healer, ‘a sage among his tribe the Lakotas,’ who said that the people of the modern world seem to have forgotten ‘the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, their dreams.’33 We seem to have forgotten other, older, or culturally different, non-rationalized, non-institutionalized ways of experiencing the world. Beyond forgetting, the Puritans wanted to suppress or even eliminate them. I agree with Whimster when he notes that in the Protestant Ethic, Weber ‘chooses the theme of the imposition [my italics] of Puritan asceticism’ as his focus. Puritanism represents the imposition of a rigid, Manichaean temporality onto believers in an effort to conquer time and contingency in face of the uncertainty, or radical contingency, of salvation. In his discussion of ‘Sect, Church, and Democracy’ in Economy and Society, Weber is quite aware of many of these issues. Even so, Weber’s central concern is revealed in language that parallels his discussion of leadership selection in political parties when he tells us: ‘Sociologically important is the fact that the community functions as a selection apparatus for separating the qualified from the unqualified.’34 Given the above, we can usefully recall a remark made by Weber’s contemporary, the theologian Ernst Troeltsch, who in Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World (1911) wrote that ‘democracy  . . .  is everywhere foreign to the Calvinist spirit.’ Troeltsch also compares the anti-democratic impulse of the ‘Calvinist spirit’ to ‘the democratic sympathies of Rousseau’s teachings.’35 This was because the ‘Calvinist spirit’ was based on a belief in an ‘aristocracy’ of chosen individuals and systematic exclusions of ‘others’ from their community, as Weber himself recognized. The Puritan sects were fundamentalist, and this went along with a dual or split notion of citizenship: a strictly enforced equality within the sects (only not always for women); a demand for religious freedom

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(for themselves and in some cases, such as the Quakers, for others); and an unconcern for the larger population of ‘outsiders,’ or those who were ‘unqualified.’ These considerations problematize the rather more positive picture that Kim leaves us with in his reconstruction of Weber’s view of the emergence of American democracy and civil society from the sects. The fundamental issue in Kim’s reconstruction is that he valorizes only those kinds of civil society associations that produce disciplined agents who can engage in the struggle of politics or in the market, where, as Macpherson noted, the stronger do down the weaker. Weber did so as well, of course, but in his account the more authoritarian side of the Puritan communities is acknowledged to a greater extent. These considerations, in their multiplicity, also complicate the ‘transposition’ or translation of the Puritan’s heroic qualities onto the landscape of modern democracy, in which Weber’s heroic agent must make his or her way. The certainty sought by the Puritan divines is, of course, no longer possible in more secular modern democracies. The heroic agent, whose exemplary ethical qualities were formed in the rigidly structured Puritan communities, is called upon by Weber to manage the uncertainty of politics in the modern state.36 That person is called upon, as I argued in the last chapter, to not only act ‘decisively, but to [also] mediate and manage a complex, ever-shifting set of contingent interests and circumstances.’ In his image of modern democratic leadership, Weber seems to want the ethical consistency of the Puritan without some of the rigid constraints of the Puritan communities. I want to begin to shift the trajectory of the discussion away from the concerns of the ‘historical validity’ critics and even Kim’s liberal reconstruction of Weber’s theory of civil society. Instead, I will offer an alternative interpretation that moves in the direction suggested by Breiner’s recent work. Breiner is concerned not with the historical validity of the Protestant Ethic and Weber’s image of the Puritan hero, but with the uses to which Weber puts that image in his work. I want to extend Breiner’s argument, for it represents a new and promising direction in the Weber literature and not simply an abandonment of the historical problem of Puritanism. It is an important intervention that crosses the boundary between political theory and the largely historically oriented work that dominates the (sociologically oriented) Weber literature on the Protestant Ethic. Breiner argues that Weber did not simply create the image of the Puritan hero from an actual historical record. Instead, he created it from historical, cultural, political, and fictional fragments, shaping them into

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a coherent and powerful narrative. Breiner subtly shifts the focus of discussions in the literature of Weber’s Puritan hero when he suggests that the hero is a fictional reconstruction designed to tell the story of the origins of capital accumulation in the West. This kind of fictional recreation of the originary moments of bourgeois capitalism (or other polities) is not, however, new in the tradition of Western political thought: a long line of early liberal political theorists, such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau, had posited a fictional state of nature to explain human nature and its relation to society, history, capitalism, the state, and, in Rousseau’s case, democracy. The state of nature was not simply a heuristic device for these theorists; it was also a prescriptive one. Breiner, as a political theorist, is aware of this intellectual genealogy. I will avail myself of it as well, building on his insight by suggesting that a comparison can be found not only to Rousseau, but also to one of his most important liberal predecessors, John Locke, who also used the state of nature as a heuristic fiction. Locke’s state of nature focused on the fictional story of the origins of private property in the modern West. This comparison can further illuminate Weber’s story of the origins of capitalism. For the student of political theory there is a key difference here: while Weber’s ideal type of the origins of capitalism is also a fictional, heuristic device, and in this sense resembles the states of nature used by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, it does not reflect or contain a natural or a universal human nature in the way that it did for the stateof-nature theorists. Yet the two accounts complement each other, even though Locke’s, which can be found in his Second Treatise of Government (1690), was written (anonymously for political reasons) more than two hundred years before the Protestant Ethic, in the period shortly after the demise of Cromwell’s government and after the restoration of a Catholic king and the subsequent Glorious Revolution of 1688. It thus comes from a different part of the liberal tradition historically (the British, leading up to parliamentary democracy in the nineteenth century), one that Weber very much admired. First, though, I will elaborate Breiner’s view in more detail. This will contextualize Weber’s fiction of the origins of capitalist accumulation within the liberal tradition; it will also prepare the way for further discussion of the political uses to which Weber puts the heroic agent of the Protestant Ethic. I think this comparison/detour can illuminate what I am ultimately interested in – both how and why Weber creates this fictional narrative and its relation to the political.

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As noted, Breiner sees the epic drama of the heroic Puritan as a story or narrative of the origins of capitalist accumulation in modernity. For him, many of the historical criticisms of the Protestant Ethic ‘miss the point of Weber’s inquiry.’37 Breiner argues that the ‘Protestant Ethic is in fact a hypothetical narrative seeking to locate the originary point of systematic capitalist accumulation in the West.’38 Following Gianfranco Poggi and Harvey Goldman, he bases his argument against the ‘historical claims/validity’ commentators on the lack of supporting evidence in the Protestant Ethic. Instead, his view is that Weber constructs a ‘just so’ argument based on suppositions about how things might have happened, rather than a rigorous historical account of how the first Puritan entrepreneurs actually behaved, succeeded, or failed. Breiner’s argument is based on the following distinctions that have not been brought to light sufficiently in the Weber literature. Breiner begins by questioning the intensity of the anxiety generated by the uncertainty of salvation, on which so many commentators have focused. But instead of impugning the historical accuracy of Weber’s assumption, he looks instead at the relation between that anxiety and the accumulation of wealth that Weber attributed to the Puritans. The unremitting anxiety caused by not knowing whether one was among the elect souls who were to be saved led to the idea that one had to prove oneself in a calling. In Weber’s construction of the Puritan ethic, this idea was already more active than Luther’s idea of a calling, which placed a much greater emphasis on obedience. But Breiner notes that the idea of devoting one’s life to a calling was more general and did not necessarily entail only the very specific idea of the accumulation of wealth or capital.39 The writings of Baxter and others did not restrict the idea of a calling to this exclusive concept. Breiner goes on to note that ‘the evidence in Weber for this link between the Calvinist ethic of vocation and the self-denying spirit of capital accumulation is tenuous indeed. It rests on an extrapolation of the sermons of Richard Baxter to the whole Lebensführung of the middle-class Puritan merchants.’40 That radical doubt must have led to the Puritan’s relentless accumulation of wealth is thus taken from Baxter’s texts and then imputed to all Puritans. Breiner focuses on Weber’s construction of the moment of transition from the ascetic, ‘rational’ capitalists, the ‘first accumulators,’ to the traditional capitalists, that is, the exploitative and self-interested capitalists – say, Ebenezer Scrooge of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol (who, infamously, demanded to know, ‘Are there no prisons, are there

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no workhouses for the poor?’), or the capitalists described so vividly in the writings of Marx and Engels. In the pages of the Protestant Ethic the traditional capitalist of the Industrial Revolution is nowhere to be found. Instead we encounter a historically earlier, religiously inspired entrepreneur, ‘a noble caste of carriers of the ascetic ideal.’41 Breiner’s problem with Weber’s construction is that, apart from citing Baxter’s text and the anecdotal case of Ben Franklin, Weber gives no concrete historical or systematic examples of either the traditional capitalists or the heroic class of ascetic capitalists. Thus the ‘moment when this ascetic rational capitalist inaugurates machine production is a purely hypothetical moment.’ As Breiner notes, ‘the claim that the first entrepreneurs were moved by the capitalist spirit of ascetic renunciation proves to be an imaginative reconstruction derived from historical traces.’42 Thus, Breiner concludes, Weber’s construction lies somewhere between factual historical type, constructed from fragments, and a ‘purely invented concept.’43 In making this argument, Breiner puts forward a controversial proposition that runs against the grain of much of the literature on the Protestant Ethic. In this regard, Breiner notes that Weber’s ‘fiction or story of a constructed origin [is] much like Rousseau’s famous descriptions of the emergence of the state and private property out of the state of nature.’44 One can also contrast Weber’s ‘fiction of a constructed origin’ to the state of nature of the early liberal thinker John Locke, who is in many respects a precursor to Weber in his own fictional construction of the originary ‘spirit’ of capitalism and private property. Locke is not usually taken up by historical sociologists in their discussions of Weber, partly because he sits near the beginning of the English, and not the German, liberal tradition. But a brief comparison with Locke provides some interesting insights into Weber’s fictional narrative. Both are narratives on the possible origins of the political in modern liberalism. John Locke is well known as the eighteenth-century English social contract theorist and parliamentarian who supported the Glorious Revolution and its call for more parliamentary rights against the king. Locke’s state of nature also makes for an interesting comparison to Weber and is in some ways closer to it than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s. Locke posited that before people entered into the social contract to form civil society and government, all human beings were naturally (and initially) rational and free. God had given man Reason to use for the betterment of his condition on earth. Specifically, Locke, in his famous fifth chapter, ‘Of Property,’ in the Second Treatise of Government, wanted to

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show that men naturally used their God-given freedom and individual reason to work for and accumulate private property. There is a brief glimmer of commonality in Locke’s state of nature: ‘God gave the world to men in common . . . and for their benefit.’ But he quickly qualifies this idea with the following: ‘It cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated.’45 Thus the commonality and equality that Rousseau supposed would be the result of overcoming private property and inequality is associated by Locke with the least rational and earliest stage of the state of nature, prior to civil society and the establishment of the market economy and government. For Locke, property in the state of nature becomes a private, individual, and exclusive right when people add their labour to nature by working on it: ‘Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his own property.’ As he says: ‘That labour put a distinction between them [the fruits of nature] and the common. That added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all; and so they became his private right.’ And again: ‘His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common . . . and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.’46 Locke initially sets limits to how much any individual can appropriate in what we might call the ‘early’ state of nature. He calls this the limit of spoils. If someone accumulates more than he can use at any point, enough so that the fruits of nature might spoil or go bad, then he does not have a right to keep or horde it. But Locke, intent on establishing the right of individual property before people leave the state of nature to form civil government, deals with the spoils limitation cleverly, by introducing money.47 Money, of course, cannot spoil. Locke further presumes that all have given their tacit consent to the invention of money. The implication is that without spoiling, money and property can be accumulated, by those who are able, in unlimited amounts. As C.B. Macpherson has argued, the introduction of money into the state of nature allows Locke to do two things.48 First, it allows him to turn the argument about mixing labour with nature into a natural right of unlimited accumulation. Second, and crucially, it allows Locke to argue that individuals can accumulate money, or that which has been produced by the labour of others. Thus, Locke is justifying the exploitation and appropriation of what others have produced in the past and then grounding that justification in nature. Arguing around the time of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Locke defends this kind of

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appropriation without the protections for workers that Weber would later include in his model of democracy. In Locke’s day, only a tiny minority of England’s population – wealthy male property owners – had the right to vote. In the following comment by Locke we find an uncanny premonition of Weber’s heroic Puritan, only without the notion of salvation explicitly attached to it. Of those who mix their labour with the fruits of nature and thus acquire a right to property in it, or who contract to buy the accumulated results of the past labour of others, Locke says: ‘God . . . gave it [the world] to the use of the Industrious and the Rational . . . not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.’49 God also gave men want, or penury, and therefore the need to labour. Property and the capitalism that came from it, for Locke, thus have their origins in divine creation. This is the early form of the Protestant ethic in liberal theory, simply without the Puritan zealot’s heroism and desperate need for a salvation that cannot be known in this world. But before the advent of government, some will be ‘quarrelsome and contentious’ in the state of nature. Locke argues that if some try to appropriate the property of others, or attack their person, a kind of natural justice will prevail even before the heavy hand of the Hobbesian state (or Locke’s more liberal version) intervenes to mete it out. In the state of nature, already rational individuals will intervene on their own to restrain offenders. This produces, according to Wolin, a ‘recollection of justice and of a prior practice of it which . . . did not depend on the existence of the state.’ The memory of this basic form of natural justice finds its way into the covenant that produces the state, which people enter into in order to institutionalize the freedom they seek to accumulate property. Wolin adds that in Locke we see not only the justification for the accumulation of exclusive, individual private property, but also the beginnings of a distinctive political economy ‘as a mode of life in which society is conceived primarily as “the economy” . . . as a system of power that is at once autonomous and determinative of all other social relationships,’ and is no longer ‘embedded in and conditioned by a complex of social and political relationships and moral norms.’50 In Locke, the economic is not yet entirely free from its Protestant religious affiliation. In Weber, it will be. In the Protestant Ethic and in Weber’s writings on the American sects, ‘the Industrious and the Rational’ become a ‘noble caste of carriers of the ascetic ideal,’ the Puritans who founded the modern capitalist order. There is thus a clear thread connecting Locke to Weber in the liberal tradition.

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Locke used the state of nature fiction deliberately. It was a popular heuristic device among theorists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was their more explicitly normative, philosophical version of the ideal type. Weber, of course, never tired of arguing that the Protestant Ethic was not an actual historical description, but an ideal type, a heuristic device designed to selectively illustrate certain essential features of the historical nexus in which Puritanism influenced the development of capitalism. From this perspective, Breiner is correct when he says that Weber’s historical critics ‘are, in effect, accusing him of something that he himself regards as an advantage: using ideal types.’51 But the implication of Breiner’s argument is more complex. If there is more to Weber’s fictional construction than the heuristic use of ideal types, we can ask what else is going on, especially if Weber does not support his reconstruction with consistent, concrete historical evidence. Breiner poses a key question when he asks about ‘the uses [my italics] to which his self-referential typology is put.’52 Weber’s fiction of the origins of capitalist accumulation may serve to conceptually clarify historically relevant ideas, ‘when an appeal to pure historical narrative would give us multiple points [of historical causation] entangled with one another.’53 The notion of multiple points of causation and its concomitant idea that there may be multiple modernities – and not only the ‘singular,’ Western version founded by the Puritans of Weber’s narrative – has been taken up in the work of S.N. Eisenstadt and other modernization theorists.54 Instead of pursuing this historical problematic, however, there is another dimension that I want to explore. It arose in the literature during the Weber revival of the 1990s, when Weber was seen to have trumped Marx and when liberaldemocratic and Western capitalism was proclaimed by Fukuyama to have definitively triumphed over communism.55 To appreciate this, I go back to an argument made by Sheldon Wolin, whom Peter Lassman and Irving Velody have sympathetically called one of Weber’s ‘political critics’ because of his sensitivity to the political and philosophical implications of Weber’s work, including his sociology of religion and the methodological writings. From my perspective, Wolin’s argument supports the contention that we can find the roots of the political in Weber in the compelling image of the heroic Puritan. Wolin has noted that Weber does two things in his construction of the Puritan divines. First, his portrait is not simply a ‘value-neutral’ ideal type of how Puritanism influenced the rise of Western capitalism. Rather, it is a celebration of their world-making activity, however

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ambivalent Weber was about the bourgeoisie in Wilhelmine Germany, or modern bureaucracy, or the capitalism of his own time. Second, in the fictional image of the heroic ‘first accumulators,’ Weber gives us, according to Wolin, ‘the most extensive formulation of Weber’s ideal conception of the political actor [my italics] and the most polemical.’ On this issue, I think Wolin is right when he writes: ‘So much scholarly ink has been expended on whether and in what sense Weber “explained” the rise of capitalism that the political importance [my italics] of the work has been almost entirely neglected.’ I think this  –  the political importance of the work – is what Breiner is also getting at when he says he is interested in the uses to which Weber’s ideal type of the Puritan has been put. Weber wanted, one hundred years ago, to not only counter the competing and at the time very powerful Marxist explanation of the origins of capitalism, but also (for Wolin) to ‘celebrate the moral and political superiority of the capitalist hero of the past [my italics] over the proletarian hero of the present and future.’56 Between the capitalist hero of the past and the proletarian hero of a potentially socialist future, and with no bourgeois heroes of the present to rely on for leadership, Weber wanted to insert the prospect of heroic bourgeois leadership as an alternative future possibility. The interplay among the temporal dimensions – past, present, and future possibility  –  of Weber’s discussion of the Puritan hero is thus complex. I will begin to address them here, and continue in the next chapter on the politics of Weber’s methodology. Central to this is the idea, argued in different ways by both Breiner and Wolin, that the Protestant Ethic and Weber’s writings on the American Puritan sects are complex works concerned with ‘the historical legitimation of capitalism.’ Furthermore, as Wolin has argued, the ‘bourgeois actor of Weber’s epic is a political hero in the classical sense. He is a founder [my italics] of a new order, the order of capitalism which has transformed the world.’ Yet in contrast to ‘Marx, Weber knew that he was comparing a portrait of the last hero before the age of rationalization set in and rendered both heroes, Marx’s and his own, anachronisms. Henceforth, the possibilities of significant action will be determined and limited by the constraints of rationalization’ – more concretely, by bureaucracy, the state, and capitalism.57 Or, as Weber says with foreboding inexorability in the closing pages of the Protestant Ethic, ‘the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order . . . today determines the lives of all who are born into this mechanism with irresistible force’ and without the need any longer for religious justification.58 In the case of the frenetically

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accumulating, religiously inspired Puritan desperately seeking salvation, the new order he created was fated to be eclipsed by the gigantic and impersonal economic cosmos of modern capitalism. The image of the heroic actor destined to forge a new political in late modernity was borne of the heroic Puritan. The indelible link between them is that they are both tragic founders. Both are destined to have their new orders supplanted. I have previously suggested that Weber, in response to this disenchanted image of agency in modernity (to which I will return momentarily), projects an image of ethical coherence, moral certainty, and rational self-discipline, in the form of the Puritan hero, into an almost mythical past.59 In his fictional image of a heroic founder of a new world order, Weber struggles with the precariousness of (his own) bourgeois identity and the disappearance of its ethical foundations in the face of the mechanical, impersonal order that had eclipsed the age of the heroic bourgeoisie. I think that his image of the heroic Puritan was a response to the right as well, and not only to Marx’s working-class hero.60 It was meant to preserve the memory of a liberal vision of the political for the future at a time when it was threatened not only by bureaucratic rationalization but, as we noted previously, by the spectre of Marxism, on the one hand, and by currents on the far right that would lead to fascism, on the other. Weber foresaw not only a new bureaucratic age, but the looming of the right when he said, with such pathos at the end of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ that ‘what lies ahead of us is not the flowering of summer but a polar night of icy darkness and hardness.’61 Weber’s agony regarding his liberal vision of the political, embedded in the ideal type of the Puritan, was that he was fully aware of the results of his own study. At the end of the Protestant Ethic, Weber writes that ‘today the spirit of religious asceticism . . . has escaped from the cage. Victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.’62 The consequence, for Weber, is that modern life ‘is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.’ And in a remark that was ahead of its time in its (perhaps unintended) environmental implications, he adds: ‘Perhaps it will do so until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.’63 The modern economic system has become a ‘monstrous cosmos’ as capitalism in the West, which had required

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the Puritans’ almost fanatical zeal in its founding moments, sheds its ethical/religious justification. The Puritan theologian Richard Baxter had still thought that the ‘care for external goods,’ with which the capitalist economy, modern technology, and science were concerned, was like a ‘light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ For Weber, however, historical ‘fate decreed that the cloak should become a steel-hard casing (stahlhartes Gehäuse).’64 The freeing or separation of capitalism from its religious roots had other consequences of which Weber was painfully aware and which provide further context for the heroic political agent’s roots in the image of the fictional Puritan founder. I will close the chapter with two related examples. Weber was aware of the emergence of both on the historical horizon at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially in America, where, as he once said, these developmental tendencies appeared in their most ‘massive form.’ I suggest that the heroic capitalists who founded the new order of the modern economic cosmos, and in whose reconstructed image the memory the political is preserved in Weber’s ideal type, were also perhaps designed to fend off these new realities as well as Marxism. The development of modern capitalism, the state, and science produced more than the steel-hard casing of bureaucracy that Weber accepted as necessary in modernity though at times he strategically lamented this was so. These developments also gave rise, in the historically specific circumstances across the Atlantic, to the robber barons of the Gilded Age at the end of the nineteenth century. Their exploits were already the stuff of popular legend and American business folklore by the time Weber visited the United States in 1904. Legendary American entrepreneurs such as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, who founded the great corporate empires such as Bethlehem Steel, Standard Oil, and Dupont, were anything but Weber’s ascetic, ethically or religiously motivated Puritans. Rather, they were traditional capitalists, only writ larger than life. As is well known, they were ruthless and unscrupulous in their business practices, crushing both competitors and workers who stood in their way. They were utterly unconstrained by ethical or religious considerations and were thus able to found the vast corporate empires that came to dominate Western capitalism in the twentieth century. Weber notes that they were, in Nietzsche’s phrase, ‘beyond good and evil’ – that is, beyond the moral compass of the early Puritans and beyond even the practices of the ordinary, traditional capitalists of the Industrial Revolution. Their

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activities changed the world, but their motivations were of an entirely new and different order. The robber barons and the capitalism they created were an example of one historical possibility that had come to be hegemonic in America, evolving into a developmental tendency that had the inexorability of fate. And their cutthroat, unregulated, and seemingly irrational competition was underpinned by the systematic rationalization of the industrial work process found in the technological innovations exemplified by Frederick Winslow Taylor, the founder of scientific management. I think that Taylorism – a brief discussion of which we find buried in Economy and Society – is interesting because it exemplifies what became of capitalism after it was freed from the Protestant ethic at the beginning of the twentieth century. At that historical moment, an increasingly bureaucratic capitalism was rationally reorganized under Taylorism and became more completely subject to the imperatives of market calculation and efficiency than it had ever been. Under Taylorism, any ethical vision in Weber’s sense was utterly subordinate. For Weber, with Taylorism, the organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the suitable methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production. On this basis, the American system of ‘scientific management’ triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psycho-physical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of . . . the machines.65

Thus described, Taylorism and its designs for efficiently restructuring the industrial workplace exemplified Weber’s forebodings of machine-like conformity and soul-destroying homogeneity in the largest institutional structures of the modern capitalist economy.66 Yet for Weber, the ghost of Puritan asceticism lives on in scientific management; in it, we see the ‘powerful tendency toward uniformity in life, which today so immensely aids the capitalist interest in standardization of production.’67 But there is another separation at work here, a temporal disjuncture. As Agnes Heller has argued, the market, defined by instrumental rationality – by Zweckrationalitat, to use Weber’s well-known term – does not need memory to function. Indeed, the ‘market requires instead the destruction and abolishment of cultural memory. The frequently heard

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complaint that the market destroys local traditions is correct: for the market’s proper functioning, the practices of cultural memory are just so many hindrances.’68 The market is geared toward ‘future-oriented activities,’ the constant and endless accumulation of capital and profits. Capitalism can do without the past. Or rather, in its quantification and commodification of all aspects of life, it constantly rewrites the past in terms of the calculation/celebration of ever-increasing sales, profits, returns on investment, accumulated stock market gains, with the reality of periodic losses and setbacks (e.g., the global financial meltdown today) not fundamentally disrupting the future-oriented temporal logic of endlessly increasing accumulation. If the market can be separated from the past, or from past practices that do not conform to its imperative to commodify experience and act according to instrumental rationality, if its activities can dislodge or destroy the diversity of collective historical memories embedded in communities, then it can be separated from ethical foundations in the future. The scope for other historical possibilities rooted in the memory of non-rational or non-commodifed experiences is thereby potentially reduced. In fact, Taylor’s own vision of the future was based on a completely rationalized system of production in which workers all had their place and were simply cogs in the giant machine of industrial production designed and run by far-sighted captains of industry and industrial engineers. This was a vision of society as a smoothly functioning, rigidly hierarchical machine, an industrial, mechanized utopia from which the class antagonisms of the nineteenth century – which, I have argued, Weber’s political model of democracy and political hero were both designed to overcome – would be eliminated. Taylor’s vision was a profoundly anti-democratic one in which the demos, accepting the imperatives of technological progress and the bureaucratic organization of capitalist production, would be compliant and have no voice or agency. There would be no need for unions, industrial strife, conflict, or resistance, all of which Taylor saw as outdated markers of a less progressive and less rational past. Stephen Hanson has noted that at the end of the Protestant Ethic, ‘Weber set out three possible futures for the rational capitalistic order as it has emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century; either “new prophets” would arise to challenge the spiritual meaninglessness of this order, or “ancient ideals” would be reborn – or, if neither, the system would sustain itself indefinitely, leading to a kind of “mechanized ossification.”’ For Hansen, Weber predicted that the subordination of

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charismatic and traditional forms of legitimacy would lead to ‘frequent revolutionary challenges by anti-modern charismatic leaders, periodic calls for a return to pre-modern cultural norms, and continuing social alienation even in the most advanced capitalist societies.’69 Taylor’s system of scientific management and the rational organization of both the state and capitalism have produced plenty of resistance and reaction on the part of the demos and other movements – not all of it progressive –  in precisely the way Hanson describes. The reactions that Hanson suggested would develop can be seen in the cultural and social criticism of the machine age and of the progress that advocates such as Taylor claimed it represented. These critiques emerged from the very fluid cultural and political environment of the postwar years, and they competed with Weber’s calls for democracy, new leaders, and the heroism of the Puritan past. Georg Lukács, a former participant in Weber’s ‘Heidelberg circle,’ argued in History and Class Consciousness (1923) that Taylorism epitomized the technical age of modern capitalism. It represented the reification of time in contrast to what Lukács – after Marx in this respect – saw as the organic, natural rhythms of work and labour. Taylorism mechanized the ‘qualitative, variable, flowing nature’ of temporality. Under Taylorism, no longer could workers cooperatively create a more open-ended temporality; instead, the highly rationalized, regimented organization of work designed by Taylor’s system ‘freezes it [time] into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum . . . into abstract, exactly measurable, physical space . . . at once the cause and effect of scientifically fragmented and specialized production.’70 For Lukács the abstract rationalism of scientific management threatened to destroy the organic and inherently social nature and unity of historical temporality. Also for Lukács, Taylorism represented the quintessential temporality of modern capitalism – the temporality of the disenchanted world that the Puritans helped bring into being. It was the abstract time of instrumental rationality, of scientific measurement, capitalist productivity, bureaucratic organization and calculation. The temporal regime of Taylorism was thus the antithesis of the eighteenth- or nineteenthcentury progressive, developmental notions of time or history inspired by the Enlightenment. It was the negation of the developmental time of Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology, or of Marx’s notion of revolutionary praxis and collective self-transformation, captured by his lucid phrase from Wages, Prices, and Profits: ‘time is the place of human development.’71

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The assumption made by left cultural critics of Taylorism was, as Antliff has put it, that modern capitalism ‘stifled our imaginative capacity by immersing human subjectivity and emotion in a system based on “extreme mechanization” and “quantitative calculation and standardization.”’72 The result was a yearning for a lost unity with nature and a utopian past based on holistic, ‘organic’ pre- (and anti-) capitalist values.73 For Lukács, that unity manifested itself philosophically in his argument that the working class is ultimately the identical Subject/Object of History. In this notion, there is a mythical memory of the political grounded in an ontological yet historically lost or destroyed unity with nature. For Weber, the temporal unity of an organic culture rooted in nature, whether sought by those on the left, or by the burgeoning protofascist radical right that was to become increasingly prominent across the continent after Weber’s death in 1920, never existed.74 In its place, and in response to the complex configuration of issues we have traced  –  manifestations of the disenchantment of the modern world such as the rapaciousness of the robber barons; the rise of scientific management; the development of the ‘monstrous cosmos’ of the capitalist economy and the modern state; the Marxist critique of the exploitation of the working class; and the incipient threats from the far right – Weber offered what he felt to be a more compelling yet self-consciously constructed alternative memory of the political in the form of the ideal type of the heroic Puritan. If Weber’s version of the memory of the political embodied in the Puritan was also the projection of a mythical ethical coherence into the past, as I have suggested, that projection was not rooted in a natural unity that had been lost, but in the fictional reconstruction of both a unique historical moment and a future possibility. All of these examples, including Weber’s ideal-typical imaginary of the Puritan hero, grounded in the reconstructed historical memory and celebration of the Golden Age of the heroic bourgeoisie, illustrate another point made by Heller. She suggests that a society based purely on market relations, or instrumental rationality, ‘could not deliver all goods that are kept in store by communities.’75 Not even a pure market society can eliminate all historical memory. Weber’s Puritan divines and Lukács’s working class represent both a kind of surplus and a countermemory that, Heller implies, cannot be contained or completely subordinated to purely instrumental imperatives of the market or the state. This is an ontological (my term, not Weber’s – he would not see it that way) yet still historical dimension of human experience that lies outside

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of instrumental rationality, beyond the bureaucratic organization of the democratic state or the market economy. It is, paradoxically, the stuff from which the political is fashioned. It is paradoxical because Weber wants to draw on the surplus, receding memory of the heroic bourgeoisie to inspire and sustain leaders who can give meaning to modern democratic politics, which has the rationalized, neutral state, freed from religious meaning, as its centre. Weber’s insight that the ‘spirit’ of capitalism has been ‘freed’ from its foundations in Puritan asceticism also illustrates an issue noted by the French Weber scholar and philosopher Catherine Colliot-Thélène. In her discussion in Max Weber et l’histoire, she argues that for Weber, it is our destiny, or fate, that there be an irreducibly indeterminate and paradoxical relationship between actions and consequences in history. The consequences of action can never be seen with full clarity, can never be predicted, can never be fully controlled by the initiators or founders of actions or systems themselves. How, and which, ideals work themselves out in, or are excluded from, practice in historically concrete situations, in systems or institutions over time, can never be predetermined or completely predicted by those who set them in motion. For Weber, this is a paradox of intentions and an irreducible dimension of historical experience.76 The Puritans, in their quest for salvation, could not foresee the global historical consequences of their ascetic practices in launching capitalism in the West, or the multiplicity of reactions to them. It is within this complex set of considerations – historical, political, and methodological – that Weber, in his reconstruction of the ideal type of bourgeois Protestant asceticism, sustains and nurtures the thin hope, or possibility, that a new agent, hearing the receding echo of the heroism of the bourgeois calling from the past, might re-create a new political in the future. In addition to its inspirational value – crucial in the context of the political instability we traced in chapter 3 – heroic memory also helped define the boundaries of what Weber considered to be legitimate (liberal) political agency and identity. In the next chapter we will look at the methodological presuppositions Weber makes that enable him to construct that ideal-typical memory and the contingent temporality in which it was embedded.

5 Science as a Vocation, or the Politics of Science

But at some point the atmosphere alters: the significance of viewpoints used unreflectively becomes uncertain, the path become lost in the twilight. The light cast by the great cultural problems has moved onward. Then even science prepares to shift its ground and change its conceptual apparatus so that it might regard the stream of events from the heights of reflective thought.1 Max Weber, ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy’

Weber always insisted that the Protestant Ethic was an example of the ‘one-sided accentuation of reality’ that characterized all ideal types. Thus, what Peter Breiner has called the ‘just so’ story of the Puritan sects and their heroic founding of capitalism was a consciously selective reconstruction rather than a straightforward historical account. Having suggested, at the end of the last chapter, that Weber’s methodological writings provide the constitutive assumptions for the construction of the ideal types, I now look more specifically at what those assumptions are, how they underlie the ‘fictional’ reconstruction of the heroic Puritan and the agency of Weber’s vocational politician, and how these are related to politics and the political in Weber’s thought. I begin this line of inquiry by first unpacking the ideal-type construct; in the process, I try to show two things. First, at the centre of my reinterpretation of the significance of the ideal type for politics and the political is a notion of open historical time or temporality. The idea of temporality that is not yet completely identical with inexorably developmental tendencies enabled the construction of the originary moment of

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capitalist accumulation in the Protestant Ethic, as well as the image of the political heroes of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ given almost fifteen years later as an explicitly political lecture rather than a scientific talk. This dimension – the notion of an open historical temporality, which lies at the heart of both Weber’s methodology and his vision of the vocational politician he empowers to bring a new political into being – signals a transgression of his own self-imposed boundary between the political and the ‘scientific.’ I want to problematize that division with reference to recent discussions of Weber’s methodology. Second, this notion of open time underlies Weber’s assumption regarding the conflict of values in the modern world. I refer to his wellknown post-Enlightenment view that in the disenchanted modern world, values, which are subjective, are eternally in conflict; no ultimate, permanent resolution to their discord is philosophically or politically possible. This has long been, and still is, a contentious issue among social scientists, social and political theorists, and philosophers. I want to situate the specificity of this notion of open temporality in relation to Weber’s views on the conflicting or ‘agonistic’ values that are central to his notions of politics and methodology. I want to ask how these notions of time and the conflict of values are implicated in Weber’s own reflections on method as well as in some of the best recent discussions that his writings on methodology have provoked. I want to ask anew a question that has concerned thinkers as diverse as Leo Strauss, Susan Hekman, Sheldon Wolin, and more recently Peter Breiner: ‘How can Weber simultaneously be committed to a view of the objectivity of social science, on the one hand, and to the position that objectivity is informed by the subjective values that guide research, on the other?’ The debates over objectivity and values have been heated because they go to the heart of what social scientists do, how they understand reality and its constructions, and how those constructions and understandings relate to, are influenced by, and have been caught up in both democratic politics and the political. Among other things, the Weber revival has shown the implications of these issues for politics and the political and their connections to other parts of Weber’s work. This chapter seeks to contribute to this line of inquiry, building on the writings of Wolin, Breiner, and those whom Peter Lassman and Irving Velody have called Weber’s ‘political critics.’2 The political and philosophical implications of Weber’s methodological writings were sometimes more clearly understood by Weber’s contemporaries than by the post–Second World War generation of Anglo-American commentators influenced by

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the work of Talcott Parsons. I also enlist some of Weber’s forgotten interlocutors in support of my contention that there is, at the centre of his methodological writings, a politics of time that is crucial to understanding the relations among methodology, politics, and the political in his work. In picking up these themes, I will be revisiting the well-worn paths of previous interpretations only briefly. I hope instead to move the discussion of methodology in Weber beyond the polarities of earlier debates, away from concerns about historicism, relativism, and ‘valueneutrality’ toward the politics and uses of theory. In doing so, I will be commenting in this chapter on the role of both the social sciences and the social scientist in liberal democracies. What is the role of the social sciences in what we have described as politics? What can the social sciences contribute to the re-creation of the political, those moments of commonality that bind the community together in a common purpose in pluralist societies? Some of the same tensions we found in the discussion of Weber’s model of democracy (chapter 2), in the relation of ‘aristocratic’ leaders to the political and the demos (chapter 3), and in the roots of the image of heroic agency of the fictional Puritan (chapter 4) reappear at the heart of Weber’s methodology. The debates that became familiar to the Anglo-American audience were framed in the post–Second World War period by Parsons. His translation of the Protestant Ethic had introduced Weber to the Englishspeaking academy in 1930.3 Furthermore, Parsons’s later work, The Structure of Social Action, provided a framework within which to interpret Weber – and social scientific work more generally – in a less philosophical and more positivist ‘value-free’ way that clearly separated ‘facts’ from values.4 There was, however, almost from the beginning of Weber’s migration across the Atlantic, resistance to the positivist view of Weber championed by Parsons. One marker of this was a collection of translations that came to serve as a popular counterpoint to the Parsonian reading, for it offered then-new selections of Weberian texts such as the lectures ‘Politics and Science as a Vocation’ and a host of Weber’s other work on the Puritan sects, on economic and legal history, and on the sociology of domination, bureaucracy, and the state. In contrast to Parson’s selections, this volume, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, introduced the Anglo-American audience to some of Weber’s key texts on politics, science, and disenchantment – texts without which we could not comprehend the relevance, scope, and depth of politics and the political in his work today. Setting aside issues of translation that have

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recently been noted by commentators, the ideas of disenchantment, science, and meaning and the complexity of Weber’s method would not have become accessible in the same way without this text. Nor would Weber’s complex relationship to Marx and Nietzsche – a relationship that was not at all central to Parsons’s view.5 The Gerth and Mills collection deserves mention as a forerunner to the Weber revival of the 1990s in its insistence on the more philosophical and more political aspects of Weber’s work – aspects that had been cleansed or extirpated from the Parsonian lexicon of positivist social scientific theory (and practice) in the postwar period, which was thought at the time to signal the ‘end of ideology.’ In addition to Gerth and Mills, there were voices from outside the sociological community that approached Weber’s work on methodology more politically, philosophically, and critically. They came largely from political theory and were, at first, lone voices on the margins of the nascent post–Second World War Weber ‘industry,’ which was dominated by behaviourist social scientists.6 Even now, since the well-established revival of interest in Weber of the 1990s, their interpretations have yet to be properly or fully integrated into the burgeoning new literature. I refer to two of the best-known examples: the diametrically opposed interpretations of Leo Strauss and Sheldon Wolin, which I will revisit in my assessment of how Weber’s methodological writings are internally related to the notion of the political. In the early 1950s, Leo Strauss published his well-known Natural Right and History. In it, he argued that Weber’s social science – with its liberal emphasis on the equality of values in modernity – led to nihilism. The fact/value distinction that was such a prominent feature of Parsons’s interpretation of Weber was not possible for Strauss, whose own preference for a philosophically objectivist notion of Truth or the Good inspired by the ancient political philosophers lay behind his critique of Weber’s methodology and modern liberalism. More recent interpretations such as Breiner’s have instead usefully shifted the focus away from this critique of liberalism-as-relativism/nihilism to see Weber’s social science as an integral part of a prudential and sociologically informed political theory. Sheldon Wolin, partly in response to Strauss, engaged Weber’s social science from a different perspective. Instead of criticizing Weber for abandoning a certain idea of Truth (that today would be called essentialist) that came from the tradition of ancient political philosophy, Wolin sought to show how, as modern science displaced earlier metaphysical

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ways of knowing and their notions of Truth, Weber’s methodology became a substitute for political theory. He did this in an article that discussed Weber’s notion of social science, titled ‘Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory.’ Lassman and Speirs have called that article ‘a breathtaking critical essay on Weber’s place in the political tradition.’7 Wolin argued that for Weber, the necessity of choosing among values was the essence of both politics and science.8 As Lassman and Velody have shown, this discussion actually goes back to debates among Weber’s contemporaries, who saw that Weber’s methodological and scientific discussions were located in a broader political discourse about modernity, liberalism, and democracy.9 In their commentary on Weber’s lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ and its reception among Weber’s contemporaries, Lassman and Velody locate both Wolin and Strauss in a loosely defined camp that they call the ‘political critics,’ reminding current readers of the political and philosophical implications of the lecture and of Weber’s work on methodology more generally. Those concerns were not on the agenda for the post–Second World War generation of Anglo-American commentators influenced by Parsons; only now are they being partially recovered and explored. More recently, Sam Whimster, Sven Eliaeson, and the new volume Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, edited by Laurence McFalls, have again taken up Weber’s methodological issues and the debates in which he was embroiled with his own contemporaries.10 Their research has added new and valuable layers of context and analysis. Yet with a few striking exceptions, such as the McFalls volume just noted, much of the new research has not engaged the underlying political issues to which Strauss, Wolin, and Breiner have been attuned, choosing to see them, somewhat more traditionally, as further removed from issues of social scientific method and practice.11 Seeing Weber’s social science this way, as the ‘political critics’ and many of Weber’s contemporaries did, thus still goes against the grain not only of the traditional Anglo-American view and but also of some of the recent historical-sociological scholarship of the Weber revival. The view of Weber that came to predominate in the post–Second World War social science literature, following Parsons’s lead, was that he had been on the one hand a serious, value-neutral social scientist committed to the fact/value distinction, and on the other a part-time, amateur political actor. The two Webers were thought to be distinct, involved in activities of a different order that did not overlap or have any necessary relation to each other. In much of the new literature that has so richly

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developed Weber’s intellectual contexts and influences, there is often still a distance between Weber’s political writings and his discussions of social scientific methodology. In the European literature there has been a greater recognition of the close proximity of Weber’s political commitments to his methodological concerns.12 Recalling our discussion of the Protestant Ethic from the previous chapter, I want to argue that the distance between the two Webers – the social scientist and the occasional politician/political theorist – needs to be recast in a way that acknowledges the intimate relation between them. The relation I see between the two is that while Weber the occasional political actor was explicitly involved in attempts to define a new liberal-democratic political, the assumptions he made about the social sciences were implicitly related to the same modern liberaldemocratic project, both at the theoretical level and in his own historical sociology.13 I want to enter this part of the discussion via a re-examination of Weber’s controversial methodological device: the ideal type as he set it out in the essays ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy’ (1904), written for the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and ‘The Meaning of Ethical Neu­­­ trality’ (1917).14 In response to critics such as Felix Rachfal, Weber insisted that the Protestant Ethic was an ideal type (or rather a series of ideal types) and not simply a straightforward historical account. The ideal type, for Weber, was a ‘construction’ that brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into an internally coherent conceptual cosmos. This construction has the substantive character of a utopia arrived at by the conceptual accentuation of particular elements of reality . . . It is one formed by a one-sided accentuation of one of several perspectives, and through the synthesis of a variety of diffuse, discrete, individual phenomena, present sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes not at all: subsumed by such one-sided, emphatic viewpoints so that they form a uniform construction in thought. In its conceptual purity this construction can never be found in reality: it is a utopia.15

It is thus, in Weber’s curious formulation, a construction that has the ‘substantive character of a utopia’ but that is consciously created by the conceptual ‘accentuation’ of a one-sided viewpoint and shaped into a logically consistent ‘whole.’ Weber claims that these conceptual utopias, thus constructed, can help us clarify the unique cultural significance of

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historical events such as, in the case of the Protestant ethic, the effect of certain religious ideas on early capitalist development in Europe. Weber’s claim is that historical objects of investigation, constituted by value choices and rendered coherent in the form of ideal types, can be analysed in a more or less objectively correct way. It is possible, Weber says, to arrive at an objective interpretation of historical phenomena upon which a variety of observers would have to agree. Weber wanted to ensure that objectivity entailed a commitment to a standard of truth.16 That standard involved a definition of universality. As Whimster has put it, Weber ‘insisted on scientific validity in the sense that the truth of empirical facts in the social and cultural world can be established and that truth will be universally valid.’17 Yet as Whimster and many other commentators have pointed out, Weber, who was embroiled in the methodological debates over the status of the social sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century, was no positivist either. As we noted, objectivity for Weber rests on the notion that the ‘truth of empirical facts in the social and cultural world can be established.’ However, what constitutes an ‘empirical fact’ is not a simple correspondence to an objectively existing reality. Rather, empirical facts are constructed by attributing or imputing meanings to actors in specific historical circumstances related by causal sequences of events. As Whimster notes in this regard: ‘Weber has his gaze firmly set on causal explanation as the standard of objectivity and of science.’18 And as Weber was fond of noting, the construction of such ideal-typical causal sequences involves the subjective selection of material and perspective by the social scientist, the explicit, self-reflexive awareness of her/ his own values in that selection, and the recognition of historically existing conditions, contexts, and evidence. Weber’s discussion involves a number of things. First, one cannot, of course, simply make up the historical record: the hero of the Protestant Ethic, and the texts from which Weber constructed him, are not complete fictions with no basis whatsoever in a historical reality. Second, in his historicist rendering of social scientific objectivity, Weber was keenly aware of what Marx had captured in his famous comment in the Eighteenth Brumaire: human beings, endowed with consciousness and will, make their own history, ‘but they do not make it just as they please. They do not make it under circumstances of their own choosing but under circumstances directly given and transmitted from the past.’19 As historical beings, we are both subjects and objects of investigation, agency, and our own histories. Weber captures this in the

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seemingly paradoxical idea that ‘the objective validity of experiential knowledge rests, solely rests, upon the fact that given reality is ordered by categories which are in a specific sense subjective: they represent the presupposition of our knowledge and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which experiential knowledge alone is able to give us.’20 The ‘truth that experience alone is able to give us’ is historical, not timeless or ahistorically transcendent. It can only be given to us by our history. For Weber, ‘the belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of particular cultures, and is not given naturally.’21 Nor can it be deciphered from an immutable or universal transhistorical human nature that can be found in a primordial state of nature that predates society, culture, or civilization, which was the approach taken by Rousseau, Locke, and the state-of-nature theorists. Nor does it manifest itself fully, exhaustively, or transparently in any given empirical or historical reality or period. This means that social science cannot establish the validity of belief on an objectively valid, trans-historical principium, to borrow Schürmann’s term. Recall that principium refers to the apparent coincidence or correspondence of the given order with a set of universal, objectively true principles, ‘both of which are observed without question in a given epoch.’22 Because the social scientific enterprise is historical and subjective, objectivity is ‘constituted by something outside of the empirical,’ as Whimster notes. As Weber put it: ‘The “objectivity” of social scientific knowledge depends rather on the fact that the empirical given is always related to those evaluative ideas which alone give it cognitive value.’23 While critics such as Susan Hekman still see traces of an older philosophical subject/object distinction at work in Weber’s formulations, many Weber commentators, such as Kari Palonen, now see Weber as methodologically antifoundationalist, or as a theorist of contingency.24 Weber made these distinctions and moves at the turn of the century, at a time when debates over positivism were raging in European intellectual circles. He argued that the natural and social (or cultural) sciences were fundamentally different in one key respect: the natural sciences were grounded in the distinction between the knowing subject and the natural world of objects. Against those who argued that the social sciences could imitate the natural sciences by producing objective knowledge of law-like historical developments, Weber argued that the cultural sciences were different. We are not only both subjects and objects or our own science. Social scientists do not study the movements

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of invariant, inanimate nature, but rather human history and meaning. For Weber, history was not the realization of an Idea in the world, a teleologically or dialectically determined process, or the reconciliation of the universal Subject and Object, as Georg Lukács argued in History and Class Consciousness shortly after Weber’s death in 1923. History, for Weber, was a succession of unique and individual events and developments, not a process unfolding inexorably in accordance with natural or objective laws that could be discovered by human reason. Weber argued that the social sciences required a method of historical understanding that differentiated them from the natural sciences. He called this method, after Wilhelm Dilthey (one of his influences from the German Historical School), deutendes Verstehen, that is, a method of interpretive understanding whereby the social scientist understands subjects empathetically and not in a disinterested, purely objective way.25 Yet he was also, as Whimster has noted, alive to Heinrich Rickert’s notion that cultural values can constitute an objectively existing or historically given condition, a kind of ‘transcendental presupposition’ of research.26 In this sense, as Catherine Colliot-Thélène has observed, the goal of historical study, for Weber, was to describe the past, or what has been, in its concrete, historical specificity, without simply assimilating the study of history to the assumptions of the present moment. This would ensure that the study of history had a scientific status able to explain how the present came to exist, or came to be, historically. In this sense, Weber accepted the inheritance of German Idealism and the German Historical School, along with the assumption that liberty is achieved through rational action. Yet he was also critical of that legacy; and, not wanting the study of history to remain suspended only on the level of ideas or to be a prisoner of teleology, he wanted to ground it in an interpretive science of concrete historical reality.27 In this way he retained a notion of objectivity, one that was thoroughly historicized and thus did not correspond to positivist notions of objectivity. In Whimster’s recent assessment: ‘The “Objectivity” essay marks the coming of age of twentieth century social science and the removal of the comforts of positivism, naïve empiricism and the transcendentalism of values and ideas.’28 It also represented, as I have argued elsewhere, a decisive shift in early twentieth-century social and political thought to a post-Enlightenment and post-Nietzschean view of both science and politics, one appropriate to the age of disenchantment that Weber outlined with so much eloquence and passion.29

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Weber was a sharp critic of the notion that the methods of the natural sciences could be applied to the study of society and history; even so, it was still important for him to retain some notion of scientific objectivity in order to legitimize the redefinition of the social scientific enterprise that he was beginning to undertake in the ‘Objectivity’ essay of 1904–5. Weber in this way makes a contentious methodological trade-off in his attempt to validate a new notion of objectivity, one that includes subjective, interpretive elements from Dilthey’s notion of empathetic understanding, a version of Rickert’s notion of culturally relevant values, and a Nietzschean perspectivalism. In formulating this view, he also banished explicit partisan value judgments and evaluations from social science. Weber repeatedly contends that the evaluation or criticism of values is a task beyond the scope of science. It is reserved for the politician, who is required to act with consequences and the future in mind; or for the philosopher, whose job it is to explore the realm of ends. It is what Kant called judgment, and it is not part of the arsenal of social science. One could argue that Weber’s strategy here was to use or co-opt the accepted language of objectivity from the natural sciences in order to fundamentally alter its meaning. In his social science, Weber uses the language of objectivity to undermine its positivist meaning and its affiliation with notions of law-like causality in the natural sciences. Still, why would he do this? I think this seemingly contradictory exercise should be seen, as Wolin has suggested, as integral to Weber’s attempt to found a new historical social/cultural science which was critical of the German Historical School and the naturalist assumptions of marginalist economics, both of which were prevalent in Germany during the early part of Weber’s career in the last decade of the nineteenth century.30 It should be seen as part of his founding activity, as part of an attempt to legitimize this new perspectival notion of objectivity as scientific. Founding, according to Wolin, involves setting boundaries and terms; it is constitutive. Drawing an analogy between the history of political thought and Weber’s efforts to launch a new cultural science, Wolin argues that ‘modern and ancient theorists  . . .  believed that founding  –  or giving a form or constitution to collective life – was reckoned to be the most notable action of which political man was capable.’ This was so because it can ‘shape the lives of citizens by designing the structure of dwelling which they . . . will inhabit.’ In this regard, ‘the founder is quintessentially the author of political presuppositions.’31 With regard to our

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discussion, ‘to found a form of social science entails an act of demarcation that indicates the subject matter peculiar to the science, the kinds of activities that are appropriate, and the norms that are to be invoked in judging the value of the results produced by the activities.’32 In his methodological writings, Weber was the charismatic or even prophetic author of a new synthesis of methodological presuppositions. In self-consciously explicating the concept of the ideal type, the role of values and concrete historical ‘reality’ within it, and the meaning of these within the human sciences, Weber was engaged in the politics of theory, in the constitutive activity of defining the boundaries and meaning of the conceptual tools of the social sciences against rival theories and their more or less explicit world views. Those rivals – religion, philosophy, and history – and their reality principles – God, Reason, and experience – had been delegitimized, or at the very least seriously challenged, by the rise of rational science in the nineteenth century. To redefine the conceptual tools of this modern, self-reflexive social science, the foundations and truth claims of these older views would have to be destroyed, and this has led Wolin to say that for Weber, ‘methodology is mind engaged in the legitimation of its own political activity.’33 The intensity of this activity has almost religious undertones. And it is characterized by something else as well. As McFalls says: ‘Like the puritan founders of bourgeois rational capitalism, Weber is a tragic hero who has the courage to face the disenchantment of the world that his own action achieves.’34 Weber’s social science and his own ‘prophetic example’ ultimately exposed not only the tremendous power of modern science to disenchant the world but also its inability to generate ultimate meanings; a perspectival, subjectively grounded social scientific ‘objectivity’ cannot ‘lend meaning to the world.’ Weber, in this view, was both the heroic founder of a new scientific order and an anti-hero in self-consciously exposing its limitations. Against this backdrop, those acts of demarcation and value-laden conceptual definition through which social scientists ‘choose their fate’ lend significance to the social scientific enterprise by self-consciously delineating historically specific parts of the modern universe – cultural, economic, political – as meaningful objects of investigation. According to Wolin: ‘Significance becomes the crucial concept in Weber’s politics of knowledge [my italics]. It symbolizes the moment of freedom for the social scientist when he registers his affirmations, when he exchanges the settled routines of inquiry for the risks of action.’35 Wolin argues that for Weber, ‘choice is the essence of true science just as it is of true politics.’36

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Those choices determine which values guide investigation. In the guise of ‘significance,’ values assume a political role in Weber’s methodology as well as in his social science. To refer to a ‘politics of knowledge’ is to imply that social scientific knowledge is contested and is not simply universally valid or determined by the instrumental rationality that guides technocratic thinking. I now add to the preceding discussion a recent view that I think is one of the best new discussions of the politics of theory in Weber. It is consistent with my arguments about Weber’s strategic uses of concepts as he makes his case for his views of politics and the political. It certainly joins the ranks of the ‘political critics’ and in this sense complements, or adds to, Wolin’s view. Peter Breiner’s recent interpretation also sees these issues from the perspective of a political theorist, and also problematizes the notion of a strict separation between science and politics. Breiner sees in Weber’s methodology an attempt to lay the groundwork for a prudential and sociologically informed political theory in which ideal types can guide political action. This emphasis gives the discussions of objectivity and the ideal type in Weber a very different inflection from the commentary on these issues in the more sociologically oriented literature.37 Breiner argues right off the bat that Weber’s notion of objectivity cannot be defended, and proceeds from there while still acknowledging that social science can produce knowledge that is not only partisan. Drawing our attention to the first part of the 1904 Objectivity essay, Breiner notes that Weber seeks to provide an account of ‘the conditions under which social science in general and social economics in particular might achieve a degree of impartiality in its modes of inquiry’ through the use of the ideal type. Furthermore, Breiner argues that in his methodological discussions, ‘Weber seeks to give an impartial “scientific” clarification of the social and political dynamics constraining or enabling the realization of partisan commitments.’38 By emphasizing the relationship between social science and partisan commitment, Breiner is drawing attention to the intimate connection – as well as the distinction – that Weber saw between the two. This is so even though, as Weber recognized in more formal sociological treatments such as the Intermediate Reflections on the Economic Ethics of World Religions, science and politics are two distinct life spheres in the modern world. Weber thinks that ideal types are heuristic vehicles through which a kind of impartiality can be achieved. Impartiality can be created by constructing transparent causal sequences of events in ideal-typical

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form in such a way that all observers, even those from different cultures or partisan positions, can agree on their validity. These ideal types can then constitute a kind of standard (though not an objective one in Strauss’s sense) against which the feasibility of various partisan viewpoints can be clarified. As Breiner notes: ‘As long as we adhere to transparency in the construction of typologies of politics and society, we can claim impartiality in testing partisan positions.’39 It is in this sense that Breiner argues that Weber uses ideal types in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and elsewhere. Weber’s discussion of heroic leadership, for example, is ‘embedded in a series of ideal-typical accounts of converging and conflicting developmental tendencies that come to form economic institutions, parties, states, parliaments and political actors.’ In that lecture, Weber constructs ‘a convergent set of ideal types and tendencies, each of which together constitute the “business-side” of professional politics,’ or what I have called democratic politics.40   Yet as Breiner goes on to note – and this is consistent with my arguments in previous chapters about how both Weber’s model of democracy and his image of leadership are couched in the language of inexorable or unchangeable developmental tendencies – the provisional or hypothetical judgments that ideal types can provide often slide into more determinate claims that in Weber’s hands resemble law-like causalities. I think Breiner makes an important point when he notes of Weber that ‘time and again he transforms a series of self-acknowledged partial hypothetical generalizations about the stream and outcome of unique social and political actions into general laws of society and politics.’41 Such was the case in Weber’s presentation of the ‘business side’ of politics in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ and in his portrayals of the bureaucratic inevitability of capitalism, socialism, and democracy. The same developmental fate is captured in the ideal types of the Puritan hero and the origins of capitalism in the Protestant Ethic. In the case of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ Breiner is correct to see this as ‘Weber’s reification [my italics] of the business side of politics into a set of immovable structures and inevitable logics.’42 I will argue shortly that there is a tension between Weber’s strategy, or habit, of constructing ideal types that lapse into inevitable patterns or unbreakable logics, on the one hand, and his positing, in the methodology essays, a conception of open time as the temporal horizon that is the methodological presupposition of the construction of ideal types, on the other. We can thus identify the transformation of an open temporality into inexorable patterns in Weber’s historical-sociological

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studies such as the Protestant Ethic, as well as in his political speeches and public lectures. Yet Breiner argues that the ideal type is ‘partial and perspectival in all its aspects’; it is utterly self-reflexive because it is built out of the value assumptions of the interpreter constructing it. Ideal types ‘are themselves constructed from one of the partisan perspectives that I am testing. Hence, I am testing other political commitments using a construct derived from my own.’ Because of this thorough onesidedness, no one can objectively or reliably predict the effects of political action based on an ideal type that was used to clarify a particular partisan position. Here, Breiner argues, ‘we reach the limits of politicalsociological advice.’43 Weber is thus never able to ‘square the circle’ of what is a fundamentally irresolvable problem: How can a social science that cannot avoid subjective, partial value judgments at a constitutive level, in the very design and construction of ideal types (such as the Protestant ethic), also claim to be objective or impartial?44 Ultimately it cannot be, and political will and judgment must take over. I want to step back for a moment and further explore the notion of an open temporality, or time, in Weber’s methodology writings. I think this notion is implicit both in Wolin’s notion of Weber’s politics of theory and in Breiner’s discussion of the strategic uses of the ideal type in Weber. The ideal type contains an important notion of the temporal that is constitutive of Weber’s subjective and deeply historicized notion of objectivity. I will begin to approach this by first briefly examining the discussion of Erik Wolfe, a now forgotten philosophical contemporary of Weber. Wolfe saw one aspect of this notion of time when he suggested that for Weber, ‘the “intended” meaning of any action can only be understood in so far as that action belongs to the past, and has become historically objective . . . Max Weber’s sociological source material derives . . . without exception from the world of past events, or “culture” . . . His causalities were historical ones, his laws heuristic devices for the interpretive representation of an observed social past [all my italics].’45 Wolfe is suggesting that for Weber, historical objectivity can emerge only in hindsight, from the reconstruction of action and experiences from the past, and that he constructed many of his famous ideal types from past, historical material. We have seen, as Breiner has argued, that Weber’s ‘material’ from the past was partly historical and partly ‘fictional.’ For Wolfe, this had consequences for the evaluation of action in the present. If the raw historical materials for Weber’s ideal types

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‘derive . . . from the world of past events,’ it follows that ‘action in the present is inaccessible to scientific inquiry; as a state-in-process, it cannot become the object of research. This had significant implications for Weber’s theory of science; for in thus rooting his work in cultural, economic, or political history, he was able to avoid . . . all-embracing philosophical and political encapsulations.’46 For Wolfe, Weber in this way restricted objectivity to the ideal-typical reconstruction of the past. Indeed, Wolfe goes even further when he suggests that Weber ‘was deeply imbued with a sense of the irrelevance of such material to the social world as it was presently constituted; to the “resolution of the social question,” for example.’47 Wolfe is on to something in his insistence that Weber’s notion of objectivity is rooted in constructs from the past, but he is not completely right either, for the following reason. While those constructs created from the past may be both analytically and historically distinct from immediate social and political issues and concerns, they are not necessarily completely separated or disconnected from them either, in two ways. First, there is a more immediate relationship or connection when it comes to Weber’s uses of ideal types such as the ascetic Puritan. This has to do with how an image from the past is called up – or made present, as Theodor Adorno put it – in Weber’s methodology.48 I argued that this is at work in the relationship between the Puritan hero who embodied the memory of the political and the vocational politician of the present, and possibly the future, in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ The same could be said of Breiner’s discussion of the three aspects of the vocational politician in the lecture, drawn from different images of the past: Pericles, the condottiere or Machiavelli’s Prince, and Gladstone. All three, enlisted selectively from history, inspired and guided Weber’s construction of the political hero in the present. And that image, in turn, contained possibilities for action in the future. Second, Weber’s new science of concrete reality had as its limited and specific goal the explanation of how the past came to be the present, as Catherine Colliot-Thélène has argued.49 Thus, if we accept Breiner’s intervention on this issue, we can see that the temporal distinction or separation between past, present, and future in Weber’s ideal types is not quite as absolute as Wolfe suggests. Indeed, one could argue, against Wolfe, that ideal types could just as easily be constructed to capture present historical configurations / causal sequences of events, and may even illuminate future possibilities, as is the case today with economic forecasting and modelling, as

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imperfect as it is. Intrigued by Wolfe’s insight, I want to extend it by asking a further question: What else characterizes the temporality in which Weber’s historical causalities are constructed? The objects of social scientific investigation are constructed out of a historical temporal reality that is perpetually and inherently in flux. As I have argued elsewhere, in the methodology essays Weber sets out a notion of historical time as an open, fluid, ever-changing temporality. In the ‘Objectivity’ essay, Weber locates the historical specificity of values in this idea of the flow of time when he writes, in a striking passage, that the stream of infinite events flows constantly towards eternity. The cultural problems that sway humankind are constantly renewed and reformulated; that which assumes individual meaning and significance for us in that constantly unending stream becomes a ‘historical individual.’ The conceptual context in which it is considered and scientifically comprehended alters. The points of departure for the cultural sciences remain mutable throughout an endless future . . . posing new questions to an eternal, inexhaustible life.50

For Weber, historical temporality is not teleological; it has no natural ends or substantive, metaphysical essence. Nor is it directionally determined or closed. In the battles Weber waged against more determinist philosophies of history, he is consistent in the idea that history is inherently unstructured, that it has no telos or rational meaning. He vociferously argued against what he saw as the ahistoricism of positivists, as well as subjectivist views such as the life philosophies of Erich Kahler, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Henri Bergson.51 If reality is ‘perpetually in flux’ and is ‘ever subject to change,’ then both the future and the past are also, potentially, open as horizons of possibility for both action and reinterpretation; their ‘store of possible meanings,’ or the multiplicity of potentiality in them, is at least theoretically ‘inexhaustible.’ These formulations retain the fluid, qualitative sense of a temporality that is not yet regimented by formal or specialized systems of instrumental or bureaucratic rationality, such as Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. This is a notion of temporality open to movement, change, intervention, and possibility, the very antithesis of the rigidity – or reification, in the terminology of Gabel52 – of time in a universe dominated by the sophisticated technologies of ‘science, bureaucracy and capitalism’ that have, as Wolin has put it, ‘clamped the world with the tightening grid of rationality.’53 It is the portrayal of ‘reality’ as

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open-ended temporality, as ‘the vast, chaotic stream of events that flows away though time,’ that allows Weber to reconstruct history as narratives of unique significance in ideal types such as the Protestant Ethic, and then to hold out the image of the vocational politician who can potentially change the course of events in the future. The image of reality as open-ended time is a critical, historicizing moment in Weber’s methodology. It is also a politicizing moment in which the agency of the social scientist is affirmed against the seemingly inexorable facticity of the given. There is a potentiality in this moment – though perhaps only in fleeting or fugitive ways – when the social scientist can resist, rupture, or disrupt the vast networks of bureaucratic rationalization and domination that appear impenetrable or inexorable to ordinary citizens in the highly complex liberal democracies of the North/ West. It is that moment of choice during which social scientists inject significance or meaning into the objects of social scientific research. On both the political and methodological levels, the portrayal of reality as chaotic fluidity is the prerequisite for the construction of ideal types and the meaning-creating activity of social scientists. Weber wants to retain a dimension of historical time that is not completely determined by the developmental logics that dominate his analyses and ideal types of modern capitalism, socialism, and modern democratic politics as a business, or Betrieb. He wants, in the very constitution of a new social science, to create an opening that is at once historical and ontological, always on the horizon of the ‘steel-hard casing,’ a time in which the social scientist can ‘act,’ one that is in principle, to some degree, open to intervention and agency.54 The same notion of time underlies the agency of the political hero in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ In the notion of an open-ended temporality we find a politics of time at the heart of Weber’s methodology.55 We can contrast the idea of an open time with the other conceptions we find in Weber’s work. One of the few commentators who has been sensitive to issues of temporality in Weber is Stephen Hanson. Though Hanson’s issues are somewhat different from mine, the interesting way in which he situates notions of time in relation to Weber’s famous threefold ‘typology’ of legitimate domination complements mine; it also adds another layer of context in which to situate Weber’s view of open temporality. Recalling Weber’s categorization of legitimate domination as either traditional, charismatic, or rational-legal, Hanson argues that the three different forms of domination have different temporal implications for

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the task of predicting or foretelling the future. Each kind of legitimacy ‘can be seen as reflecting the acceptance of a particular conception of time  –  and hence of the future that is to be foretold.’56 Hanson notes that ‘traditional forms of prediction are intimately tied to a conception of time that is based on the concrete flow of events, which are usually interpreted as cyclical in nature.’ This notion of time was prevalent in pre-modern societies that were not yet disenchanted, in Weber’s term. Ideas of time were tied to the rhythms of nature, the seasons, and myth. This is the temporality in which the biblical Abraham lived. In ‘Science as a Vocation,’ Weber says that ‘Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died old and satiated with life because he stood in the organic cycle of life.’57 In this traditional conception, ‘sages and elders in traditional settings,’ such as Lame Deer of the Lakota whom we mentioned earlier, ‘predict that historical outcomes will repeat themselves ineluctably.’58 By contrast, charismatic forms of prediction transcend historical forms of time and space and assume that ‘those with extraordinary or divine insight can see the “future” as “present.”’ The ability to do so derives from prophetic revelation. In both exemplary and ethical prophecy, the future can be seen as the completion  – usually beyond this world – of an imperfect earthly existence in the present. Behind this lies the idea, as Weber notes in The Sociology of Religion, of a meaningful totality, a ‘unified view of the world derived from a consciously integrated meaningful attitude toward life.’59 Finally, rational prediction, which, as Hanson notes, is ‘the sole form that is legitimate within the institutional context of modern science – is based upon acceptance of the notion that time (and space) is abstract, forming a grid that extends infinitely and linearly from the past, to the present, to the future.’60 We saw one version of this in our earlier discussion of Lukács and his critique of scientific management. The abstract, quantified time of scientific experimentation and market calculation, which allowed for the prodigious expansion of capitalism, modern technology, and the modern bureaucratic state, was not the time in which the more holistic ‘human development’ of the demos, the working class, or humanity could take place. Yet the rational notion of time is particularly important in the modern, disenchanted world because it alone is the temporality that lends itself to the construction of causal relationships, which may have predictive value regarding future possibilities. Hanson draws our attention to this aspect of scientific, rational time in modernity. Which is, that it allows us – social scientists and potentially political actors as well – to connect the past, present, and future causally

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in the way Weber did in the Protestant Ethic. In his methodological writings, as we have noted, Weber assimilates the idea of rational, scientific causality to his notion of objectivity, blending them in the notion of the historical yet heuristic construct, the ideal type. The open notion of time that I see in Weber’s methodology essays can be seen as a fourth notion of time in his work. It is clearly different from the first two. It is not rooted in the organic rhythms of nature, the seasons, or myth; and it is not charismatically transcendent, moving agency onto the plane of another world beyond this one. Yet neither is it strictly rational in the sense of allowing for prediction of the future based on causal analysis of the present or the past. Its relationship to the rational time of modernity is more complicated. There is an indeterminacy, or contingency, in the idea of an open time that is grounded, in Weber’s case, in a strong liberal notion of autonomous agency heroically struggling to act within the constraints of, but also potentially against, powerful historical forces and tendencies. It provides the backdrop for Weber’s notions of agency and choice in social science and politics and is designed, in Weber’s methodology, to ‘save some remnants of individualist freedom’ for the social scientist in the disenchanted world. By methodologically grounding his own model of ‘reality’ in an open, fluid temporality subject to human intervention, Weber creates a space in which social scientists can construct a theoretically endless, though historically limited, range or diversity of possible ideal types. They all might rely on the construction of rationally constructed historical causal sequences, even if we keep two things in mind. First, that those causal sequences are constructed out of and grounded in assumptions based on particular points of view, as Breiner has argued. Second, as Catherine Colliot-Thélène has noted – and here is a possible difference between the social scientist who can construct ideal types with the benefit of hindsight, and the politician who has to act in the present – that consequences and intentions are destined to stand in a paradoxical relationship; the future consequences of action may not be foreseeable or predictable by actors themselves, by those who initiate change in the present. The consequences of action may not be intelligible to political actors in the same way they can to social scientists. The relationship between actions and intentions also exists in another context to which both Hanson and Colliot-Thélène alert us. The hallmark of both modern science and bureaucracy is predictability.61 Yet when actors, whether Weber’s hero or the demos, intervene in history, they do so in the context of a temporality

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that is in principle open, potentially fluid, and therefore not entirely or precisely predictable. With the idea of an open temporality, Weber hopes to counter the hegemony of instrumental rationality and bureaucratic domination as well as the reification of time common to both. Since the means of democratic politics are also defined by instrumental rationality and bureaucratic organization, the notion of open time could, conceivably, also be used to construct ideal types that are historical alternatives/narratives to the organization of democratic-bureaucratic politics in Weber’s own model. Not satisfied with compelling social scientists to ‘choose,’ Weber emphasizes that neither science nor technological progress nor history can normatively elucidate the ends of human existence for us in definitive ways. His strategy for establishing this is to argue that the disenchanted world made by modern science has left us with an irreducible plurality of irreconcilable values. Weber terms the irreconcilable values of modernity the ‘warring gods,’ a ‘new polytheism.’ The new polytheism of modernity now constitutes the cultural world out of which the social scientists’ acts of choice arise, as well as the boundary conditions for acting and choosing in the disenchanted world. For Weber, the notions of fluid reality and time we have just outlined provide the context in which the warring gods are fated to do battle. ‘Today,’ he says, ‘the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves: they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another.’62 As the ‘old gods’ are awakened in the institutions of the capitalist economy, in the state, in modern urban regional or national cultures, or on the terrain of religious and ethnic conflicts, they are unleashed to ‘resume their eternal struggle with one another,’ only now against the backdrop of social, political, and economic ‘developmental tendencies’ that are global in scale. The ideal types that are constituted from the perspective of one ‘god’ or another are therefore also always partial, ‘agonistic,’ and contested.63 The open-ended notion of time, which has not been commented on in the Weber literature, has also not been internally connected to Weber’s more famous discussion of the ‘warring gods,’ or the values of modern culture, in his methodology. Together, the clash of the warring gods, reawakened in the disenchanted culture of modernity, and the openended time in which they are fated to do battle, constitute important dimensions of the politics of knowledge or the politics of theory in Weber.

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The assumption that the ‘warring gods’ are locked in ‘eternal struggle’ underlines the idea that history is not progressive or determined in any teleological sense. The metaphor of the warring gods also rejects the metaphysics of progress found in the thought of nineteenth-century proponents of science such as Comte, J.S. Mill, and Marx. Weber thought that teleological notions of historical progress precluded the necessity of choosing the values that created the objects of research and gave it meaning. His methodology, set in an undetermined, contingent temporality, virtually compels social scientists to self-reflexively declare and ‘act’ upon their value choices in their research. Choosing values – which in the context of their perpetual struggle Laurence McFalls has aptly called ‘acts of political as well as scientific foundational violence’ – is not merely the decisive moment in which the professional social scientist creates significance, as we have argued.64 More philosophically, at an ontological level, for Weber it is also an irreducible part of what it means to be human in modernity. Here consider Weber’s lucid words from ‘The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality,’ only now with a different emphasis: ‘Every single important activity and ultimately life as a whole . . . is a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul – as in Plato  –  chooses its fate.’65 The reference to Plato powerfully captures what is at stake, for Weber, in the imagery of the warring gods.66 It is that moment when the soul comes alive as actors make choices that will determine their fate and the fates of unknown others. The fundamental difference between Plato’s world and Weber’s is that the world of the ancients was not meaningless. In contrast, Weber thought that the modern world had been made meaningless by science.67 In a modernity dominated by science, bureaucracy, and capitalism, the universe does not answer when asked to reveal its meaning or truths. It is up to individuals, including social scientists, to reveal those things. They can confront their ‘fate’ only if they are still capable of acting and making choices in a historical universe of open time that summons them to do so. In that time, they are compelled to choose from among the great cultural values of the age and to take responsibility for – or as we would now say, ‘ownership of’ – their choices. In this cultural/historical context, the struggle between the warring gods takes on a fateful quality, for Weber. As Wolin has noted: ‘Even when Weber addressed what seemed on its face a purely methodological question, he transformed it into a political engagement, stark, dramatic and above all, theological.’68 This is the same ‘politics of the soul’ as we noted in previous chapters, and it lies at the heart of Weber’s social science.

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These notions of significance, the partial nature of the ideal type, and the open notion of time that underlies both these things stand opposed to the objectivist notion of truth proposed by Strauss. Since Strauss’s argument is still controversial among political theorists, and still has its adherents, I will critically distinguish it from the preceding discussion. The very modern liberal/subjective formulation of objectivity, choice, and agency is what exercised Strauss in Natural Right and History. Strauss saw Weber’s distinction between facts and values  –  the radical heterogeneity in his social scientific methodology between the Is and the Ought, fact and value – as the triumph of modern positivism. The triumph of the fact/value distinction in modern social science has meant that objective knowledge produced by reason has been limited to the domain of the scientific understanding of nature. For Strauss, modern social science has reduced objectivity to the ethically neutral equivalence of all values. Strauss’s complaint about Weber’s methodology is that in it, ‘there cannot be any genuine knowledge of the Ought’69 because of the heterogeneity and equality of values under modern liberalism. Weber’s value relativism, for Strauss, rests on its historicist understanding of truth. ‘From the historical school he [ Weber] took over the view that there is no possible social order or cultural order that can be said to be the right or rational order.’ If there are no objectively valid criteria that the social scientist can employ to evaluate historical epochs, regimes, and actions, then the observer must be silent before history. All values, actions, and cultures are equal in the eyes of modern social science, according to Strauss. This is Weber’s relativist version of a kind of modern ‘categorical imperative,’ which Strauss says boils down to this: ‘Follow Thy Demon, regardless of whether he is a good or evil demon.’ Or as he puts it: ‘Thou Shalt have Preferences.’70 This follows, for Strauss, from Weber’s injunction that modern social science is value-neutral. The ethical neutrality of the social scientist, unable to objectively decide which values, cultures, or regimes are true and which are not, means that social science is indifferent to Truth. This must be because, as Richard Wellen puts it in his discussion of Strauss, Weber has ‘denied himself recourse to the trans-historical standards’ by which he could judge the best regimes, citizens, or ideals. As Wellen says: ‘Weber refuses the transition from a non-evaluative objectivity to evaluative reason.’71 What frustrates Strauss is that Weber ‘refused to say that science or philosophy is concerned with the truth which is valid for all men.‘72

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For Strauss, Weber’s modern liberal formulation of social science was devastating. It represented the decisive shift of modern liberalism toward nihilism. In Strauss’s view, it ‘necessarily leads to nihilism or to the view that every preference, however evil, base or insane, has to be judged before the tribunal of reason to be as legitimate as any other preference.’73 If one pushes this logic to its conclusion, ‘the quest for truth has the same dignity as stamp collecting. Every pursuit, every whim, becomes as defensible or legitimate as any other.’74 Strauss’s reading of Weber’s texts challenges the very premises of the fact/value distinction and Weber’s methodological individualism and historicism. To make matters worse, Strauss notes that Weber never proves that reason and philosophy cannot produce truth that is universally valid for everyone. Social science, in Weber’s hands, has irretrievably reversed the ‘order’ of the ancients’ view of reason, which alone could elucidate those things that were intrinsically or naturally worth knowing such as excellence, virtue, or the Good. For the ancients, reason alone was capable of giving man access to the highest order of Truth, or knowledge of the proper ends of human existence. Strauss says that ‘if there were genuine knowledge of the ends,’ or the political, ‘that knowledge would guide all search for means,’ or what I have called politics. A ‘genuine’ knowledge of ends would, in the terms we have been using, objectively or universally define the political. It follows from this that ‘based on genuine knowledge of the true ends, social science would search for the proper means to those ends; it would lead up to objective and specific value judgments regarding policies.’75 The search for objective knowledge of the proper ends of man is what guided the ancients’ conception of natural right. Strauss describes it this way prior to his discussion of Weber’s social science in Natural Right and History: ‘Natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe. All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them . . . reason determines what is by nature right with ultimate regard to man’s natural end.’76 This view, of course, has profound implications for how one conceives of the political, the relation of citizens to one another, for philosophy and the role of the philosopher. In Strauss’s view, philosophy is an aristocratic enterprise in which only a privileged few can engage. Nor are philosophers to rule, however. There are thus unbridgeable gaps separating philosophers from rulers from the demos. Ultimately, the political for Strauss is grounded in a transcendental notion of the Good

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that lies beyond politics and beyond the comprehension of the demos. Without the guidance of philosophers in discerning the Good, there is simply nihilistic chaos. For Strauss, the hierarchically ordered polity of the ancients, rooted in natural differences, must guide politics. The demos cannot be trusted to define a vision of the political on their own, because according to Strauss, they cannot comprehend the Good. There are, of course, many questions one can ask about Strauss’s view of political philosophy and its implications for the political. I will touch briefly on a few. First, one could ask  –  as Marx did  –  who educates the educators? Is it the philosophers who set the standard or discover Strauss’s essentialist (absolutist?) notion of Truth? In more current terminology, who holds them accountable, and how? How could they be challenged? In addition, in defining the Truth, the philosophers would also be defining the boundaries and ‘content’ of the political. If there is only one correct view of the Truth, then what does that portend for resistance, opposition, or dissent, for other views and alternatives? Would the definition of the Truth render opposing views marginal, unacceptable, or worse yet, persecuted? What if the definition of the Truth, transcendent in any event for Strauss, were to have religious overtones or underpinnings (recall here our discussion of the authoritarian streak of the Puritans)? Much postmodern criticism has talked about the normalization of discourses of power/knowledge and how the construction of essentialist, universally ‘objective’ discourses renders other views marginal, perverse, untrue. Strauss’s objectivism could have serious implications for political, religious, individual, or group freedoms. Furthermore, the view sanctioned by the philosophers could leave existing social, political, and economic inequalities in place, accepting them uncritically as inevitable or natural. In addition, an existing regime could permit the philosophers to continue their quest for Truth untouched by ‘economic storms,’ the need to work, or political turmoil in an authoritarian regime. The implication here is that the role of the philosophers is not necessarily compatible with democracy, either in Weber’s formulation or in the more radically egalitarian view of Wolin. Strauss’s aristocratic view of the philosopher’s vocation and the knowledge of the Truth it produces could, as Drury has argued, have profoundly anti-democratic consequences.77 Habermas, in his well-known discussions of deliberative democracy, has disagreed with the aristocratic nature of both Strauss’s philosopher and Weber’s ‘decisionist’ social scientist, as well as the differing notions of knowledge/objectivity espoused by each. I want to briefly note his

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objections as they pertain to our discussion of the relation of Weber’s social science to the political. Habermas is critical of the idea that either social science or philosophy is the ‘affair of an intellectual aristocracy.’ He is specifically critical of Weber’s idea – which Wolfe brought out in his temporal distinction between the past and the present in his discussion of Weber’s ideal types – that the social scientist cannot evaluate validity claims. Since the social scientist is embedded in the same life-world, and shares cultural assumptions with those s/he observes and communicates with using the same language and modes of reasoning, it is impossible for her/him be value-neutral or objective in Weber’s sense.78 Judgments and evaluations are already built into communication and observation. All of this necessarily goes into the construction ideal types. Thus, Habermas notes: ‘The specific verstehen problematic lies in the fact that the social scientist cannot “use” this language “found” in the object domain as a neutral instrument. He cannot “enter into” this language without having recourse to the pre-theoretical knowledge of a member of the life world . . . which he has intuitively mastered as a layman and now brings unanalyzed into every process of achieving understanding.’79 From this, Habermas concludes that ‘the social scientist has no privileged access to the object domain; he must draw upon the intuitively mastered interpretive procedures that he has “naturally” acquired as a member of his social group.’80 This means that the social scientist forfeits his/her privileged position in relation to those social actors whom he observes. In contrast to Weber’s view of the social scientist who is distinguished from the ordinary citizen by specialized training, there is, for Habermas, a kind of equality between the social scientist and her/ his objects of study. This democratic turn in Habermas’s view of social science, which is crucial to his view of deliberative democracy, is made possible by an assumption that is central to his model of communicative action, namely, that ‘the agent possesses just as rich an interpretive competence as the observer himself.’81 This is an important democratic principle in the spheres of the modern state and economy within which Weber’s social scientist operates. I appreciate Habermas’s attempt to level the playing field against precisely the kind of elite training and specialization that made social science an ‘affair of the intellectual aristocracy’ for Weber. I would make a few points, however. First, even if the playing field in the production and dissemination of knowledge could be levelled in the global North  –  and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, things are moving in the direction of a wider, not smaller gap between the demos

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and the highly trained technical specialists who run the economy and the state  –  there is still no guarantee that various and often fractious constituencies can or will arrive at consensus. Second, the construction of highly technical object domains of knowledge by specialists of all kinds – political, economic, administrative, scientific – continues to proliferate in the West. As a result of this trend, the inequalities between professional specialists with good jobs and/or resources, and non-specialist citizens  –  especially those relegated to the service sector or those remaining manufacturing workers who perform menial, unspecialized jobs requiring little skill or training in industrial settings designed by Frederick Taylor’s disciples – continue to grow. This is not a uniform process across all sectors of the global economy; however, with neoliberalism still firmly in command at this historical juncture, there are no signs of it abating either. The deployment of social scientific knowledges of power/control, especially in the state and the global corporate sector, continues to create barriers to the kind of democratic consensus sought by Habermas. He, of course, also recognizes the state and the market economy as the two most influential sites of the deployment of social scientific knowledge, and those with the gravest consequences for any attempt to define a new political beyond Weber’s model of democracy or our own. If one adds the exclusions created or perpetuated by specialization to those of race, class, gender, and religion in their now globalized forms, both within the North and between the global North and South, it is questionable whether consensus on key issues – climate change, for example – is possible. Nor will it be consensus among equal citizens, the vast majority of whom do not have access to the specialized training (or the resources to hire it) that would enable them to participate in the ‘legitimate,’ formally representative democratic forums and venues in which issues are decided. In contrast to the criticisms of Strauss and Habermas, Tracy Strong has a different view of the social scientist who creates ideal types. It is one that is also sensitive to the historical world, of which the social sciences are a part, in a way that has implications for the relationship of social science to politics and the political. For Strong, the construction of ideal types begins with an acceptance of the ‘inexhaustible chaos’ of the world into which the social scientist is thrown. That world out of which ideal types are constructed is also an irreducibly historical one in which actors are destined to create meaning. In this regard, Strong argues that ‘the role of the ideal type in establishing the right to make claims about the world has generally been overlooked.’82 The contested issue of who

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has the ‘right’ to make validity claims is another important dimension of what Wolin has called the politics of theory. For Strong, the ideal type is related to the right to make claims in three ways. First, ideal types such as those in the Protestant Ethic will be better the more those who construct them are aware of who they are. Weber was painfully aware of his position and values as a ‘member of the bourgeois classes,’ as he declared in his Freiburg Inaugural Address. Second, the ideal type, for Strong, has a moral as well as a scientific purpose: ‘It compels the acknowledgement of one’s own stance and status and thus keeps one from pretending to a transcendence to which one is not entitled.’ Third, and contra Strauss, the explanatory power of the ideal type rests on ‘only one standard: that of success of recognition of concrete cultural phenomenon in their interdependence, their causal determination and their significance.’83 It follows from this, for Strong, that ‘the knowledge we obtain from using the ideal type will be “objective” as an ordering of the world in categories whose power it is to show ourselves to ourselves as meaningful beings.’ This means, as we have seen, that the ‘ordering of given reality’ in the ideal type rests on categories ‘that are subjective in a specific sense, namely as presenting the presuppositions of our knowledge.’ The values that constitute the presuppositions of our knowledge are ‘made available to us by our history.’84 The values that guide social science in the search for that truth, though inevitably subjective, say something about who we are as historical beings. Revealing who we are historically is intimately bound up not only with how we can make legitimate claims to know reality, but also with who is socially, professionally, or politically entitled to make such claims, since the social scientist, like everyone else, is historically situated, or bound. To reveal who we are historically to ourselves, one of the questions we need to ask is: ‘Who has the right to make claims about reality?’ For Strong, the key question then becomes: If the world is for Weber . . . inexhaustible chaos, then the source of the validity of understanding of this world must be derived not from the ‘facts’ of this world, but from the quality and character of a person of knowledge. What kind of person must one be – what must one have acknowledged about one’s own historicity – in order to be . . . entitled to make ‘objective’ claims about our condition?85

To make ‘objective’ claims about our condition, one must accept – and I think this is key as a rejoinder to both Strauss’s conception of the

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philosopher and Habermas’s participant observer who is an equal citizen in a democratic deliberative process  –  the limitations of what it means to be a social scientist. Those limitations include what historical sociology enforces on us: the permanence of the division of labor, the necessity of specialization, the demagification of the world, the end of amateurishness. To have accepted and acknowledged as oneself these qualities of the modern world means to have accepted as oneself the position of member of the professional middle classes, of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, to acknowledge oneself as a bourgeois is a precondition for being able to responsibly make a claim to scientific truth.86

It follows from this that one has to accept  –  as Weber did and Habermas does not  –  that there is an elite privilege and training in being the kind of person who can make valid claims to ‘objective’ social scientific knowledge.87 This kind of social scientist is, in late modernity, perhaps the predominant culturally/historically specific version of the ‘unavoidably ascetic trait of the vocational specialist type of man’ of whom Weber spoke in ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’ and ‘Science as a Vocation.’88 The vocational specialist type of person is the product of the historical process of rationalization whose outcomes are bureaucracy, the state, and the modern capitalist economic order. Yet s/he also exists in a world of value plurality, the cultural universe of the warring gods. And like the politician, the social scientist must acknowledge and choose her gods and demons. For Weber, ‘our civilization destines us to realize more clearly these struggles again.’89 These cultural/political struggles are, in modernity, for Weber, just as inexorable as the developmental tendency of bureaucracy; they are constitutive of all social scientific research and its presuppositions. What Strong’s insight tells us about our own historicity and historical moment, and the relation of these to social science, is that beneath the intense methodological and discursive battles around gender, race, and class of the past thirty years in the Anglo-American academy, there is another constitutive layer that challenges the current discourse of heterogeneous rights. The predominance of the ‘vocational specialist type’ in the social sciences, in the massive apparatuses of the state, and in the institutions and culture of the global corporate universe, have rendered marginal, fugitive, other ways of knowing and seeing, be they traditional or charismatic, such as the dreams of the sage Lame Deer of the Lakota. They are fugitive in the specific sense outlined by Wolin: they

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are non-scientific and non-institutionalized.90 As such, in the modern world they are emblems of powerlessness. This specifies the relation of social science to politics and the political in the global North at the beginning of the third millennium, despite Wolin’s injunction that Weber’s hard-edged notion of choice forces social scientists to make politically significant choices in the very construction of their ideal types and research projects. The production of highly specialized knowledge in huge institutions – still in Weber’s sense an affair of various ‘intellectual aristocracies’ who occupy privileged sites atop the state and corporate sector, with their vast and highly professionalized administrative resources91 – does not bode well for a self-governing demos. In addition to the now more commonly cited exclusions of race, gender, disability, and age, we should not forget the exclusions of specialization and the ways in which specialists in the middle-class professions colonize and try to monopolize knowledge-drawing boundaries of exclusion and even secrecy around spheres of ‘information’ and practice that Weber accepted as necessary for the functioning of the modern democratic state as well as the capitalist economy. One might thus say that the exclusive nature of the production of knowledge in late-modern liberal democracies is also constitutive of Weber’s model of politics. Yet it is still possible to envision other potentialities from within the modern universe of even the most specialized social scientist. Specialists can still produce valuable knowledge in ways that do not simply contribute to the seemingly inexorable ‘Herrschaft of facticity,’ in Wolin’s apt phrase, and that do not simply follow from the way science has rendered the modern world meaningless – namely, the perpetual reproduction of a world of ‘power without right.’92 The notion of open time embedded in Weber’s ideal type allows for the specialized training of social scientists to point critically to diverse aspects of the great cultural and political problems of the day, to construct causal/historical sequences that allow us to see, from perspectives of those other than the great hegemonic late-modern powers, that the past came to be the present in ways that do not conform to the official views of the dominant classes, groups, or elites. In rare cases – usually in periods of flux or crisis that give rise to paradigm shifts – social, political, or economic thinkers and social scientists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Keynes can actually change fundamentally the ways the great cultural and political issues are seen and understood. This is the opposite of the routinized bureaucratic knowledge produced by ‘specialists without spirit,’ to recall Weber’s famous words in the Protestant Ethic. It can

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contribute to the redefinition of how politics works as well as to the formulation of a new political. Under more normal circumstances, there are always openings for critique, however fleeting, to which social scientists can contribute. This is precisely because their interventions and ideal types will always be partial in the way Breiner has outlined. Recall his argument that the ideal types are partial in every respect; they are built as constructions against which to test other equally partial perspectives and constructs. Breiner reaches this conclusion because, for Weber, there was no way, in a modernity based on rational science, of definitively privileging one perspective over others. If ideal types are constructed out of assumptions drawn from partial and ultimately partisan perspectives, they cannot help but contain traces, more or less self-consciously, of competing notions of the political. To the extent that they reconstruct historical events that contain these traces, they are also fated to reveal moments of the memory of the political. These moments are also fated, as Weber said, to be in eternal conflict, suspended from definitive resolution, competing traces of historical memory perpetually caught up in the politics of modern social science, struggling to contribute to the emergence of a new political or to the maintenance of the dominant powers.

Conclusion

It is, of course . . . a fact confirmed by all historical experience, that what is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible. But the person who can do this must be a leader; not only that, he must, in a very simple sense of the word, be a hero. Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’1

This quote, from the last lines of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ though not quite as famous as many others from Weber, precisely captures the dilemma of his model of democracy. In the context of the historical constraints that confronted Weber and other progressives, be they liberal, socialist, or feminist in the aftermath of the First World War, arguing for a formal system of universal suffrage and the full inclusion of the working class constituted a (liberal) version of ‘reaching for the impossible.’ But, Weber believed, only heroic leaders were really capable of both envisioning the impossible (in ethics of conviction) and achieving the possible (in ethics of responsibility) within the constraints of the given historical circumstances – of achieving, in the sense I have attributed to Weber, the redefinition of the political. This tension provides me with a theme that will allow me to link, in these concluding remarks, the preceding discussion of Weber’s model of realist democracy, and his conception of the relation between politics and the political, to two of the many theoretical assessments of democracy today in the global North. This is not done explicitly or often in the Weber literature. The outpouring of scholarship produced by the Weber ‘revival’ of the 1990s has

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focused largely on genealogical and exegetical efforts to recover a vari­ ety of lost contexts for Weber’s work – political, historical, theoretical, and biographical.2 Yet these voluminous efforts have been carried out largely apart from the equally voluminous, and equally impassioned, debates in democratic theory that have arisen parallel to the Weber revival. In the ‘collective’ academic/cultural memory of professional sociologists, Weber is still seen as, among other things, a founder of modern social science.3 Yet his profile as a founder of the competitive-elitist model of democracy has been less noticed and less controversial. He has been a somewhat marginal figure in recent debates over democracy, partly because of the legacy of this Anglo-American ‘reception-history,’ which branded him many years ago as the founder of a value-neutral or unpolitical social science.4 In addition, Weber’s elitist concern with the rigorous ethical requirements of leadership has been left behind and/ or subjected to savage criticism by more recent ‘deconstructions’ by the postmodern left, as well as by deliberative and radical democrats who are not postmodern. Yet among some political theorists, there is growing recognition, on the margins of the Weber ‘industry,’ of a complex set of concerns and problems associated with the relationship between Western representative democracies and Western (now global) capitalism  –  concerns and problems that tie Weber to us. Modern Western democracies and capitalism have both proven to be highly bureaucratic and specialized. As ‘rationalized’ as each has become in the hundred years since Weber wrote about them, both remain fraught with tensions. Weber’s challenges regarding the complexities and predicaments of the modern democratic state and capitalism are still with us in the early twentyfirst century. There is an irony to this: The model of democracy that Weber attempted to found almost one hundred years ago was a rebellion against, and a more democratic alternative to, the crumbling, authoritarian monarchical system in Wilhelmine Germany. Yet halfway through the twentieth century, after the defeat of fascism, a version of the model for which Weber had argued became, in very different historical circumstances, the hegemonic system and paradigm for democracy in the global North/West. At the dawn of the new millennium, twenty years after the collapse of its communist rival, that model – now in the guise of neoliberalism – is under fire for its own practices of exclusion, its own inadequate mechanisms and constructions of democratic representation, and its own concentrations of power and wealth; and, most recently, for not being able to control the volatility of a deregulated

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global capitalism and its financial markets.5 In Europe just after Weber’s death in 1920, fledgling democracies were challenged by the rise of the radical right and by the newly founded Soviet Union. Though the historical and political forces are, of course, different now: the challenges faced by the realist model in the global North today, in the era of postcommunism and global neoliberalism, are the result of multiple movements and forces, which Weber would still recognize. In the conclusion to this book, I will identify some of the threads that connect Weber to early twenty-first-century Anglo-American democratic thought in the global North. This treatment will by no means be exhaustive. I will try to include Weber again in the current debates, even while reaching beyond his model. I will proceed by recollecting the journey we have taken through Weber’s democratic thought. I will then compare Weber’s thinking on these matters to that of two leading democratic theorists who have critically responded to some of his key issues and challenges. Mark Warren has outlined a host of paradoxes facing representative democracies in the global North today. I want to go through his issues in some detail. His critique begins, in many ways, at the limits of Weber’s realist model. I will then move on to discuss Sheldon Wolin’s (sometimes quite Weberian) assessment of the current predicaments facing liberal democracy in the global North. After decades of intellectual labour, Wolin has emerged as a leading critic of democracy in Anglo-American academe. His work has a close affinity with many of Weber’s critical themes and issues, while pushing them in a more radically democratic direction in a different historical context. Wolin has a critical appreciation of, and an intense engagement with, the themes that animated Weber’s work on politics, the state, capitalism, and social science, as well as the intimate relations among these spheres in modernity. This emerges most dramatically in some of Wolin’s best-known work, in articles such as ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ which we discussed in relation to Weber’s social-scientific methodology in chapter 5. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs have referred to that article as ‘a breathtaking critical essay on Weber’s place in the political tradition.’6 Wolin has noted that Weber’s writings have endured because ‘they reveal him deeply engaged with the powers that dominate the soul of modern man: bureaucracy, science, violence and the intellectualism that has destroyed the spiritual resources on which humankind has fed for more than three thousand years.’7 Implicit in and central to this list are the modern state and capitalism, neither of which is ever far from Wolin’s

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field of vision. Wolin’s work has endured over the decades because it shows him to be ‘deeply engaged’ with powers and issues similar to those that consumed Weber. Wolin and Weber have differing yet related views of these epochally significant issues. Their notions of democracy are starkly different; yet in the context of their own historical contexts, both are highly critical of existing politics and the lack of a more democratic political. They also share, albeit from very different perspectives, a deep concern with the history and destiny of the imperial powers in which they find themselves enmeshed and which so dramatically affect their work and their political and intellectual personalities. For Weber, this concern was not easily separated from what he considered to be the highest form of community or commonality: the nation. In circumstances of political collapse after the First World War, two paramount issues were political and social cohesion and the creation of a new political system. For Weber, as I have noted, this meant that the question of how to include the working class in a new, formally democratic national community urgently needed to be resolved. This concern was heightened by the revolutionary situation in Germany immediately after the war, when the nation was at its weakest;8 and when, in the turmoil of collapse, more radical notions of a new socialist political and conservative calls for monarchic restoration were competing for support among the working classes with Weber’s proposed model of parliamentary democracy. For Wolin, writing in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, without the complete defeat or collapse of America in a catastrophic war, the highest form of commonality can be found not in the existing, institutionalized system of representative democracy, but in the demos and the fleeting moments of collective self-determination still available to it. Even with these differences in mind, Wolin is one of the few prominent political theorists who, over many years, has repeatedly engaged Weber’s work and concerns, albeit not as a scholar in the Weber ‘industry.’ Thus he has lived ‘for’ some of the great Weberian themes, though not ‘from’ Weber, to echo Weber’s famous distinction in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’9 Before proceeding to this discussion, however, let me briefly recapitulate my argument, connecting its threads in an overview that will allow me to argue that in the current debates, in voices such as Warren’s, and in Wolin’s, we still hear echoes of a ‘long and intense dialogue’ with Weber’s ghost over the meaning of democracy and the political.10

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I I have argued that Weber’s immediate historical concern was to search for a new political during a time of crisis in postwar Germany. Weber was seeking to replace a monarchical, pre-liberal, profoundly reactionary system – one based on a differential, three-tiered franchise – with a system of parliamentary democracy based on equal suffrage and formal equality. In this regard, he wanted to replace the existing, exclusionary system with an institutional framework that would include on a formally equal footing the working class, women, and soldiers returning from the war. But he was faced with two challenges in arguing for a new and more democratic institutional system, or form, of politics. First, his sociology provided him with the ideal type of the modern rational, hierarchical, specialized bureaucratic organization. As Breiner has noted, Weber often turned this ideal type into an inexorable developmental tendency in his political writings and arguments. He wedded these arguments to his publicly made case for formal equality in the context of a representative democracy. Then, using ideal-typical arguments for the inevitability and irreversibility of the bureaucratic organization of the modern state, Weber deployed these arguments against political opponents on the socialist left as well as against the reactionary coalition of monarchists, nationalists, and industrialists on the right. Against the left he argued that more substantively or radically democratic forms of participation or agency were simply not feasible in any polity based on the machinery of the modern administrative state. The modern state, for Weber, was the irreducibly necessary institutional form and centre of democratic politics. As I have argued, politics for Weber also needed a ‘quasi-transcendental’ grounding, as Fred Dallmayr has put it in his discussion of Wolin, fugi­ tive democracy, and the political.11 Yet as we saw in chapter 5, Weber’s own studies on the methodology of the social and cultural sciences showed that this kind of ‘grounding’ was non-teleological and could not be established in an absolutely objective, transcendent way beyond or above historical time. Weber sought to anchor that ‘foundation’  –  which in the context of the warring gods of modern disenchanted culture can only be contingent in any case – in the personality of the charismatic leader. He invested the heroic vocational politician with the almost exclusive agency to redefine the political – those moments of commonality that for Weber could bring the national community together in a time of crisis.

Conclusion 181

It is both the power and the tragic limitation of Weber’s vision that he gave us the compelling image of the heroic actor who was singularly saddled with the capability of re-creating the political within the institutional form of a system of democratic politics. It is this quest for the political – limited by the given, yet pressing the limits of the possible –  that takes Weber’s work beyond his immediate historical context and that continues to make it a challenge for democratic theory today. Weber’s image of the political, which did not include the active agency of the demos in a leading role, was based on two things, both intimately related to those ominous developmental tendencies that often provided the background for, and sometimes dominated, his political writings as well as his historical sociological work. Both are reactions to those tendencies, acknowledging their existence and seeming inevitability. First, Weber’s vocational politician was inspired by the charismatic example of the heroic Puritan, who changed the world by establishing capitalism through an ethically rigorous, religiously inspired conduct of life. The ideal-typical Puritan served for Weber as a model from the past that he hoped could inspire leaders of the future, whose task it would be to create a new political in the wake of a national collapse and crisis. It was a version of the memory of the political, a foundational myth embodied in the heroic Puritan, that might sustain those who ventured into the complex and difficult arena of democratic politics. But to ensure that those developmental tendencies did not turn into the ‘iron cage,’ or the hard steel casing that Weber prophesied in the closing pages the Protestant Ethic, he embedded the agency of the heroic actor in a notion of open time, which he first articulated in his methodological writings. This temporality open to agency and possibility was meant to counteract two opponents, one historical and political, the other intellectual. The open time in which Weber wanted to situate the political hero/ actor was meant to counteract the massive bureaucratic forces that threatened to dominate the modern spheres of the state and the economy. In addition to Weber’s view that only the state could act as a minimal check and balance on the power of private capital, the notion of open-ended time added a further space within the ‘steel-hard casing’ in which political action would be possible. This was an attempt to ensure that the ‘casing’ would not be completely closed to either the vocational politician or the modern social scientist. As Wolin has argued, social scientists share some of both the agency and the responsibility of the heroic political agent; they also need to make choices and ‘act,’ in their

182 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

research, on the ultimate values that animate the conflicting visions of the political and that often (however indirectly) underlie social scientific research (policy research in particular). Both the politician and the social scientist have agency only in the context of an open-ended, non-teleologically defined historical temporality. The non-teleological dimension concerned Weber’s arguments against Marxist and (especially) Hegelian philosophies of history, which saw historical development in teleological terms, as driven by a universal if emergent and not yet fully manifested or comprehended agent of change. Second, there are, for Weber, historical moments of lucidity, possibility, and dramatic transformation in which the impossible, over time and through conflict and struggle, becomes the new historical reality. But instead of being instantiated by the demos, these ‘epochal transformations’ become embodied in specific exemplary, ideal-typical figures, themselves representative of (current or to be ‘hegemonic’) historical movements.12 Weber’s favourite example, in which we find the foundational myth of the Puritan, was the heroic age of the bourgeoisie in which the asceticism of the Puritans fuelled the rise of capitalism and changed the world. The political, for Weber, depends on such gifted figures as leaders of movements and, ultimately, states; they are the driving forces of historical change. For David Dyzenhaus, this way of seeing things – where the participation of the vast majority of the electorate is limited to the periodic acclaim of leaders competing for the offices of state – results in a truncated and permanently split polity.13 As we have seen, the rational bureaucratization of modern democratic politics is responsible for this; it sets limits to both mass democratic participation and even what exemplary leaders can do. In Economy and Society, in ‘Mass Parties and the Bureaucratic Consequences of Democratization,’ Weber says bluntly that the demos itself, in the sense of the shapeless mass, never ‘governs’ larger associations, but rather is governed. What changes [in modernity] is the way in which executive leaders are selected and the measure of influence which the demos, or better, which social circles from its midst are able to exert upon the content and direction of administrative activities by means of ‘public opinion.’ ‘Democratization’ . . . does not necessarily mean an increasingly active share of the subjects in government.14

From this argument regarding the need for bureaucratic dominance of politics and its constraining influence on the realization of the political,

Conclusion 183

Weber gave us a model of a liberal constitutional order without either substantive equality beyond the ballot box, or active, continuous participation by the demos at what we would now call the ‘grassroots’ level. Yet at the same time, he was not completely closed to the idea that ordinary citizens could have agency. At the end of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ we see a fugitive glimpse of this when Weber tells his audience that the ordinary citizen who acts on the ‘basis of an ethics of responsibility, says at some point, “Here I stand, I can do no other” . . . For it must be possible for each of us to find ourselves in such a situation at some point if we are not inwardly dead.’15 Here Weber is talking about heroically accepting responsibility for the consequences of one’s own past political actions (or inaction). This seems to imply that all citizens are capable of political action, for which they then must accept responsibility before their fellow citizens. The action in question, and accepting responsibility for it, could theoretically be collective and not only individual; and it could be geared toward change, even toward the radical alteration of existing politics or the political. Weber did not, however, give free rein to this more democratic (fu­ gitive?) impulse. This is because he felt that to achieve even the limited, bureaucratized ‘leader democracy with a machine’ – which was part of his proposal for parliamentary reform – would be to push against the limits of the possible in post–First World War Germany. He felt that alternative visions of the political, from the left (the new Soviet Union, the new German Communist Party) and from the far right (the industrialists and monarchists who wanted to regain power), would be far worse and even less democratic. Weber was unable (or unwilling) to separate the democratic impulse implicit in the statement ‘for it must be possible for each of us to find ourselves in such a situation at some point’ from his analysis/deployment of the inexorability of the bureaucratic structures of the modern state and party. He deployed that analysis extensively, as we have argued; and he included the institutions of state and party in the model of parliamentary democracy that we find in his political writings and public advocacy. Weber wanted to replace the old institutional structures with new, more liberal ones. His image of the hero he saw as both a historical necessity and an opportunity. The heroic agent that Weber wanted to lead this change was caught between epochal forces of working-class assertion, on the one hand, and the need to contain revolutionary impulses, on the other. His system was a liberal compromise between the two. Parliamentary democracy can momentarily unify the two in contingent decisions regarding national

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interests – interests that nominally include workers and women – but it cannot resolve contradictions, be they social or economic, in fundamental ways or permanently, based on either teleology or grand narratives (i.e., of today’s fundamentalism). It is possible, however, to separate the more radically democratic impulse we glimpsed in Weber’s ‘for it must be possible for each of us’ from both the new institutional context in which Weber wanted to locate parliamentary politics, and the role that he assigned to leaders in defining a new political within that institutional system. In a moment I will argue that both Warren and Wolin represent late-twentieth-century departures from Weber in separating both politics (Warren) and the political (Wolin) from the state as Weber conceived it. In doing so, each theorist has pushed the boundaries of the democratic discussion beyond the realist model for which Weber had to fight, in his own time, against hostile odds. I would reframe Weber’s observation somewhat, leaning toward the ethic of conviction that Weber said, in the same closing remarks, is the complement to the ethic of responsibility and not its antithesis: in extraordinary historical moments – including moments of rupture, historical openings, in which established forms of rule, politics, and oppression are challenged from below – it is possible for ordinary citizens to stand on principle, to say ‘no more,’ to resist, to refuse, to say ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ In doing so, they help create an open temporality, a historically open but contingent moment that can redefine the possibilities of agency and the political. We can thus glimpse a more democratic interpretation of the ‘possible’ if we detach Weber’s notion of political change from an emphasis on elite leadership that largely excludes and only partly includes the demos, and if we allow for (perhaps more rare) moments – partly of historical opportunity, partly selfgenerated through resistance, activism, and organization  –  in which the demos can participate in building processes of collective self-rule. In different ways, both Warren and Wolin explore and push the limits of the possible in ways that are sympathetically critical of Weber, yet that build on and try to move beyond his limits. II Mark Warren, a democratic theorist who has also addressed Weber’s concerns, has picked up on the possibilities for ordinary citizens to act in concert while at the same time problematizing and rethinking the

Conclusion 185

realist model. He does so by engaging Weber’s model and its successors on issues of democratization and the spaces for democratic participation both within and outside existing state systems and structures. In his assessment of the alignment between the realist model and how democracy in the global North currently works, Warren is interested in rethinking ‘what democratic participation can mean today within a political landscape beset by democratic paradoxes.’16 The paradoxes begin with the fact that while the state in Western democracies is increasingly pervasive, many citizens have come to accept (as Weber would have argued) that ‘the major premise [is] that political participation by most people, most of the time will . . . be limited to acts of voting.’17 This is because the system of formal democratic politics in the West, whose institutional arrangements are reflections of power, does not provide adequate avenues for ongoing, equal, and effective collective citizen participation. Notwithstanding the recent (and momentary? fleeting?) electoral mobilization undertaken by Obama’s Democrats in the United States, for some time now critics have suggested that the realist model creates ‘apathetic’ citizens who participate in politics minimally. The small numbers of citizens who are actively involved in parties and the electoral process are still highly concentrated, just as Weber thought would inevitably be the case in modern democracies.18 But Warren takes issue with this supposition. He argues, rather, that citizens are disaffected. Disaffection is a much more active and engaged stance. It also reflects the idea that citizens who are now less deferential to traditional forms of political authority are coming to expect more, not less, from the governments they elect. As Warren notes: ‘Disaffection reflects not apathy but increasingly critical evaluations of government.’ Warren is also critical of a key assumption of the realist model that is closely related to this: ‘Part of the reason that individuals are “apathetic” about politics is that they conceive “politics” as equivalent to the state.’19 By ever larger numbers of citizens, the state is no longer seen as the privileged site of democratic politics. The state, though formally democratic, is experienced by many citizens – especially the poor, the marginalized, and the working class  –  as inaccessible as well as unrepresentative, as run by remote, specialized, political and technocratic elites. In a challenge to Weber’s state-centred model and its successors (Schumpeter and Dahl among the most prominent Anglo-American examples), Warren suggests that these developments indicate that ‘the

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realist model of democracy is outdated, not least because it focuses almost entirely on the possibilities for self-governance through the state.’20 In Warren’s view the competitive-elite model no longer adequately describes the ‘real world’ of liberal democracies, to use C.B. Macpherson’s term. We are in a transitional period in which ‘reality is, once again, ahead of democratic theory, so we don’t yet have the conceptual tools we need to assess these developments.’21 Some of the key assumptions of the realist model and its limited forms of participation, which Weber took to be inevitable and even necessary, are now widely viewed by citizens as inadequate. Yet even while the existing system of representative democracy remains in place, we are not entirely sure which forms of democratic participation can replace or supplant it, in the global North at least. Warren suggests that we do not yet have the language to articulate a new consensus on what democracy, beyond or outside the state, means. The rational consensus, which Habermas and some deliberative democrats thought possible in mature Western democracies under the welfare state, has not materialized over the past two decades.22 New languages and sharply contested visions of the political have emerged in an environment of neoliberal globalization, marked by the declining legitimacy of the shell of the realist model to which the political and economic elites of the nationstates of the global North still cling. Both within and beyond academe, these sharply contested disputes over the political can be seen in the ongoing, fractious debates over postmodernism and identity politics, and in the revival of traditions of political economy on the left, as well as in critiques of democratic legitimacy from the right. All seek to fill the void left by the waning legitimacy of the realist model and the post–Second World War Keynesian welfare state, in arguing for new democratic possibilities, with definitions of ‘democracy’ varying widely. When the state is no longer seen as an accessible site of democratic politics for the demos, when the rights of some are favoured by governments while the rights of others are invisible or fugitive, then the things that might be achieved primarily by trying to democratize the existing, representative state also lessen in significance or become more problematic. A corollary of this for Warren is that ‘increasing disaffection from formal political institutions seems to be paralleled by increasing attention toward other ways and means of getting collective things done.’23 Democratic politics and the participation that shapes it take place increasingly outside state structures and the electoral system. Those organizations, whether they work as part of a broader policy community or outside the political arena entirely, have often sought

Conclusion 187

to function in less hierarchical bureaucratic ways in which more democratic, egalitarian principles are part of the day-to-day practice and experience of participation. Recall that in Weber’s assessment, despite vigorous competition among civil society groups for power and prestige, democratizing the franchise did not extend to the democratization of civil society or the economy. The uneven, episodic or fugitive democratization/politicization in the civil society groups to which Warren refers has occurred precisely because of the limitations built into Weber’s model of leadership-driven representative democracy. Warren points to this trend when he notes that ‘developing the political and civic capacities of citizens’ has occurred outside the political arena on a broader scale, often in institutional settings that are ‘flatter, looser, more democratic forms of organization,’24 more deeply participatory and egalitarian than the traditional institutions of state or party. He observes that ‘the erosion of the state as a collective actor has been accompanied by a multiplication of political venues’ and that ‘venues of collective action are increasingly pluralized and increasingly unlikely to be organized directly by the state.’25 Warren’s view  –  now widely shared by scholars, activists, and growing numbers of ordinary citizens  –  represents a strong, critical challenge to Weber’s model, its successors, and their state-centred view of what the realist view saw as the business side of democratic politics. But in this view, Warren is not postmodern; his decentring of the state and his search for more egalitarian and extensive democratic citizen participation does not mean that he sees attempts to create a new political as utterly groundless, that they occur in an ‘empty place’ as an ‘absent presence’ or as the ‘disparity’ of incommensurate views that share no common ground.26 Warren’s view does not fall into what Robert Antonio has called the ‘strong-program post-modern’ positions of deconstruction or radical difference that have emerged from French post-structuralism.27 Nor does Warren’s position correspond to that of ‘agonistic democrats’ such as Chantal Mouffe, for example. Yet neither does it sit in the camp of ‘deliberative democrats’; it does not imply that a new and more democratic political can be fully constructed through rational consensus and agreement within or across civil society. The significance of Warren’s intervention in the debates – which appeared in 2002, shortly after Seyla Benhabib’s influential volume of essays Democracy and Difference (which included contributions by a broad range of democratic theorists, such as Chantal Mouffe, an ‘agonistic’ democrat; Fred Dallmyr, a ‘cosmopolitan’ democrat; Benhabib

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herself and Stephen K. White, ‘deliberative’ democrats influenced more by Habermas]; and Sheldon Wolin, whose important article ‘Fugitive Democracy’ appeared in the collection) – is that it steers a course somewhere between the ‘agonistic’ and ‘deliberative’ positions, outlining a critique that does not reject meaning altogether but that at the same time is critical of the state as the central or only legitimate site of democratic politics or the political.28 Warren shares the critique of the state with a growing number of democratic theorists; but he is not saying that the state is unimportant or about to melt away. In this, he retains a Weberian appreciation of the state’s power  –  something he shares with Wolin  –  and its continuing yet problematic predominance and significance. Yet as democratic practices and sensibilities spill out beyond the boundaries of the state in mature liberal democracies, the realist model first championed by Weber no longer adequately describes the changing realities, complexities, and paradoxes of democratic participation, representation, and exclusion. As Warren provocatively puts it, very much in the spirit of Wolin’s own critique of the institutionalized form of representative democracy, ‘democracy ought to follow politics, not political institutions.’29 Wolin, whose concern is to revive the idea of a more radically democratic political in which the demos is the central actor, chimes in on a related note: ‘Democracy is not about where [my italics] the political is located [institutionally – my addition] but about how it is experienced.’30 In his discussion of the conditions of democratic participation in which democratic engagement takes place sporadically, unevenly, in spaces within but also increasingly outside the state and across boundaries and/or intersections of race, class, gender, nationality, and religion, often against the powers of capital and the state, Warren is describing the conditions of agency and the possibilities for democratic politics in a situation of fugitive democracy, in which the role of the demos has been systemically circumscribed and diminished but not completely extinguished by the extraordinary powers of the late-modern state and political economy. This critique of the realist view presents a serious challenge to Weber’s model of democratic politics as a ‘business’ that has the state at its centre. III Weber’s model of democracy required participation that we can refer to as simple. It stipulated the conditions of ‘minimal codetermination’ and

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‘minimum consent.’ Weber saw simple participation, and the complementary argument for leaders who could define the political that went with it, as the necessary, mass foundation of his attempt to found a new democratic system in pre-liberal, post–Second World War Germany. The basic outline of his model, in which citizen participation was limited to the act of voting in periodic elections organized by elites-led parties, stayed with the realist model in its post–Second World War reincarnation by Schumpeter and Dahl. Yet the issues raised by Dyzenhaus with regard to Weber’s model still haunt Western liberal democracies, only now under different historical circumstances. If we bracket or modify (or drop?) Weber’s notions of the necessity or inexorability of ‘leader democracy with a machine,’ we can see democratic participation and engagement as complex, not simple.31 The conditions of citizen participation are now more fluid, overdetermined by multiple sets of global political-economic, multi-cultural, ethnic, religious, and other circumstances. The kind of citizen activism and participation envisioned by Warren now occurs discontinuously across multiple settings, sometimes within but also on the boundaries of systems of formal representative democracy, but as often either outside of such systems, or on the ‘borderlines,’ in the gaps and grey areas between the state and civil society. In these borderline spaces it may be possible for the demos to envision different ideal types of the political or to engage in self-generated practices out of which moments of a new political can be generated.32 This is possible if we recall the notion of an open-ended time in which the ‘warring gods’ are fated to struggle. This open-ended notion of temporality is, I have argued, a historicizing moment in which both agency and critique are possible, in which alternative futures and common projects can be constructed, in which a new political can be democratically created in the transformative, cooperative actions and designs of ordinary citizens, in which their beginnings can be imagined. Thus Weber’s view, with its notion of possibility embedded in an open-ended time, can be seen as an argument against the inexorability of precisely those developmental, rationalizing trends toward ‘totalizing’ bureaucratic domination that Weber himself warned of, as well as the ‘polar night of icy darkness and hardness’ that he foresaw in the competing visions of the political on the radical right which sought to mythically ‘re-enchant’ the soulless, disenchanted world of modernity.33 Yet I do not want to romanticize or ‘reify’ Weber’s notion of openended time. Weber’s foreboding ‘steel-hard casing’ is never completely

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closed, as Alkis Kontos has argued.34 But neither is it very open  –  a theme pursued relentlessly by Sheldon Wolin. Those developmental tendencies which characterize the late-modern political economy remain as daunting challenges to critics of Weber’s realist model of democracy and radical democrats. The state, as the predominant organizational form of institutional politics in the liberal democracies of the global North, is still a dominant fact of political life and cannot simply be avoided in the imagination of a new political or new arrangements for the conduct of what Weber thought of as the ‘business’ of modern democratic politics. In Wolin’s view, democracy is now captive to the deeply entrenched, institutionalized powers of late modernity: the state, capitalism/consumerism, modern science and technology. These institutional ‘spheres,’ in Weber’s terminology, no longer check and balance one another, as Weber thought the modern state and economy would; instead they conspire to create and enforce conditions of political passivity in large segments of the demos. IV Sheldon Wolin’s critical engagement with current and historical democratic paradoxes and dilemmas of modern American democracy is, in some ways, as dramatic and starkly drawn as Weber’s. It is confined, however, by the very specialization of which Weber spoke. In Wolin we see the late-modern thinker in academe reaching for the impossible, deeply engaged in theorizing democratic possibilities with an acute awareness of the great historical forces and powers that have shaped and limited the current moment and its democratic potentialities and that have rendered more profound experiences of democracy in the global North fugitive, ephemeral, and fleeting. Wolin’s provocative analysis of ‘fugitive democracy’ emerges from his sharp juxtaposition of (very Weberian) modern developmental tendencies in the state and economy, with the discussion of democracy, the role of the demos, and the political in the Western tradition of political thought. Over many years, Wolin has engaged Weber and his key themes with tenacity and insight. Wolin traces the political and its strong association with notions of public purpose and commonality among citizens back to Aristotle, whose thought and the historical context in which it arose provides a kind of originary moment for the idea of the political in the Western tradition of political thought. For Aristotle, the highest achievement of which human reason was capable was the formation of the political

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association, or the polis. The polis was governed by the political, or hē politikē, which as Wolin has noted had the double meaning of ‘the master science that dealt with the multiple “ends” . . . appropriate to the political association and the highest human good attainable through collective life.’35 Thus the political was not, as it was to become in modernity, ‘a department of society, or a separate sector.’ Nor was it separated from the means necessary to achieve it. For Aristotle, some means – which also meant certain people – were naturally subordinate and necessary for the realization or achievement of the highest ends. Echoing the terms we have used throughout the text, a teleological notion of the political, grounded in natural hierarchies, could not be separated from politics or the means of its realization. Yet, in articles such as ‘Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,’ Wolin notes that the political – Politikē – in the way Aristotle (and his mentor Plato) had envisioned it, was strictly separated from the demos and superior to it. The highest ends of human and political life, and the capacity to realize them, were not considered achievable by ordinary people, by women or slaves. Plato becomes, in Wolin’s own (ideal-typical?) narrative construction of the history of the demos, the first in a long line of theorists in the Western tradition who have been critical of the demos as an unruly mob, an untamed rabble capable only of creating democracy as an anarchic, unstable form of rule. It was the ancient philosophers who began what Wolin sees as an underground leitmotif of the Western tradition, in which the critics of democracy, who have invariably seen it as wild, undisciplined, and divorced from the highest ends of human life, have nonetheless, ironically, kept its memory and potentialities alive. Instead of seeing this attribute of the demos negatively, Wolin celebrates its anarchic quality, its refusal to be contained: ‘Thus democracy is wayward, inchoate, unable to rule yet unwilling to be ruled. It does not naturally conform. It is inherently formless.’36 Like Weber’s discussion of the Puritan hero, Wolin’s key illustration is located in a specific historical moment, in the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403–2 BC, when the demos rejected an attempt to ‘limit the franchise to property owners, thereby preserving its egalitarian conception of citizenship.’37 This also signified a moment in which, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has noted, farmers, labourers, and craftsmen  –  those without property  –  became equal citizens and were not, because of their economic status, subject to economic exploitation by a propertied oligarchy.38 The rebellion by the demos against the tyranny of the Thirty that

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resulted in the restoration of democracy was a protest against the previous form of rule, which was ‘inherently exploitative’ and which saw the political as the form of knowledge that guided rulers in the art of ‘how to use others.’39 In its originary moments, for Wolin, the demos was both fundamentally resistant to oppression and taken up with the direct participation of equal (male) members of the community, whether they owned property or not. In his reading of the rebellious and egalitarian nature of ancient Athenian democracy, we see both Wolin’s archaism, which plays an important role in his thought in preserving the memory of the political, and his propensity to see and to celebrate the demos as anarchic. In the specificity of this coupling, Wolin captures the ‘golden age’ of the demos in a way that echoes Weber’s celebration and retrieval of the Puritan hero as the founder of modern capitalism. Wolin’s vision, akin in spirit to Weber’s though substantively different in its notions of democracy and the role of the demos, has been concerned in part to keep alive the heroic memory of a democratic political, to retrieve that which might still resonate across millennia even though it is, like Weber’s Puritan hero, lost in time. This is part of Wolin’s contribution to keeping alive this tenuous memory of the political among those who teach, write about, and study the history of political thought and its links to contemporary issues. It is part of his decision to ‘act’ as a social scientist within the limitations of his specialized role as a political theorist in postmodern academe. The dispossession of the demos from the power to govern itself began, in Athens, with the formalization of offices in the fourth century. This marked the beginning of the unequal institutionalization of power, which was encoded, for Wolin, in the form of subsequent constitutions. Moving from the ancient Greeks, through the liberal social contract theorists, to the founding moment of the American Revolution and the modern nation-state, Wolin traces, in works such as The Presence of Past (written in 1989 as a reflection on the bicentennial of the American Constitution of 1787), the paradoxical (and seemingly inexorable?) historical trajectory that has seen the modern demos included and contained within the constitutional and institutional forms of democracy in the West. This trajectory is paradoxical because, while the inclusion of the people in the constitution was signalled as the hallmark of the new democracy, the actual power of the demos – the power to govern itself democratically – was attenuated and contained by the way the electoral system was structured, by the division of powers, and by other constitutional and institutional mechanisms inscribed in the way that

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democratic politics were to be formally conducted in the new United States of America. Wolin’s more theoretical point is that constitutions and the distributions of power, offices, and functions they outline have served, historically, to define political boundaries – boundaries that include the demos but that simultaneously protect the rights, powers, and property of elites. Democratic constitutions and the theories and models that have explained and supported them have limited the substantive scope of democracy and the power of the demos to govern itself. Weber stands in this tradition, as a founder of a new constitutional form that sought to include the demos while containing it. Without specific reference to Weber, Wolin has referred to this as a modern tradition in which we have ‘democracy without the demos as actor.’40 The tension inherent in this idea  –  that constitutional and institutional structures include and contain the demos – has reached its height, for Wolin, in the modern liberal democracies of the global North and especially in the American Superpower. Wolin sets the archaism of the ancient Athenian demos and his celebration of its anarchic character starkly against his unrelenting analyses of what he calls the modern Megastate. The Megastate encompasses modern, representative liberal democracy, capitalism and consumerism, and the cultural and material dominance of Western culture by science and technology. He has also referred to the modern American polity simply as Superpower, to highlight its imperial dimension. These deeply interconnected and extraordinarily powerful spheres of modernity prepare the canvas for Wolin’s project, which is to trace  –  with an almost ‘brutal insistence’41  –  late modernity’s paradoxical trajectory of broadening social and economic inequality and diminished citizenship under the banner of democracy. The gap between ordinary citizens’ capacity to govern themselves, on the one hand, and the power of vast bureaucratic apparatuses of the state and corporate capital, on the other, has only grown in late-modern liberal democracies, even as these polities historically and perhaps momentarily or partially have fulfilled some of the promises of modernity in the post–Second World War era of the welfare state. The Megastate has grown to the point that Wolin posits the idea  –  which would have been alien to Weber’s idea of heroic leadership that could define the political for the national community – that the modern state has become ‘autolegitimating.’ As Wolin puts it: Instead of the state being grounded in the associational life of society [as it had been for the Athenian demos], the relationship becomes inverted so

194 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought that the state becomes its own ground and enjoys a condition of autolegitimacy. The degrounding of the state and the autolegitimacy of the political [my emphasis] are the expression of power in an age of high technology that has nullified the traditional notion, as old as the tradition of Western political theory itself, that power emanates from the community . . . Political power no longer needs a community and hence it no longer needs the predicate ‘political.’42

This stark assessment, which Wolin provided in the mid-1980s, during the transitional period between the decline of the welfare state and the rise of the current era of unbridled neoliberalism, is one he has held to consistently since then, right up to his most recent elaboration of these matters in Democracy Incorporated (2008).43 In the global North, where these very Weberian ‘developmental tendencies’ are highly developed and still predominant, mass movements of democratic commonality are rare, in Wolin’s view, because under the current system of American/Western representative democracy, the capacity of the demos (as opposed to the elites) to create common moments of solidarity and action continues to be dramatically attenuated by the great modern powers of the Megastate and the global market economy. With regard to the First World democracies, Wolin’s view at the turn of the twentieth century is – as was Weber’s in 1919 – deeply pessimistic. In light of the preceding discussion, Wolin’s view is sobering: ‘heterogeneity, diversity and multiple selves are no match for the modern forms of [corporate and state] power.’44 Regarding recent debates in democratic theory, Fred Dallmayr has noted that by taking this stance, Wolin ‘explicitly draws attention to the pitfalls of an extreme post-modernism dwelling excessively on heterogeneity, singularity and the absence of demos.’45 This is Wolin’s rejoinder, still in the name of democratic renewal, to the strong-program postmodern celebration of ‘difference.’ Again in Dallmayr’s terms, it is Wolin’s response to ‘the tendency to radically disaggregate and thereby to disempower the “people” and hence to “virtualize” democratic politics,’ instances of which we alluded to in the introduction to this volume with reference to totalizing critiques of modernity.46 As long as the state remains the centre of power in the democracies of the global North, and as long as the global market economy, supported by the neoliberal views of the ruling global elites, continues to create vast inequalities in wealth and opportunity, the legitimacy of Western liberal-democratic institutions, one hundred years after Weber argued

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for them in his model of democracy, can only be ‘good enough,’ as Jane Mansbridge has put it.47 In the autolegitimating liberal democracies of the global North, the veneer of popular sovereignty, the will of the people, remains for Wolin a symbolic but ineffective gesture. In the era of the neoliberal Megastate, the ability of the demos to create common bonds of solidarity and to realize common purposes is occasional and fleeting because of complex, selective mechanisms of passive democratic inclusion created by the state, on the one hand, and the ‘radically disaggregating’ forces of global capitalism, on the other. We have already seen the outlines of both features of this disenchantment in Weber. One hundred years later, Wolin sees similar tendencies: ‘The democratization of advanced industrial societies has come down to this: the labor, wealth, and psyches of the citizenry are simultaneously defended and exploited, protected and extracted, nurtured and fleeced, rewarded and commanded, flattered and threatened.’48 Against the forces of the modern state and market, in which enormous power has been concentrated in huge institutions, the possibilities for the democratic creation of commonality have been rendered, for Wolin, increasingly fugitive. But Wolin’s notion of fugitive democracy signals a disaffection – not merely an abject despair, as some have suggested.49 As we noted earlier, disaffection is a more active stance than apathy. Dissatisfied with the limitations of both the previous model of realist democracy and the emerging practices of differentiated, exclusive citizenship under neoliberalism,50 Wolin has argued that democracy can be something else: ‘Democracy is a project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them.’51 Provocatively, and almost against his own analysis of the Megastate, Wolin insists that ‘ordinary individuals are capable of creating new cultural patterns of commonality at any moment.’52 They do this every time they gather to form community groups to protest everything from local school and hospital closures, to runaway suburban development, to home foreclosures and evictions by the banks after the recent financial collapse. Thus, in addition to the recovery of the power of the demos in the Western tradition, we find in Wolin’s work more historically recent common, shared experiences/memories of suffering, oppression, and exclusion, as well as the resistance these can engender. In the postwar

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generation, some of this history was created by the Great Depression, evidenced in the struggle for trade unionism on the shop floor and in factories, as well as in spontaneous sit-down strikes for better wages and working conditions before, during, and after the Second World War in the United States, Canada, and other Western democracies. It was also embodied in the feminist and civil rights movements. For this generation, it is struggles around race, colonialism, globalization, and capitalism that have, in spatially dispersed and often discontinuous ways, galvanized parts of the demos. Against the pervasive power of the Megastate and global capital, Wolin places archaic and modern forms of local community as potential repositories of a democratic political. To the extent that ‘eruptions of utopia’ (in Joseph Gabel’s lucid term) have occurred at all, they have taken place sporadically, on the periphery of the global political economy, as Wolin’s notion of fugitive democracy would suggest. These movements are often formed by ordinary citizens who have been transformed into activists because  –  like the revolutionaries, workers, students, and the poor of Weber’s time in 1919  –  they are alienated from the ‘legitimate’ institutional arenas of power, from the democratic processes of politics as defined by the state, and from democratic control over their economic well-being and working lives under global capitalism. In ways that echo the left counterculture of the 1960s, and that often go far beyond the ‘Rock the Vote’ model of mobilizing young people to participate in the electoral system, these movements are still struggling to define alternative and often conflicting visions of a more democratic political. This has sometimes happened in the global South, particularly in Latin America. Examples are the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and Bolivia’s rebellion against the neoliberal dispossession of public resources such as water in the early 2000s. Other well-known examples have been the participatory budgets in Latin America (particularly those in Brazil, such as in Porto Alegre), the factory occupations by unemployed and underemployed workers in Argentina, the landless movements, and the World Social Forum. All of these have the history of colonialism as their deep historical memory. The historical memory of dispossession that has fuelled these eruptions has been kept alive for decades by Latin American writers and journalists such as Eduardo Galleano and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Common yet culturally and historically differentiated memories have galvanized the demos in Latin America, from peasants and indigenous peoples to women to the oppressed and historically exploited urban

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working class. It is interesting that, given Wolin’s critique of the institutional form of the modern state, some of these democratic experiments have not entirely eliminated the state form, but rather have sought to dramatically transform it in ways that break the historical bonds between the form of the state (previously authoritarian, now neoliberal) and the privileged rights of private property and capital. The nearrevolutions in Bolivia and Venezuela, fuelled by eruptions of popular pressure from below, have not abolished the state; rather, they have sought to redemocratize it, and civil society, in ways that are radical in comparison to previous state forms in Latin America. These are all (admittedly very different and now global) examples of Wolin’s view that moments of commonality can be created, or constructed, by ordinary citizens, and that they emerge from circumstances (perhaps eventually, though not necessarily in a direct, linear causal relationship) of suffering, oppression, and neglect. They reflect Wolin’s view that ‘democracy needs to be reconceived as something other than a form of government: as a mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives.’53 In this we might say that Wolin’s vision echoes something in Weber’s. Recall Weber’s comment at the end of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ that ‘politics means slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment.’54 This quote comes from the passage right before the one with which we began this Conclusion: that ‘to reach for what is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.’ I think that Weber and Wolin share this sense of critical historical possibility or vision, even if their notions of the political, and of the kind of democracy it embodies, are different. They share a deeply ambivalent, critical relationship to the Herrschaft of the given historical reality, with its often ominous tendencies, as well as a stubborn insistence that, in different ways, the historical possibilities for action (individual, heroic action, in Weber’s case; the collective action of the demos in Wolin’s) are never completely closed. In Weber and Wolin, this moment is related to the idea that the historical outcomes of action can never be fully predetermined. No matter how rational or bureaucratic political, social, or economic planning is, the initiators of social action can never predict precisely how present-day ideals, interests, and policies will work out in, or become, historical reality in the future. In this lies the hope of democracy and the historical possibilities of its ephemeral,

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occasional agent, the demos, which has persisted in the imagination of the political for more than two thousand years. V Some of Wolin’s critics are not satisfied with either his analysis of our current democratic predicament or his view of the demos. The critiques operate on two levels of analysis, one more empirical, the more other philosophical. Stephen White, in his comparison of Wolin’s notion of the radically democratic political with liberal and postmodern conceptions, has posed two questions regarding Wolin’s view that ordinary citizens can rise up to re-create a new political in the current circumstances that prevail in the global North. First, he finds Wolin’s view of the demos unlikely, noting that it is ‘tailored to what is too extraordinary, too heroic, at least in regards to the realities of late modern democratic life. No doubt, Wolin intends moments of forging commonality to be extraordinary in some senses. But I think his conception of the political is extraordinary in ways that make it remote from the ongoing expression of democratic energies.’55 Wolin’s view that the demos is capable of creating moments of more egalitarian solidarity or commonality is based on the fact that they suffer substantial ‘oppression and neglect’ in the current political economy. For White, however, the degree and severity of oppression and neglect is not uniform across the modern demos, nor is it necessarily a galvanizing agent for political change. In this vein, he notes two things on an empirical level. First, that we do not have a huge demos facing a small elite. One can go pretty far down into the middle class in the U.S. and still find recent improvements in living standards, or, at least, not sheer misery . . . Is the classical idea of the demos plausible when it is not tied to the idea that it can trust finally in being the most numerous category?56

White is no doubt right when he says there is ‘substantial misery’ in the bottom one-fifth (now, after the financial crisis, perhaps one-quarter, or more?) of the American population. He suggests that ‘perhaps here the radical democratic political is the undeniably appropriate logic.’57 That is where a new political might emerge. But for White, the demos is not ‘a universal class in Hegel’s or Marx’s sense that fully comprehends itself eventually and then . . . plays out its allotted role in history.’58

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Second, the logic of radical democracy may not hold for the broad middle classes now, any more than it did in Weber’s time, especially under conditions of neoliberal globalization that are making them similarly and increasingly insecure. Recall that Weber was highly critical of the political cowardice of the German middle classes and their acceptance of authoritarian rule in the Wilhelmine Kaiserreich in exchange for economic security. The current economic insecurity of the North American middle classes, which still  –  though now more nervously  –  accept the neoliberal tenets of the necessity of tax cuts and smaller government almost as a principium,59 may be a barrier to further political and economic democratization. In White’s view, the heroic eruptions of the demos that might reshape the political in more radically democratic directions have not occurred among either the bottom half of the citizenry or the middle classes in the United States and other Western liberal democracies.60 George Kateb raises two different objections to the fugitive character of democracy and the political in Wolin’s work. First, he notes that the political can also be reactionary, even if it is ‘democratic.’ He asks: ‘Why is he [Wolin] fascinated by the idea of fugitive democracy, when in theory it need not be democratic in any sense?’61 Some members of the community may not react well to their own suffering, exclusion, or past injustices. The demos could also be exclusionary and repressive toward minorities, and might become racist, sexist, xenophobic, or homophobic. Or aggrieved minorities may want their issues addressed in ways that are undemocratic. Seen in light of Weber’s imaginary of the warring gods, and/or the fact that, as Dallmayr has put it, the demos is subject to the effects and displacements of postmodern culture and the bureaucratic impersonality of the Megastate, as well as of global capitalism, some members or segments of the demos may not always be progressive. This does not negate the idea, however, that other parts of the demos may still be capable of either democratic resistance to regressive definitions of the political, or that they can still come together in common cause to create new practices of solidarity, participation, and decision making that are more egalitarian and democratic. We have provided a few examples of this, especially from Latin America. Wolin’s notion of the demos does not imply absolute homogeneity. It can even include serious disagreement. At times, however, that may mean active resistance to oppression, exclusion, or undemocratic practices. Kateb’s criticisms do not negate the possibility of democratic commonality implied in Wolin’s notion of the demos as actor.

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Kateb goes on to argue that Wolin’s notion of fugitive democracy is ‘undescribed, barely sketched.’ Wolin provides few examples and gives no clear explanation, or even signs, of how fugitive democracy might be institutionalized or made sustainable. I will offer one response to Kateb’s charge that Wolin leaves the notion of fugitive democracy undefined. Having taken up the idea of the political and the notion of fugitive democracy in the Western tradition, I am not sure it is Wolin’s job, or the job of the theorist, to spell out all the details or to provide a host of empirical examples in the same analysis. Others have referred to the article in which Wolin introduces fugitive democracy as ‘an important essay’ for what, within limits, it tries to do.62 I don’t see the need for theorists to do everything at once. Seemingly in despair himself about the elusive nature of the idea, Kateb can only say that ‘fugitive democracy is at heart anti-elitist’ as well as ‘anti-statist.’ In addition, ‘Wolin’s critique of capitalism is unremitting.’63 He asks, does Wolin ‘have in mind, say, a moment that lasted a few months, like the Paris Commune of 1871, or the brief radical takeovers in some German cities in 1919? . . . Wolin does not say.’ These were, of course, historical moments of rupture, or revolution in which entrenched, hegemonic relations of domination were momentarily overturned and more democratic possibilities were created and/or envisioned. As Henry Kariel wrote in Beyond Liberalism, Where Relations Grow: ‘During revolutionary moments, stable regimes are unexpectedly demystified by the emergence of alternatives. Previously unheard of outsiders rush in to the public arena and make their mad, momentary appearance: workers, women and students begin to speak in out in public.’64 Even if they are later subject to Weberian routinization or to outright repression and reaction, those moments will likely change those who brought them about and may even change the direction of future historical events. Wolin’s evocative idea has affinities with other analyses that, from different traditions and locations in academe, have taken up issues he has raised. The issue of commonality – or the ‘common’ in the context of new, spatially dispersed, global networks  –  has been taken up by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in works such as Multitude (2004). From a Marxist perspective that is in touch with the anti-globalization movements, David McNally’s Another World Is Possible (2006) offers a comprehensive overview and analysis of global struggles against neoliberalism, many of which could be seen as examples of fugitive democracy. McNally has argued that in the anti-globalization movements there

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are visions that ‘another world is possible,’ that there are, in the varied forms of resistance to globalization, intimations of a new, post-capitalist political. Alex Khashnabish’s work, on the way the Zapatista movement’s ways of organizing and communicating democratically have influenced North American struggles for greater democracy, is another case in point. Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter, and Saul Newman, study and create democratic spaces outside the Megastate. Their focus is on experiments in non-hierarchical, decentralized democratic participation and decision making. Post-foundationalists such as Badiou agree with Wolin’s analysis of the overwhelming power of the Megastate, whose dominating presence radicalizes democratic critique, rendering it fugitive, marginal. To be relevant, democracy, which is currently fugitive, must be ‘grasped in a form other than the state.’65 All of these analyses point to three notions, which are strongly implied by Warren and explicit in Wolin’s idea of fugitive democracy. First, as Coté, Day, and de Peuter have said, the state as a privileged site of mediation ‘overlooks the potential of forms of political organization that move beyond mass-based, parliamentary forms of representation.’ Second, these critiques have in common the idea that global neoliberalism, in its current forms, must be changed in more democratic directions or scrapped altogether. Third, again in the words of Coté, Day, and de Peuter, ‘critical thinkers, educators, activists, builders’ of these new democratic ‘spaces’ ‘all share the common trait of proposing something other than a new Anglo-American world order.’66 In the end, for Kateb, Wolin’s notion of fugitive democracy ‘resembles George Sorel’s general strike of all workers, which Sorel called a myth.’ Such a myth is seen by Kateb as ‘an imprecise hope that stirs the imagination and incites to amorphous and unpredictable action.’67 But as we saw in the case of Weber’s mythical Puritan hero, it is precisely such ‘myths’ that lie at the heart of the memory of the political. Wolin has noted that for the ancients, myths were unselfconscious; ‘they were a form of discourse that did not know its name’ but that defined relations of power, their boundaries, and people’s places within them.68 More modern ‘myths’ have been created, modified, and remembered by the demos in settings as diverse and seemingly discontinuous as the Berkeley student movement,69 the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Bolivian ‘water wars,’ the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and the antiglobalization demonstrations in Seattle, Genoa, Athens, and Toronto. They are moments or fragments of a democratic political that have become fugitive in light of the ‘titanic’ powers of the modern state,

202 Democracy and the Political in Max Weber’s Thought

bureaucracy, and global capitalism; they live on tenuously against the background of the great late-modern powers. Wolin’s notion of fugitive democracy may be such a ‘myth,’ and it may stir eruptions of the demos such as those just mentioned, the kind of ‘amorphous and unpredictable’ actions about which Kateb seems concerned. What is important is that fugitive democracy can, against the ‘Herrschaft of facticity’ (Wolin’s term) of the late-modern powers, still be imagined, envisioned, and even in rare moments acted upon. These challenges are not minor, but nor do I think they negate the power of Wolin’s vision, which retains traces of what Ronald Beiner has called the ‘strong normative appeal’ of Wolin’s view of commonality earlier in his career, only now under different and much more difficult historical circumstances.70 The question I would ask is this: Why does Wolin’s recent view of fugitive democracy retain such a strong normative appeal for political and democratic theorists now?71 I think that Wolin’s vision captures contradictory and agonizing tensions in what democracy means in our current historical moment, and how the development of the Megastate, the modern political economy, and science and technology have rendered democracy a ‘fugitive’ moment in the lives of most citizens. In this, his analysis is at times strikingly similar to Weber’s, even though his own promptings are not for reform of the existing system, but for its revolutionary transformation. He shares with Weber a deep historical appreciation, filled with pathos, of how our present (now postmodern?) condition in the West came to be what it is today. These two thinkers share an acute awareness of the dramatic historical transformations that have produced our present situation, with its dilemmas and paradoxes, and how those transformations have both limited and opened up democratic possibilities. In the questions, challenges, and agonizing difficulties found in both thinkers, I see a resistance to the shattering or dispersion of commonality produced by the modern and late-modern powers, and a resistance to its loss. This resistance, for Wolin, appears furtively in the idea of fugitive democracy, which occupies an important but ambiguous status in his thought, a kind of grey area in the interstices of the ‘steel-hard casing’ of the Megastate. Nicholas Xenos sees this ambiguity when he notes that for Wolin, ‘democracy eludes definition because it has a protean nature, but it is not unrecognizable. It is transformative, but it leaves no institutional product.’ Most important, and a reminder to Wolin’s critics, Xenos says that ‘this is a difficult conceptualization.’ Xenos argues that ‘the implications of the notion of a fugitive democracy are

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transformatory for political theory, and Wolin has worked harder and better than anyone to think against the boundaries of our received tradition. He has illuminated the experience of democracy.’72 It is this that Wolin shares with Weber: a singular voice and a rebellious vision in the current anti-democratic climate, with all of its difficulties, complexities, and uncertainties. At either end of the twentieth century, the two thinkers share a passion for a more democratic political, defined, despite their differences, by the slogan, ‘here I stand, I can do no other.’

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Notes

Introduction 1 This tension between the demos and leaders, the ruled and rulers, was part of a larger and very intense debate about the viability of liberal democracy and parliamentary government in the years of turmoil in Germany that followed the First World War. These fundamental debates over the viability and meaning of parliamentary democracy continued throughout the troubled Weimar period, for a little over a decade after Weber’s death in 1920. For a discussion of the complexity of these debates, and some of the key players who engaged in them both before and after Weber’s death, see Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context,’ in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xiii–l. Among them were Friedrich Naumann, Joseph Schumpeter, then a Marxist, Hugo Preuss, Richard Thoma, and Gustav Radbruch. 2 See, for example, Michael Greven, ‘Max Weber’s Missing Definition of “Political Action” in his “Basic Sociological Concepts,” ’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2004): 179–200 at 186–7, where Greven takes issue with ‘recent approaches that perceive Weber first and foremost as a homo politicus’ (186). He argues that ‘maybe the distinction between his scientific writing as a sociologist and his individual political statements has to be taken more seriously’ (187). His argument is based on the fact that ‘political action as a single category is not of genuine concern in the first part of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft [Economy and Society]’ (186). (That work is Weber’s posthumously assembled sociological magnum opus.) One can cite examples on both sides. They reveal the inconsistency in Weber’s attempts to strictly separate the political and the scientific. Perhaps the best-known argument

206 Notes to pages 6–7 regarding the non-separation of the two spheres in Weber is Sheldon S. Wolin’s ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401–24. 3 Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., introduction to Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), x–xi. 4 On this issue, see also Peter Breiner, ‘Ideal Types as “Utopias” and Impartial Political Clarification: Weber and Mannheim on Sociological Prudence,’ in Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, ed. Laurence McFalls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). 5 Indeed, to the historical sociologist, to the historian, or even to some sociologists, it may not seem that Weber has a ‘model’ of democracy or a political theory at all, but merely occasional, fragmentary comments, reflections, or interventions that are not properly part of his scholarly work. This is not the view of political theorists who have seriously engaged Weber. See, for example, the introduction to Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley, The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); and the essays in that volume by Sheldon Wolin, Fred Dallmayr, Mark Warren, Asher Horowitz, Alkis Kontos, Christian Lenhardt, and Gilbert Germain; as well as the comments by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs in the introduction to their collection of Weber’s political writings, Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science, Disenchantment, and the Search for Meaning,’ in Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation,’ ed. Peter Lassman and Irving Velody (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 159–204. All agree that (a) there is something more substantive in Weber’s political commentary than the notion of ‘occasional’ remarks would indicate, and (b) this commentary reaches deep into other parts of Weber’s work. 6 For an excellent discussion of the self-reflexive use of ideal types and their relation to political judgment, see Breiner, ‘Ideal Types as “Utopias,”’ 89–116. 7 As McFalls has correctly put it, ‘much of the “Weberological” work . . . by Thomas Burger, Guy Oakes, Guenther Roth, Lawrence Scaff and Stephen Turner, has been devoted to the intellectual origins and context of Weber’s work.’ See Laurence McFalls, Augustin Simard, and Barbara Thériault, ‘Introduction: Towards a Comparative Reception-History of Max Weber’s Oeuvre,’ in Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, 24n38. 8 There is another subsidiary issue that I want to raise regarding the accessibility of the new Weber scholarship to the Anglo-American audience. Much of the groundbreaking work in German has been undertaken as part

Notes to pages 7–9 207 of the massive and ongoing Max Weber Gesamtausgabe project, edited by H. Baier, M.R. Lepsius, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Johannes Winckelmann (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck] 1984–). Though not all of the new material has found its way into translation, more of it has been appearing, over the years, in specialized journals such as Max Weber Studies. Though I have consulted a number of the German sources, including Weber’s original material and some of the newer literature, I have chosen to focus primarily on those Weber texts and (some of the huge) secondary literature that are currently available to the English-speaking audience. Given the greater range of material that is now available in translation, I think this strategy (and I accept its obvious limitations) can make the broad range of Weber’s political and democratic thought, and recent discussions around it, more accessible to a wider, non–German-speaking audience.  9 Lassman and Speirs, introduction to Weber: Political Writings, xi. 10 Frank Cunningham, Theories of Democracy: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 14. 11 See McFalls, Simard, and Thériault, ‘Introduction,’ 12–13, for a perceptive and nuanced treatment of the Anglo-American ‘reception-history’ – shaped for a previous generation by Talcott Parsons – of Weber as a ‘founding father’ of social science and of the complexities, subtleties, and contexts for the varying and highly contested receptions of Weber’s work since then. The introduction to Bryan S. Turner’s well-known For Weber provides an excellent discussion of the shifting theoretical contexts that defined the reception of various aspects of Weber’s work in the 1990s. It is still relevant today. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Introduction: Marx and Nietzsche,’ in For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1996). The introduction to Sam Whimster and Scott Lash, eds., Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), provides a good discussion of the historical conjuncture and context in which, in the 1960s and 1970s, the image of Weber as social scientific ‘founder’ began to be contested. 12 The famous text and rival to the Parsonian view of Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), fell into this category, as did subsequent elaborations such as Irving M. Zeitlin’s Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory (Englewood: Prentice-Hall, 1968), now in its seventh edition. For one of the best discussions of the complex relationship between Weber, Marx, and twentieth-century schools of Marxism, see Turner, For Weber, chs. 1, 2, and 3. The ‘revival’ of interest in Weber has led scholars such as Turner to suggest that on a number of issues, it is incorrect to see Weber in complete opposition to Marx.



208 Notes to pages 9–10 13 See Alan Sica, Max Weber and the New Century (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2004), 1. See also Whimster and Lash, ‘Introduction.’ 14 Sven Eliaeson, Max Weber’s Methodologies (Oxford: Polity, 2002), 99.6. 15 McFalls, Simard, and Thériault, ‘Introduction,’ 6, 18, and 20n1, in which the Weber ‘renaissance’ is noted and the ‘explosion of interest’ in Weber is discussed. As the title of the editor’s introduction indicates, they also cover the complex reception history of Weber’s work, focusing, as I also do, more on the Anglo-American debates. What I try to do here is locate Weber’s model of democracy within the overlapping orbits of the Weber ‘revival,’ recent democratic theory, and the tradition of Western political thought. Each has a distinctive reception history. Each set of discussions has its own reception history of Weber. 16 The Protestant Ethic was first published as two essays in German in 1904–5. It was first translated into English by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons and has been retranslated a number of times recently as part of the wave of new Weber scholarship. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (New York: Scribner, 1976); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, trans. Peter Baehr and C.G. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002); and Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg ( Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002). See also William H. Swatos, Jr, and Lutz Kaelbler, eds., The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis (Boulder: Paradigm, 2005). 17 As if in reaction to the partial and ideologically loaded nature of Parsons’s view of Weber as a ‘founder’ of a new, ‘value-free’ social science, which dominated a previous generation of Weber interpretation, much of the recent and often brilliant historical research and translation has tried to retrieve Weber – his texts, contexts, concerns, and preoccupations – in the original, without imposing our own, contemporary presuppositions on him. One wonders if this is a reaction not only to the previous Parsonian interpretive ‘hegemony,’ but also to the withering post-structuralist ‘deconstructions,’ over the last thirty years, of the Western notions of truth, objectivity, and subjectivity with which Weber struggled. As Antonio notes, much postmodern thought completely rejects the ‘truth seeking’ of the early twentieth-century Continental social theorists. See Robert Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism,’ American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 2 (July 2000): 40–87 at 77. In this book, I am engaged in different project, a different kind of retrieval, one that draws on a tradition of Weber’s political-philosophical critics as much as on the new scholarship. This tradition, which I elaborate further toward the end of

Notes to pages 10–11 209 this Introduction, deals with the more political and philosophical dimensions of the complex, ongoing ‘reception history’ (Rezeptionsgeschichte) of Weber’s thought. 18 See the McFalls volume for a wide range of assessments regarding Weber’s ideal types, methodology, and historical sociology one hundred years after he raised these issues. As the editors note, the discussions range from ‘the celebratory to highly critical.’ See McFalls, Simard, and Thériault, ‘Introduction,’ 6. 19 A position that Mommsen later toned down, though, as McFalls notes, ‘the damage had already been done.’ See ibid., 27n71. 20 For the new edition of Hennis’s classic text, see Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber’s Central Question, trans. and new intro. Keith Tribe (London: Threshold Press, 2000). For a good discussion of Hennis’s interpretation of Weber in relation to the classical political and sociological traditions, and more recent social and political thought, see Bryan S. Turner, Classical Sociology (London: Sage, 1999), 16–18. 21 Sven Eliaeson and Kari Palonen, ‘Max Weber’s Relevance as a Theorist of Politics,’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2004): 135–42. 22 See, for example, Peter Lassman, ‘Political Theory in the Age of Disenchantment: The Problem of Value Pluralism: Weber, Berlin, Rawls,’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2004): 253–71. Tocqueville has been a popular comparison. See Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Stephen Kalberg, ‘Tocqueville and Weber on the Sociological Origin of Citizenship: The Political Culture of American Democracy,’ Citizenship Studies 1, no. 2 (1997): 199–222. 23 Max Weber, ‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy,’ trans. Keith Tribe, in The Essential Weber, ed. Sam Whimster (London: Routledge, 2004), 403. 24 I will take up some of the translation issues that commentators have noted recently regarding the ‘iconic’ Weberian term the ‘iron cage’ in my discussion at the end of chapter 4, on the Protestant Ethic. 25 See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). For a discussion of Lefort’s use of the term, see Fred Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and Postmodern Reflections,’ in Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham: Rowman and Littefield, 2001), 79. I say reintroduced because the theme of the political, the concern over what grounds the public realm, or what concerns citizens share in common, is certainly not new in the Western tradition of political thought. It was

210 Notes to pages 11–14 long a prominent theme in discussions that preceded the current interest in the idea. See, for example, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), ch. 7, ‘The Public Realm: The Common.’ As I argue later in the Introduction, the fact that discussions of the political have arisen again, and are being hotly debated, means that another paradigm shift is under way, perhaps as significant as the one that shaped Weber’s milieu and his thought. 26 Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). The contributors included Jürgen Habermas, Fred Dallmayr, Iris Marion Young, Will Kymlicka, Carol Gould, Nancy Fraser, Chantal Mouffe, William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, Richard Rorty, Benjamin Barber, Robert Dahl, who popularized Weber’s model in America in the postwar era, and Sheldon Wolin, whose work I extend in this book. 27 C.B. Macpherson’s critique of the realist model, from the perspective of a participatory democrat who was not postmodern, made the point that apparently objective or neutral descriptions were always also prescriptive. They contained not only descriptions of the way things are now, but also normative assumptions about the way things should or could be. In our terms, apparently empirical descriptions always and already contain assumptions about the political. Macpherson’s insight applies well to the discussion below. See C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2. 28 See Robert Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism,’ for an extensive discussion of the ‘epochal’ issues and historical changes that shaped early twentieth-century Western social and political thought. 29 Ibid., 46. It is to note not only the historical differences but also some of the striking similarities between critiques of liberal democracy in the Weimar era and critiques of the present day (from the far right and radical left) – similarities and differences to which Antonio is attuned. For the critiques from both the left and the right in the immediate post–Great War period, just prior to and after Weber’s death in 1920, see Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context.’ 30 See Fred Dallmayr’s longer and more detailed discussion of the significance of Lefort’s intervention in these debates, in Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 87–97. 31 See Asher Horowitz and Gad Horowitz, ‘Everywhere They Are in Chains’: Political Theory from Rousseau to Marx ( Toronto: Nelson, 1988), particularly the chapters on the reactionaries Bonald and de Maistre and their justifications of violence in enforcing religious and political conformity.

Notes to pages 14–20 211 32 See Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 16–17. 33 Many postmodern thinkers, such as Derrida and Lyotard, have of course taken the critique of the philosophy of consciousness back through the entire Western tradition, back to early proponents such as Plato and Aristotle. See, for example, Jean-François Lyotard, The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 34 Jeremy Valentine, ‘The Political,’ Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 2–3 (2006): 505–11 at 506. 35 Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, 50. 36 Ernst Vollrath, ‘The Rational and the Political: An Essay on the Semantics of Politics,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 13: 17–29 at 19, 18. 37 Valentine, ‘The Political,’ 508. 38 Ibid., 509. 39 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Why Europe Needs a Constitution,’ New Left Review 11 (September–October): 5–26. 40 Valentine, ‘The Political,’ 509. We will have more to say about Strauss’s critique of Weberian ‘relativism’ in chapter 5, which deals with the theoretical politics of Weber’s social science. 41 Hans-George Betz and S. Immerfall, eds., The New Politics of the Right: NeoPopulist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies (New York: St Martin’s, 1998). 42 Robert Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism,’ 61. 43 See the discussion of Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993). 44 Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism,’ 55n14. 45 Ibid., 71. 46 Ibid. 47 Valentine, ‘The Political,’ 510. 48 Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization versus Reenchantment ( London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), does take some of these issues into account in its discussion of how Weber’s theories of rationalization and disenchantment influenced the post-structuralist thinkers Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. Gane’s focus is not on democratic theory, however. In this and many other respects, my approach to Weber is significantly different. 49 Ibid. 50 For a discussion of Weber’s thought in relation to the Enlightenment, see Horowitz and Maley, ‘Introduction.’

212 Notes to pages 20–1 51 Ibid. 52 Not all political theorists agree with the distinction between politics and the political. For example, John Gunnell in his discussion of Wolin and others rejects the ‘ontological’ claims of those who attempt to differentiate a somehow autonomous sphere called the political. In Gunnell’s view, arguments for the political are merely the selective, and unwarranted, privileging of some aspect of conventional political practice. Such attempts to ‘reontologize’ an aspect of more conventional politics usually argue that a certain lost or surpressed practice is ‘a deformed instance of a deeper, unrealized value’ (85). For Gunnell, these efforts amount to ‘little more than an abstraction from historically situated first-order political forms’ (where ‘first order’ is the level of real, ‘concrete’ politics that occur in ordinary or ‘conventional’ historical settings). They fail, he argues, to ‘recognize the conventional character of political life’ (87), and they do not celebrate ‘contemporary conventional political practices’ (85). There may be good reasons for not celebrating ‘contemporary conventional political practices,’ such as the realist version of representative democracy in our own time. As we will see, Weber struggled with the both the historical fluidity and seeming rigidity or inexorability of ‘conventional practices’ in formulating his own model of democracy. Weber certainly acknowledges the conventional nature of domination, or the world as given to us historically, but he also seeks, within limits, to change how politics is done within the ‘steelhard casing’ of the modern state and economy. I argue that his attempt to do so relies on a certain implicit notion of the political. See John Gunnell, The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 84–7. 53 See Sica, Max Weber and the New Century, 7–8. 54 See, among many others, C.B. Macpherson’s classic, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Norbert Bobbio’s study, The Future of Democracy, trans. Roland Griffen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); and more recently, Mark Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ Political Theory 30, no. 5 (October 2002): 677–701 at 682–3. 55 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 30. Wolin has recently elaborated his notion of fugitive democracy in the expanded edition of his classic, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Wolin’s work has itself become the subject of a major edited collection titled Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William

Notes to pages 21–7 213 Connolly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), as he is coming to be seen as one of the foremost democratic theorists and critics of the realist model in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. 56 See Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ 79. 57 Witness the intense debates in the festschrift for Wolin that I mentioned earlier, Democracy and Vision. 58 On a related note, Alan Sica has observed that the new Weber scholarship is ‘not pure hagiography to be sure,’ but it can hardly be seen to be ‘tearing at its object’s imperial robes.’ See Sica, Max Weber and the New Century, 7. 59 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 30. 60 See Wolin, ‘Max Weber.’ 61 See Lassman and Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science,’ 162. 62 See, for example, Horowitz and Maley, ‘Introduction.’ 63 Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. and ed. Günther Roth and Clauss Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 223. 64 David Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 10. 65 Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society. 66 The distinction between thin and thick notions of citizenship has been discussed by both political and social theorists. With reference to Weber, see, for example, Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society; Sam Whimster, Understanding Weber (London: Routledge, 2007), 246; and Mark Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber: When Does Reason Become Power?’ in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason. 67 Weber’s decisionist leadership has long the subject of heated debate in the literature since Mommsen raised the issue. See Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans. Michael Steinberg, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society, for a recent critique of Mommsen. 68 See Peter Breiner, ‘Translating Max Weber: Exile Attempts to Forge a New Political Science,’ European Journal of Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 133–49. 69 The recent discussions over Parsons’s famous translation of stahlhartes Gehäuse as ‘iron cage’ – a term that, as Stephen Kalberg has noted, acquired nearly iconic status for more than a generation – is a good example of the sensitivity of the new wave of scholarship to the historical, cultural, and interpretive contexts in which Weber worked and wrote. See Kalberg’s detailed discussion in Stephen Kalberg, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002), note 129. See also Sam Whimster’s alteration in his recent discussion, in Unders­ tanding Weber, of Parsons’s translation of the same famous Weber passage at the end of the Protestant Ethic.

214 Notes to pages 29–31 1. Bureaucracy versus Democracy? 1 This connection has been established in the new Weber literature by Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins and by Peter Breiner. See Lassman, Velody, and Martins, introduction to Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation,’ ed. Lassman, Velody, and Martins ( London: Unwin and Hyman, 1989); and Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 2 The theme of the various uses to which Weber puts his key concepts is one we will develop throughout the book. It will surface again in our discussions of Weber’s model of democracy in chapter 2; of the carefully constructed nature of the political in chapter 3; and of Puritan heroes in chapter 4; as well as in our discussion of Weber’s methodology in chapter 5. In each chapter I discuss how Weber puts his concepts to use in his arguments for a specific configuration of politics and the political. 3 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401–24 at 403. 4 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31. 5 In chapter 3, devoted to Weber’s notion of the political, I will argue that the heroic actor represents the moment of solidarity or unity in modern liberal-democratic polities that are highly bureaucratic and administratively rationalized yet culturally and politically diverse. Weber uses the strategies outlined in this chapter to position his heroic actor as the only antidote to the ills of modern bureaucracy and its domination of politics and the state. 6 As Duncan Kelly notes, Schmoller, president of the Verein für Sozialpolitik from 1890 to 1917, was already defending the German bureaucratic state against parliamentarization in 1907 in the Viennese Neue Freie Presse. There, ‘Schmoller had defended the German Beamtenstaat as superior to any parliamentary system.’ See Duncan Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106. 7 There is a debate in the literature as to whether Weber’s discussion is historically specific to the German situation, or whether it has broader implications for democratic politics in modernity. I follow David Beetham in not seeing Weber’s arguments as limited to the historical specificity of German politics. I will suggest that Weber’s strategies and arguments on the level of politics, as well as his notion of the political, are not only historically bound or limited. As Weber’s contemporaries knew, and as a wide array of modern

Notes to pages 32–5 215 commentators from Karl Löwith and Karl Mannheim to David Beetham and Sheldon Wolin have recognized, there is clearly something in Weber’s work that transcends the immediate context of the German historical situation. See, for example, David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, introduction to Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xi, where the editors point to the ‘dual character’ of Weber’s discussion.  8 See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. and ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 223; and Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 137.  9 See also Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 137. 10 Weber, Economy and Society, 214, 946. See also Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 130. 11 Max Weber, ‘The Social Psychology of World Religions,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 299; and Weber, Economy and Society, 217. 12 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in Weber: Political Writings, 330; Economy and Society, 225, 975. 13 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (New York: Scribner’s, 1976), 15–16. 14 Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 137. 15 Max Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order,’ in Weber: Political Writings, 147–8. 16 See, for example, Max Horkeimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1975); Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984); and Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley, introduction to The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 17 Weber poses both questions in ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 159. 18 Ibid. 19 Immanuel Kant, ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’ in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 249.

216 Notes to pages 35–7 20 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 44. 21 Mark Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber: When Does Reason Become Power?’ in The Barbarism of Reason, 73, my italics. 22 Kant, ‘What Is Orientation in Thinking?’ 247. 23  Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’ in Kant: Political Writings, 54. 24  Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abott, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), 50–1. 25 Bernard Yack, ‘The Problem with Kantian Liberalism,’ in Kant and Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner and William James Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 26 Immanuel Kant, ‘Critique of Judgment,’ paras. 1, 2, 40, 294ff, cited in Hans Reiss, postscript to Kant: Political Writings, 255. We will see in chapter 4 on Weber’s social science that Weber rejects this view in favour of a more Nietzschean perspectivalism. 27 See Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber,’ for an elaboration of this distinction with reference to Kant, Weber, and Nietzsche. 28 As Breiner notes, the term Betrieb in German connotes a firm or organization in the economic sense as well. In fact, there are parallels between Weber’s use of the term and similar notions in Marx. See Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 146. Lassman and Speirs also note the complexity of the term and its possible uses. It can ‘denote either the conduct of an activity, i.e. the conduct of politics, or a set of activities or practices (the business of science) or an institution or organization in which such activity is carried out (a capitalist firm). The term is often used by Weber to refer simultaneously to an activity and its framework.’ This is, in part, what allows Weber to draft the term so flexibly in his political arguments. See also Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 372. 29 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 146. 30 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 315. 31 See, for example, Karl Löwith’s well-known work, Max Weber and Karl Marx, ed. Tom Bottomore and William Outhwaite, trans. Hans Fantel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982); Gerth and Mills, introduction to From Max Weber; and Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, 7th ed. (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2001). 32 See Robert Antonio and Ronald Glassman, eds., A Marx–Weber Dialogue (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985). In the next chapter I will look specifically at how this ‘separation from means’ – of administration and politics – plays out in Weber’s model of parliamentary democracy. The

Notes to pages 37–9 217 present discussion lays the groundwork for my subsequent assessment of Weber’s proposals for the establishment and limitations of democracy. 33 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 315. 34 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 157. 35 Ibid. 146. 36 Ronald Beiner, What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Weber is difficult to read on the important matter of the ends of the polis, and he never resolves the tension between means and the plurality of ends. He argues, as we will see in chapter 3, that ends are defined by heroic leaders and that they cannot be defined conclusively in the traditional philosophical sense: there is no independent, objective notion of the Good. This follows from the fact that, for Weber, the modern disenchanted world is defined by value-plurality. Beiner offers a compelling response to Weber’s value-pluralism when he writes that ‘liberalism itself instantiates one particular version of the good, namely, that choice in itself is the highest good.’ As we shall see, the notion of ‘choice’ in Weber’s politics is elevated to a moral principle. 37 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 158. 38 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 182. 39 Sven Eliaeson and Kari Palonen, ‘Max Weber’s Relevance as a Theorist of Politics,’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2004): 135–42. 40 Lawrence Scaff’s classic, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), discusses the cultural context for this new perception, as well as the various avenues of escape from the ‘iron cage’ of modern rationalized life and its institutions sought by the avant-garde and members of the counterculture. 41 This larger issue of inevitability versus contingency has surfaced in recent, somewhat more technical discussions in the Weber literature surrounding Talcott Parsons’s original translation of stahlhartes Gehäuse as ‘iron cage’ (from his 1930 translation of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which for decades after the Second World War was the standard translation). A number of scholars have now altered that translation, even though, as Stephen Kalberg points out, ‘iron cage’ has ‘acquired near-mythical status in sociology’ (Kalberg, PESC, 245n129). In his extensive discussion of the term, Kalberg argues that iron cage ‘implies great inflexibility and hence does not convey . . . contingency’ sufficiently. The contingency that Kalberg sees in the more literal translation of ‘steelhard casing’ refers to the way Weber qualifies his use of the phrase in the PESC, Parliament and Government, and elsewhere. Weber uses ‘what if,’ ‘as

218 Notes to pages 39–43 if,’ ‘might,’ ‘could’ – conditional formulations that imply, to a far greater degree than Parsons’s ‘iron cage’ suggested, that the emergence of such a ‘casing’ is historically contingent, dependent on a politically, culturally, and temporally specific configuration of circumstances. If this is so, then it can also, potentially at least, be ‘peeled off,’ shed, or perhaps changed in the future. It is not necessarily, therefore, the ‘unstoppable unfolding of bureaucratization and rationalization,’ or the inevitable fate that Weber often seems to imply. Kalberg’s nuanced discussion raises the issue of the tension between the ‘inevitability’ of bureacuracy and its contingency. This is related to my discussion, in chapter 1, of how Weber uses the term bureaucracy as a shifting term/weapon in his political writings. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002), 245–6n129. 42 Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 15. 43 As Breiner notes, it was W.G. Runciman who first noted that for Weber, feasibility was a key criterion of judgment. See W.G. Runciman, ‘Sociological Evidence and Political Theory,’ in Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 40. Also see Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 7. 44 Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 16. 45 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 166, 173. 46 Ibid., 177. 47 Ibid., 145. 48 Ibid., 161. 49 Ibid., 155. 50 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 330. 51 Kenneth Kernahan and David Siegel, Public Administration in Canada (Toronto: Nelson, 1995), 449. 52 Ibid., 448. 53 Weber, Economy and Society, 225, 975; Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 330. 54 Georg W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), para. 297, 193. Tracy Strong challenges the claims of both Weber and Hegel that bureaucracy is a neutral, technical, or objective instrument of governance, arguing that in Weber’s sociology it becomes the preserve of the liberal middle classes. See Tracy B. Strong, ‘Weber and the Bourgeoisie,’ in The Barbarism of Reason. Catherine ColliotThélène, however, notes that Weber’s notion of the rational state has its antecedent in Hegel, who talked about the rationality of bureaucracy and the civil service and the ‘disenchantment’ of the modern state almost one

Notes to pages 43–4 219 hundred years before Weber. Colliot-Thélène sees many connections between the two thinkers, ones that are not always direct – Weber rejected Hegel’s metaphysics of history – but that can be seen clearly when one reads sections of the Philosophy of Right and compares them to Weber’s discussions of the rational administrative state or his sociology of rational domination. Hegel’s influence on Weber is also indirect in the sense that it is mediated through Marx. See Catherine Colliot-Thélène, introduction to Le Désenchantment de l’État: de Hegel à Weber (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 10. 55 Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, para. 301, 196. 56 John Stuart Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government,’ in Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government, ed. H.B. Acton (London: J.M. Dent, 1988), 265. 57 Ibid., 265–6. 58 Ibid. 59 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 178. 60 Ibid. Cf. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, para. 303, 197. For Weber, contra Hegel, the bureaucracy is not, however, a new universal class that can objectively or universally embody the interests of society as a whole. 61 Weber, Economy and Society, 980; Tracy B. Strong, ‘Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie,’ 122. 62 In the next chapter we will look at how Weber thought the inclusion of equal suffrage in his model of democracy would create a formal political counterweight to the inequalities of the market. 63 See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). 64 This model has its problems, as commentators have made clear. See, for example, Gregory Albo, ‘Democratic Citizenship and the Future of Public Management,’ in Modern Democratic Administration, ed. Gregory Albo, David Langille, and Leo Panitch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 27; and Kernahan and Siegel, Public Administration in Canada, 451. The main criticism from the left has been that ‘the machinery of state power is not a neutral instrument. The administrative structure and the professional model reflect the existing power structure of society’ (Albo, ‘Democratic Citizenship,’ 27). The case has also been made that public administration should not be neutral, but progressive. It should advocate for clients. At times, when he was arguing against the conservative Junkers, Weber would for strategic reasons have readily agreed with this assessment. At other times – when he was trying to establish the political space in which the heroic actor could manoeuvre – he would not, or at the very least would have accepted it as a necessary precondition for the effective functioning of

220 Notes to pages 45–8 independent political leadership. The reasons for this are complex and have to do with how Weber’s own liberal agenda was shaped by the political forces in Wilhelmine Germany. 65 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 157–8. 66 Ibid., 158. 67 Ibid., 159. 68 Preuss’s article was ‘Volksstaat oder Verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat,’ Berliner Tageblatt, 11 November 1918, in Hugo Preuss, Staat, Recht und Friehiet. Aus 40 Jahren Deutsche Politik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926), 366. I accept Ellen Kennedy’s translation of umgedrehter as ‘reversed.’ It also has the connotation of the same kind of state ‘turned around,’ only in a different but equally wrong direction. Verkehrter, in the title of Preuss’s article, also implies that socialism would produce an inverted Obrigkeitsstaat, just as negative as Bismarck’s only under a different ideological banner. See Kennedy’s discussion of these issues in her ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context’, in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xxi. 69 Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988). 70 Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 10. 71 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 156. 72 Andrew has noted that ‘Taylorism was “Russified” [after] Lenin’s first major speeches in power called for the introduction of Taylorism into the Soviet Union.’ Edward Andrew, Closing the Iron Cage: The Scientific Management of Work and Leisure (Montreal: Black Rose, 1999), 48. See also Hanson’s interesting discussion of Lenin’s argument for a ‘socialist’ Taylorism. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Instititutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 97–100. 73 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 143. 74 Günther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Salem: Ayer, 1984); Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics. 75 For a discussion of Weber’s relation to modern political thought influenced by the Enlightenment and its ideals, see Horowitz and Maley, introduction to The Barbarism of Reason. 76 Weber, Economy and Society, 985–7; Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 138. The expansion of democratic entitlements involves, as Mommsen puts it, ‘the greatest possible freedom through the greatest possible domination.’ Weber would have thought that Mommsen’s statement applied to socialism as well. See also Horowitz and Maley, introduction to The Barbarism of Reason, 6.

Notes to pages 49–53 221 77 Max Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Lassman and Speirs, 104. 78 Ibid., 105. 79 Ibid., 104. 2. The Politics of Realist Democracy 1 The framework I use to analyse Weber’s realist model of democracy relies on Sheldon Wolin’s discussion/contrast of the terms politics and the political in his article, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and in the last chapter of the recent, expanded edition of his Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Wolin’s notions of the political and fugitive democracy are taken up by Fred Dallmayr in ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ a chapter in his own Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); as well as by a host of authors in a recent edited collection that recognizes Wolin’s significance as an important late-twentieth-century theorist of democracy. See Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly, eds., Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and The Vicissitudes of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). I look critically at what I take to be Weber’s notion of the political in the discussion of heroic leadership not only in the next chapter but throughout the rest of the book as well. 2 Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi. 3 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 30. See also Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). See also Dallmayr’s discussion of both Lefort’s and Wolin’s use of the term the political in ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ 79. 4 Weber’s model thus has significance beyond Weber scholarship and is related to current debates in democratic theory, selected aspects of which I take up in this book’s Conclusion. 5 See, for example, Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976); and two early works on democracy by Robert Dahl: Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); and Who Governs: Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Dahl’s later work came to be more critical of American ‘polyarchical’ democracy. In works such as On Democracy and On Political Equality, he became more concerned with

222 Notes to pages 53–5 the obstacles to democracy, growing political inequality, and the concentration of power in an increasingly less democratic American polity. See his On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and On Political Equality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For critiques of the plural-elite model, see C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); and Mark Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ Political Theory 30, no. 5 (October 2002): 677–701.  6 See Sven Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism: Weber’s Politics in their German Context,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Weber, ed. Stephen Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 138, for a good discussion of the Obrigkeitsstaat as obedience, or authoritarian state. The term also has the connotation – of which Weber was highly critical in the case of the Junkers and the Kaiser – of a state ‘entirely focused on its monarch or ruling class.’ See Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 377.  7 See Peter Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician – A Series of Just-So-Stories? Or Why Is Weber’s Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?’ Max Weber Studies 6, no. 1 (2005): 3–31 at 13, for a discussion of Sombart’s negative view of equal suffrage, mass democratic politics, and demagogic politicians. Also see Duncan Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Franz Neumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106, on Schmoller’s argument regarding the superiority of the (Junker-dominated) bureaucratic state over parliamentary government.  8 Max Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order,’ in Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 144.  9 Ibid., 143. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 145. 12 See Günther Roth’s well-known treatment, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Salem: Ayer, 1984); Karl-Ludwig Ay, ‘Max Weber: A German Intellectual and the Question of War Guilt after the Great War,’ in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Sam Whimster (London: St Martin’s, 1999); and Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism.’ All of these provide good discussions of the political system put in place by Bismarck and of Weber’s hostility to it. 13 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 165. 14 On Weber’s affinity for, and familial ties to, Great Britain and the British parliamentary system, as well as related ties to Protestant social reform

Notes to pages 55–6 223 in Germany, see Günther Roth, ‘The Young Max Weber: Anglo-American Religious Influences and Protestant Social Reform in Germany,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 10, no. 4 (1997): 659–71; and ‘Weber the Would-be Englishman,’ in Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, and Contexts, ed. Helmut Lehman and Günther Roth (Washington/Cambridge, MA: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a more extensive treatment of these connections and influences in German, see Günther Roth, Max Webers deutsche-englische Familiengeschichte 1800–1950 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). Ellen Kennedy has correctly noted that while Weber, Hugo Preuss, and other progressive German liberals believed that the English parliamentary system was perhaps the ‘ideal,’ or the best model for modern democracy, it could not simply be transplanted or applied whole to Germany after the First World War. The eventual result was that the Weimar constitution, the founding document of the new republic that Weber had helped draft after Preuss was assigned the task by the provisional government leader Friedrich Ebert in November 1918, combined elements of British, French, and American constitutions, as well as a complex admixture of direct and indirect forms of representation. See Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context,’ in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xxii. 15 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 142. 16 See Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context’, xiii–l. 17 Ibid., 165. 18 Ibid., 144. 19 The differential voting scheme lasted until 1918. It provides the backdrop for Weber’s equal suffrage argument, which we will examine in this chapter. See Günther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany. 20 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 144. 21 Ibid., 145. 22 Ibid., 135. 23 Weber was certainly aware of the categorization of regimes in the Western tradition of political thought. Wilhelm Hennis, who sees Weber as a modern neo-Aristotelian, notes the echo of Aristotle’s Politics, ch. 2, in Economy and Society, where Weber introduces his famous threefold typology of domination: traditional, charismatic, and rational. This typology provides an implicit framework for Weber’s critique of the Junker regime – a regime that is degenerate from the perspective of the parliamentary democracy that Weber wants to establish. Cf. Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber’s Central

224 Notes to pages 56–8 Question ( London: Threshold, 2000). For a good discussion of Weber’s typology in relation to that of Aristotle, see Regina Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy in Max Weber’s Political Thought,’ in Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion, ed. Charles Camic, Phillip Gorski, and David Trubek (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 24 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 129. 25 Ibid. 26 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 190. 27 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 104. 28 Ibid., 103. 29 See Rousseau’s ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality,’ in The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald Cress, intro. Peter Gay (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). There is a lively though not dominant line of Rousseau commentary/ comparison by political theorists interested in Weber. See also Breiner’s discussion of Rousseau and Weber in ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 3–31 at 5; as well as Titunik’s discussion of the two thinkers in ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy’; Asher Horowitz, Rousseau: Nature and History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); and J. Merquior, Rousseau and Weber: Two Studies in the Theory of Legitimacy (London: Routledge, 1980). 30 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, I:800, cited in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 58. 31 See Horowitz, Rousseau. 32 See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘The Social Contract,’ in The Basic Political Writings, 150; and Regina Titunik’s comments in ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 156, in which she notes Weber’s disagreement with Rousseau regarding how best to reconcile ‘rule and freedom.’ These discussions, in both Weber and Rousseau, are also related to the role of direct democracy. Rousseau, of course, was for it; the collective will of the demos could not be sovereign outside of direct democracy – that is, in a representative system that would inevitably reflect social and economic inequalities. By contrast, Weber’s reform proposals were based firmly on the idea that only representative democracy was feasible. For Weber, the only form of direct democracy that found its way into the Weimar constitution was the proposal for the direct, plebiscitary election of the Reichspräsident under Article 48. See note 44, below.

Notes to pages 58–60 225 33 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 103. 34 Ibid., 105–6. 35 This notion of legitimacy is borrowed directly from Weber’s famous sociological definition in Economy and Society. But in the context of a political tract such as this, it loses its value-neutral quality and assumes explicitly political overtones. See Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 165. 36 Ibid., 174. 37 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 365. 38 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 191. 39 The idea that politics is struggle is one of the most enduring themes in Weber’s political writings. It can be found from his Freiburg Inaugural Address of 1895, ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy’ (in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 173), right through to the famous political speech, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in 1919. Moreover, it had its strategic uses in Weber’s attempt to validate his model of democratic politics. Seeing politics as struggle, making it a contested terrain, meant opening up democratic possibilities beyond the bureaucratic control of the ruling Junker aristocracy. 40 Ibid., 150. 41 Ibid., 161. 42 Ibid., 182. 43 The classic case in the Weber literature is Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber and German Politics: 1890–1920, trans. Michael Steinberg, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), particularly ch. 10, in which Mommsen outlines the charge that Weber’s decisionist view of charismatic leadership helped pave the way for Hitler. As Laurence McFalls notes, though Mommsen later toned down his view, ‘the damage was done’ and Weber was seen as a dangerous decisionist by a generation of Anglo-American and German Weber scholars after the Second World War. The renewed interest in Weber’s political writings has again raised questions concerning his liberalism. It is clear, though, that Weber was not arguing for unfettered leadership that could completely overturn his parliamentary model and assume a more authoritarian or even dictatorial form. Despite this caveat, Ay has raised some disturbing questions regarding Weber’s role in drafting the new Weimar constitution after the First World War. The debate revolves around Weber’s support for Article 48, which allowed the suspen-

226 Notes to pages 60–2 sion of Parliament by the President of the Reich in times of crisis or emergency. As Eliaeson shows, it was precisely this article that President von Hindenburg fatefully used to suspend the Reichstag and appoint Hitler to the chancellorship in 1933. See Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism’; and Ay, ‘Max Weber: A German Intellectual.’ In the Weber revival of the 1990s this issue was again taken up by Mark Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber: When Does Reason Become Power?’ in The Barbarism of Reason, ed. Horowitz and Maley; and by David Beetham, ‘Weber and the Liberal Political Tradition,’ European Journal of Sociology 30, no. 3 (1989): 311–23. For a recent critique of Mommsen’s view, see Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 1. 44 The article was then published again in the Heidelberger Zeitung and the Konigsberger Hartungsche Zeitung in March 1919. 45 Max Weber, ‘The President of the Reich,’ in Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 305. Lassman and Speirs suggest that had there been a stronger tradition of multiparty politics in Germany, and had the country not been in crisis, Weber ‘might not have put forward this controversial proposal.’ See Lassman and Speirs, introduction to Weber: Political Writings, xxi–xxii. Nonetheless, Weber supported the inclusion of Article 48 in the new constitution, which gave the popularly chosen Reichspräsident the power to temporarily suspend parliament in a crisis or emergency. This, and the context in which the Weimar constitution was negotiated and drafted, has ever since been the topic of heated and exhaustive discussion in Germany and among Weber scholars. See, for example, Ay, Max Weber: A German Intellectual; Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics; and Lassman and Speirs, ‘Introduction,’ Weber: Political Writings; as well as Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context’, in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xxx. Weber would have disagreed with Schmitt’s view that Article 48 could be seen as a ‘commissarial dictatorship.’ I do not pursue a more detailed historical discussion here. Rather, I am interested in the logic of Weber’s argument. 46 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 174. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 178. 49 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. and ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1405. 50 For Weber’s sociological discussion of direct democracy, see his Economy and Society, 292; and Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 146–7. 51 Weber, Economy and Society, 290, 948.

Notes to pages 62–5 227 52 See the discussion in Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 149, 152. 53 Ibid., 153. 54 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopff, 1999). 55 Michael Greven, ‘Max Weber’s Missing Definition of “Political Action” in his “Basic Sociological Concepts,”’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2004): 179–200 at 186. Greven does not support this new interpretive trend in the literature, preferring to see Weber’s politics and his social science as fundamentally different endeavours. 56 Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism,’ 138. 57 See Mark Warren, ‘Max Weber’s Liberalism for a Nietzschean World,’ American Journal of Political Science 82, no. 1 (March 1988): 31–50; and Christian Lenhardt, ‘Max Weber and the Legacy of Critical Idealism,’ in The Barbarism of Reason, ed. Horowitz and Maley, for two of the many discussions of Weber’s complex relation to both Kant and German neoKantianism. 58 Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 145. See also Regina Titunik, ‘Status, Vanity, and Equal Dignity in Max Weber’s Political Thought,’ Economy and Society 24, no. 1 (1995): 101–21; and Sung Ho Kim’s comment on Titunik’s ‘liberal reading of Weber’ in Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society, 15n26. 59 Weber, Economy and Society, 953. 60 Max Weber, ‘On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia,’ in Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 69. 61 Weber, Economy and Society, 985; Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 151. 62 Weber, ‘On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia,’ 69. 63 Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 156. 64 David Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 10. 65 Titunik, ‘Democracy, Domination, and Legitimacy,’ 156. 66 See Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. It is important to note, as Lassman and Speirs have, that for Weber’s German audience the term Führer had the broader connotation of leader. See Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 374. For the term, ‘leadership democracy with machine,’ and its context in the lecture, see Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 351. 67 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. 68 Ibid., 77. 69 Ibid., 78.

228 Notes to pages 65–9 70 Beetham, ‘Weber and the Liberal Political Tradition,’ 311–23 at 314. 71 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, 78. 72 See Rand Dyck, Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 2000), 565, for the standard definitions of elected representatives in a parliamentary system as either trustees or delegates. 73 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 128. 74 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, 79. 75 Ibid. 76 David Held, Models of Democracy, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 198. 77 Ibid. Schumpeter’s critique in the 1920s, from a Marxist perspective, was that parliamentary democracy represented, and was dominated by, class interests. See Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context,’ xxvi. 78 Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘The Antinomical Structure of Max Weber’s Political Thought,’ in The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber (Oxford: Polity, 1989), 34. 79 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 26. 80 Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, 1. Some of the tensions in liberalism identified by Macpherson are further explored in David Beetham, Democracy and Human Rights (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999); and David Held, ed., Prospects for Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 55–73. 81 Those defenders now dominate the new Weber literature – or, as Alan Sica has put it, the new literature ‘hardly tears at the clothes of the emperor.’ The new literature is not very critical of some of the implications of Weber’s democratic politics. See Alan Sica, Max Weber and the New Century (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2004) 9. 82 As Eric Olin Wright has noted, Weber’s view of capitalism, despite its many affinities with that of Marx, did not include the category of exploitation – a category that could also have impinged on Weber’s model of democracy. Without it, the model of democracy is necessarily more circumscribed. Attempts to push democratic politics beyond the boundaries of the plural-elite model are also common in the literature on new social movements. For Wright’s critique, see Eric Olin Wright, ‘The Shadow of Exploitation in Weber’s Class Analysis,’ in Max Weber’s Economy and Society, ed. Camic, Gorski, and Trubek. For the new social movement critique of the plural-elitist view, see, for example, Warren Magnussen, ‘New Social Movements,’ in William Carroll, ed., Organizing Dissent ( Toronto: Broadview, 1996), 67.

Notes to pages 70–4 229 83 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 209. 84 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 121. 85 Max Weber, ‘The Distribution of Power in Society: Classes, Status Groups, and Parties,’ in Sam Whimster, ed., The Essential Weber ( London: Routledge, 2004), 43–56. 86 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Injustice and Collective Memory,’ in The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 38. 87 Ibid., 39. 88 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 31. 89 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 16. Breiner’s discussion has a slightly different context – a comparison of Weber and Sombart on the issue of the vocational politician. His point still applies to my discussion quite directly. 90 For the distinction between thick and thin notions of democracy, see, for example, Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society; and Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber.’ At the same time, however, we need to recall that within the historical-political context that we have outlined, Weber’s model of democracy was also the expression of a blocked political impulse that could not be realized in Wilhelmine Germany. Unlike ‘utopians’ on the left, however, it was not a more radically egalitarian impulse that was blocked, but rather a liberal one that split democracy into active leaders and passive followers. 91 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 31. Here I am modifying Wolin’s notion momentarily, for purposes of this part of the discussion, by rendering it only partially. The full extract would be: ‘Democracy needs to be reconceived as something other than a form [my italics] of government . . . as a mode of being that is conditioned by bitter experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily’ (43).  In this volume’s Conclusion I will deal more directly with Wolin’s idea that democracy ‘as a mode of being’ cannot be contained within an institutional or constitutional form. Wolin, writing at the end of the twentieth century from within the heart of the American empire, takes the issue of democratic agency to a place beyond Weber, who was more concerned with the fragility of democracy as a ‘form of government’ in precarious circumstances. As we know, the Weimar democracy was ‘conditioned by bitter experience’ and was ‘doomed to succeed only temporarily.’  Wolin’s idea of the ‘memory of the political’ raises a key issue regarding the possibility of reviving more substantive democratic practices within democratic political systems such as the one for which Weber argued. Within Weber’s model, fleeting (or even more sustained) moments of commonality may be more possible for some – for political and economic elites, for active but small sections of the middle and even the working

230 Notes to pages 74–7 classes, for some civil society groups. The question is, can they be more extensively democratized, made more egalitarian and sustainable? Is there any prospect of re-creating the extensive and deep solidarity of, for example, Rousseau’s General Will, or Marx’s working-class solidarity, within the boundaries of parliamentary democracy? Or can the memory of the political only be re-created en masse and consolidated in moments of crisis or revolution, in circumstances closer to Sorel’s General Strike or Rosa Luxemburg’s idea of spontaneous revolution? We will take up some of these issues in the remaining chapters. In the Conclusion, we will compare Wolin’s notion of fugitive democracy to Weber’s realist model and its successors. 92 Wolin cites the nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan, who in 1881 in What Is a Nation stated that ‘the essence of a nation is that all individuals share a great many things in common, but that they have also forgotten some things.’ See Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Injustice and Collective Memory,’ in The Presence of the Past, 33–4.  93 For Weber’s discussion of the Kulturkampf and Bismarck’s anti-socialist legislation, see Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 135–45. 94 See, for example, Martin Fritsch, ed., Homage to Käthe Kollwitz (Leipzig: E.A. Seeman, 2005); and Thomas Fecht, ed., Käthe Kollwitz: Works in Color, intro. Thomas Fecht, trans. A.S. Wensinger and R.H. Wood (New York: Schocken, 1988). 95 There has been a notable absence of feminist analysis of Weber, or of Marianne Weber’s own intellectual and political career, in the Weber ‘revival’ of the 1990s, especially in the Anglo-American literature. The most extensive treatment in English remains Günther Roth’s long and splendid introductory essay, ‘Marianne Weber and Her Circle,’ in Harry Zohn’s translation of Marianne Weber’s Max Weber: A Biography (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988). 96 We will take up Weber’s proximity to Locke in chapter 4, in the discussion of the difference between Locke’s fictional state of nature and Weber’s fictional ideal type of the Puritan hero. 3. Democracy and the Political  1 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31. See also Wolin’s well-known Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Notes to pages 77–8 231 2 See Fred Dallmayr’s discussion of Lefort’s and Wolin’s uses of the political in ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and Post-Modern Reflections,’ in his Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 79. 3 Whether this means consensus is another matter. The question is this: Can citizens in communities have moments of commonality without consensus or even explicit consent? On this issue I differ from Habermas, who has argued for an ideal speech situation in which citizens can arrive at a rational consensus. Yet it is unlikely that modern democratic politics of the sort Weber argues for can sustain rational consensus. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984). See also Asher Horowitz, ‘The Comedy of Enlightenment: Weber, Habermas, and the Critique of Reification,’ in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 4 See Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), for a classic treatment of the relation between politics and the culture of both the fin de siècle and modernity, in Weber’s political thought. 5 My interpretation of the political in Weber differs from the traditional focus in the Weber literature on the lecture as the place where Weber talks first and foremost about one of the oldest issues in Western political philosophy: the relation between politics and ethics. He certainly does this, but he also tries to define a space in which a heroic, charismatic leader can momentarily reconcile class with other differences and articulate a new political. 6 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 31. 7 Among them are Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401–24; Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins, eds., Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Tracy B. Strong, ‘Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie,’ and Alkis Kontos, ‘The World Disenchanted, and the Return of Gods and Demons,’ both in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason; Mark Warren, ‘Max Weber’s Liberalism for a Nietzschean World,’ American Political Science Review 82, no. 1 (March 1988): 31–50; Peter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8 The passage is from the end of Plato’s Republic. See Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992) para. 618, 289–90. See also 131.

232 Notes to pages 78–81  9 Max Weber, ‘The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics,’ in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Edward Shils and Hans Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 18. 10 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 364. Weber here refers to the Sermon on the Mount as an example of a pure ‘ethic of conviction,’ or an ethic of ‘ultimate ends.’ 11 Peter Breiner contends that Weber offers a theory of prudence in his notion of political action. See Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics. 12 For further discussion of the context and events surrounding the drafting of the Weimar constitution, see Renato Cristi, ‘Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Constituent Power,’ in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, ed. David Dyzenhaus (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 188. For the roles played by Weber and Preuss, see Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context,’ in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 13 Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. and ed. Jefrey Seitzer (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 109. See also John McCormick, ‘The Dilemmas of Dictatorship: Carl Schmitt and Constitutional Emergency Powers,’ in Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics; Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 2005), and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 1999); R. Slagstad, ‘Liberal Constitutionalism and Its Critics,’ in Constitutionalism and Democracy, ed. R. Slagstad and John Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Max Weber, ‘The Nation,’ in The Essential Weber, ed. Sam Whimster (London: Routledge, 2004), 147–55. 14 In Weber’s various references to nationalism and the nation, we can also find highly qualified references to homogeneity. For example, ‘the idea of a nation is apt to include the notions of common descent and of an essential, though frequently indefinite, homogeneity’ (my italics). The recognition that homogeneity is frequent but indefinite constitutes an important opening for the recognition of diversity in Weber’s model. As limited as Weber’s model of democracy was with respect to participation, the political implications of an ‘indefinite’ national identity are quite different from Schmitt’s view. As we saw in the previous chapter, Weber joined parliamentary representation, leadership, and democracy in his model in a way quite different from, and much more liberal than, that of Schmitt. 15 Max Weber, ‘Parliament and Government Germany under a New Political Order,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Lassman and Speirs, 194. 16 Ibid., 175–6.

Notes to pages 83–6 233 17 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 309–10. 18 These are, of course, exactly the same descriptions of the state that we find in Economy and Society. Weber’s political writings and speeches often borrow directly from his sociological texts, giving the lie to the old distinction between supposedly objective, value-neutral science and the value-laden, contested business of politics. See ibid., 316. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. As Lassman and Speirs point out in their comment on Weber’s observation, the ‘present moment’ referred to the ‘German Revolution,’ which was under way in January 1919, while Weber was delivering the lecture to students in Munich. See ibid., 310n2. 21 Fred Dallmayr, ‘Max Weber and the Modern State,’ in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason, 50. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1985), 75. 23 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ in Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1966), 110–11. 24 Sven Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism: Weber’s Politics in Their German Context,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Weber, ed. Stephen Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 137. 25 Gilbert Germain, A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 72. 26 Max Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ in Weber: Political Writings, 105. 27 With regard to the wartime reference to the battlefield, Weber’s notion of equality is more exclusive, however. Women were not allowed to enlist, and the officer corps, of which Weber was a reserve member, was marked by an elite class distinction that kept Weber and his professional colleagues far from the squalor of trench warfare and the slaughter on the front lines. 28 Ibid., 103. 29 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 159. It is well known that on the question of rights, Weber was influenced by the jurist Georg Jellinick’s The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, trans. M. Farrand (New York: Holt, 1901). Weber was influenced both by Jellenick’s argument that inalienable individual rights are religious, specifically puritan, and not simply political in origin in the West, and that rights need institutions to sustain them. For the historical context, see Günther Roth’s introduction to Hartmut Lehman and Günther Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, and Contexts (Washington/Cambridge, MA: German Historical Institute / Cambridge University Press, 1993), 21–2.

234 Notes to pages 86–7 30 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 103. See also Max Weber, ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy,’ in Weber: Political Writings, 1–28. The issue of whether citizenship can unify the nation, overcoming all of the fault lines of modern cultural diversity, is a crucial one. Weber recognized that ethnic or racial homogeneity is not, in itself, a possible or desirable criterion on which to build a national political identity. In contrast, he refers to modern society as ‘a battlefield’ of competing interests and to the plurality of values in modern society as the ‘warring gods.’ Whether a homogeneous political identity or national culture can unify the plurality and diversity of civil society is a difficult question. It has been taken up by modern theorists of democracy such as Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Will Kymlicka, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 31 Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Miami: University Press of Florida, 1983), 188. 32 David Beetham, ‘Weber and the Liberal Political Tradition,’ European Journal of Sociology 30, no. 3 (1989): 311–23 at 312. 33 See the fascinating commentaries by Weber’s contemporaries on the relations in his thought among science, liberalism, and the political. These have been gathered and edited by Lassman, Velody, and Martins in Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation.’ 34 Ibid. 35 Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism,’ 139. 36 Ibid. With reference to Kant, commentators have noted that his notion of autonomy is not so universal. As Hans Reiss has pointed out: ‘To exclude the majority of the population, wage earners, employees of any kind, convicted criminals, and all women, reveals a regrettably myopic view of human capacities.’ See Hans Reiss, ‘Postscript,’ in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 257. 37 For a good comparison of Weber and Hegel on the modern state, see Dallmayr, ‘Max Weber and the Modern State,’ 49–67. See also Fred Dallmayr, G.W.F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics (Latham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 38 Catherine Colliot-Thélène has argued that we can already see the outlines of the rational disenchantment of the state in Hegel. In Weber, the rationalization of the disenchanted state is fully developed – and without the explicitly metaphysical context that Hegel provided for it. See Catherine Colliot-Thélène, ‘Introduction,’ in Le désenchantment de L’État: de Hegel à Weber (Paris: Minuit, 1992).

Notes to pages 87–92 235 39 See ibid., 23–4, for a discussion of Sittlichkeit in Colliot-Thélène’s comparison of the disenchantment of the state in Weber and Hegel. 40 Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism,’ 132. See also Sven Eliaeson, ‘Max Weber and Plebiscitary Democracy,’ in Max Weber, Democracy, and Modernization, ed. Ralph Schroeder (London: Macmillan, 1998). See also Mommsen’s discussion of Weber’s sympathy for, and critique of, Roberto Michels’s views of direct democracy. Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Robert Michels and Max Weber: Moral Conviction vs. the Politics of Responsibility,’ in Max Weber and His Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 129. 41 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 311. 42 This can apply to majority governments in parliamentary systems based on the Westminster model, or to presidential systems with a division of powers if the executive and both houses of Congress are controlled by the same party. 43 Jane Mansbridge, ‘Using Power / Fighting Power: The Polity,’ in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib, 54. 44 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in Weber: Political Writings, 365. 45 Ibid. 46 Max Weber, ‘On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia,’ in Weber: Political Writings. 47 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 37. 48 Max Weber, ‘Russlands Übergang zum Scheinkonstitutionalismus,’ Archiv für Sozialwissenchaft und Sozialpolitik, 23 (1906), 396, cited in Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, 180. 49 Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, 180. 50 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 159. 51 For a discussion of the open-endedness of Rosa Luxemburg’s notion of revolutionary process, and its own contradictions and tensions, see Norman Geras, ‘Democracy and the Ends of Marxism,’ New Left Review (January– February 1994): 92–106. 52 Reflecting on the founding of Weimar a decade later, Schmitt also recognized both the partial and the bureaucratic aspects of the revolution, though with a different inflection. In his discussion of the origin of the Weimar constitution in Constitutional Theory (1928), he notes that even under the near-revolutionary circumstances that produced the workers’ and soldier’s councils of 1918–19, the ‘available state apparatus . . . continued to conduct business. The existing administrative situation . . . was not abolished and the old “state machine smashed,” as in the year 1793 under the rule of the Jacobins in France or in 1918 under the Bolsheviks in Russia, in order to establish a fully new organization. The “machine” continued to operate

236 Notes to pages 93–5 with changed direction.’ What Weber and Schmitt’s comments share is the idea that the routines of bureaucratic administration continued to function. But given the mixed elements of the new constitution, the functioning of the bureaucratic ‘machine’ did not produce the verkehrter Obrigkeitsstaat that Weber and Preuss had feared a socialist state would create. See Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 109. 53 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 365. 54 As Scaff and others have rightly noted, Weber was critical of ‘dilettantes’ and literati not only on the left but also on the right, and of reactionary, chauvinist, and romantic nationalist notions such as the ‘Ideas of 1914.’ See Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, 172. 55 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 365. 56 Ibid., 366. 57 Ibid., 360. 58 Max Weber, letter of 4 August 1908, to Michels, cited in Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage, 97. 59 Volker Heins, ‘Reasons of the Heart: Weber and Arendt on Emotion in Politics,’ European Legacy 12, no. 6 (2007): 715–28 at 717. 60 Ibid. 61 Three of the pioneering treatments of these issues in Weber by feminist theorists are Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988); Rosalyn Bolough, Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine Thinking – A Feminist Inquiry (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); and Susan Hekman, Max Weber, The Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), for a critique, with gender implications, of Weber’s assumptions about the rationality of social science that predated the Anglo-American Weber revival. These issues are given further elaboration in Susan Hekman, ‘Max Weber and PostPositivist Social Theory,’ in The Barbarism of Reason. This line of feminist commentary continues to suffer a silent neglect in the huge literature on almost every other aspect of Weber’s oeuvre. I would certainly include it in the line of theorizing about Weber undertaken by political theorists who are not career Weber scholars, those whom Lassman and Velody have called Weber’s ‘political critics.’ It has virtually dropped out of the recent Anglo-American Weber literature, which has been more concerned with either following the Germans, who continue to be understandably preoccupied with recapturing the ‘historical’ Weber in exhaustive detail, or rehabilitating Weber’s democratic credentials, albeit without a gender critique. A welcome exception is the Heins article I have cited in this chapter,

Notes to pages 95–100 237 ‘Reasons of the Heart.’ See also Klaus Lichtblau’s fascinating analysis, ‘The Protestant Ethic versus the “New Ethic,”’ in Weber’s Protestant Ethic, ed. Lehman and Roth, for another one of the few exceptions. 62 Heins, ‘Reasons of the Heart,’ 718. 63 Weber, ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy,’ 23. The difference between Weber’s view of 1895 and his political views expressed in the wartime articles was that in 1895 he was not a democrat and did not advocate democracy as a solution to the political incapacity of the bourgeoisie. Twenty years later, in his wartime journalism, he was and he did. 64 Ibid., 21. 65 Ibid. 66 Weber’s favourite example was Great Britain and its parliamentary democracy. He admired the way the British system selected and tested its leaders, referring to Gladstone as the general of the electoral battlefield on more than one occasion. 67 Ibid. 68 Karl-Ludwig Ay, ‘Max Weber: A German Intellectual and the Question of War Guilt after the Great War,’ in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Sam Whimster (New York: St Martin’s, 1999), 110–28 at 110. 69 Ibid., 111. 70 Ibid., 121. 71 Ibid., 119. As well as the literal starvation that was visited upon the working class and the soldiers themselves in the latter phase of the war. 72 See ibid., 127n44. 73 Gustav Radbruch, ‘Goldbilanz der Reichsverfassung,’ Die Gesellscahft 1 (1924): 57–69 at 62, quoted in Ellen Kennedy, ‘Introduction: Carl Schmitt’s Parlamentarismus in Its Historical Context,’ in Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), xxviii. Similarly, Naumann argued that the committee of the National Assembly, called by Friedrich Ebert to draft the new constitution, accept ‘a negotiated truce between capitalism and socialism.’ See Kennedy, ‘Introduction,’ note 45. 74 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 113. 75 Heins, ‘Reasons of the Heart,’ 722. 76 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 232. 77 Ibid., 231. 78 I purposefully use the title of Scaff’s excellent book, which alerted us to the tensions that Weber saw between the different life spheres – specifically those between the realm of politics, the ‘iron cage’ of modern rational

238 Notes to pages 100–3 culture more generally, and the desire to escape from its grip. See Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage. 79 Heins, ‘Reasons of the Heart,’ 717. 80 Ibid., 722. 81 Ibid. 82 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 108. It is important to distinguish Weber’s ideal use of the term ‘political aristocracy’ from the real Junker aristocracy he criticized in his political writings and speeches, and from the aristocracies of the past that had produced rule by notables. The latter was no longer viable in an age of mass democracy, even though aristocratic notables were instrumental in the establishing nineteenth-century democracy in England. 83 Ibid. 84 Wilhelm Hennis has become well known for focusing on the notions of Lebensführung and Menschentum as Weber’s central themes even in Weber’s early work before the Protestant Ethic essays. The example I cite here is much later, from Weber’s ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ written during the First World War. See Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber’s Central Question, intro. Keith Tribe (London: Threshold Press, 2000). 85 Weber, ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy,’ 15. 86 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 109. 87 Georg W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ed. and trans. T.M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), para. 306. 199. 88 Ibid. 89 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 216. 90 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 110. 91 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980). Here, Locke famously went from an argument about hording the fruits of nature, which could spoil, to the invention of money, which could be accumulated in unlimited amounts without going bad. Locke also accepted the Aristotelian assumption that the ownership of property was both natural and a sign of rationality. Locke’s political project was, of course, the justification of the Glorious Revolution and the entrenchment of bourgeois property rights. He was trying to justify greater parliamentary rule by the rising bourgeoisie and was, of course, not a democrat. No universal suffrage (even male), no suffrage without property, and no property for women, for Locke. We will engage in a more systematic comparison of Locke’s and Weber’s views of the founding of property and capitalism in the next chapter. 92 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 112.

Notes to pages 103–8 239  93 Ibid.  94 Ibid., 113. All quotations in this paragraph are from 113.  95 Weber, ‘Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,’ 104.  96 See Breiner’s discussion of Werner Sombart’s prefiguring of Weber’s discussion in The Profession and Vocation of Politics. Peter Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician – a Series of Just-SoStories? Or Why Is Weber’s Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?’ Max Weber Studies 6, no. 1 ( January 2006): 3–31.  97 Ibid., 11.  98 Ibid.  99 Ibid., 12. 100 Ibid., 12, 21. 101 Ibid., 23. 102 Ibid., 24. 103 Ibid., 21. 104 See, for example, Peter Breiner’s discussion of Sombart’s very negative view of the modern professional politician in his 1907 article in the journal Morgen, where politics as a vocation or life activity is discussed from the perspective of a fin de siècle romantic pessimism obsessed with degeneration and decay in modernity, including modern democratic politics. Breiner notes that Weber’s discussion of the modern vocational politician in The Profession and Vocation of Politics takes place without any reference to Sombart’s Morgen article, of which Weber must have been aware. See ibid., 17. 105 Ibid., 17–18. Breiner’s intriguing discussion of James Bryce’s American Commonwealth (1912), and his notion of ‘magnetic man,’ the modern plebiscitary politician, is one of the few in the literature. 106 Ibid., 24. 107 Ibid., 25. 108 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 369. 109 After Arthur Koestler had written The Ghost in the Machine – albeit under very different circumstances. There is a broader historical context that renders ambivalent Weber’s discussion of a leading aristocracy. The historical situation that produced a leading class like the heroic Puritans – a kind of vanguard of the bourgeoisie, shaped by a rigorous moral code of conduct and conviction that in turn shaped Western history – had been changed irrevocably in late modernity. It was not only the absence of middle-class leadership after the war that defined this context. The disenchantment of the world, its bureaucratization, and the rise of capitalism and the modern state provided the cultural and historical backdrop for

240 Notes to pages 108–12 Weber’s concerns – an entire constellation of factors that he associated with modernity in ‘Science as a Vocation,’ which has come to be seen as the companion lecture to ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics.’ The complex cultural configuration of late modernity had made the restoration of a true aristocratic elite a difficult if not impossible task. 110 See Sheldon Wolin’s discussion of the retrieval of the past in Tocqueville in his Tocqueville, Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). For a good comparison of Weber and Tocqueville, see Stephen Kalberg, ‘Tocqueville and Weber on the Origins of Citizenship: The Political Culture of American Democracy,’ Citizenship Studies 1, no. 2 (July 1997): 199–222. 111 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 11. 112 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 352–3. 113 In his recent biography, Joachim Radkau notes: ‘Few scholars have sought so doggedly as Weber to deny the emotional basis of thought; but by the same token, few have revealed that basis in such a stirring manner.’ Heins, ‘Reasons of the Heart,’ 717. It is interesting that this sentence from the Introduction to the German edition of Radkau’s riveting biography was edited out of the English translation of the Polity edition. Compare Joachim Radkau, ‘At the Den of the Sick Lion,’ in Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 4, with Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005), 23. 114 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 353. 115 Ibid., 367. 116 Weber, ‘Parliament and Government in Germany,’ 230. 117 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 353. 118 Catherine Colliot-Thélène, Max Weber et l’histoire ( Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1990), 88. Her precise formulation is: ‘le “polythéisme des valeurs” n’est pas pour lui une dimension constitutive de l’être-au-monde de l’homme, une quelque sorte une propriété trans-historique de la condition humaine, mais bien l’effet de la diversification des pratiques, qui n’est accomplice, et par conséquent réelle, que dans les sociéties modernes.’ 119 Ibid., 367. 120 Ibid., 355. 121 My emphasis. See Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 369. Weber publicly extolled the virtues of charismatic British prime ministers in this regard; Gladstone and Lloyd George are cited frequently and with approval in his political texts.

Notes to pages 113–16 241 122 Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ 72. 123 See Dallmayr’s discussion of Lefort’s version of the critique of the metaphysics of presence/representation in Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, 87–97; and Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ 65–6. 124 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 366. 125 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). Pocock contends that Machiavelli’s prince intervenes in politics not only for personal glory but also for republican ends, to found or renew great, well-ordered cities and states in which citizens are free. See also David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), ch. 2, ‘Republicanism,’ for a good discussion of the republican tradition. 126 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 352. 127 Ibid., 369. 128 Ibid., 368. 129 See Strong, ‘Weber and the Bourgeoisie,’ 131. 130 Thomas Wilson, ‘The Impact of Nationalist Ideology on Political Philosophy: The Case of Max Weber and Wilhelmine Germany,’ History of European Ideas 16, nos. 4–6 (1993): 545–50, gives an excellent sense of the complex and at times conflicting, intersection of Weber’s historical, social, national, familial, and political contexts and commitments. The new biography by Radkau explores these in rich detail, under the relatively new argument (in the Weber literature) that Weber’s life and work were defined by the tension between his recognition and analysis of rational Western civilization, and a repressed naturalism and emotionalism. See Radkau, ‘At the Den of the Sick Lion,’ 1–4. 131 Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 199. 132 I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for emphasizing this point. 133 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 335; and Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics, 153. 134 For some European commentators closer to the German debates, the problems posed by Weber’s view of charismatic leadership resonate. They go back to the debate started by Mommsen and can be seen in comments such as this one from Eliaeson, who states that the problem that Weber’s charismatic hero was designed to solve was difficult and ‘needs to be understood on its own terms.’ Yet he also notes that Weber’s heroic actor was a ‘toxic cure for the diseases of the German political order’ and

242 Notes to pages 117–20 that Weber’s Caesarism was dangerous. See Eliaeson, ‘Constitutional Caesarism,’ 134–5. 135 See Max Weber, ‘Sociology of Religion,’ in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. and ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 447, where Weber discusses exemplary and ethical prophecy and the relation of each to the ideal and material circumstances of their followers. 136 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 367–8. 137 Charles Turner is alive to this ambiguity when he notes that ‘in his articles on democracy and parliament he [Weber] was concerned about the political education, maturity and judgment of all citizens, not only leaders.’ Turner also notes, though, that ‘this view, it has to be admitted, is not common in the literature.’ See Charles Turner, ‘Weber and Dostoyevsky on Church, Sect, and Democracy,’ in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Sam Whimster (New York: St Martin’s, 1999), 162–75 at 163–4. 138 Another indication of the volatility surrounding the lecture and the historical moment in which it was given is that the Freistudentische Jugend was itself on the ‘cusp between authoritarian, and democratic communitarian and völkish politics,’ as Carl Levy has noted. See Carl Levy, ‘Max Weber, Anarchism, and Libertarian Culture: Personality and Power Politics,’ in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Whimster, 89–90. 139 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 44. 140 See Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,’ in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. Peter J. Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 34. 141 Radkau, Max Weber, 507. 142 Ibid. As Radkau points out, Weber of course could not have foreseen this turn of events and publicly condemned their murders. 143 Ibid., 508. 144 Ibid. 145 The phrase is that of Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 17–19. 146 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Injustice and Collective Memory,’ in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 40. 147 This distinction made on page 138 – between the mythic and the historical –  is complex and will become more important as our discussion proceeds. It runs through the next chapter on Weber’s heroic puritans.

Notes to pages 121–4 243 4. The Puritan Sects and the Spirit of Democracy: The Memory of the Political in the Protestant Ethic  1 The literature is legion. For examples by well-known Weber commentators, see Hartmut Lehman and Günther Roth, eds., Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, and Contexts ( Washington/Cambridge, MA: German Historical Institute / Cambridge University Press, 1993); and the volumes and journals that came out for the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (hereafter PESC) in 2005. For example, William H. Swatos, Jr, and Lutz Kaebler, eds., The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis ( Boulder: Paradigm, 2005); and special volumes of these journals: Max Weber Studies 5, no. 2 (July 2005) and 6, no. 1 (January 2006), ed. Sam Whimster; and Journal of Classical Sociology 5, no. 1 (2005), ed. Peter Baehr.  2 This line of commentary has come from scholars who are mostly political theorists. I called them the ‘political critics’ in the previous chapter. See, for example, David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins, eds., Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ (Cambridge: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401–24; Peter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and ‘The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician – a Series of Just-SoStories? Or Why Is Weber’s Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?’ Max Weber Studies 6, no. 1 (January 2005): 3–31.  3 Baehr, ‘Issue Editor’s Preface,’ Journal of Classical Sociology, 6.  4 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 31.  5 Sung Ho Kim’s neo-Tocquevillean reconstruction of Weber’s view of civil society is one of the most prominent recent studies of Weber as a democratic theorist. See Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).  6 Ibid., 90.  7 Ibid., 93.  8 Ibid., 80.  9 Ibid., 117. 10 Ibid., preface. Kim’s discussion revolves around the connection made by Weber between the Puritan sects and democracy in America. Weber’s

244 Notes to pages 124–6 well-known view that the American sects were forerunners of democracy will be discussed in relation to the PESC in more detail in chapter 4. For now, I would like to look at the aspect of Kim’s argument that relates to democracy and civil society. 11 C.B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2. 12 See David Zaret, ‘The Use and Abuse of Textual Data,’ in Weber’s Protestant Ethic, ed. Lehman and Roth, 245. Among prominent ‘historical critics’ of Weber’s thesis has been Malcolm MacKinnon, who sparked an intense controversy by suggesting that Weber had got it wrong about the state of grace, uncertainty, and anxiety in which the Puritans lived. His view was that Weber fundamentally misread key Puritan texts and exaggerated the constant and unending degree of anxiety – exemplified in the work of Protestant theologian Richard Baxter – that drove the Puritans to work in a calling because they could not know if they were among the elected or not. Thus the issue for Mackinnon and his critics has been the historical inaccuracy of Weber’s reading of key Puritan texts. Others, such as David Zaret and Kaspar von Greyerz, have taken issue with MacKinnon’s position, defending Weber’s view on historical and textual grounds. For some of the back and forth on a number of the contentious historical issues to which Weber’s thesis has given rise, see the essays – including contributions by MacKinnon and his detractors – in Lehman and Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic. 13 Max Weber, ‘Sect, Church and Democracy,’ in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. and ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1208. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Max Weber, ‘Sect, Church and Democracy,’ in Economy and Society, ed. Roth and Wittich, 1209. 17 See Sam Whimster’s discussion in Understanding Weber (London: Routledge, 2007), 65. 18 Weber, ‘Sect, Church and Democracy,’ 1210. 19 I say this here even though I have argued elsewhere that Weber was a post-Enlightenment thinker in many respects. Weber’s relationship to Enlightenment ideals is complex. Many of Weber’s cultural and artistic contemporaries and colleagues rejected the ideals of the Enlightenment completely. Then there is Weber’s complex relationship to Nietzsche. See Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley, introduction to The Barbarism of Reason; Mark Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber: When Does Reason Become

Notes to pages 126–30 245 Power?’ in The Barbarism of Reason, ed. Horowitz and Maley; and Bryan S. Turner, For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1996). 20 Stephen Kalberg, ‘The Origins and Expansion of Kulturpessimismus: The Relationship between Public and Private Spheres in Early Twentieth Century Germany,’ Sociological Theory 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1987): 150–64 at 155–6. 21 Weber, Economy and Society, 1206. 22 See, for example, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). 23 James Henretta, ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Reality of Capitalism in Colonial America,’ in Weber’s Protestant Ethic, ed. Lehman and Roth, 333. 24 The gender issues in the sect communities and the witch trials are rarely mentioned by defenders of the Protestant ethic thesis in the Weber literature, but there is a lively discussion among sociologists oriented toward gender and culture. See, for example, Ian Reed, ‘Why Salem Made Sense: Culture, Gender, and the Puritan Persecution of Witchcraft,’ Cultural Sociology 1, no. 2 (July 2007): 209–34. 25 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (New York: Scribner, 1976), 107; and Joseph Gabel, False Consciousness: A Study in Reification, trans. Margaret and Kenneth Thompson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 25. 26 David M. Levin, ‘Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,’ Humanistic Psychologist 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1988): 17. 27 Gabel, False Consciousness, 25. 28 Joseph Gabel, ‘Elements d’une Lecture Marxiste de la “Sociologie Religieuse” de Max Weber,’ Sociologie de l’alienation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), 175. 29 Ibid. 30 Weber, PESC, 166–7 31 Ibid., 166–7. 32 Whimster, Understanding Weber, 69. 33 Levin, ‘Transpersonal Phenomenology,’ 17. 34 Weber, Economy and Society, 1204. 35 I am still inclined to side with Troeltsch on this issue. The highly moralistic solidarity of the sects, or their ‘inner-worldly asceticism,’ must be ‘transcended,’ left behind or shed for them to be capable of democratic participation in a diverse and plural society. See Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 115–16.

246 Notes to pages 131–7 36 And by implication, the uncertainty and volatility of the modern market economy, upon which the modern democratic state depends. 37 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 9. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 See Gianfranco Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), 65, for an earlier iteration of this argument. 40 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 7. 41 Ibid., 6. 42 Ibid., 5–6. This issue, with a different inflection, has also been discussed by Goldman. See Harvey Goldman, Power, Death, and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 43 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 7. 44 Ibid., 5. 45 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 21. 46 Ibid., 20. 47 Ibid., 29. 48 See C.B. Macpherson’s well-known critique in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). See also Peter Lindsay’s good, clear discussion of Macpherson’s liberalism in Creative Individualism: The Democratic Vision of C.B. Macpherson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). 49 Locke, Two Treatises on Government, 333. 50 See Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Injustice and Collective Memory,’ in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 40, 42. On this issue, and others, Wolin’s analysis of the emergence of the ‘economic’ as a separate, and later dominant, sphere of life in modernity complements those of Karl Polanyi and Ellen Meiksins Wood. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001); and Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1996), particularly ch. 1, which deals with the separation of the economic from the political and democracy. 51 Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan,’ 9. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 4.

Notes to pages 137–41 247 54 See Sam N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2003), as well as Whimster’s discussion in Under­ standing Weber, 204–12. 55 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992). 56 Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 296–7. 57 Ibid., 297, 299. 58 Weber, PESC, 182. 59 Maley, ‘The Politics of Time,’ 151. 60 One might note that Weber was perhaps concerned with the growing intellectual and political presence of Marxism and the left even as he wrote the first Protestant Ethic essays in 1903–4. The contention I make at the end of this chapter rests on the argument that Weber did not fundamentally or significantly alter, let alone renounce, his image of the heroic Puritan even as he responded to some of his critics in the revised, 1920 version of PESC and the essays on the Puritan sects. I am thus placing his image of the heroic Puritan in the context of his political struggles with both the left and the right. 61 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 368. 62 Weber, PESC, 181–2. 63 Ibid., 181. Had Weber written this today, in the context of rising oil prices, global warming, and heated debates over environmental sustainability, this might be the passage from PESC that commentators quoted most often, and not the more industrial metaphor of the ‘iron cage.’ 64 This is the famous ‘iron cage’ passage, from the end of the Protestant Ethic, to which commentators have been drawn ever since Parsons’s original rendering in English in 1930. I commented on some of the recent discussions over it and on how the newer Weber scholarship has adopted a more literal translation of stahlhartes Gehäuse, in chapter 1n42. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2002), 245–6n129. The prominent Weber scholar Sam Whimster has also adopted the newer translation of Weber’s phrase as ‘a casing as hard as steel.’ See Whimster, Understanding Weber, 70. 65 See Weber, Economy and Society, 1156; and Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Weber,’ 68–99 at 94. 66 I have previously discussed Taylorism in more detail in relation to Weber’s view of science and technology in Terry Maley, ‘Max Weber and the Iron Cage of Technology,’ Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 24, no. 1 (2004): 69–86.

248 Notes to pages 141–4 67 See Weber, PESC, 168–9. 68 Agnes Heller, ‘A Tentative Answer to the Question: Has Civil Society Cultural Memory?’ Social Research 68, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 1031–40 at 1035. 69 Stephen E. Hanson, ‘Weber and the Problem of Social Science Prediction,’ in Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, ed. Laurence McFalls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 290–308, at 290. 70 See Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin, 1968). Even though Weber disagreed with Marxism’s prophetic metaphysics of universal emancipation, he was sympathetic to Marx’s analysis and critique of capitalism – something that has been forgotten in the recent Weber literature. To appreciate this, one has to go back to an older literature that predates the recent Weber ‘revival’ to which I referred in the introduction to this volume. See, for example, Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); Karl Löwith, Max Weber and Karl Marx (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982); Robert Antonio and Anthony Glassman, eds., A Marx–Weber Dialogue (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985); and Sam Whimster and Scott Lash, eds., Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987).  Though Weber did not deploy the discourse of alienation in his many prophetic pronouncements on the fate of those destined to live and work in the ‘iron cage,’ he was, in his more philosophical and political moments (which were many) describing the existential milieu of a disenchanted world in which temporality has been mechanized. Weber’s idealized, backward-looking projection of the Puritan hero is a reaction to disenchantment, which we will take up in the next chapter on social science and method.  For a discussion of the relations among reification, time, and capitalism, see Gabel, False Consciousness. Though further comment is beyond the scope if this work, Alan Sica has rightly noted, in his introduction to his edited collection of Gabel’s essays, that Gabel’s oeuvre is – in North America at least – an achievement that has not been fully appreciated. Curiously, Gabel’s essay on Weber’s sociology of religion, which I cited earlier in this chapter (n27) is not included in Sica’s collection. See Alan Sica, introduction to Ideology and the Corruption of Thought, ed. Alan Sica (London: Transaction, 1997). For a more detailed discussion of Gabel’s notion of the spatialization of temporality in relation to Weber’s notion of disenchantment, see Maley, ‘The Politics of Time,’ 139–68. 71 Karl Marx ‘Wages, Prices, and Profit,’ in Selected Works, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1977), 68. 72 Mark Antliff, ‘Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,’ Art Bulletin 84, no. 1 (March 2002): 148–69 at 148.

Notes to pages 144–9 249 73 Henri Bergson was wildly popular and lectured to overflowing university classes in Paris before the First World War. As part of his critique of modern ‘rationalized clock-time,’ he talked about the vitality of intuitive consciousness in ways that would later be taken up by fascist artists and their supporters. See ibid., 162. 74 On the rise of the radical right and its relation to regressive notions of temporality, culture, and myth, see ibid., 150. For the historical and theoretical context, see Robert Antonio’s comprehensive article, ‘After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism,’ American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 2 (July 2000): 40–87. 75 Heller, ‘A Tentative Answer,’ 1039. 76 See Catherine Colliot-Thélène, Max Weber et l’histoire, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 95. See also her discussion of Durkheim and Weber and their views of intentionality and its historical, social, and methodological contexts, in ‘Speaking Past One Another: Durkheim, Weber, and Varying Modes of Sociological Explanation,’ in McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, 137–64. 5. Science as a Vocation, or the Politics of Science  1 Max Weber, ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy,’ trans. Keith Tribe, in The Essential Weber, ed. Sam Whimster (London: Routledge, 2004), 403.  2 Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science, Disenchantment, and the Search for Meaning,’ in Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation,’ ed. Peter Lassman, Irving Velody, and Herminio Martins (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).  3 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (New York: Scribner, 1976). See ‘Preface to the New Edition,’ xiii.  4 Anthony Giddens, Politics, Sociology and Social Theory: Encounters with Classical and Contemporary Social Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 2. As Giddens notes, the Structure of Social Action, published in 1937, only achieved near hegemonic status in the post–Second World War period; having done so, it influenced both interpretations of Weber and the practice of social science in the English-speaking North for a generation.  5 The pay-off from the Gerth and Mills collection was evident a generation later, in fine analyses of Weber’s relationship to Marx and Nietzsche such as the one found in Bryan S. Turner, ‘Introduction: Marx and Nietzsche,’ in For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 1996).

250 Notes to pages 149–51  6 See John Gunnell’s work on this period of Anglo-American political theory, the critique of behaviourism and positivism in the social sciences, and the central role that Wolin’s classic Politics and Vision played in those debates. John Gunnell, Between Philosophy and Politics: The Alienation of Political Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 1998).  7 See Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, ‘Bibliographic Note,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xxvi. For the original article, see Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401–24.  8 Ibid., 406. Reprinted in Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley, eds., The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 287–310.  9 This is brought out brilliantly in the editors’ introduction to a collection of commentary by Weber’s contemporaries. See Lassman and Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science.’ 10 See Laurence McFalls, ed., Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); and Sam Whimster, Understanding Weber (London: Routledge, 2007), esp. ch. 4, ‘Wissenschftslehre’; and Sven Eliaeson, Max Weber’s Methodologies (Oxford: Polity, 2002). 11 Ibid. See also McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered. For an example of a more traditional, yet recent, separation of Weber’s politics from his social science, see Michael Greven, ‘Max Weber’s Missing Definition of “Political Action” in his “Basic Sociological Concepts,” ’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2004): 179–200. 12 An earlier example that preceded the recent upsurge of interest in Weber is Hans H. Brunn, Science, Values, and Politics in Max Weber’s Methodology (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972). The most striking discussion from the Weber revival is Lassman and Velody, ‘Max Weber on Science.’ 13 In light of the discussion of the Protestant Ethic in the previous chapter, we can look at it through the lens, in this chapter, of the relationship between Weber’s liberal-democratic project and his methodology. 14 The first translation available to the Anglo-American public was Max Weber, ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,’ in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949). A new translation by Keith Tribe titled ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy,’ was

Notes to pages 151–4 251 published in Sam Whimster’s edited collection, The Essential Weber (London: Routledge, 2004). 15 Weber, ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge,’ 387–8. 16 Whimster, Understanding Weber, 103. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 111. 19 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ in Karl Marx: A Reader, ed. John Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 277. 20 Max Weber, ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge,’ 402. 21 Ibid., 402. Weber’s statement here thus corresponds to his political understanding of equality, which we discussed in chapter 2 – that equality is also not given in nature and thus that democracy is not grounded in nature either. 22 See the discussion of Schürmann’s notion of principium from the Introduction. 23 Whimster, The Essential Weber, 403. 24 For a critique of Weber as a post-positivist adherent to the subject/object dichotomy, see Susan Hekman, ‘Max Weber and Post-Positivist Social Theory,’ in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason. For a discussion of scholars who have seen Weber as somehow anti-foundationalist, see Whimster, Understanding Weber, 115; or as a kind of deconstructionist avant le lettre, see Sven Eliaeson and Kari Palonen, ‘Max Weber’s Relevance as a Theorist of Politics,’ Max Weber Studies 4, no. 2 (2004): 135–42. 25 The intellectual currents surrounding the debates on objectivity have been treated exhaustively – in particular, the influence of the Southwest German Historical School as represented by Dilthey, Rickert, and Windelband. See Guy Oakes, ‘Max Weber and the Southwest German School: The Genesis of the Concept of the Historical Individual,’ in Max Weber and his Contemporaries, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Johanne Osterhammel (London: Allen Unwin, 1987); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1983); and, following C. Wright Mills, Irving M. Zeitlin, Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory, 7th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 2001), for an earlier treatment of some of the same intellectual influences – particularly Dilthey and Rickert – in the context of the Marx–Weber debates of the 1970s, in which Weber’s affinities with Marx, and not his differences from him, were first brought to light for the AngloAmerican audience.

252 Notes to pages 154–9 26 Whimster, Understanding Weber, 114. 27 See Catherine Colliot-Thelene, Max Weber et l’histoire (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1990), 94–5. 28 Whimster, Understanding Weber, 104. 29 On the issue of science and disenchantment in Weber, see Terry Maley, ‘Max Weber and the Iron Cage of Technology,’ Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 24, no. 1 (February 2004): 69–86. On Weber as a postEnlightenment thinker politically and methodologically, see Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason, 3–20. 30 Weber’s critique of marginalist economics is taken up in Peter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); his complex relationships to the German Historical School and German Idealism are discussed in Colliot-Thélène, Max Weber et l’Histoire. 31 Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401. 32 Ibid. 33 Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 406. 34 McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, 15. 35 Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 417. 36 Ibid., 409. 37 See, for example, the very detailed and historically informed discussion of Weber’s methodology in Whimster, Understanding Weber, 73–115. 38 Peter Breiner, ‘Ideal Types as “Utopias” and Impartial Political Clarification: Weber and Mannheim on Sociological Prudence,’ in McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, 89, 110. 39 Peter Breiner, ‘Translating Max Weber: Exile Attempts to Forge a New Political Science,’ European Journal of Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 133–49 at 136. 40 Ibid., 135, 136. 41 Breiner, ‘Ideal Types as “Utopias,”’ 102. 42 Breiner, ‘Translating Max Weber,’ 143. 43 Breiner, ‘Ideal Types as “Utopias,”’ 110–11. 44 The argument of strong program postmodern thinkers would, of course, go much further. They would maintain that no objective meaning is possible because even partial, or perspectival and transparent, attempts to construct ideal types self-reflexively would reveal interests and power. See Robert Antonio’s comprehensive article, ‘After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism,’ American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 2 (July 2000): 40–87, for an excellent discussion of these issues and the intense ‘politics of theory’ that surrounds them.

Notes to pages 159–62 253 45 Erik Wolfe, ‘Max Weber’s Ethical Criticism and the Problem of Metaphysics,’ in Lassman and Velody, Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation,’ 131. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Theodor Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’ In Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman, trans. T. Bahti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 114–29. 49 Colliot-Thélène, Max Weber et l’histoire, 72–92. 50 Weber, ‘The Objectivity of Knowledge,’ 383. 51 Erich Kahler, ‘The Vocation of Science,’ in Lassman and Velody, Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’; Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (New York: Harper and Row, 1960) and Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911). For a good discussion of Sombart’s Lebensphilosophie and its relation to his critique of politics, see Peter Breiner, ‘The Origins of the Puritan Capitalist and the Vocational Politician – a Series of Just-So-Stories? Or Why Is Weber’s Genealogy of the Vocational Politician So Uncontroversial?’ Max Weber Studies 6, no. 1 (January 2006): 3–31. 52 Not only has Weber made a comeback, but so also has the concept of reification. Though I deploy Gabel here without further critique or reconstruction, I acknowledge Axel Honneth’s rich exploration of the idea in light of post-Marxist debates over recognition – discussions to which Gabel did not have access. Reification, so characteristic of the modern world described by Weber, for Honneth amounts to a ‘forgetting’ of the almost primordial intersubjective bond between human beings. See Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (London: Oxford University Press, 2008). 53 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 405. 54 Both Kontos and Germain have argued that Weber’s formulation of the agency of the political hero means that the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic domination is never completely closed. My argument is that the same sense of open-ended time underlies Weber’s notions of the agency of both the political actor and the social scientist. See Alkis Kontos, ‘The World Disenchanted, and the Return of Gods and Demons,’ and Gilbert Germain, ‘Revenge of the Sacred: Technology and Re-enchantment,’ both in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason; and Gilbert Germain, A Discourse on Disenchantment: Reflections on Politics and Technology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). 55 For a previous discussion of the issues around time, only with regard to technology, see Maley, ‘Max Weber and the Iron Cage of Technology.’ For a discussion of the temporality of reification and disenchantment in

254 Notes to pages 163–8 Weber, see Maley, ‘The Politics of Time: Subjectivity and Modernity in Max Weber,’ in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason, 139–68. 56 Stephen E. Hanson, ‘Weber and the Problem of Social Science Prediction,’ in McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, 298. 57 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 140. 58 Stephen E. Hanson, ‘Weber and the Problem of Social Science Prediction,’ in McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered. 59 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 450. 60 Hanson, ‘Weber and the Problem,’ 299. I do not take ‘linear’ to mean normatively progressive, historically necessary, or a ‘higher’ stage of development in any teleological sense. 61 Colliot-Thélène, Max Weber et l’histoire, 88. 62 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in From Max Weber, 149. 63 This has been discussed, from very different perspectives, by Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988); and recently by Whimster, Understanding Weber, 103–4. 64 McFalls, Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, 15. 65 Max Weber, ‘The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics,’ in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward Shils and Hans Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 27. 66 Some of Weber’s ‘political’ critics have been struck by this dramatic reference to Plato from the end of the Republic. See Kontos, ‘The World Disenchanted,’ and Tracy B. Strong, ‘Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie,’ both in Horowitz and Maley, The Barbarism of Reason. 67 For a good discussion of Weber and Ellul on the issue of the fateful ‘reenchantment’ of the world by modern science and technology, see Germain, ‘Revenge of the Sacred,’ 255. 68 Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 408. 69 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 41. 70 Ibid., 45. 71 See Richard Wellen, Dilemmas in Liberal Democratic Thought Since Max Weber (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 127. 72 Ibid., 73. 73 Ibid., 42.

Notes to pages 168–73 255 74 Ibid., 73. 75 Ibid., 41. 76 Ibid., 7. 77 Among the many discussions of Strauss’s problematic notion of political philosophy and its relation to both social science and (in relation to chapter 3) religion, see, for example, Shadia Drury, Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). See also her previous work on Strauss: Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St Martin’s, 1997); and The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St Martin’s, 1988). Closely related to the issues discussed by Drury and in this chapter, see also Bryan S. Turner, ‘The Problem of Cultural Relativism for the Sociology of Human Rights: Weber, Schmitt, and Strauss,’ Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 4 (December 2002): 587–605. For an excellent discussion of the ‘politics of theory’ behind Strauss’s critique of modern social science, see Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism.’ See also John Gunnell, ‘Reading Max Weber: Leo Strauss and Eric Voeglin,’ European Journal of Political Theory 3 (April 2004): 151–66. 78 Weber’s notion of objectivity has been subjected to extensive criticism. See, for example, Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action; Strong, ‘Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie’; Deiter Misgeld, ‘Modernity and Social Science: Habermas and Rorty,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 4, no. 11 (Fall 1986): 355–73; and Strauss, Natural Right and History. For important feminist critiques, see Brown, Manhood and Politics; and Rosalyn Bologh, Love or Greatness: Max Weber and Masculine Thinking: A Feminist Enquiry (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 79 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 110. 80 Ibid., 125. 81 Ibid., 118. 82 Strong, ‘Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie,’ 124. 83 Ibid., 125. 84 Ibid., 125, 126. 85 Ibid., 124. 86 Ibid., 125. The issue of who is entitled to produce ‘legitimate’ social scientific knowledge and the degree to which that knowledge can claim the status of Truth has, of course, been just as contentious in recent debates over postmodernism as it was in Weber’s time. Strong asks what is demanded of ‘the bourgeois truth seeker’ who can presume to make scientifically valid claims. His response: ‘It is a demand that one take upon oneself the various and now irreconcilable fragments into which the world has been shattered.’ Antonio, in ‘After Postmodernism,’ has noted that for Weber

256 Notes to pages 173–4 and other ‘first-generation’ modern social theorists, the ‘ethical dimension’ of their social scientific inquiry was ‘manifested in beliefs about “truth seekers”’ and the ‘exemplary events, struggles . . . (i.e. the trial of Galileo)’ they underwent in the search for truth (77). Antonio notes that ‘today’s constructivist standards,’ articulated by ‘strong-program postmodernists’ such as Lyotard and Butler, are dismissive of the ‘truth seeking’ of the early twentieth-century social theorists (77). Blistering postmodern deconstructions of the notions of scientific validity and truth, objectivity and subjectivity, have tried to demolish any pretence to ‘truth seeking.’ Antonio notes that ‘in general, post-modernists see theory and science as perspectivist “narratives” arising from, justifying and reproducing hegemonic relations and identities of specific socio-cultural locations’ (52). They have thus radicalized and politicized Weber’s perspectivism, rejecting entirely his methodological individualism and the individual responsibility of the social scientist. Antonio goes on to differentiate between his own more reflexive version of this critique – which is perhaps not as hostile to ‘truth seeking’ — and that of the ‘strong-program postmodernists,’ who ‘view social science and theory exclusively as narratives and reject any references to “realities” external to the text, thus dismissing any discussion of “objective” inquiry about the “validity” of theories and how well they represent “reality”’ (52–3). (All page numbers cited in this note are from the Antonio article.) 87 Hanson makes a related point about the need for the social scientist to be self-aware. He notes that the social scientist, practising within the time frame of the world of modern science (and not in a traditional or charismatic context), is forced to ‘assess the “causes” of his or her own epistemological, ontological and methodological stances.’ Stephen E. Hanson, ‘Weber and the Problem,’ 301. 88 Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,’ in Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 346. Weber discusses specialization extensively as well in ‘Science as a Vocation,’ where he paints the compelling portrait of the scientist to which we referred earlier. 89 Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation,’ in Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, 149. 90 Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth,’ Social Research 52, no. 2 (Summer 1985), 218. For the role of the late-modern version of the ‘vocational specialist type’ in both global corporate culture and contemporary democracy in the United States (and the global North), see Wolin’s recent collection of essays, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). In relation to our discussion of the role of voca-

Notes to pages 174–8 257 tional specialist type, see particularly ch. 8, ‘The Politics of Superpower: Managed Democracy,’ and ch. 9, ‘Intellectual Elites Against Democracy.’ 7 91 For a discussion of the production and political uses of technocratic knowledge, see Maley, ‘Max Weber and the Iron Cage,’ 82–4. 92 Both phrases are Wolin’s. See Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 420, 421–2. Conclusion  1 Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 369.  2 On the biographical, which has always exercised a fascination for (especially German) Weber scholars, see the recent – and in Germany quite controversial – biography by Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Polity, 2009). What is new in Radkau’s interpretation is that Weber’s various discussions of passion and emotion – such as those we have examined in ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ – were rooted in a notion of nature. We have not pursued this theme at length, but it challenges the view of Weber as primarily a theorist of rationality.  3 We can usefully recall the apt comment by Peter Baehr, which we cited at the beginning of chapter 4, that the The Protestant Ethic represents ‘a contested symbol of sociology’s collective memory.’ Baehr’s point applies more broadly – that the image of Weber as a ‘founder’ of modern sociology is still a hotly contested ‘symbol of sociology’s collective memory.’ See Peter Baehr, ‘Issue Editor’s Preface,’ Journal of Classical Sociology 5, no. 1 (2005): 5­–9.  4 See the insightful discussion of the culturally varied and highly contested ‘reception histories’ of Weber’s social science in Laurence McFalls, Augustin Simard, and Barbara Thériault, ‘Introduction: Towards a Comparative Reception-History of Max Weber’s Oeuvre,’ in Max Weber’s ‘Objectivity’ Reconsidered, ed. Laurence McFalls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). For Weber’s reception into the classical tradition of sociology, see Bryan S. Turner, ‘Weber’s Reception into Classical Sociology,’ in Classical Sociology (London: Sage, 1999), 30–47.  5 For one of the many recent assessments/critiques of neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).  6 See Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, ‘Bibliographic Note,’ in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge

258 Notes to pages 178–86 University Press, 1994), xxvi. For the original article by Wolin, see Sheldon Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory,’ Political Theory 9, no. 3 (August 1981): 401–24.  7 Wolin, ‘Max Weber: Legitimation,’ 421.  8 See Lassman and Speirs, introduction to Weber: Political Writings, x, on Weber’s ‘dismay’ that the revolution occurred just at the moment of Germany’s defeat.  9 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 318. 10 The term was first coined in the 1940s by Albert Salomon with reference to Weber’s ‘long and intense dialogue with Marx’s “ghost.”’ See Albert Salomon, ‘German Sociology,’ in Twentieth Century Sociology, ed. Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), 596. On the ‘fate’ of this debate, see Turner, Classical Sociology, 31. 11 I borrow this term from Fred Dallmayr’s insightful discussion of fugitive democracy and the political in ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ in Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 79. In Dallmayr’s discussion of Wolin and Lefort, he points to the idea of the political as non-teleological yet something higher than the procedural allocation of resources implied in my use of the term politics. 12 See Robert Antonio’s comprehensive article, ‘After Postmodernism: Reactionary Tribalism,’ American Journal of Sociology 106, no. 2 (July 2000): 40–87. 13 David Dyzenhaus, ‘Why Carl Schmitt?’ in Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism, ed. David Dyzenhaus (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 9–10. 14 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Günther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 985. 15 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 367–8. 16 Mark Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ Political Theory 30, no. 5 (October 2002): 682–3. 17 Ibid., 678. 18 According to Canadian political scientist Rand Dyck, less than 3 per cent of Canadians belong to a political party or actively work on electoral campaigns, and about 1 per cent contribute financially to parties or campaigns. Yet 50 per cent claim to be involved in some kind of voluntary group. The figures are, no doubt, similar for the United States. 19 Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ 681. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid.

Notes to pages 186–9 259 22 See, for example, Benhabib’s ‘The Democratic Moment and the Problem of Difference,’ the introduction to her well-known collection, Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 9. There she asks whether a more rational consensus at a higher level is possible. 23 Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ 682. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 682, 694. 26 As is well known, the influence of French deconstructionist and poststructuralist thought is decisive in these formulations. See, for example, Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Jacques Rancière, Dis-Agreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 12. 27 See Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism.’ Antonio notes that ‘strong-program’ postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard and Ulrich Beck reject meaning altogether, believing that a new, more democratic political cannot emerge from either the mechanisms of compromise described by the liberal realist model, or from the more social democratic deliberative models that seek to build the political through rational consensus and agreement. For strong-program postmodernists, both of the former alternatives that were part of the postwar Keynesian compromise are self-interested and driven by power, as are all state-centred processes. Strong-program positions ‘imply that, even when the old post-war party names remain, convergent mass politics [whether the liberal-realist or social democratic model] no longer provide alternative sociopolitical visions’ (46). For a good contextual discussion and defence of Weber in relation to postmodernism and the post-structuralist critique, see Bryan S. Turner’s introduction in For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate (London: Sage, 1996), xxv–xxxv. 28 Benhabib, Democracy and Difference. See her Introduction for a good overview of the key distinctions and issues between ‘agonistic’ and ‘deliberative’ democrats. 29 Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ 687. 30 Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ in Democracy and Difference, ed. Benhabib, 38. 31 Warren, ‘What Can Democratic Participation Mean Today?’ 698. 32 Peter Breiner has argued that Weber’s prudential, sociologically informed political theory influenced a generation of émigré theorists, including Franz Neumann, who reconstructed ideal-typical alternatives to the rise of fascism during the Weimar period. His view was rooted in alternative

260 Notes to pages 189–94 visions of both politics and the political and was based, as Wolfe said, on past events. Breiner’s analysis is undertaken without reference to Weber’s notion of open time, but assumes it in the same way that Wolin’s view of Weber’s social science does – as I suggested in my discussion of the politics of theory in chapter 5. See Peter Breiner, ‘Translating Max Weber: Exile Attempts to Forge a New Political Science,’ European Journal of Political Theory 3, no. 2 (2004): 133–49. 33 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 368. 34 Alkis Kontos, ‘The World Disenchanted, and the Return of Gods and Demons,’ in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 223­–47. 35 Sheldon Wolin, ‘Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth,’ Social Research 52, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 217–39 at 224–5. Wolin’s discussion refers to Aristotle’s discussion in book 1, chapter 1 of the Politics (1252, a 3–6). 36 Sheldon Wolin, ‘Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,’ in Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. Peter J. Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 50. 37 Ibid., 43. 38 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1996), 187–8. 39 Wolin, ‘Norm and Form,’ 45–6. 40 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 34. 41 Wolin, ‘Postmodern Politics,’ 221. Wolin uses this phrase with reference to Weber’s discussion of the tensions inherent in the vocation of the modern social scientist. One could equally use it to describe Wolin’s own analysis and predicament here. 42 Ibid., 227. 43 Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 44 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 44. Wolin elaborated this view further in the closing chapter of the expanded edition of his classic Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 17. 45 Fred Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and Postmodern Reflections,’ in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William Connolly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 77n24. 46 Ibid., 69; and Antonio, ‘After Postmodernism.’

Notes to pages 195–9 261 47 Jane Mansbridge, ‘Using Power / Fighting Power: The Polity,’ in Democracy and Difference, ed. Benhabib, 54. 48 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 36. 49 See, for example, George Kateb, ‘Wolin as a Critic of Democracy,’ in Democracy and Vision, 39–57; and Ronald Beiner, ‘Review of Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political,’ in Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 24, no. 1 (February 2004): 60–2. 50 Aiwha Ong’s analysis provides an excellent complement to Wolin’s critique. See Aiwha Ong, ‘Mutations in Citizenship,’ Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 2–3 (2006): 499–531. 51 Kateb, ‘Wolin as a Critic of Democracy,’ 32. 52 Ibid., 43. 53 Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 43. 54 Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics,’ 369. 55 Stephen White, ‘Three Conceptions of the Political: The Real World of Late Modern Democracies,’ in Democracy and Vision, 177. 56 Ibid., 179. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 176; and Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 39. 59 This recalls the discussion of principium in the introduction. Valentine used the term to refer to ‘the coincidence of the order of authority derived from a prince and the order of intelligibility derived from a principle, both of which are observed without question in a given epoch.’ See Jeremy Valentine, ‘The Political,’ Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 2–3 (2006): 505–11 at 508. 60 Ronald Beiner, in his review of Democracy and Vision, agrees with White that Wolin’s notion of the demos is too heroic. For Beiner, there is a tension in Wolin’s thought between the anarchic, ungovernable (and romanticized) demos and the need for the renewal of the institutional (i.e., state-centred) conditions of politics, or what Weber would have called the ‘business of politics.’ Beiner recalls Wolin’s first groundbreaking work, Politics and Vision (1960), in which the target of his critique was liberal pluralism. There Wolin called for a common civic community that was not anti-statist, one that stood above the clash of individual interests and the pluralism of civil society associations. Wolin called for the political to be the integrative art of defining common involvements among citizens. Beiner argues that Wolin’s recent work has changed significantly, that it is now ‘bathed in despair about the political possibilities made available by modernity’ (62).  Beneath the despair, which I think Wolin shares with Weber, I don’t think his substantive view has changed in one respect: he still seeks

262 Notes to pages 199–201 commonality among citizens, only now in a different historical context marked by postmodern ‘difference,’ cultural complexity/diversity, and global, neoliberal capitalism and the Megastate. I think that Wolin still sees the political both as the art of the possible and as potentially integrative. The dramatic transformation has been in the historical conditions of democratic politics over the past half-century, the rampant growth of those Weberian ‘developmental tendencies’ bound up in the Megastate (and its megabureaucracies), and the political economy of global capitalism. It is these historical changes that have made the goal of a more genuine, egalitarian democracy created and sustained by the demos much more elusive and difficult, or ‘fugitive.’  The most important point in Beiner’s challenge, which I take seriously, concerns the ‘political possibilities made available by modernity.’ What are they now, under the conditions outlined by Wolin? See Beiner, ‘Review of Democracy and Vision.’ 61 Kateb, ‘Wolin as Critic of Democracy,’ 45. 62 See Fred Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy: Some Modern and PostModern Reflections,’ in Democracy and Vision, 59. 63 Ibid., 42. 64 Henry Kariel, Beyond Liberalism: Where Relations Grow (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 125. 65 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). Already in its second edition, see David McNally’s Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism, rev. ed. (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2006). See also Alex Khasnabish, Zapatismo beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 85; Saul Newman, ‘Anarchism, Poststructuralism, and the Future of Radical Politics,’ SubStance 36, no. 2 (2007): 3­19. While I would not necessarily agree with some of the positions taken, for example, by Hardt and Negri, the thinkers cited here all point to issues related to fugitive democracy, and to Wolin’s attempt to define a new, more radically democratic political, partly through his intense dialogue with Weber. 66 Mark Coté, Richard Day, and Greig de Peuter, ‘Utopian Pedagogy: Creating Radical Alternatives in the Neoliberal Age,’ Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29 (2007): 317–36 at 322, 328. 67 Ibid., 44. 68 Wolin, ‘Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth,’ 217.

Notes to pages 201–3 263 69 Very much in the spirit of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, Henry Kariel, in Beyond Liberalism, is sharply critical of the ‘Myth of Liberalism,’ or the myth of equality and freedom for all, in America, tracing it back (as Wolin also does) to Hobbes, Locke, and the American Founding ‘Fathers’ such as Madison. Kariel says that ‘because the thinkers of the Enlightenment had no cause to worry about the consequences of freeing rational individuals to pursue their own interests, they could easily plead their freedom . . . They were revolutionaries because they were simply unconcerned about the consequences of private innovation, dynamism and restlessness’ (7). The Myth still assumes that whatever disrupts the free play of private interests – whether internal protests over civil rights in the 1960s, or Wall Street greed now, or externally shocks such the Vietnam War then, or Iraq, Afghanistan, or the ‘war on terror’ today – can be contained within the boundaries of the Constitution and the liberal framework originally set by it. For Kariel, the dominant Myth and its ‘institutional frame’ now go beyond containment, rendering criticism marginal, fugitive, or trivial. Or, as Kariel puts it: ‘Critics of American institutions quickly learn when they are out of bounds’ (3). Wolin’s work is often close to being in this ‘utopian’ spirit or tradition. 70 Beiner, ‘Review of Democracy and Vision,’ 61. 71 A number of the contributions to Democracy and Vision recognize both the importance of Wolin’s 1996 essay ‘Fugitive Democracy’ and the implications of the idea for political theory. See, for example, Nicholas Xenos, ‘Momentary Democracy,’ and Fred Dallmayr, ‘Beyond Fugitive Democracy,’ both in that volume. 72 Xenos, ‘Momentary Democracy,’ 36.

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Index

accountability, political, 41, 61 Andrew, Edward, 220n71 Adorno, Theodor, 160 ‘Affektpolitik,’ 94 alienation, 37–8 ‘Antimonian Controversy,’ 126 Antliff, Mark, 144 Antonio, Robert, 12, 14 Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Socialpolitik, 151 Arendt, Hannah, 11 aristocracy: absence of, 105; political class, 99; ‘stable tradition,’ 102 Aristotle: degenerate regimes, 56; political associations, 103, 192–3 associations, civil: democratic nature of, 123– 4; role of, 10; valorized, 131 authoritarianism: Calvinist, 127; religiously inspired, 58 autolegitimacy, state, 193– 4 autonomy: citizens, 35; moral, 63; state, 49 –51; wealth, 103 Ay, Karl-Ludwig, 97 Badiou, Alain, 201 Baehr, Peter, 121

Baxter, Richard, 133; iron cage, ‘light cloak,’ 140 Bebel, August, 45– 6 Beck, Ulrich, 19 Beetham, David, 47–8, 87 Beiner, Ronald, 38, 202 Benhabib, Seyla, 11, 187–8 Benoist, Alain de, 17 Bergson, Henri, 161 Berlin Wall, influence of, 8– 9, 12 Berliner Boersen Zeitung, 60 Berliner Tageblatt, 45 Betrieb, 36, 47, 50, 106 –7 Betz, Hans-George, 17 Bismarck, Otto von, 40 –2; anti-socialist legislation, 45; authoritarian obedience state, 53; use of force, 89 ‘Bismarck’s Legacy,’ 53– 4 Bolough, Rosalyn, 95 boundaries, political, 193 bourgeoisie, 96 –8, 182 Breiner, Peter, 10 –11, 29; bureaucracy, irreversible, 39 – 40; expropriation of political means, 37; feasibility of socialism, 46; heroic leaders, 67–8, 105–7, 109; ideal types, 157– 60, 175; ‘just so’ story, 146; politicians,

284 Index vocational, 71; Puritan heroes, 122, 131– 4; rationalization, 29 –30, 39; responsibility, political, 115–16 Brown, Wendy, 23, 46, 95 Bryce, James, 107 Bundesrat, autonomy of, 55– 6 Bunyan, John: bifurcation of time, 127, 129 bureaucracy: defining characteristics, 33; irreversibility of, 11, 30, 31, 38– 40; Junkers and socialists, 49; limits of democracy, 48; overview, 24; private and public, 45– 6; revolutionary movements, 91–2; as a political weapon, 49 bureaucratization: parallels of state and capitalist enterprise, 36; trained experts, 34 bürgerlich Rechtsstaat, 55, 82, 87 business, functional efficiency, 33 Caesarism, 61 Calvinists, religious freedom, 125 capitalism: bureaucratic officialdom, 36; market imperatives, 141; ‘monstrous cosmos,’ 139 – 40; new elites, 71; production, means of, 47–8; Puritan influence, 124, 129, 137; religious roots, 140 –1; transition to, 133–5 change: bourgeoisie, failure of, 97–8; historical, 182; peace, hunger for, 98; predictability of, 164 –5; reason and emotion, 95– 6; revolutionary, 90 – 4, 117–18; uprisings, Munich, 100 choice, political, 103– 4 citizens: accountability, political, 116 –17; competitive-elite model, 66; irreversible democracy, 31–2; ‘of the state,’ 59; suffrage, equal, 57

citizenship: equality, 86; national unity, 87, 234n30; political equality, 88; passive/active, 95, 116, 195; Puritan view, 130 –1 class: aristocratic, 102; differentiation, 32; exclusion, 75; radical democracy, 199. See also working class codetermination, 59 Colliot-Thélène, Catherine, 145, 154; polytheism of values, 11 commonality, 3, 195; consensus, 231n3; gifted leadership, 116; global networks, 200 –3; societies, diverse, 78 competitive-elite model. See realist model compromise, mechanisms of, 259n27 Comte, August, 166 conscience, freedom of, 125 consensus: commonality, 231n3; Keynesian, 12 consequentialism, 90 Continental theory, 11, 12 contingency, of action and history, 5, 52, 77, 128– 9, 130, 153, 164, 217n41 contingent, temporality, consequences, 5, 20, 22, 26 –7, 39, 41, 45, 48, 66, 72, 84, 88, 98, 105, 108, 119 –20, 145, 166, 180 – 4, 217n41 conviction, ethic of, 93 corporatism, 49 –50 Coté, Mark, 210 Council of the People’s Commissars, 80 Dahl, Robert, 25, 189 Dallmayr, Fred: democratic theory, 194; modern state, 84; politics and the political, 15; transcendence, 113 Day, Richard, 201

Index 285 decisionism, elitist, 118 deficit, democratic, 4 –5 democracy: autolegitimation, 195– 6; Myth, 263n69 democratization, economic: marginalized, 71; passive, 48 demos: anarchic, 192– 4; democracy, fugitive, 261n60; Latin American, 196 –7; oppression of, 198– 9; passivity, 12; power, recovery of, 195–7; self-determination, 179; selftransformation, 113; Taylorism, 142–3 der bureaukratischen rationalen Wissen­ herrschaft, 48 despotism, 108– 9 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 154, 155 disaffection, political, 185 disempowerment, 194 –5 disenchantment, 156, 165, 195 ‘Distribution of Power in Society: Classes, Status Groups, and Parties, The,’ 70 domination: charismatic, 117; freedom, individual, 34 –5; freedom from, 62; guarding against, 42–3; ideal type, 39; legitimate, 32–3, 64 –5; officialdom, 38; passive democratization, 48; selfdetermination, 69; by a single class, 50; temporality, 162–3. See also power; struggle Drury, Shadia, 169 Durkheim, Emile, 9 duty of office, 33 Dyzenhaus, David, 65, 182, 189 Ebert, Friedrich, 80 economics, marginal, 155 economy, capitalist, 69

Economy and Society, 64, 130, 141, 182, 205n2, 213n63, 215n8, n10, n11, n12 Eden, Robert, 86, 87 Eisenstadt, Sam N., 127, 137 Eisner, Kurt, 91, 117 electoral representatives: citizen participation, 59 – 60; shared responsibility, 55; as trustees, 66 electoral systems: division of power, 192; pluralist elitist model, 65– 6 Eliaeson, Sven, 9, 25, 63, 87 elitist models, 53, 65–70, 73. See also realist model Ellul, Jacques, 34 empowerment, 73 ends, kingdom of, 35– 6, 168 Engels, Friedrich, 84 Enlightenment: ideals of, 244n19; naivety of, 47–8; systems of representation, 14 enterprise. See Betrieb entrepreneurship, 140 equal freedom principle, 68 equality: bureaucracy, 44; collectivity, 57–8; rule, relationships of, 64; suffrage, 85 ethics: conviction, 93; conviction and responsibility, 114; heroic leaders, 89 – 90; life, 87; Puritan, 133; responsibility, 111–12, 183 exclusion: democracy, 4; political, 71–2; religious sects, 126, 130 –1; suffrage, equal, 75 experience, polarization of, 128, 130 Fachwissen, 34 facticity, Herrschaft of, 202 force: democracy, legitimacy in, 89 – 90; ethics of, 93; modern state, 83

286 Index forgetting, selective political, 74 –5 Foucault, Michel, 19, 126 framework, institutional, 63 Frankfurt School, 34 Frankfurter Zeitung, 50, 63, 105 Franklin, Ben, 127 freedom: bureaucracy, bondage of, 38; bureaucracy, unstoppable, 34 –5; revolution, effect of, 92; rule, relationships of, 64; stifled, 40, 49 Freiburg Address 1895, 96, 102 Freistudentische Jugund, 117 fugitive democracy, 188, 200 –2 Gabel, Joseph, 127– 9, 196 –7, 248n70 Galleano, Eduardo, 196 Garcia Márquez, Gabriel, 196 gender: parliamentary democracy, 115; Salem witch trials, 127, 245n24; suffrage, equal, 75 Germain, Gilbert, 84 German Historical School, 154, 155 Gerth, Hans, 37, 148 Goldman, Harvey, 133 Governance, direct, 62 government officials: role of, 42; specialized training, 44 Gramsci, Antonio, 46 Greven, Michael, 63 Gross, Otto, 94 Gunnell, John, 23, 212n52 Habermas, Jürgen, 16 –17, 169 –70 Hanson, Stephen, 142–3, 162–3 Hardt, Michael, 200 Hegel, Georg W.F., 42–3, 84, 87, 102 hegemony, theory of, 20 Heins, Volker: emotionality, 100 –1; politics of the streets, 94 –5

Hekman, Susan, 153 Held, David, 66 –7 Heller, Agnes, 141, 144 –5 Hennis, Wilhelm, 10, 102 Henretta, James, 126 Herrschaft: administrative, 84; facticity, 202; historical reality, 197–8; legitimacy, 32–3. See also domination historicism, 144 –5, 152– 4 history, as unstructured, 161–2 Hobbes, Thomas, 13, 70, 75, 132 Hobhouse, Leonard T., 84 Hohenzollern monarchy, 53, 57 homo politicus, Weber as, 205n2 humanity, historicity of, 172 ideal type: ancient polis, 62; diversity of, 164; domination, bureaucratic, 39; extremes of, 67; leaders, heroic, 105– 9; methodology, 27, 151–3; overview, 5; partiality, 175; political action, 157– 60; Puritan, heroic, 144; ruling class, 103–5; state of nature theory, 132–7; temporality, 189; validity claims, 171–2 Idealism, German, 154 ideals, democratic, 100 –1 Immerfall, Stefan, 17 individualism, defiant, 123 inequality: capitalism, 57–8, 69; economic, 193; gender, 75; market, 85; power, 88; private property, 44; universal suffrage, 71 Intermediate Reflections on the Economic Ethics of World Religions, 157 iron cage, metaphor. See steel-hard casing Jameson, Fredric, 128 Jaspers, Karl, 23

Index 287 judgment: passion, 110 –11, 114; political, 115–16 Junker class: bureaucracy, domination of, 48– 9; class, universal, 84; politics, usurpation of, 40 –2; threetiered system, 54 justice, natural, 136 Kahler, Erich, 161 Kaissereich, accountability, lack of, 61 Kalberg, Stephen, 126 Kant, Immanuel, 35, 63, 87, 89, 155, 215n19, 216n20 Kariel, Henry, 200 Kateb, George, 199 –201 Kautsky, Karl, 45– 6 Kennedy, Ellen, 220n68, 223n14 Khashnabish, Alex, 201 Kim, Sung Ho, 10; associations, civil society, 123– 6, 131; heroic leaders, 104 –5 Kingdom of ends, 35 knowledge: dimensions of, 165; domination, 34; exclusion, 174; politics of, 156 –7 Koestler, Arthur, 239n109 Kollwitz, Käthe, 74 Kontos, Alkis, 190 labour: alienation, 37; property ownership, 135– 6 Laclau, Ernesto, 19, 20 Lame Deer (indigenous healer), 130, 163 Lassman, Peter, 5, 23, 52, 137 laws, 39, 58 leaders, heroic: absence of, 101; accountability, 116; capitalist, 140; change, revolutionary, 90 –1; democracy and future

possibilities, 107– 9; examples of, 105– 6; Karl Liebknecht, 94, 118; memories, future, 120; Puritan, 121– 4, 139; qualities of, 110 –11; redefining the political, 176; Rosa Luxemburg, 118–19; transformation, 112–15; unity, national, 87 leadership: domination, charismatic, 117; Hitler, 225n43; modern state, 83– 4; realist model, 72– 4; vision of, 59 – 62; wealth, 103– 4 ‘leadership democracy with a machine,’ 65 Lebensführung, 10, 102 Lefort, Claude, 11–14, 19, 52, 113, 209n25, 210n30 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 46 –7 Levin, David M., 128, 130 liberalism, paradox of, 68– 9 Liebknecht, Karl, 94, 118 Locke, John, 132–5; equality and inequality, 44; labour as a commodity, 130; money, accumulation of, 238n91; state of nature and private property, 47, 134 –7 Löwith, Karl, 29, 37 Lukács, Georg: collective social transformation, 47–8, 143– 4, 154 Luther, Martin, 112 Luxemburg, Rosa: charismatic, murdered, 118–19; Munich revolutionary, 94 Lyotard, Jean-François, 19 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 90, 105– 6, 113–14, 160, 241n125 machine age, 140 – 4 Macht, Machtstaat, and Machtpolitik, 88– 9

288 Index Macpherson, C.B.: democracy, duality of, 124; market principle, 68; model 3, 65– 6 Mann, Thomas, 55 Mansbridge, Jane, 89 market: economy, 69; principle, 68 Marx, Karl: capitalists, 37, 84, 143, 152; heroic leaders, 138– 9; Marxist theory and the working class, 20 masterless slavery, 57–8 McFalls, Laurence, 150, 207n11, 209n18, n19, 225n43, 248n69 McNally, David, 200 ‘Meaning of Ethical Neutrality, The,’ 78, 151, 166, 232n9, 254n65 Megastate, modern: autolegitimacy, 193– 4 memory: cultural, 141–2; historical, 196 –7; mythical, 144; of the political, 22–3, 74, 175 Menschentum, 10 methodology, politics of theory, 156 –7. See also ideal type Michels, Roberto: iron law of oligarchy, 48 Mill, John Stuart: bureaucracy and governance, 43; working class, political immaturity of, 99 Mills, C. Wright, 148 models: model 3, 65– 6; thin and thick, 72, 229n90. See also elitist models; realist model modernities: multiple, 137; potential and vision, blocking of, 18–19; values, irreconcilable, 165 Mommsen, Wolfgang, 67 monarchical system, displacement of, 71 money, introduction of, 135 Mouffe, Chantal, 20

myths: and memory of the political, 201; Myth, of democracy, 263n69 nation, 4, 39, 49, 54 – 6, 59, 63, 87, 96 –7, 99, 101, 112, 115, 119, 179, 230n92, 232n14; nation-state, 37, 186, 192 nationalism, 18; homogeneity of, 232n14 nature, state of, 132–7 Negri, Antonio, 200 neoliberalism: under fire, 177–8; homogenizing pressures, 18; inequality, 171; postwar economy, 12 neutrality, ethical, 167 Newman, Saul, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 58; the state, 84; nihilism, 86; 104; eternal return, 115; beyond good and evil, 140 –1 nihilism, social science, modern, 168 objectivity, social scientific, 9, 20, 39, 43, 147, 152– 69, 208n17, 251n25, 255n78 ‘Objectivity of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy,’ 151–3, 157 Obrigkeitsstaat: accountability, 61–2; Bismarck, 41–2; ‘essence of politics,’ 60; institutional framework, 53– 4. See also state oligarchy, iron law of, 48 ‘On the Situation of Constitutional Democracy in Russia,’ 64 Palonen, Kari, 10, 88 paradox of intentions, 145 ‘Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order,’ 34, 56, 61–2, 99

Index 289 parliaments: British Westminster, 54 –5; leadership training, 60; negotiation and compromise, 66; single class interest, 50 Parsons, Talcott, 148–50, 207n11 participation, simple, complex, 188– 9 passion and judgment, 110 –11, 114, 116 Peuter, Greig de, 201 philosophy, the Good, 168– 9 Plato, 78, 113; fate, 166; fate of the soul, 78 Poggi, Gianfranco, 133 Polis: ancient, 62; political, ruled by, 192 Political: antagonism of, 81; autonomous, 50 –1; defined, 4, 21–2; ethical paradox, 90; heroic leaders, three types, 106 – 9; memory of, 140 –1; origins of, 133– 4; overview, 77, 180 –1; politics and the political, 212n52; postwar, 52; religiously inspired, 126; revitalization of, 112–13; visions of, 118–20, 196 –7 political neutrality doctrine, 42 politician, vocational, 181–2 politics: defined, 4; equal suffrage, 70; exclusion from, 174; and inequality, 69; power, 88– 90; revolution, 93 polity, split, 182 polytheism, warring values, 111, 165 positivism, 153– 4, 155, 167 postwar collapse (WWI), 80 –2 power: autolegitimacy, 194; civil recovery of, 195–7; competitive struggle for, 66; democracy, parliamentary, 56 –7; popular, in Latin America, 197; struggle for, 70, 88– 90. See also domination prediction, 162– 4

Preuss, Hugo, 61, 80, 87 principium, 15, 153, 199 ‘principle of the small number,’ 61 production: economic, 47–8; standardization of, 141 ‘Profession and Vocation of Politics, The’: bureaucracy, irreversibility of, 30; heroic leaders, 79, 109 –13, 176; memory of the political, 119; plebiscite, 82; politically active or passive, 116 –17; possible and impossible, 197–8; revolutionaries, 93; state, 83; wealth, 102–3 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The: asceticism, 130; bondage of bureaucracy, 38– 9; fictional construction, 131–7; heroic Puritan, 121– 6; ideal type, 137, 146 –7, 151–2, 172; leaders, heroic, 138– 9; memory of political, 120 Puritan sects: organization of, 125; Protestantism and Progress, 130; and societal change, 123– 4 Radkau, Joachim, 119 Rancière, Jacques, 19 rationalization: bureaucracy, irre­ versibility of, 30 –1, 78; heroic leaders, 82–3 realist model: and democratic paradoxes, 184 –8; equal suffrage, 66, 73; inclusion and exclusion, 118–19; prescriptive descriptions, 210n27. See also elitist models; models reason, 35, 36, 134 reason and emotion, 95– 6, 99 reception-history, 23 referendum, 82

290 Index reform, parliamentary, 74 –5 regimes: ancien, 14; degenerate, 56 Reichsanzeiger, 80 Reichstag, 41–2, 54 – 6, 99 resistance, 123, 199 –201 revolutions, 90 – 4 Rickert, Heinrich, 154, 155 rights: human, 63– 4, 86, 125– 6; natural, 168; private property, 47 robber barons, 140 –1 Roth, Günther, 47–8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: equality, social and economic, 13, 57–8, 70; state, emergence of, 134 –5 Salem Witch Trials, 127 salvation: demos, loss of agency, 128; ethics of conviction, 93 Scaff, Lawrence, 237n78; politics as a battlefield, 111 Schluchter, Wolfgang, 29 Schmitt, Carl: decisionist Machstaat, 87–8; the political, 17; sovereign dictatorship, 80 –1 Schmoller, Gustav, 53 Schumpeter, Joseph, 8, 53, 67 Schürmann, Reiner, 15 science, social, 153–5 ‘Science as a Vocation,’ 163, 173 scientific management (Taylorism), 46 –7, 141– 4 self-determination: limitations, 65; right to, 68 Simmel, Georg, 161 Singer, Paul, 104 social action, 197–8 Social Democratic Party (German), 100 social justice, marginalized, 71

social science: founder, 177, 207n11, 208n17; infinite events, 161–2; interpretive competence, 170 –1; limitations of, 173; political theorists, 151; truth, revelation of, 166 socialism: aspirations, ideals, 46; as impossible, 47–8; private and public bureaucracies, 45– 9 ‘Socialism’ (speech), 44 –5 society, civil: democratization of, 186 –8; marginalization of, 71 Sombart, Werner, 53 Sorel, George, 201 soul, and fate, 166 ‘sovereign dictatorship,’ 81 specialization, professional: irreversibility of bureaucracy, 33– 4; shaping the political, 28 Speirs, Ronald, 52 stahlhartes Gehäuse. See steel-hard casing state: authoritarian, 60; as bureaucratic enterprises, 47; as a capitalist enterprise, 36 –7; demos and democratic politics, loss of, 186 –8; inverted authoritarian, 61; leadership and unity, 83–8; Massachusetts Bay, 126; politics, institutional, 190; rejection of, 19 –20; reversed authoritarian, 45; struggle for power of, 88; Superpower, 193 steel-hard casing: bureaucratic irreversibility, 39; freedom, individual, 92; ‘light cloak,’ 140; metaphor, 11; socialism, 49; trained mediocrity, 43 Strauss, Leo, 149; political and Socratic dialogue, 17; truth, 167–8 streets, politics of, 94, 100 Strong, Tracy B., 115, 171–2, 173

Index 291 struggle: cultural/political, 173; economic, 102; fugitive democracy, 200 –1; marginalized groups, 196; middle class, 56 –7; party politics, 60, 66; political heroes, 42; politics, 89, 225n39; resources and power, 99; state power, 88; warring gods, 165– 6; working class, 47–8. See also domination submission, passive, 56 suffrage, equal: counterweight, 57– 9; negative arguments for, 50; parliamentary democracy, 52, 69 –70; realist model, 73 superpower, 193 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 46 –7, 141– 4 temporality: ideal types, 159 – 62; open, 27, 147, 162– 6, 189 – 90; Taylorism, 143. See also contingent Tenbruck, Friedrich, 29 theory, politics of, 156 –7 time, open: bureaucratic forces, 181–2; historicity, 174; politics of, 148, 162–3; reification of, 128– 9, 143; values, conflict of, 147 Titunik, Regina, 63– 4 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 36, 108 tolerance, in sects, 125 Toller, Ernst, 91, 117 town hall meetings, 62–3 transformation, and fugitive democracy, 202 tribalism, reactionary, 18 Troeltsch, Ernst, 130 Truth, 149 –51, 169, 255n86 truth: universal, 166; validity of, 152–3, 168

tyranny: of the majority (Mill), 36; of work, 46 –7 unity, political, 87–8 utopia: eruptions of, 196 –8; ideal type, 151; mechanized, 142 Valentine, Jeremy, 16 –17, 19 Value neutrality, 148 value polytheism, 111–12 values: conflicting, 113; creating significance, 166; cultural, 154; research, 155; ultimate, 78– 9 Velody, Irving, 23 viability, parliamentary democracy, 205n1 vision, rebellious, 203 vocation: heroic leaders, three types of, 106 – 9; specialist type, 173; wealth, accumulation of, 133 Vollrath, Ernst, 15 vote, right to, 57. See suffrage Warren, Mark: democracies, paradoxes of, 178; enlarged thought, 35– 6; leadership criticism, 65; realist model, 185–8 warring gods, eternal struggle, 165– 6 wealth: freedom, 102– 4; vocation, 133. See also capitalism Weber, Marianne, 75 Weimar period: constitution, 25, 61; fascism, 122; pluralism, 81 welfare state: Bismarck’s, 53– 4; cutbacks to, 12; paradoxes of, 193; rational consensus, 186 Wellen, Richard, 167 Whimster, Sam, 129 –30; objectivity, standard of, 127, 152– 4

292 Index White, Stephen, 188, 198 Wolfe, Eric, 159 – 61 Wolin, Sheldon: democracy, fugitive, 71, 190 –1, 194, 201–3; equality and inequality, 70; founding, 155– 6; ‘Fugitive Democracy,’ 188; ideas review, 199 –200; Megastate, 192– 6; political, defined, 21–2; politics and the political, 21, 78; politics of theory, 30; Puritan divines, 137–8; revolutions, 91; Weber’s critical themes, 178– 9 Woodrow Wilson, 42

workers: as cogs in a machine, 142 Workers’ Soviet, 91, 93 working class: immaturity of, 99 –100; struggles, 47. See also class Wright Mills, C., 23 Xenos, Nicholas, 202–3 Yack, Bernard, 35 Zapatista movement, 201 Zaret, David, 124 –5 Zentrum, 54