The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In another myth, they are reconciled, even fused. The professor becomes a politician, saving the polity from corruption and ignorance, demagoguery and vice. Think Plato’s philosopher-king, or Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet. The nobility of ideas is preserved, and transmuted, slowly, into the stuff of action.
The sociologist Max Weber spent much of his life seduced by this second fable. A scholar of hot temper and volcanic energy, Weber longed to be a politician of cold focus and hard reason. Across three decades of a scholarly career, in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, he made repeated and often failed incursions into the public sphere—to give advice, stand for office, form a party, negotiate a treaty, and write a constitution. His “secret love,” he confessed to a friend, was “the political.” Even in the delirium of his final days, he could be heard declaiming on behalf of the German people, jousting with their enemies in several of the many languages he knew. “If one is lucky” in politics, he observed, a “genius appears just once every few hundred years.” That left the door wide open for him.
On the page, Weber told a different story. In the last years of his life, which ended in 1920, he delivered two lectures in Munich, one on the vocation of the scholar and the other on the vocation of the politician. The lectures were published in 1919 and have now been reissued, in a brisk translation by Damion Searls, as “Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures.” In Weber’s hands, the professor and the politician are not figures to be joined. Each remains a lonely hero of heavy burden, sent to ride against his particular foe: the overly structured institution of the modern mind, the overly structured institution of the modern state. (Weber assumed both of his protagonists were male.) Neither has much probability of success; in part because of that improbability, each is possessed by a great determination to prevail.
Students of these lectures often miss the likeness that Weber draws between the professor and the politician because they’re misled by the distinction he makes, at the end of his second lecture, between “an ethics of personal conviction” and “an ethics of responsibility.” In conventional readings, the first ethic is associated with the purist, who codes as a professor or intellectual, and who cares more about his good intentions than the consequences of his actions. The second ethic is associated with the realist, who codes as a savvy pol and cares about results. The realist understands that not everyone shares his goals, that the highest ends require the lowest means, and that, if he acts in the world, he must take responsibility for the foreseeable consequences he creates in the world.
Making the distinction in this way seems to stack the deck against the purist. He’s selfish and solipsistic, concerned only with his clean hands and a clear soul. The realist is responsive and responsible; he cares for the world. The simplicity of the distinction may be why it is so beloved of pundits and politicos (or older activists giving instruction to younger ones). The fact that it is so simple, the choice between the two ethics so clear-cut as to be no choice at all, should tell us that Weber had other things in mind.
Education and government, said Freud, are two of the world’s “impossible professions.” Weber had a theory as to why. Every effort of the professor and the politician is haunted by the spectre of its disappearance. As a scholar, the professor wagers his soul on getting “this specific conjecture exactly right about this particular point in this particular manuscript.” The smaller the question, the larger the devotion—a “strange intoxication,” Weber concedes, “mocked by all who do not share it.” That is the poignancy of the scholar’s vocation: to demonstrate his worth by taking on a task that no one believes is worth doing, and in which “success is by no means guaranteed.” Even if he is successful, the scholar must face the fact that his work will produce new questions. Those can be answered only by new scholarship, which, one day, will surpass his. It is the “destiny,” and even the “point,” of the scholar’s work to be “left behind.”
The politician faces a different annihilation. It is in the nature of political action, Weber said, that it “leads to final results that totally fail to fit, or even entirely go against, the original intention.” We seek freedom; we produce tyranny. We want peace; we wage war. Machiavelli, writing four centuries earlier, had made a similar point about the gulf, so puzzling and peculiar to politics, between intention and result. A prince wishes to be generous. He showers the people with gifts, which must be paid for with taxes; the people now see him as rapacious. Thrift, on the other hand, even miserliness, saves the prince from lavishness and levies. It wins for him a reputation for generosity. That is the way of politics.
But where Machiavelli saw this gulf as an opportunity for a more sophisticated agency, in which the prince produces an intended effect by deliberately doing the opposite, Weber possessed little confidence in the politician’s ability to manipulate outcomes. The medium of political action—the bureaucracies of the modern state; the violent relations and imperial rivalries between states—was simply too dense.
Machiavelli wrote at a moment of collapse, in the sixteenth century, when the force field of the Church was weak and political actors were being released from their traditional obligations and constraints. The state had not yet come into being: it was something to create, an opportunity for invention and originality. By the time Weber began writing about politics, the state had become a mighty arsenal, with rules and claims of its own. Weber’s politician may have had more power at his disposal than Machiavelli’s prince, but he was more checked in its use. Perhaps that’s why Weber built into his conception of power the recoil of institutions. Where a philosopher like Thomas Hobbes defined power in solipsistic terms—as simply our “present means, to obtain some future apparent Good”—Weber saw power as relational, the exertion of self against other people and other things, the “enforcing of one’s own will even against resistance,” as he put it in “Economy and Society.”
That relational dimension of power is the dramatic context of the politician’s actions, setting a trap into which all too many fall. The politician needs to convert effort into effect, to “make an impression” on the world. But there’s a fine line between molding the world into a shape and needing to see one’s signature at the base of it. The politician is always at risk of swapping out “actual power”—power tethered to purpose—for “the brilliant appearance of power”—power untethered from purpose. The first is the aim of the true politician; the second, the temptation of vanity, which is “the deadly enemy of any commitment to one’s goals.” When a politician gives in to vanity, amending or adapting his aims in order to perform effectiveness, his power is drained of its design.
According to Weber, instead of giving up on his intentions or revising his ends, the politician should pursue them with greater force. In politics, as in scholarship, we take on obligations that are difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. “Politics is struggle,” Weber wrote. Or masochism: the harder the cause, the nobler the pain. If he hopes to “achieve what is possible,” the politician must “reach for the impossible.” The scholar, for his part, must do “something that will never be finished, in fact can’t be.”
Though the professor and the politician pursue their impossible dreams, they have no objective way of defending them. The modern world is home to multiple and conflicting systems of belief. That moral pluralism, the division of the world into separate spheres of obligation and commitment, makes it difficult for anyone to claim, with confidence or honesty, that his values, and the actions his values demand, are necessitated by or correspond to the moral structure of the universe. There is no such structure. The professor can’t “prove” that his work is worth doing, that it is authorized by nature or God. We can’t outsource our justifications to the world in that way. Our values are ours, and ours alone, and we must take responsibility for them and the actions they inspire. That’s the impossibility of the professor and the politician: neither has a ground to stand on; both must reach for the sky.
Weber delivered the first of the two lectures, on the scholar’s work, on November 7, 1917, the day of the Bolshevik Revolution. One year later, a wave of revolution and counter-revolution swept across Germany. It didn’t break until after Weber delivered his second lecture, on the politician’s work, on January 28, 1919. Weber makes occasional, if oblique, reference to the swirl of events around him, but the dominant motif of both lectures is neither turbulence nor movement. It is stuckness. The particles of academic and political life have slowed to a halt; all that was air has become solid.
Weber’s complaints will sound familiar to contemporary readers. Budget-strapped universities pack as many students as possible into classes. Numbers are a “measure of success,” while quality, because it is “unquantifiable,” is ignored. Young scholars lead a “precarious quasi-proletarian existence,” with little prospect of a long-term career, and the rule of promotion is that “there are a lot of mediocrities in leading university positions.” Every aspiring academic must ask himself whether “he can bear to see mediocrity after mediocrity promoted ahead of him, year after year, without becoming embittered and broken inside.” The “animating principle” of the university is an “empty fiction.”
The state is equally ossified. Most people lack the time or wealth to devote themselves to politics. Those who have the resources see politics as business by other means. There’s no way that politics can be “institutionally organized to correspond to any kind of ‘higher calling.’ ” For Weber, the only place where “unconditional, ruthless political idealism” is to be found is “among the classes who own nothing.” They don’t participate, except in a revolutionary period, which Weber doesn’t believe he is in. The events of 1918 and 1919 are a “carnival being dignified with the name of ‘revolution.’ ”
The spectre haunting Weber is neither bureaucracy nor capitalism (although capitalism does play an under-remarked role in these lectures). Instead, it’s an ancient tension between hero and fate, transposed to modern life. Where classical tragedy sees the hero felled by a destiny that he resists, the nemesis of the Weberian actor is absorption in the institutions that he’s meant to oppose. Society is a siren, forever tempting us to forsake our tasks and seek the smaller goods of reputation and status. The scholar becomes a scribe; the politician, a hack. The danger is not defeat of the opposing self from without but corruption of the self from within, where the self’s diminishing desire to oppose comports all too well with society’s needs.
It’s tempting to see Weber’s theory as an empirical description of the modern world, particularly as the engines of social movement have slowed, and after we’ve elected a President whose appeal, as a candidate, was the promise of blank stability. In a revisionist mode, we might be tempted to junk Weber’s notion of a political savior, while holding onto his account of institutions. In this amended version of Weber’s theory, the structures of modern life remain, only it is democratic movements, rather than the heroic self, that are tragically arrayed against them. Yet even this form of Weber’s tension should be seen for what it is: a fiction, profoundly modern, deeply misleading.
As the political theorist Steven Klein argues in his enormously clarifying study, “The Work of Politics: Making a Democratic Welfare State,” Weber had a suspicion, almost a fear, of the realm of everyday needs, particularly material needs. A need or want demands gratification. Sometimes, that demand sets the stage for revolutionary leaders who transform society, whether with a social contract or a workers’ republic. Even capitalism, according to Weber, was once the work of a charismatic cohort of schismatics. But while unmet needs may elicit acts of extraordinary creativity, both moral and political, met needs limit our capacity to experience suffering, and to generate meaning from that suffering. When fulfillment replaces frustration, social structures degenerate into flattened planes of existence, free of friction. For Weber, capitalism and socialism, the market and the welfare state, firms and social movements, economics and politics—all spell the same end: people getting what they want. With that satisfaction comes the retirement from striving, the disappearance of tragedy, and the loss of the tutelage of suffering.
In an age of deep polarization, neoliberalism, and global warming, Weber’s vision can seem like an appealing one. (The fact that he died at the tail end of a pandemic, which may have taken his life, and in the midst of a street battle between left and right, only adds to his aura.) His spirit of melancholy—a word often heard on the academic left—registers a desire for something different without committing us to the confidence that collective action requires. Yet for all the potency of that vision, Klein’s reading suggests the perils of overstating the vice grip of the material world and underestimating the possibilities of political action—possibilities not for the tragic elevation of the self or the sadness of social movements but for the collective transformation of the world.
Needs, after all, can and should be met. If the last half century’s struggles over the economy have taught us anything, it’s that the provision of comforts will always be contested; social democracy will always need defending. We needn’t worry too much about the end of conflict or an abundance of ease. When Weber constructed his theory, it was less a description than a prayer, a desperate bid to find friction in a world supposedly smoothed by structure. He was hardly the only social theorist to over-structure reality, to mistake the suspended animation of a moment for the immobilisme of an epoch. Tocqueville suffered from the same malady; Marcuse, Arendt, and Foucault shared some of its symptoms as well. But Weber needed the malady. The question is: Do we?
