Max weber

Max Weber German sociologist ( Erfurt , Prussia , 1864 – Munich , Bavaria , 1920 ). Max Weber was the son of a prominent jurist and politician in the National Liberal Party in Bismarck’s time. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen, taking a special interest in Law , History and economics .

Summary

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  • 1 Biographical data
  • 2 Sociology after Marx and Nietzsche
  • 3 Characteristics of a sociology of action
  • 4 Three moments in one method
  • 5 Four Weberian constants
  • 6 Religion and social organization
  • 7 The disenchantment of the world
  • 8 Domination and political action
  • 9 Bureaucracy
  • 10 Ethics and politics as forms of tragedy
  • 11 Weber Ethics: Responsibility and Conviction
  • 12 List of jobs
  • 13 See also
  • 14 External links
  • 15 Bibiography

Biographical data

Max Weber’s early research focused on economic issues, some of it carried out on behalf of the reformist intellectuals known as “chair socialists.” From 1893 he was a professor at various German universities, mainly in Heidelberg, except for the years 1898 – 1906 when, suffering from severe depression, he left teaching to dedicate himself to traveling and researching.

In 1909 he founded the German Sociological Association. He was a great renovator of the social sciences in several aspects, including methodology: unlike the precursors of sociology, Weber understood that the method of these disciplines could not be a mere imitation of those used by the physical and natural sciences, given that individuals with conscience, will and intentions intervene in social affairs that must be understood. He proposed the method of ideal types, subjective categories that describe the intentionality of social agents through extreme, pure and unambiguous cases, although such cases have never occurred in reality; Weber thus laid the foundations of the method work of modern sociology -and of all social sciences-, based on building theoretical models that focus the analysis and discussion on rigorous concepts.

Sociology after Marx and Nietzsche

he first fruit of the application of this method was Weber’s work on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ( 1905 ); Working on the ideal types of the ‘bourgeois’, the ‘Protestant ethic’ and ‘industrial capitalism’, he studied the morals proposed by some Calvinist sects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show that the Protestant Reformation would have created in some Western countries a culture more favorable to capitalist economic development than that prevailing in Catholic countries.

Max WEBER died in 1920 , Durkheim had died in 1917 and Simmel in 1918 . It is too simple to turn these three thinkers, and particularly WEBER, into a kind of “anti-Marx” –or reconstructors of bourgeois thought– as has been a cliché in the Iberian context. Rather, WEBER should be considered as the author who has understood to what extent the “philosophy of suspicion”, to use a rather anachronistic label, is right in what it criticizes but is, at the same time, powerless in what it proposes. Apparently WEBER would have confessed to Spengler, in February 1920 , that: ‘The honesty of an intellectual can be measured by his attitude towards Marx andNietzsche … The world in which we exist intellectually ourselves is to a large extent a world formed by Marx and Nietzsche. ‘

His project does not seek, then, reconstruction, but the revision of what was said by the masters of suspicion. Precisely because Marx and Nietzsche lead to a dead end –because they are brilliant and blind at the same time, it is necessary to assume them as themselves, at their best, they would have wanted: without scholasticism, but without forgiving them for being alive; without contempt but without submission.

WEBER as a thinker summarizes the political traditions of the Germany of his time: he was liberal, involved in Christian social thought, and ended up at the Deutsche Demokratische Partei in 1919 , after having been linked to the social democracy, which he disliked as bureaucratic; It does not pretend to transform the world but shares with Marx a basic methodological approach: that of explaining societies as a set of collective social structures and practices. And it does so with a perfect distance, or “axiological neutrality” if you like, when it comes to moral considerations. Thus, in 1892he could write, for example, that: «… from the point of view of reason of state; This is not for me a problem regarding agricultural workers, I do not ask if they live well or badly and how they can be helped ». We could find texts by Marx on the situation of workers in India that would not be too far from this approach.

Topics like the analysis of capitalism and bureaucratization, and even the reification of human relations, are found in Marx as well as in WEBER. However, what separates them is obvious: WEBER does not accept the reductionism of the central hypothesis of Marxism, the primacy of the only economic factor to explain capitalism. The Weberian alternative is well known: if capitalism has triumphed, it is due not to surplus value or to machinism, but to the social efficiency of values ​​embodied by Protestant ethics, which has made work a lifestyle that goes much further. far from the pure economic element and permeates all our actions. The second crucial influence came from Nietzsche. WEBER discovers in him the fundamental idea of ​​his sociology: the central place that values ​​occupy, its founding role of social conscience which is, at the same time, moral conscience. Nietzsche shows WEBER that values ​​are not eternal and that the fundamental thing for a sociologist is to understand how certain values ​​have become clichés, until they even become incapable of identifying themselves as such: it is the social acquiescence, the historical context and the usefulness of the values ​​to found lifestyles which offer us the criteria to understand how a social action works and how it is articulated. It has been said that WEBER empirically implements the GENEALOGY OF MORALS program. But we will find a crucial difference between the two: Nietzsche wants to “transvaluate”, to change the sign of values; instead, what WEBER seeks is to understand the indirect influence of values ​​on life and on social formation, but without becoming a judge. Values ​​are “rational”, even more rational than economic interests, and therefore the axiological attitude of neutrality is more convenient than that of moral judgment or, worse still, moralizing.

Characteristics of a sociology of action

WEBER was an encyclopedic author, capable, for example, of writing two theses on commercial law in Italian cities ( 1889 ) and on the agrarian history of Rome, considered in its relation to public and private law ( 1891 ). Hence his keen sense of history, which confronts him with Carl Menger’s Austrian marginalist School ( 1840 – 1921 ), which he considered only capable of enunciating abstract rules. But he was also an empiricist, capable of conducting field surveys, such as the one he devoted to the situation of agricultural workers in the eastern Elbe ( 1892 ) and studied German industrial workers ( 1908).). However, WEBER is not limited to broad empiricism. Rather, it considers it necessary to elaborate theoretical concepts that allow an account of social realities, from a dynamic point of view.

It is not the function of sociology to establish laws of the “science of culture”, the meaning that, for example, Wilhelm Dilthey ( 1833 – 1911 ) understood when he distinguished between explanation [erklären], typical of natural sciences, and verstehen understanding , proper of the social sciences . Social sciences do not have a minority status. Sociology is a historical science that must separate itself from all kinds of dualisms and, consequently, its method must not be based on the natural sciences, as the positivists claimed. What WEBER meant by “social action” can be summarized in a paragraph from his own work:

The two concepts that allow us to understand the development of Weberian sociology are those of “socialized actor” and “instituted action”; both allow us to overcome the topic of “sociological individualism” which, as we shall see, is more complex than its elementary explanation suggests. Speaking of “socialized actor” suggests that the individual is part of a series of networks of social relationships, outside of which he cannot be understood. The point of view of the “socialized actor”, that is, the understanding that the actors themselves have of their own function is sociologically fundamental. These organized actors are the basis of all social action. WEBER distinguishes between “social classes”, “status groups” and “political parties”, different strata corresponding respectively to the economic, social and political orders. So,

The “status groups” are distinguished by their mode of consumption and by their differentiated social practices that depend both on objective elements (birth, profession, educational level) and on other purely subjective elements (consideration, reputation …). These “status groups” are distinguished from one another by styles or “ways of life” (a concept to be understood as opposed to “standard of living”).

Finally, “political parties” express and unify common economic interests and social status in an institutional way, although their creation can also be based on other interests (religious, ethical, etc …).

This three-dimensional analysis highlights that in modern societies there are various hierarchical criteria for social groups. Among the various modes of belonging to a group, the “status group” has a special relevance: it is there that values, norms of behavior and significant practices that specify them are acquired and shared. Consequently, a theory of social action must account for the way in which some individuals interact with others to modify their behaviors; which is not necessarily produced in a rational way …

Hence, sociology must also account for “instituted action” which is something more than the pure “rational choice” of supposed methodological individualism. The choice of values, which is the responsibility of the individual, refers implicitly to his “status group”. Promote, or not, certain values ​​depends on a group that is always institutional. If we speak of a socialized actor and an instituted action, it is because the individual’s choice of values ​​is social, made in institutions that are hierarchical in themselves. Conformity or disagreement with respect to a rule constitutes the individual. Actually acting according to the rule is equivalent to being instituted by it. But it is the individual, and not a “holistic” totality, that explains the action. Rather than develop holistic theories, which due to their high level of generalization do not explain anything, what it is about is to elaborate a complex thought about the individual. The instituted is expressed in its actor.

Methodological individualism should not be confused, then, with social individualism, typical of some liberal societies that encourage people to be “different”; nor with ethical individualism that is opposed to “collectivism.” Both see the individual as opposed to the group, or “de / socialized”, while methodological individualism is exercised in the context of a society and institutions.

Three moments in one method

WEBER, in the famous first sentence of economics AND SOCIETY, defines sociology as: «… a science that aims to understand social activity by interpretation [deutend verstehen] by interpreting it, and from there causally explain [ursächlich erklären] its development and their efects”.

From this derive the three stages of all sociology: understanding, interpretation and explanation, which are not to be considered as rungs of a ladder but as forms of convergent analysis of social reality, without allowing one to be considered “superior” to another.

“Understanding” social action means opting for “axiological neutrality”, both for moral reasons and for the very specificity of the theory. It is not necessary to put oneself in the shoes of social actors to understand them, or as it says in economics AND SOCIETY: “It is not necessary to be Cesar to understand Cesar.” No social scientist has the right to take advantage of his situation to flaunt his particular feelings. And, due to the very fact that in social sciences it is essential to carefully select materials, axiological neutrality is essential for the good result of the analysis. Without axiological neutrality there is no scientific understanding of society. As he himself defined in a posthumous article ( 1927 .

The absence of a doctrinaire spirit, the refusal to transform society in order to interpret it must be parallel to the passionate demand for clarity in the analysis. As will be seen, the “ethics of responsibility” arises from the demand for understanding over and above prejudice and utopia.

“Interpreting” social action becomes possible through the construction of “type ideals” [Idealtipen – word also translated by: “ideal types”, or “typologies”]. A “typical ideal” is an abstract construction, with a provisional status, capable of ordering chaos, the infinite diversity of reality. They do not express “the” truth, which as a substantial concept is a vain ideal, but one of its aspects, by accentuating the qualitative features of a reality. Its value is therefore utilitarian, insofar as it allows greater intelligibility of the real. The “typical ideal” coincides with a “mental image obtained by rationalizations of a utopian nature”, that is, without empirical content, which takes up the Kantian distinction between the “concept” [truth] and the “real” [reality]. It is thus a question of avoiding both the positivist confusion between truth and reality and the conceptual resignation of pure empiricist relativism. In his own words:

The concept of “ideal type” serves to WEBER to overcome the contradiction between the subjectivity inherent in the selection of materials that any sociologist must propose and the objectivity that he demands of himself as a scientist who must act from parameters of “axiological neutrality ”. And still more, the “typical ideal” is a tool through which the contradiction between singular historical facts and the generalization required by social rules is overcome. Finally, a “standard ideal” is also useful for the rational reconstruction of social behaviors. WEBER uses them both for his sociology of action (types of rationality), and for his economic sociology (types of capitalism), his sociology of religions, and his political sociology (types of domination).

“Explain” means, in WEBER’s words, to establish “judgments of historical imputation” which, unlike what happens in Marx, imply a causal pluralism. It is important to establish that the same phenomenon can be explained in very different ways. It must therefore be kept in mind, insofar as the Weberian theory of the “spirit of capitalism” is concerned, that WEBER himself had more than reservations about the overvaluation, attributed to his interpreters, of the role of religious ethics on the famous “spirit”. This explanation should not be generalized, nor should it be universalized beyond a very concrete historical context, outside of which it is not valid – precisely to the extent that it would be monistic, when what WEBER intends is to vindicate pluralism.

Four Weberian constants

  • THE SPECIFICITY OF WESTERN RATIONALISM: The specificity of the Western world and modernity is linked according to WEBER to “rationalization” and “disenchantment of the world.” These two principles of social action, which have not occurred anywhere else on the planet, are expressed in an especially significant way in the capitalist organization of work and in the modern bureaucratic state, with its emphasis on the criterion of efficiency. Some scholars of his work place this discovery around 1910 (in his works on music) but it is obvious that it is an intuition that can be found in his larger works. What is specific about Western rationalism is that his work links economic forms, social structures and political institutions. It is not that WEBER is “ethnocentric”: As we have said, he methodologically defends causal pluralism; But the truth is that the accumulation of circumstances that lead to rationalization in the West does not arise anywhere else. However, it should be noted that WEBER never believes that there is any kind of linear development of societies, nor that other cultures should “progress” (a concept that it does not assume either) towards the Western model.
  • THE ORDERING OF BEHAVIOR AND CONSTRUCTION OF A “VITAL ORDER” [LEBENSORDNUNG] A second great Weberian theme is that of the way in which religions construct the “ethos” of individuals, that is, the internalized normative order, which gives shape to The conduct. For WEBER it is important to emphasize that this “ethos” does not constitute something purely limited to ideas, but rather has social consequences and, furthermore, it does not arise from isolated individuals but from groups that consider their ethics as an explicit distinctive sign in social action. Social relations and symbolic forms cannot be separated, and they constitute a vital order that identifies certain “ideal types”. Subjective mechanisms and social efficiency are not only not contradictory, but they are needed, and mutually explained.
  • THE TENSION BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY It is one of the basic themes of the modern world. A basic part of Weberian historical studies is oriented to show how the rational emerges from the irrational, so that it is not possible to maintain a split between both levels; in fact not even one can be sharply differentiated. The “irrational” fascinates his time: Freud, like Th. Mann and WEBER, investigate it – and are attracted to its study. This does not mean that Weber’s work can be confused with an “irrationalism” but rather that it shows us the extraordinarily complex, and even ambivalent, of the very notion of rationality.
  • THE INFLUENCE OF ETHICAL PROVISIONS is the other great constant of Weberian social thought. The bourgeoisie, in addition – and above – being an economic system, or a social class with a series of legal rights, is an “ethos”, in break with traditional principles, centered on professional conscience and that places work as a value central that gives meaning to life. The Protestant “ethos” may seem contradictory – it accumulates wealth but maintains the radical prohibition of enjoying it – and constitutes secular asceticism as opposed to religious asceticism. Through education, this “ethos” will eventually spread to other social groups, including workers, to become a kind of common sense in Western societies.

Religion and social organization

WEBER, as his wife Manrianne wrote, confessed “not having a musical ear for religion.” Lutheran by training, it is obvious that he preferred Calvinist rigorism, whose severity and intransigence he transferred to his vital conduct. Perhaps it would not hurt to remember, without being too Freudian, that Calvinism was also his mother’s religion. WEBER participated in various congresses on social Christianity and was interested in the social action of the church, which, for both liberals and pietists, was the purest expression of faith. But when he approaches the study of religions, be it Judaism or Calvinism, he imposes on himself a radical “axiological neutrality” and displays impressive historical scholarship. What you are interested in is basically

The first thing to make clear is that, for WEBER, religion cannot be dismissed as irrational. Even yesterday’s magic, which rationalization fights today, was rational at the time; and the same can be said of monotheism versus polytheism and animism. Even the 10 commandments of Judaism established a rationalizing legalistic mechanism. If rationality and irrationality exist together within religions, it is because religious behavior is also a type of social action. It is interesting to observe how in the Reformation, when trying to eliminate the magical elements of belief, it was not possible to break with the irrational. On the contrary, with increasing rationalization the irrational reinforces its intensity.

WEBER distinguishes, as a sociologist, two forms of religiosity, with four types that, once again, should not be read as evolutionary, or ascending, but exist simultaneously:

  • “Asceticism” (active form) that affects the world and that can occur as monastic asceticism (monk, priest) or “in the world” as secular asceticism (enterprising Calvinist). In fact, in capitalism, secular asceticism has its roots in monasticism without this meaning that it has taken its shape. The very concept of “industry” originates in the monastic sphere to come to mean something entirely different in the economic sphere.
  • “Mysticism” (passive form) that does not pretend to adapt to the world. It also has an “out of the world” form (the closure) and a more active one (Puritanism).

In his 1920 text “Intermediate considerations: theory of the degrees or orientations of the religious rejection of the world” [Zwischenbetrachtung – “Theoretical parenthesis”] he shows how in modernity there is a progressively insoluble opposition of the religious sphere with respect to other spheres of value . Religion ceases to permeate economics , politics and science and a growing difference between these orders and the religious sphere opens, until two groups of forces progressively unrelated to it are constituted: those of rational activity ( economy andpolitics) and those that belong to the level of the irrational (aesthetic and erotic). The paradox is that also aesthetics and erotica will also inevitably know their rationalization process to the extent that they become autonomous (which in fact happened with Freud, it must be said). It is the bureaucratic and impersonal state, and not religion, that judges the contradictions between the various spheres of values ​​and marks their differentiation and relative autonomy.

The disenchantment of the world

With increasing intellectualization, modern man ceases to believe in magical powers. But when the prophetic meaning is lost, he finds himself forced to live in a “disenchanted” world. What he calls the “ethical irrationality of the world” comes from the antagonism of values ​​linked to the fundamental intuition of the infinite diversity of reality itself. For the rest, the modern world experiences great difficulty in producing new gods or new values. Humanity, or at least Western humanity, is in grave danger of passing from ethical irrationality to “ethical ice age”; the supposed polytheism of values ​​in a modern society is nothing more than the facade under which an indifferentism towards values ​​is hidden, which are no longer confronting each other. Under this pluralism what happens is a pure standardization.

The concept of “disenchantment with the world” Entzauberung der Welt – also translatable as “loss of magic” “disenchantment” … allows a double approach. On the one hand, it confirms the exhaustion of the power previously possessed by religions to significantly determine social practices and to give meaning to the global experience of the world. But it also offers a criterion for evaluating the role of the Enlightenment. This is, however, a question that should be raised in a coherent context. This is not a judgment, which would be contrary to axiological neutrality, on whether the Enlightenment movement has failed by failing to offer a civil form of hope to the world. The disenchantment of the world, caused by the current pluralism of values,

This intellectualization forces in our time to recognize that in order to find meaning in the world’s scientific knowledge, humans become entangled in a rationally insoluble conflict between incompatible ideals. Only traditional religions were capable of conferring on the content of cultural values ​​the dignity of unconditional ethical imperatives. But today religious practices belong to the private sphere.

Theodicy and the promises of salvation are replaced by individual ethics; the social controls established by a capitalist economyand a bureaucratic state do not have the force of the religion of yesteryear. While religion could be defined as a meaningful form of collective action, “intellectualization” is at the origin of the “disenchantment of the world.” Religion, which WEBER clearly distinguishes from sectarian “virtuosity” is a matter of this world and not of the hereafter that produces a very concrete “ethos”; It is not that there is something like an “internal logic” of religions that leads to an ethic, but rather that in religion the nucleus of interests (material and ideals) that govern human life crystallizes in a very specific way. Or, as they say, religion inserts the extraordinary into ordinary life.

Domination and political action

Along with the study of religion, that of politics is the other central area in WEBER; It is customary to remember, when it comes to this issue, that his father was already an important figure in the National Liberal Party and that he himself participated as a delegate in the pathetic Treaty of Versailles and in the drafting of the constitution of the Weimar Republic . But from the sociological point of view what interests him is public action and the political order as “domination.” It must be clearly established that for WEBER power rests on force. Marsal quotes a perfectly clear Weberian text to this effect: “Power is the possibility that a person or a number of people carry out their own will, in a communal action, even against the resistance of others who participate in the action.”

For the rest, WEBER was always a convinced elitist or, as it is sometimes said, “a critic of mass society”; no matter how hard he tried to get closer to the social democracy, what really interested him was that the latter organically represented the labor aristocracy. What he values ​​in democracy is not so much the expression of popular will as the cunning he uses to achieve a certain level of control over the activity of the elites.

The Weberian theorization of the modern state is inserted in his analysis of the forms of rationalization. But what characterizes the modern state is that it does not use violence in the brutal way of the old states; On the contrary, it has managed to make itself indispensable in human life, becoming the only source of legitimation, managing services, etc. The fascinating thing about state domination is that it is achieved without apparent violence, through conviction and charismatic mechanisms.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is for WEBER the fundamental pillar of the modern rule of law, insofar as it allows differentiating the political-administrative sphere from other spheres or levels (religion, economics…). In this sense, it plays a rationalizing role. Even if state violence is upheld as “legitimate”, it is because it clearly differs from indiscriminate feudal violence. If there is a rule of law, there must necessarily be a bureaucracy that gives meaning and organizational structure to the law. That is the figure of the bureaucrat. If the law is abstract, impersonal, and egalitarian, the bureaucrat must be exactly like that too. The bureaucrat, detached from any personal interest, recruited by an objective procedure based on qualification and merit, is thus the effective instrument of the law.

All effective organizational systems are based on the bureaucracy: the State, the company and even the Churches (the priest is still the bureaucrat of faith). Without bureaucracy there is no rationalization, no law-based society. Hence the bureaucratic “ethos” (rationality and impersonality) permeates modern societies. Bureaucratization is “the new servitude” because it is the servitude of the law.

But in WEBER’s view, bureaucratization is not only inevitable in capitalism, it is the common destiny of all modern societies, even those of the socialist type. The “dictatorship of the civil servant”, and not that of the proletariat as the Marxists believed, is the one that haunts us in the future. With this, the rationalization of the world will have reached a milestone once, but it is not clear that human freedom has. Quite the contrary.

Ethics and politics as forms of tragedy

Perhaps the Weberian work that has best withstood the passage of time is his conference POLITICS AS A PROFESSION ( 1919 ) where he raises the contradiction between the various possible ethics in politics. Along with ch. III of ECONOMY AND SOCIETY is the fundamental text to understand the difficult relationship between ethics and politics. Contrary to what has sometimes been argued, WEBER does not consider only politics as naked power; it is and must be a power based on values, on convictions, on elements of charisma and rationality.

The title of the aforementioned conference is, in German, POLITIK ALS BERUF and, once again, it should be remembered the ambiguity of the term “Beruf” (both vocation and profession). In the very expression of the title is incorporated the idea that politicians live “for” politics as well as “from” politics. This distinguishes modern politics from that which was carried out, on the part of rentiers or more or less idle liberal professionals. WEBER defends that the politician must be a professional. In its aspect of “vocation” all political action needs, and implies, a certain “charisma”; In its aspect of “profession”, on the other hand, politics is increasingly a more autonomous sphere, more responsibly committed. With only passion without responsibility, one does not become politics. The politician, according to a well-known Weberian expression, must “tame his soul.” The strength of the politician consists in allowing the facts to act on him, in the recollection and inner calm of his soul, seeking what he calls “distance from objects and men”, to extract from them the necessary practical consequences. Thus the good politician, to put it with a Laurent Fleury expression, would exercise his office as a “dispassionate passion.”

  • In POLITICS AS A PROFESSION, he states that:

It cannot be ignored that the political vocation has something tragic in WEBER, insofar as it implies conflict management and that we will never be able to free ourselves from it or find perfectly just solutions. Since men live together they have diverse interests and some of these interests are inevitably sacrificed; hence all politics have something tragic and even nihilistic. We depend on politics – like fate in the Greek tragedy – from the moment we are born. That, by the way, would also be a very Nietzschean conception of political activity as an expression of the “will to power,” as a constant struggle in which what counts is not so much success in the realization of ideals as the expression of antagonism. and the fight for recognition.

All politics is “struggle” and finally “choice” and, to the extent that every choice is exclusive, it has an inevitably tragic meaning: in all politics there will always be winners, losers and resentment. The ethical element of politics must, therefore, be studied from a correct perspective, without ignoring that small prides, personal miseries and the most obvious material interests play a fundamental role.

Politics is made with people and people have interests that are not always fair, not worthy, not even decent. Any policy, no matter how pure it pretends to be, suffers from conditions, dependencies, mortgages to pay and “instrumental” needs –or nonsense–; She does not belong to any angelic realm, but is sometimes “human, too human.” Consequently, a policy of ideals, of pure abstractions aimed at imposing the rule of good on earth, would perhaps be an “ideal policy” but it would be very little “real”.

For WEBER, the place of ethics is as far removed from that of utopia as it is from the pure justification of the social values, or the cultural clichés, of an era. What he called “the authentic man” is one who is capable of adequately combining the two perspectives, instrumental and moral, without denying the contradictions, sometimes tragic, of his concrete situation. And in this sense it warns that: There is also a tragic “paradox of consequences in politics: sometimes the results that are achieved turn out to be perfectly opposite to the motivations or intentions that moved the politician to act.

The uncontrollable repercussion of certain acts, the impossibility of foreseeing the circumstances, the contradiction between ends and means, the distance between what was dreamed and what was achieved, weigh like a slab on political action. This does not mean, far from it, that the politician should dispense with a “faith”, but it does mean that he should temper it to his real conditions and hence WEBER does not believe he has magic recipes to act ethically in politics. In addition, a tragic “paradox of consequences rules” in politics: sometimes the results that are achieved turn out to be perfectly opposite to the motivations or intentions that led the politician to act.

The uncontrollable repercussion of certain acts, the impossibility of foreseeing the circumstances, the contradiction between ends and means, the distance between what was dreamed and what was achieved, weigh like a slab on political action. This does not mean, far from it, that the politician should dispense with a “faith”, but it does mean that he should temper it to his real conditions and hence WEBER does not believe he has magic recipes to act ethically in politics. In addition, a tragic “paradox of consequences” rules in politics: sometimes the results that are achieved turn out to be perfectly opposite to the motivations or intentions that led to the politician’s actions. The uncontrollable repercussion of certain acts, the impossibility of foreseeing the circumstances, the contradiction between ends and means, the distance between what was dreamed and what was achieved, weigh like a slab on political action.

This does not mean, far from it, that the politician should dispense with a “faith”, but it does mean that he should temper it to his real conditions and hence WEBER does not believe that he has magic recipes for acting ethically in politics. sometimes the results that are achieved turn out to be perfectly opposite to the motivations or the intentions that moved the politician to act. The uncontrollable repercussion of certain acts, the impossibility of foreseeing the circumstances, the contradiction between ends and means, the distance between what was dreamed and what was achieved, weigh like a slab on political action. This does not mean, far from it, that the politician should dispense with a “faith”, but it does mean that he should temper it to his real conditions and hence WEBER does not believe that he has magic recipes for acting ethically in politics. sometimes the results that are achieved turn out to be perfectly opposite to the motivations or the intentions that moved the politician to act.

The uncontrollable repercussion of certain acts, the impossibility of foreseeing the circumstances, the contradiction between ends and means, the distance between what was dreamed and what was achieved, weigh like a slab on political action. This does not mean, far from it, that the politician should dispense with a “faith”, but it does mean that he should temper it to his real conditions and hence WEBER does not believe that he has magic recipes for acting ethically in politics.

Moreover, it even happens that: “ethics can play a disastrous role from the moral [practical] point of view.” In his sociology we will find, yes, a series of basic concepts for political action “charisma”, “rationalization” and, especially, “responsibility”, but not a theory about democracy. Perhaps this is attributable to the fact that democracy is nothing but the space in which the tragedy of politics is not concealed in any way and is played out in all its radicality. Democracy, finally, has as its essence the possibility that all the supposed political “essences” recognize its contingency.

The weber ethics: responsibility and conviction

The concepts of “responsibility” and “conviction” express the tragedy of politics in an eminent way insofar as they are the poles in which political action moves. Both extremes need and repel each other. A politician without convictions is simply an opportunist, a professional manipulator and a salesman of smoke. But a politician unaware of his responsibility, lost in his neurotic world of unrealizable utopias, leads to certain defeat. Finding the effective path between Scylla and Charybdis is the mark of a good politician who is both possible and transformative. Or in the words of the same text: “Passion does not make the politician if he is not capable of converting responsibility to the service of the cause in the north of his political activity.” And at the same time:

WEBER therefore opposes two political logics that are two ethical:

  • The “ethics of conviction” [Gesinnungsethik] is animated only by moral obligation and absolute intransigence in the service of principles.
  • The “ethics of responsibility” [Verantwortungsethik] values ​​the consequences of their actions and confronts the means with the ends, the consequences and the various options or possibilities in a given situation. It is an expression of instrumental rationality, in the sense that it not only values ​​the ends but also the instruments to achieve certain ends. It is this “maturely reflected” instrumental rationality that leads to political success.

In short, it would be a mistake in political action to consider exclusively the “rationality of values” to dispense with what is fundamental: rationality in the tools that must lead to the realization of these values. There is, then, in politics an implicit ethic that is not known by those in favor of purity, of evangelical naivety or of dogmatic doctrinalism of any sign. WEBER himself gives a well-known example of the impossibility of applying the Christian “Sermon on the Mount”, a model of the ethics of conviction, on a page that ends as follows:

Job listing

  • The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ( 1903 )
  • History of Roman agriculture
  • Community Sociology
  • Science as a vocation and Politics as a vocation – Two lessons that are published together.
  • Studies on the Sociology of Religion ( 1921 )
  • Methodology Studies 1922 )
  • The russian revolution
  • The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism

economy and society posthumous work)

  • The Politician and the Scientist

 

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