Violence and Politics: Reconsidering Weber’s ‘Politics as a Vocation’

Introduction

On 28 January 1919, during a period of intense political upheaval and a year-and-a-half before his premature death, Weber delivered a lecture, ‘Politics as a vocation’ (hereafter PV). Three months earlier Germany had surrendered to the Allies after four years of debilitating war; just two weeks before he spoke, the Spartacist uprising in Berlin was suppressed, finally ending a year of political disruption (Jones, 2018); and only two years prior, revolutionary Bolshevism succeeded in Russia, something Weber (1918a [1994]: 289–302) continued to regard as a dangerous ‘experiment’. Against this background Weber agreed to speak to a student audience, whose attention was already galvanized by the travails of politics (see Bruun, 2007: 240–274; Owen and Strong, 2004: ix–xviii, xxxiv–lviii; Radkau, 2009: 514–518; Schluchter, 1996: 10–36).

Given the passing of these particular events, this lecture might have become a relic of its time, but instead PV occupies a central place in the appreciation Weber continues to receive from his readers. Nevertheless, the standing of PV, and a companion lecture ‘Science as a vocation’ (1917b [1970]), are seen as possibly anomalous in the context of Weber’s intellectual corpus:

Both addresses differ in character from Weber’s scholarly treatises or his academic lectures, and from his political articles or election speeches. They pursue a different goal. They are ‘philosophical’ texts, intended to lead the listeners (and later the readers) to recognize facts and to encourage self-reflection, to win them over for responsible efforts on behalf of a realistic cause. (Schluchter, 1996: 8)

To regard these texts as philosophical, however, is to misjudge them. While their tone and flavour are dissimilar to that of The Protestant Ethic (1920 [1991]), say, or Economy and Society (1921 [1978]), and while they apparently seek first principles, these lectures nevertheless depart from the standard form of philosophical exposition. Rather than being philosophical, PV operates through a combination of didactic and polemic forms. Didactic because it is directed to teaching radical students, those ‘who now feel [themselves] to be genuinely “principled” politicians and who share in the intoxication signified by this revolution’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 127–128), that they lack moral focus and courage, that ‘they have not experienced the vocation for politics in its deepest meaning’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 128, emphasis added). PV’s polemic quality is in the fact that Weber does not address the attitudes or behaviour of the students directly, but challenges their imputed commitments through construction of a contestable account of the nature of politics and the state, and of the vocation of politics. We shall see that these latter remain at some distance from what Schluchter calls recognizable ‘facts’.

The relevance today of PV is that it raises core issues of our time, namely the role of violence in the exercise of political power, the ethics of political leadership, and the fundamental nature of politics and the state. The way in which Weber treats these considerations, however, invites close examination. A critical discussion of PV not only provides an exploration of Weber’s enduring text but entails examination of the institutions and principles of governance and standards of political behaviour in the context of the modern state. Weber (1921 [1978]: 14) wrote that ‘in a sociological context’ reference ‘to a state’ can only mean a ‘certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons’. This methodological commitment does not mean that Weber believed that the state does not exist. On the contrary; he insists that there are ‘political actions and political structures, especially the state’ (Weber, 1917a [1949]: 45). And while ‘there is no elaborated sociology of the state in Weber, [and] a finished doctrine of the state is also lacking’ (Anter, 2014: 2), PV provides the most accessible and sustained treatment of the state among Weber’s dispersed discussions of it. Indeed, more than any other of Weber’s texts PV is widely seen to represent his emblematic approach to the modern state and the enigmatic qualities of political leadership.

The State and Its Means

PV begins with what are presented as non-controversial and ostensibly incontrovertible definitions. Politics, Weber (1919 [1970]: 77, emphases in original) says, ‘comprises any kind of independent leadership in action’ so that politics is ‘the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state’. Before outlining his understanding of the state, Weber (1919 [1970]: 78) quotes Trotsky: ‘Every state is founded on force.’ Accepting this statement as a premise of his own account Weber (1919 [1970]: 78) says that: ‘If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of “state” would be eliminated.’ It is acknowledged that ‘force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state . . . but force is a means specific to the state [so that today] the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 78). This leads directly to Weber’s well-known definition of the state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 78, emphasis in original). In this account, then, a means becomes the means.

The first part of this definition of the state is provided in preceding publications. Weber had earlier written that the state is ‘an association that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, and cannot be defined in any other manner’ (Weber, 1915 [1970]: 334, emphasis in original). Similarly, he writes that ‘it is possible to define the “political” character of an organization only in terms of the means peculiar to it, the use of force’ (Weber, 1921 [1978]: 55) and that a ‘compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a “state” insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’ (Weber, 1921 [1978]: 54, emphasis added). It might be noticed that the territoriality of the state is absent from these definitions, but in PV Weber reinforces the expanded definition of the state by saying that ‘“territory” is one of the characteristics of the state’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 78). This will be taken up below.

The seamless move from his definition of politics to his definition of the state belies the novelty of Weber’s account. While the state ‘is undeniably a messy concept’ (Mann, 1984: 187) it is possible, indeed necessary, to distinguish between ‘the state’ and ‘government’ (see Abrams, 1988; Nettl, 1968). The 19th-century Russian anarchist Kropotkin (1897 [1973]: 10–11) anticipates much of this discussion when he writes that these are ‘two concepts of a different order’, with the state alone operating as a ‘power situated above society . . . [as] the concentration of many functions of the life of societies in the hands of the few’. In this sense government as opposed to the state can be characterized as the political sphere, the sphere in which public life entails the exercise of authority under conditions of conspicuous and contestable leadership. In PV, however, there is an absence of such a distinction, a distinction between the state, that can be organizationally understood as comprising the military and the police and the juridical apparatus on the one hand, and the arena of political leadership shaped by struggle and contestation, or government, on the other. This is in spite of the fact that in PV Weber (1919 [1970]: 80–86) discusses the development of the modern state in terms of a differentiation of the means of power from the administration of politics.

A distinction between state and government is important, as we shall see, because whereas force or ‘legitimate violence’ is a means acknowledged by all to be exercised by the state in the sense indicated here it does not necessarily follow that the same proposition applies to government, as the sphere of politics. Indeed, in Economy and Society, quoted above, Weber more appropriately refers to the state’s ‘administrative staff’ as the appliers of ‘physical force in the enforcement of [the state’s] order’, thus removing it from the sphere of politics, a distinction Weber (1918b [1994]: 160–161) employs elsewhere. The importance of this latter issue arises in Weber’s treatment of the moral dimension of politics, considered below. What of Weber’s characterization of the means of the state in terms of violence or force?

Weber (1919 [1970]: 78) says that violence is the ‘means specific to the state’ but ‘not the normal or the only means of the state’. This formulation raises the question of what other means may meaningfully be regarded as characteristic of the state. A factor central to the modern state and fundamental for its operation is its fiscal structure. Indeed, this is arguably the hallmark of the modern state, an appreciation of which is consistent with Weber’s understanding of rationalization in both calculable revenue generation and the organizational form manifest in the historical development of the modern state, which is outlined in PV. It has been noted that Weber fails to provide an adequate discussion of taxation, even though the ‘modern state as Weber describes it could not have existed without substantial and regular tax revenues’ and that ‘the “modern tax state” carries all the hallmarks of Weber’s modern state . . . [being] systematic, continuous, legal-rational, extensive, regularized and bureaucratized’ (Pierson, 2004: 24). Indeed, it is remarkable that while Weber mentions exotic and historical cases in various texts, he avoids a sustained discussion of taxation in the modern state (see Weber, 1927 [1981]; see also Weber, 1921 [1978]: 336–337) even while acknowledging the ‘importance’ of taxation for its operation (Weber, 1921 [1978]: 167, 169, 196). The Prussian state, with which Weber was in so many ways preoccupied, developed one of the most efficient systems of taxation in early modern Europe (Kiser and Schneider, 1994). The idea that taxation is a means specific to the state and defining of its modern variant was proposed by an associate of Weber in a speech delivered in 1918 to the Viennese Sociological Society and published later that year.

Schumpeter (1918 [1991]: 99) asks whether ‘the fiscal problems left in the wake of the war cannot be solved within the framework of [the] prewar economic order’. Schumpeter, following Goldscheid’s (1917) exposition of a fiscal sociology, shows that the modern state is not only created by its capacity to collect taxes but that the way in which it does so determines both the capacity of the state to act on its own behalf and also the nature of the society from which those taxes are drawn (Schumpeter, 1918 [1991]: 108–109). The tax system of the modern state, Schumpeter (1918 [1991]: 101) says, creates not only ‘economic forms’ but also ‘human types’. The sweeping significance of the state’s fiscal measures, he goes on to say, is in the way they ‘have created and destroyed industries, industrial forms, and industrial regions’ and the manner in which the ‘spirit of a people, its cultural level [and] its social structure’ derive from the state’s fiscal history (Schumpeter, 1918 [1991]: 101). ‘The public finances’, Schumpeter (1918 [1991]: 101) continues, ‘are one of the best starting points for an investigation of society, especially though not exclusively of its political life’. Schumpeter shows that the historical basis of the modern state and its fiscal means result from the growing financial costs of the prosecution of warfare up to the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, and that in this way the means of violence depends on the means of taxation and that the latter defines more clearly the modern state, in which organization becomes more significant, both practically and conceptually, than violence in understanding the trajectory of state development and its functions (see Braddick, 1996; Glete, 2002; Tilly, 1992: 84–95).

While Weber quotes Trotsky, Schumpeter could have quoted Marx. In Capital Marx (1867 [1977]: 919) similarly argues that the mercantile rivalry of European powers during the period from the 15th century to the 17th led to ‘commercial wars [which] served as a forcing-house for the credit system’. The cost of these wars required the state to borrow funds that created a national debt, which, Marx (1867 [1977]: 919) says, is responsible for ‘joint stock companies . . . stock-exchange gambling and the modern bankocracy’. The national debt also generates the modern system of taxation, the latter being, as Marx (1867 [1977]: 921) approvingly quotes a contemporary commentator, ‘the best system for making the wage-labourer submissive, frugal, industrious . . . and overburdened with work’. Here again force cedes to organization as the state’s means of control through the instrument of fiscal practices. The disciplinary capacity of taxation, mentioned by both Schumpeter and Marx, anticipates Mann’s (1984: 209) distinction between the state’s ‘despotic power’ and its ‘infrastructural power’, with this latter including taxation.

As indicated above, the idea of the state developed by Schumpeter is not entirely foreign to the framework of Weber’s thought, and given expression in another war-time text. Weber’s well-known definition of the state as an association claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, spelled out in PV and also in ‘Religious rejections of the world’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 78; Weber, 1915 [1970]: 334), includes the idea that the state requires a permanent administrative apparatus, even if that idea is not highlighted within this definition itself (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 80–81; Weber, 1915 [1970]: 333–334). In a work written in 1917 as a series of newspaper articles and published in book form in 1918 as Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order, Weber (1918b [1994]: 145) emphasizes this aspect of the state: ‘In a modern state real rule, which becomes effective in everyday life . . . through the day-to-day management of the administration, necessarily and inevitably lies in the hands of officialdom’. Indeed, the organizational nature of the state is treated as its sine qua non in Parliament and Government:

Looked at from a social-scientific point of view, the modern state is an ‘organization’ in exactly the same way as a factory; indeed this is its specific historical characteristic. In both cases the relations of rule within the organization are subject to the same conditions . . . [namely] a system of justice and administration which, in principle at any rate, functions in a rationally calculable manner according to stable, general norms, just as one calculates the predictable performance of a machine. (Weber, 1918b [1994]: 146, 147–148)

Under conditions of bureaucratic rule in the modern state, Weber goes on to say, the expression of ‘political will’ is largely through political parties. He writes that parties are ‘voluntarily created organizations directed to free recruitment’, the goal or purpose of which is the ‘canvassing of votes for elections to political positions or to an electoral corporation’ (Weber, 1918b [1994]: 149), a significant part of which includes managing or controlling mass emotions (Weber, 1918b [1994]: 230–231).

While there is no mention of fiscal management in this discussion, the focus of Weber’s account is nevertheless the corresponding administrative means of the state rather than the means of force. There is mention of conflict, between parties supported by mobilized elements of electorates, but the subject here is management not violence. The means of administration are not strictly an alternative to violence; the military and the constabulary are ultimately instruments of force, but they subsist through budgets that are supplied by means of taxation and what underlies the latter is not force but regulation through development and application of rules. The incentives that operate in fiscal practices are financial and the final sanctions for misdemeanour or default are confiscation, namely seizure that requires authority not force. Resistance to confiscation may provoke the use of force, as with any contravention of law. The disruptive impact of force or violence in the political arena, rather than its instrumentality, will be considered further below.

The State’s Extra-Territoriality

It will now be clear that regarding the means specific to the state exclusively in terms of the use of force is limited if not arbitrary. It is possible that during a war the violence inherent in a state’s military engagement with another is paramount, and that Weber’s definition of the state and therefore of politics can be understood in terms of the historical period in which he delivered PV. But Weber does not address warfare in this lecture. A related notion, while not in itself misleading, distorts our understanding of the state if the territoriality, ascribed to it by Weber, is taken to be an exclusive and definitive characteristic. In fact, the limitations of this formulation can be noticed in the context of the military contest between imperial powers that was the First World War, through which the state’s preoccupation with extra-territoriality is self-evident. The concern here is not Weber’s acknowledgement of the state’s territorial basis (see, for example, Weber, 1921 [1978]: 902), which is a simple statement of the obvious, but his neglect in PV of any reference to the extra-territoriality of states. Indeed, the definition of the state in terms of its means of violence is much more appropriate to the state’s extra-territoriality than to domestic home-territorial activities (Bruun, 2007: 248). The contention here is that Weber’s neglect of the state’s extra-territoriality in PV is not an accident.

In his address in 1919 to the Union of Free Students Weber makes no mention of his own political enthusiasms even though he freely acknowledges a number of other personal convictions. He does not here address his audience as ‘Fellow students’, as he did in the earlier ‘Science as a vocation’ lecture (Weber, 1917b [1970]: 150) as a way of overcoming his distance from them. In PV, on the other hand, he acknowledges the age difference between those listening to him and himself, ‘twenty years of age . . . [and] over fifty’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 126); but while he talks of the importance of both conviction and a ‘passionate devotion to a “cause”’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 115) he fails to indicate what political causes in particular he is passionately devoted to. To do so would risk losing the attention of this generation of Germans who could not be more disengaged from a commitment to empire. The risk of such disengagement is increased and more likely to occur if Weber were to explicitly acknowledge the extra-territoriality of states, even though this is a crucial aspect of their development, history and ongoing animus.

The extra-territoriality of the state is explicit in Weber’s continuous endorsement, over his career, of German imperial and colonial ambition. His encouragement of such ambitions is expressed in publications that appeared over the span of his adult life. In his inaugural lecture, ‘The nation state and economic policy’, delivered in 1895, Weber (1895 [1994]: 20–21) describes himself as an ‘economic nationalist’, that is, someone who places ‘the nation’s enduring economic and political power interests . . . above all other consideration’. This lecture is such a forceful assertion of the need for the domination of German national power in an international context that some scholars hold that Weber did not mean what he said in this work (see Turner and Factor, 1984: 15), even though it is consistent with his subsequent views, expressed both in private correspondence and public lectures as well as in his publications (Mommsen, 1990). In his reflections on ‘The economic foundations of imperialism’, written between 1911 and 1914 and published in Economy and Society, Weber (1921 [1978]: 918) muses on state power and its extra-territoriality, arguing that: ‘In general and at all times, imperialist capitalism, especially colonial booty capitalism based on direct force and compulsory labour, has offered by far the greatest opportunities for profit’. He notes the ‘[i]ncreasing opportunities for profit abroad [that] emerge again today, especially in territories that are opened up politically and economically’. Weber (1921 [1978]: 919) goes on to say:

The safest way of monopolizing for the members of one’s own polity profit opportunities which are linked to the public economy of the foreign territory is to occupy it or at least subject the foreign political power in the form of a ‘protectorate’ or some such arrangement . . . The universal revival of ‘imperialist’ capitalism . . . and the revival of political drives for expansion are thus not accidental. For the predictable future, the prognosis will have to be made in its favour.

Although he does not refer to the fact here, the practices Weber indicates were at the time being prosecuted by Germany in Africa and China. The destruction wrought by the war, a consequence of imperial ambition, did not shake Weber’s attachment to his imperial commitments and his vision of the correctness of national self-assertion as an appropriate strategy for the German state, even in military defeat (Mommsen, 1990: 321). In his address to the Union of Free Students in 1919, however, the state’s extra-territoriality is forgotten. This is a key feature of states too frequently overlooked in general discussion and such blindness to the state’s extra-territoriality is readily supported in the single-society focus of conventional approaches by quoting Weber’s definition of the state in PV, namely the state is ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 78, emphasis added).

What has been discussed in this section and the one preceding it can be described as Weber’s sins of omission, to remain consistent with the tone of discussion in some key sections of PV. The following account, on the other hand, will turn to Weber’s sins of commission.

Politics and Morals

The ‘tasks of politics’, Weber (1919 [1970]: 126) says, ‘can only be solved by violence’. This idea, that violence is the means of politics, is repeated many times in PV. According to Weber (1919 [1970]: 119, 121), ‘politics operates with very special means, namely power backed up by violence’, so that the ‘decisive means for politics is violence’. He arrives at this position directly through his definition of the state, even though that definition is inconsistent in itself and also diverges from other statements concerning the nature of the state expressed elsewhere by Weber. The point to be made here is that under the canopy of this definition Weber (1919 [1970]: 124) says that it is the ‘specific means of legitimate violence as such in the hand of human associations which determines the peculiarity of all ethical problems of politics’. These problems, as Weber sees them, play a key role in his understanding of the vocation for politics. It will be shown here that such an understanding of politics is not only unhelpful in itself but also that the characterization of the moral animus of the political vocation informs neither a useful treatment of ethics nor of the calling of politics. This is not to say that it is without purpose in Weber’s lecture.

Violence as a means of politics is an unsatisfactory summary of not only the nature of politics but also its available means. It is possible that the war-time context of Weber’s talk might lead to the idea that the execution of political decisions requires the use of force, which may lead to violence. In a perceptive discussion of revolutionary violence Barrington Moore (1962: 206–207) shows that stable and established political regimes and their social orders exact a calculus of mortality just as decisively as that which follows political upheaval in revolution or war. But this is to refer to the consequences of politics not their means. Similarly, the idea of the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1832 [1989]: 87) that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, offers no support to Weber’s construction as it implies the obvious conclusion that war and politics employ different means. In Economy and Society Weber (1921 1978]: 1414) writes that the ‘essence of politics . . . is struggle, the recruitment of allies and of a voluntary following’. The idea of the centrality of struggle and conflict to not only politics but also economics (Weber, 1895 [1994]: 17) and social life in general (Weber, 1917a [1949]: 26–27) is ubiquitous in Weber and frequently noted (Beetham, 1991; Mommsen, 1990: 40–48; Swedberg, 1998).

It is widely accepted that Weber’s assumption of the unavoidable prospect of violence in politics, even if infrequent, is continuous with his characterization of politics in terms of power, conflict and struggle (Bruun, 2007: 245–248; Walter, 1969: 49–53). Contrary to this perspective is the idea that power and violence are not continuous but opposites, that power is a quality of collectives and as such authoritative whereas violence is a mere instrument that ‘always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues’ (Arendt, 1972: 150). The argument here, though, is not based on semantic refinement, as with Arendt, but rather with the proposition that Weber’s characterization of politics is contradictory. The use of violence in politics, which it may be held arises through and is an extension of conflict and struggle, has the consequence of bringing conflict and struggle to an end. This is to say that violence disrupts and undermines politics. Police or military action, which typically deploy some form of violence, serve the purpose of suppressing conflict or struggle through removal of an adversary. Violence on this basis is a means of engagement quite distinct from politics. Political struggles remain political as long as they are not violent. If the ‘essence of politics . . . is struggle, the recruitment of allies and of a voluntary following’ then an absence of violence is required in politics, for the application of violence in political contests not only undermines or compromises the prospect of recruiting a ‘voluntary following’ but determinatively suppresses conflict itself.

Politics entails inducements to support a purpose or a course of action, on the one hand, and dissuade opposition to such purposes or actions, on the other. The means drawn upon for such exercises, to paraphrase the relevant passage in Economy and Society, is the enlistment of allies and the recruitment of collateral or contributory support. Consistent with this perspective is the notion that politics is a matter of conflict and struggle. In a classic analysis of politics as conflict Schattschneider (1960: 64–65) argues that ‘conflicts divide people and unite them at the same time’ so that ‘the development of one conflict may inhibit the development of another because a radical shift in alignments becomes possible only at the cost of a change in the relations and priorities of all of the contestants’. On this basis he argues that: ‘Conflict is so powerful an instrument of politics that all regimes are of necessity concerned with its management, with its use in governing and with its effectiveness as an instrument of change, growth and unity’ (Schattschneider, 1960: 67). The most effective means for managing conflict, Schattschneider continues, is conflict itself. This is because one conflict will tend to displace another by altering the alignments of recruitment and support. Political leadership, then, can be conceived in terms of the capacity to select or promote one conflict over another, for ‘the choice of conflicts allocates power’ (Schattschneider, 1960: 68). From this perspective violence, in suppressing or otherwise removing opponents will disrupt rather than contribute to the political process. In a classic discussion of Weber’s understanding of politics as applied to ‘political crisis’ Parsons (1942 [1969]: 117–119) shows that Nazi violence destroyed politics, even though he does not say so explicitly.

The means of politics nominated here, ‘struggle [through] the recruitment of allies and of a voluntary following’ (Weber, 1921 [1978]: 1414), fit better with Weber’s evocative description of politics as ‘a strong and slow boring of hard boards’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 128). Indeed, this is a better match than the idea that ‘the decisive means for politics is violence’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 121), by which such boards would instead be cracked apart and broken. Weber’s preference for a heroic (see Weber, 1919 [1970]: 128) rather than a realist conceptualization of politics has a purpose in his argument of magnifying and thus possibly misrepresenting the ethical dimension of politics in order to overestimate or idealize the personal qualities required for the vocation for politics. The ethical problems Weber has in mind are stated in a discussion that is replete with historical and religious references, thick with rhetorical gestures and obscure constructions or formulations. The issue seems to be that the exercise of violence exacts a personal cost on its agents, that the political actor who by hypothesis unavoidably deploys violence ‘must know that he is responsible for what may become of himself under the impact of these [ethical] paradoxes’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 125). It is a novel critique of violence in politics, that is concerned with the damage to the perpetrator not the victim; the political user of the means of violence is ever at risk of losing his soul, Weber (1919 [1970]: 126) says.

The ‘ethical paradox’ Weber refers to, which in all likelihood constitutes the philosophical element identified by Schluchter (1996: 8), mentioned above, and indeed the ‘facts’ to which he implicitly refers, can possibly be located in the following:

We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conflict can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility’. (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 120)

While Weber claims that these two ethics are ‘fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed’ he goes on to say, only seven pages later, that ‘an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 127). In the form that he initially presents them these ‘maxims’ are not statements of ethical choices, as Weber suggests, choices that social actors draw upon in their actual conduct, but rather they are summary statements of theories of ethics. The ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ is the ethic of the categorical imperative, the binding principle of Kantian ethics and also of rule utilitarianism; an ‘ethic of responsibility’, on the other hand, is the idea that morally right action can only be judged in terms of its consequences, an approach described in ethical theory as consequentialism or act utilitarianism. Ethical conduct, though, can never simply express an ethical theory because the context of such conduct includes the moral agent’s resources and capacities for action and the structures of opportunities in which they find themselves, facts that are both extra-theoretical and necessary in shaping moral behaviour.

Weber is at pains to show that it is not possible for a hypothetical adherent of either of these ‘maxims’ to be consistent. He discusses stereotypical socialists, Christians, Hindus and so on over six pages in order to show that:

Everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the ‘salvation of the soul’. If, however, one chases after the ultimate good in a war of beliefs, following a pure ethic of absolute ends, then the goals may be damaged and discarded for generations, because responsibility for consequences is lacking, and two diabolic forces which enter the play remain unknown to the actor. (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 126, emphasis in original)

Commentators tend to assume that Weber regards the ethic of responsibility as most suited to the political vocation (Schluchter, 1996: 87–92); certainly, his student audience, Weber (1919 [1970]: 127–128) feels, is motivated by conviction rather than responsibility. But in fact, as we have seen, Weber’s apprehension of ethical principles is more complex and nuanced than his readers frequently assume. And yet, the reduction of political choice to its ethical dimension in the manner Weber presents it, through a definition of politics in terms of its supposed violent means, has the polemical rather than analytical purpose, in this context, of heightening the threshold of the achievement of vocation in politics.

Vocation and Passion

The significance of Weber’s idea of vocation or calling is first clearly developed in The Protestant Ethic to account for the mechanisms required to realize in action the quality of rationality, namely self-control in both overcoming natural impulses and maintaining and realizing constant motives (Weber, 1920 [1991]: 69, 118–119). It is through such self-discipline and application to an external purpose, realized through the acceptance of a calling, that persons experience the psychological process of becoming ‘a personality’ according to Weber (1920 [1991]: 119; see also 131). These same powers of calling, and the resilience of personality founded upon it, are indicated in PV when Weber refers to the ‘steadfastness of heart’ found in those who have a vocation, ‘which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 128). The main difference is that whereas calling or vocation in The Protestant Ethic achieves rationality through emotional suppression (Weber, 1920 [1991]: 123, 136) in PV, as well as in ‘Science as a vocation’, calling is founded on emotion, indeed ‘passion’, rather than opposed to it (Weber, 1917b [1970]: 135, 137; 1919 [1970]: 95, 115). The basis of this transition in Weber, from the suppression of emotion in vocation to its cultivation, cannot be treated here (see Barbalet, 2008: 58–71), but the relevance of passion in vocation for the practice of politics, in Weber’s account, must be understood.

A person who enters politics, Weber (1919 [1970]: 123) says, ‘contracts with diabolical powers’. This is because action that applies force as means to some end renders false the idea that good can come only from good and evil only from evil: indeed, ‘often the opposite is true’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 123). ‘Anyone who fails to see this’, Weber (1919 [1970]: 123) says, is ‘a political infant’. Those who can successfully work with such forces, not only in terms of managing the actual political process but also in terms of their own sense of self within that process, have the political vocation, according to Weber:

it is immensely moving when a . . . man . . . is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand: I can do no other.’ . . . [Here] an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man – man who can have a ‘calling for politics’. (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 127, emphasis in original)

It is the burden of working with moral demons, then, that is the essence of politics. And it is this that thus informs what special qualities are required for the political vocation.

This assessment is at variance with a statement of only four years earlier when Weber (1915 [1970]: 333–334) wrote that ‘the political man’ is without passion, depersonalized in the manner of the economic man. The context here is the ‘very extraordinary quality of brotherliness of war’ (Weber, 1915 [1970]: 336) with which political actors, subject to political rationalization, are contrasted and through which politics is not infused with but rather free ‘of passionate feelings’ (Weber, 1915 [1970]: 335). War produces a counter tendency to politics:

As the consummated threat of violence among modern polities, war creates a pathos and a sentiment of community. War thereby makes for an unconditionally devoted and sacrificial community among the combatants and releases an active mass compassion and love for those who are in need. And as a mass phenomenon, these feelings break down all the naturally given barriers of association. (Weber, 1915 [1970]: 335)

Here violence and politics are characterized in an opposite manner than in PV. In this latter work the prospect of violence is not to generate a sense of community but effectively isolating self-reflection regarding a politician’s sense of personal responsibility. And yet the connection between the earlier text and PV is in the latter’s recognition that most persons involved in politics at any given time do not have a political calling and therefore are without the associated ‘passionate feelings’. Indeed, those without a calling may even be at certain times ‘decisive figures in the cross-currents of the political struggle for power’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 80). We are all of us ‘occasional’ politicians, Weber (1919 [1970]: 83) says, and the majority of parliamentarians, for instance, are ‘nothing better than well-disciplined “yes” men’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 106).

The particular characteristics of the political vocation arise from the definition itself of politics, provided by Weber. Because the ‘decisive means for politics is violence’ there is in political life a necessary ‘tension between means and ends’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 121). Weber sees this as constituting ‘the peculiarity of all ethical problems in politics’ (Weber, 1919 [1970]: 124). But as we have seen this position is arrived at on the basis of an arguably flawed conceptualization of both the state and politics. Its purpose is not to sociologically explicate the nature of politics but to exclude a generational cohort from the moral community of a political vocation particularly conceived. It is possible to see a reflection of Weber’s own self-image in the model of the political vocation he presents. When asked what the arduous work of scholarship meant to him Weber replied ‘I want to see how much I can stand’. His meaning, according to his biographer, was that: ‘he regarded it as his task to endure the antinomies of existence and, further, to exert to the utmost his freedom from illusions and yet to keep his ideals inviolate and preserve his ability to devote himself to them’ (Marianne Weber, 1926 [1975]: 678; emphasis in original).

This personal stance is consistent with Weber’s published accounts of the meaning of vocation, as indicated above. Soon after publishing the first edition of The Protestant Ethic in 1905 he describes ‘personality’ in terms of ‘a constant and intrinsic relation to certain ultimate “values” and “meanings” of life … which are forged into purposes and thereby translated into rational-teleological action’ (Weber, 1906: 192). In a similar vein he writes that the antidote to meaninglessness in life

consists in the insight that 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. (Weber, 1917a [1949]: 18)

Weber’s themes of self-control against external or natural forces in the pursuit of constant motives, which constitute the powers of calling and the resilience of personality on which it is based, define vocation in both his analytic texts and his personal life. It has been observed that a feature of PV is the oscillation ‘between the level of scientific discourse and the level of personal (political or ethical) commitment’ in which ‘methodologically relevant passages . . . are often formulated in personal terms . . . [and thus] bear witness to the unity between Weber’s work and his personality’ (Bruun, 2007: 259–260). His account of the political vocation in this lecture, then, reflects a highly personalized vision of what Weber regards as an appropriate outlook for political commitment, which he and his generation possessed but which his student audience, that included anarchists and socialists, lacked (Liebersohn, 1988: 123–124). This conception of the political vocation fails to address, however, how on the back-bench a ‘yes’ man may after acquiring high office become a statesman; nor does it indicate how the real career of politics unfolds and how its personnel relate to others in the enterprise of leadership achieved by alliance formation and the generation of a following in directing the course of events. Weber’s purpose here is of a different order.

Conclusion

Because it summarizes a good deal of his previous writing, PV has become a major resource for understanding Weber’s political sociology; and it is widely regarded as a paradigmatic statement of the nature of the modern state and modern politics. A realistic description of the rise of the modern bureaucratic state from its 14th- and 15th-century origins is provided by Weber in PV. The work also includes a comparison of the trajectory of political and institutional development in Germany, England and the USA during the 19th century. Weber’s characteristic ideal-types of legitimate domination and especially the form and practice of charismatic leadership are also set out in the work. In this sense PV remains an invaluable presentation of core elements of Weber’s historical sociology of political institutions and practices, and is widely appreciated for being so. Perhaps because of the esteem with which Weber is held PV has been extensively described and its arguments outlined, but it has received relatively little critical evaluation. The present article, instead, has focused on the core elements of Weber’s definition of the state and politics as well as his treatment of the political vocation based on these definitions. If Weber’s account of politics as a vocation is to be taken seriously, then it is necessary that his basic premises and what he draws from them must be carefully examined and not simply repeated as final truths.

The dual concerns of the relationship between the state and physical force, or violence, on the one hand, and the nature of the political vocation and its ethical basis on the other, are not simply enduring concerns of political sociology but at the present time are also of considerable practical interest. The argument here does not deny the possibility of the intrusion of violence into the political arena; but whereas Weber’s treatment of the state and politics sees such instances as an unavoidable aspect of politics it is necessary to show, rather, that physical force disrupts and undermines politics; that Weber’s heroic treatment of the means of politics as violence contradicts his realist understanding of politics as alliance formation and the building of a constituency or following in struggles for leadership. The conflict entailed in political practices in this sense can only be displaced by physical force, which (paradoxically) is a means for the suppression of conflict in realization of a single dominant locus of control. The modern state’s extra-territoriality in particular is a pertinent reminder of the fact that the use of the means of violence is not a means to engage in politics but rather to assert a dominant position that will not tolerate struggle and requires only compliance. The argument of the present article does not deny the relevance of ethical considerations to political practices and commitments. It cautions, though, that the basis of political morality cannot be assumed to derive from a necessity of violence as a political means, nor from a need for a politician to seek to save her own soul. The morality of politics cannot be deduced from ‘ultimate’ values, as with Weber, but must entail a capacity to learn from experience through which a politician may reflectively consider her values and possibly change them.