Introduction: From politics as a vocation to politics as a profession

The ritual celebration of a text after a century is always open to criticism. As Hinnerk Bruhns points out in this Special Issue, these important events become part of a sociological calendar and are built into an academic praxis that from time to time takes one back to these ‘classical texts’ in social and political theory. Yet, in the case of Weber’s brief lecture on ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, as the contemporary translation of Politik als Beruf has it (Weber 1994), the centenary publication after 1919 is not the only reason that makes this text of continuing relevance.

In recent years, the world seems to have gone awry. Neo-liberal restrictive policies for welfare systems, the financial and Euro crisis as well as subsequent austerity policies have resulted in rising economic and social inequality. Growing and uncontrolled migration flows, greater cultural and religious diversity and a crisis of traditional identities fuel feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. The deferral of political decisions, so placing them beyond the reach of democratically elected parliaments at European or other intergovernmental levels, restricts citizens’ participation in political processes and stimulates a widespread impression that democracy has become substantially hollowed out. Citizenship is a much contested category of membership. The beneficiaries of this multi-dimensional crisis, referred to in the public arena under the heading of ‘populism’, are above all the political entrepreneurs, who claim to represent ‘the people’ against the elite. While the ‘left-behind’ suffer the consequences of globalization and austerity, those who live off and not for politics know how to exploit the diffuse uncertainty by trading off fear and resentment. Accordingly, they can make political capital out of allegations against ‘corrupt elites’ and the ‘external enemies’ of the nation. At the same time, there are no obvious or practical solutions for the ongoing crises of global warming, economic development, social injustice, migrant integration and the larger creeping crisis of democracy.

Contemporary uncertainty and doubt about the meaning of politics have intensified in the current crisis and underline the continuing relevance of Weber’s ‘Profession and Vocation of Politics’. Is it still possible to develop a politics that is something other than demagoguery? What can withstand the irrationality of the widespread fears of our epoch? Does liberal parliamentarism have a future? Is a confederal system of states like the European Union possible? The current historical conjuncture – and the questions generated by it – has many characteristics in common with the Weimar crisis of the 1920s. From this viewpoint, it makes sense critically to come back to Weber’s reflections on politics between World War I, the collapse of the German Empire, and the conciliar revolution in Munich, the city where he gave his talk on Politik als Beruf. An assessment of Weber’s insights into the complex political crisis that faced Germany after the War and during the period leading up to the Versailles Treaty of June 1919 is manifestly relevant to the political crises that we face in the early decades of this century.

Between our world and the age in which Weber published ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, there is of course a significant historical distance that has to be taken into account. In order to reach the real core of Weber’s theses, the historical interpretations that have characterized the reception of Weber’s text have to be interrogated and if necessary removed. This issue of interpretation was already related to the political circumstances occasion of the speech. On the invitation of Immanuel Birnbaum, the spokesperson of Munich’s Union of Free Students, Weber gave his lecture on 28 January 1919 in the Munich Kunstsaal Steinicke about the calling of politics, because he did not want to leave the address to students to the revolutionary Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner. In the Minister, Weber saw the ideal type of a politician without a sense of proportion for the consequences of political action, which remained in the focus of his analysis (Birnbaum, 1963: 21). Believing that he would be speaking to a majority of Eisner’s supporters, Weber gave his argument the particular contour that determined its later success. He wanted to present his audience with a critical pathway for moving from politics as a profession to politics as a calling, in order that somebody who felt the call for a political career could develop the necessary traits of character to deal with its challenge.

In the years ahead, a wide audience of politically interested thinkers felt the need critically to return to Weber’s lecture. Thus, its subject matter has had an impact that helped to make the lecture a classic in the debate on the relationship between ethics and politics. On the one hand, Marxist thinkers like Herbert Marcuse (1965) criticized Weber for speaking out against politics as a theory of revolution and for allowing no normative criterion to face the injustice of capitalist society. In his critique, Georg Lukács (1962: 521–537) situated Weber’s conception of politics in the history of the decadence of the German spirit, which in fact, albeit not deliberately, would have allowed the emergence of an irrationalist ideology and thus favoured the seizure of power by National Socialism. Conservative thinkers, on their side, objected to the lecture because they took exception to the fundamental separation of ethics and politics that Weber advocated. Eric Voegelin (1995) opposed the predominance of the sociological method in Weber’s investigation of the political, which in his view did not allow the ‘normative relevance criteria’ of the philosophical tradition to be applied to its discussion. Leo Strauss (1989 [1956]: 13 ff.) complained that Weber’s value neutral approach did not allow for a normative critique of the established values and beliefs of a society, which was in his eyes the major task of political science since antiquity.

In contrast, other authors were inspired by Weber’s lecture as a guide to active politics in times of societal crisis. This applies to Karl Jasper’s portraits of Weber as a researcher and politician. Looking for political orientation in the hour of the failure of Weimar democracy in the early 1930s, Jaspers (1988 [1932]) looked back to Weber and opposed all attempts to play off his lectures on science and politics against each other. Furthermore, Weber’s impact on political thought can be observed by reading the different introductions to the many editions and translations of ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’. Thinkers and politicians from very different perspectives, such as Eduard Baumgarten, Theodor Heuss and Ralf Dahrendorf in Germany, Raymond Aron in France and Delio Cantimori in Italy, engaged in debates with Weber’s view of the political. At the centre of the quest, the issue of Weber’s conception of an ‘ethics for the politician’ remained a constant. In turn, the recurring role of Weber’s speech within public debate stimulated historians like Wolfgang Mommsen (1974 [1959]) to embed the lectures in their historical context and to consider more critically his activity as a political speaker and writer.

It would not be surprising if, in the light of our contemporary debates about politics, Weber’s lecture would once more assume a different meaning than it had in the past. By asking questions about its deeper meaning, one aspect, however, stands out. In his lecture, Weber fiercely opposes the intermingling between the different logics of action existing in a qualitative differentiated society, like politics, economics, science and ethics. He insists that politics has an own logic. Therefore, who wants to act politically has to be aware of its specificity and demands. Weber’s opposition against the colonization of politics through the logic of other societal domains thus applies also to the current claims of the neoliberal ideology that reduces politics to the market logic of economics. Weber’s lecture transports a specific conception of modernity that focuses on the crucial meaning of politics for the function of complex societies. Here, a pluralisation of the action logic takes place as well as a qualitative differentiation of societal domains. Accordingly, for Weber, the transition from the vocation to the profession of politics takes the shape of a long-lasting process of adaptation to the structural conditions of political practice in complex societies. Since 9/11 and even more so after the financial and economic crises of 2008–2011, the classical historical processes characterizing modernity returned to the fore. Capitalism, economic crisis, downward social mobility, decline of democracy, populism and authoritarianism, war and forced migration once more shape social reality. Here, Weber’s analysis of the necessity, the function and the role of politics as a force that promotes a balance within societal conflicts and empowers the needs of society as a whole against the greed of particular interests is of the highest relevance.

In his memoirs, Birnbaum stated that Weber’s treatise on politics must be considered as the most important text for every politician and political scientist. Yet, in all probability, it cannot be considered to be Weber’s most important contribution to political analysis. This conclusion is at least a thread that connects the contributions for the present issue of the journal. ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ constitutes rather a prism that permits us insights into the deeper layers of Weber’s analytical laboratory on the issue of politics. Beneath its most evident line of argumentation, Weber’s treatise thus conceals further lines of reflection that are respectively made to the subject of our assessment here. A crucial question is the consistency of Weber’s analysis from the viewpoint of political science. To answer it, Kari Palonen develops an all-around assessment of the four dimensions of politicization, polity, politicking and policy that constitute the political domain and shows that Weber evaluates all of them without adopting a reductionistic approach. Making reference to the classical debate on Machiavelli’s political thought, Bryan Turner shows how Weber’s reflections on politics concentrates on the relationship between virtue and destiny. In these terms, the pessimistic note that is classically imputed to Politik als Beruf can be understood as an outcome of its assessment of the anticipated and unanticipated consequences of political action. Furthermore, Weber’s treatise is seen as a synthetic presentation of his political thought that bridges to other aspects and parts of his work. In this context, Bruhns underlines the importance of Weber’s analysis of parliamentary democracy in Suffrage and Democracy in Germany as well as in Parliament and Government in Germany under a New Political Order for the formulation of his lecture on politics. What emerges is a mature conception of the balance between parliamentarism and mass democracy for the good functioning of modern politics. Sam Whimster goes further by insisting on the importance of Weber’s approach to federalism in Parliament and Government in Germany. This constitutes a further inspiration for Politik als Beruf and grounds its relevance for the understanding of the European Union and its crisis. In a critical approach to Mommsen’s classical thesis, stating the dependence of Weber’s sociology from his political position, Gregor Fitzi reconstructs the foundation of Weber’s lecture on his sociological analyses of the political domain in the manuscript for the posthumous Economy and Society. From different points of view, these contributions thus underline Weber’s championing of parliamentarism despite the traditional allegations regarding his ‘political Caesarism’. In a similar way, all contributions of the journal bring other classical keys to ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’ under critical assessment. Its author eventually emerges as a sociologically well-informed political thinker, who argues in favour of parliamentarism, but recognizes the inevitability of a Caesarist moment in modern mass politics. His concern is then how to realize a practical balance between both possibilities. Weber thus appears as a thinker of politics, who existentially sways between a strong will for consistent political action and a consciousness of the uncontrollable effects of its unintended consequences. He delivers a sound analysis of the political domain that cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional idea of politics and proposes actual analytical keys for the assessment of the current crisis of democracy as well as for the shortcomings of the federalism that characterizes the European Union. By way of conclusion, it is more the political and less the ethical Weber that speaks in the assessments of Politik als Beruf in this issue.