Weber’s tragic legacy

Epistemological

Weber’s epistemology begins with the Kantian manifold of an “infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistently emerging and disappearing events” that in-themselves are neither lawful nor rational. According to Weber, we categorize and select a “finite part” of that reality is “worth knowing about” (Weber, 2012: 114). Only what we think of as “value-relevant” is likely to receive our attention. “[E]ven purely empirical scientific research is guided by cultural interests—that is to say: value interests” (Weber, 2012: 317). Only because of values do specific facts become intelligible. Social science is an immensely creative practice. The “ideal-types” central to this neo-Kantian vision of social science are “utopian” mental constructs formed by imaginative “one-sided accentuation” that in their “conceptual purity.” They “cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality” (Weber, 2012: 125). They are theoretical abstractions created as analytical tools to “grasp the elements of reality which are significant in a given case” selected out from the “infinite abundance of reality” (Weber, 2012: 34). Weber is, nevertheless, adamant that while facts become intelligible through the prism of value, empirical social science can offer no prescriptions. “An empirical science,” must be robust in its methods, Weber (2012) writes, “cannot tell someone what he ought to do” (p. 103). It is “indisputable” that science does not answer the question “What shall we do and how shall we live?” (Weber, 2012: 344).

Sociological

The separation of truth and morality is a key facet of rationalization as Weber understands it. In modernity, social institutions—notably, the state and market—separate from cultural “value-spheres” such as science, morality, and art. Marx’s notion of the alienation of the laborer from ownership of the means of production is “merely one special case” of this process, accompanied by many others such as the alienation of the state bureaucrat from ownership of the means of coercion. “Restricted” by social differentiation to “specialized work,” moderns must confront the “abandonment of the Faustian universality of humankind” (Weber, 2012: 120). The differentiation of cultural value spheres undermines the possibility of ethical unification. “Nietzsche has reminded us,” Weber (2012) writes, that “not only can something be beautiful although it is not good—it can also be beautiful because of what is not good about it” (p. 347).

Weber famously looks to Protestantism, among other phenomena, to elucidate the differentiation of economic institutions from cultural value systems. The terrible incongruity between human merit and worldly destiny always cries out for a “rational theodicy of misfortune” (Weber, 1946: 275). The heavily Augustinian Calvinist doctrines of divine omnipotence and predestination constitute one of a limited number of “rationally satisfactory” answers to the theodicy problem. Born of efforts to systematize the relations between sinful mankind, omnipotent god, and the world, the belief in predestination led Calvinists, desperate to demonstrate their grace, to highly rationalized and ascetic worldly conduct. The religiously inspired Protestant work ethic was unwittingly hypostasized into an impersonal, amoral “steel-hard cage” (Stallhartes Gehäuse) of capitalist competition. Although its original foundation was cultural, the logic of economic necessity became dominant in social institutions independent of the sphere of cultural value (Weber 2000). Once established, the autonomous imperatives of market competition compelled the rationalization of the worldly activities of all who came under its sway, regardless of their spiritual value systems. Completing the dialectical interplay of the ideal and material, this economic rationality disenchanted spiritual life and undermined cultural meaning.

Political

The “fate of a cultural epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge” is to recognize that events in the world have meaning only insofar as we ascribe it and that there is no one comprehensive and rational value system (Weber, 2012: 104). Experience in our disenchanted age leads, paradoxically, to “polytheism” as the “numerous gods of former times, who have lost their magic and have therefore assumed the aspect of impersonal powers, rise up out of their graves” (Weber, 2012: 348). We must “acknowledge” that these “gods are forever warring with each other,” that “the ultimate possible standpoints towards life are irreconcilable” (Weber, 2012: 350). Anyone in this world, says Weber, “can only feel himself subject to the struggle between multiple sets of values, each of which, viewed separately, seems to impose an obligation on him” (Weber, 1994: 79).

This view of endemic value conflict colored Weber’s view of international and domestic politics. The state, thought Weber, was the vehicle of inevitable conflict, although came to believe that empires would replace states as the leading political units. He understood that tragedy is an even more common phenomenon in international relations because competition for standing among states, and especially among the major powers, introduces an irrational element into international relations that exacerbates tensions, military preparations, and conflict. Self-assertion is appropriate to great powers, and for this reason, he supported German imperialism. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Weber (1994) justified Germany’s entry into the war with the observation that “A nation will forgive damage to its interests, but not injury to its honour, and certainly not when this is done in a spirit of priggish self-righteousness.”

Weber was troubled—even disgusted—by the kinds of people who enter politics. They do not possess the kind of holistic understanding, judgment, and commitment to respond to the objective needs of the state. This tension arises because Weber is drawn to Hegel’s conception and commitment to reference to the nation’s so-called objective cultural tasks (Kulturaufgaben; Hegel, 1999: 6–101). Political leaders across the spectrum in Germany and elsewhere, Weber repeatedly complains, are focused instead on the parochial goals of their factions.

Weber hoped plebiscitary democracy would allow a leader to govern more or less unconstrained by the hurly burly of politics and focus on national tasks. Weber’s typology of authority might be regarded as his theoretical response to the leadership problem. Elected charismatic leaders could appeal to the people over the head of legislatures and overcome some of the political restraints of pluralistic democracy. Spiritual renewal is deeply imperiled in this disenchanted world but still remains possible. Charisma, admittedly extraordinary and evanescent, has the potential to overcome, at least in part, the stultifying bureaucratization that rationality imposes on society. A plebiscitarian political system might allow elected charismatic leaders to stave off the creep of bureaucratic metastasis. Even here, the seemingly stark opposition of irrational charisma and institutional rationality is desperately tangled, as preserving a residue of charisma requires its transformation into its rationalized and institutionalized antithesis.

Tragic

According to Weber, the breakdown of cosmic order leads not just to renewed value pluralism but to reckoning with an “ethically irrational” world. Disenchantment shatters religious systems that attempt to rationalize the seemingly senseless discrepancy between moral personality and worldly compromises. It is simply false that “good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, as the opposite is often true.” Not just “the entire course of world history,” but “any unbiased examination of daily experience proclaims the opposite” (Weber, 2012: 362).

Nowhere is this more evident than in politics, in which the “profound opposition” between the ethics of “conviction” and “responsibility” is sharpest (Weber, 2012: 359). The former requires people to act in accord with their principles regardless of the outcome. Weber describes this ethic as an unaffordable luxury. “No ethics in the world,” he reasons, “can get round the fact that the achievement of ‘good’ ends is in many cases tied to the necessity of employing morally dangerous means, and that one must reckon with the possibility or even likelihood of evil side-effects” (Weber, 2012). The ethic of responsibility, by contrast, recognizes that people who get involved with politics—that is with the “means of power and violence”—are “making a pact with diabolical powers” (Weber, 2012). It directs attention to the consequences of one’s behavior, is more appropriate to politics, and international relations especially. No political actor can avoid the “tragedy in which all action, but quite particularly political action, is in truth enmeshed” (Weber, 2012: 354–355). Anybody who fails to recognize this truth “is indeed a child in political matters” (Weber, 2012). Weber’s ethic of responsibility remains obscure because action so often has unforeseen consequences, especially when violence is used in volatile domestic or foreign conflicts among adversaries with competing values (Satkunanandan, 2014). Morally justifiable policies can produce horrible outcomes and so too can policies crafted to produce good ones. He does not identify the conditions that should govern the choices between them on the grounds that they are situation specific.

After distinguishing these ethics from each other, Weber (2012) concludes that they “are complementary and only in combination do they produce the true human being who is capable of having a ‘vocation for politics’” (pp. 354–355). A wise leader must “be conscious of these ethical paradoxes and of his responsibility for what may become of himself under pressure from them” (Weber, 2012). They must not only think with their head but also listen with their heart. Politics, Weber says, requires the “mature man” who is “certain that he will be able to say ‘Nevertheless’ in spite of everything.” He has a “‘vocation’ for politics” (Weber, 2012: 379). It is “immensely moving” when, aware of his responsibilities and convictions, this man can say with Luther, “Here I stand, I can do no other” (Weber, 2012: 367).

Weber attempted to live up to his vocational ideals and confront head-on their paradoxes. He fell far short of his goals, as all of us must, given the difficulty of denaturalizing our most fundamental values and commitments (Lebow, 2017: ch. 3). Asked about the exhausting and painful discipline he imposed on himself as a scholar, he replied, “I want to see how much I can stand.” Recalling this acknowledgment, his wife Marianne speculated that he personally “regarded it as his task to endure the antinomies of existence” (Weber, 1998: 678).

Epistemological

Like Weber, Schmitt embraced the creativity of scholarship and the constitutive place of ideas in imposing order on the world and rendering it intelligible. He understood the task of the jurist as “the development of concrete concepts out of the immanence of a concrete legal and social order” (Mueller, 1999). The Weberian scientist’s will to know finds its counterpart in Schmitt’s “will to form” (Mueller, 1999). Weber recognized and struggled with what he regarded as the tension between value commitments and knowledge. Schmitt rejects that goal of knowledge as an end in its own right; it should serve the political. He resolves Weber’s epistemological tension by framing concepts as weapons to be mobilized in specific political conflicts.

Sociological

Schmitt articulated his “sociology of concepts” with polemical intent. His idiosyncratic historical idealism identifies a profound correspondence between an epoch’s “basic, radically systematic” metaphysical “structure” and its “conceptually represented social structure” (Schmitt, 2005: 45). The sociology of concepts is the most fundamental sort of intellectual history because concepts represent “the most intensive and the clearest expression of an epoch” (Schmitt, 2005: 46). In turn, the most important piece of a conceptual architecture lies at its most radical point. Schmitt focused on “borderline concepts” like sovereignty and “the enemy” that pertain to the “outermost sphere” (Schmitt, 2005: 5). The “exception” is “more important” and “more interesting” than the “rule.” Ordinary legal norms, he insisted, are less fundamental than their extraordinary suspension. The rule, he insists, “proves nothing; the exception proves everything” (Schmitt, 2005: 15).

The centerpiece of this sociology of concepts is Schmitt’s famous precept that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” because “they were transferred from the theology to the theory of the state” and retain the same “systematic structure” (Schmitt, 2005: 36). The dependence of the natural order’s existence on the will of an omnipotent god is transferred to that of the state on the sovereign. Neither god nor sovereigns are bound by laws of their creation; both can suspend them at will. The sovereign is “he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt, 2005: 5). Weber’s interpretation of the Protestant ethic at the juncture between medieval theology and modern society had been entirely dialectical. Schmitt, by contrast, depicts a linear transference from the theological to the political. Weber’s interpretation of the theological aspects of politics had been limited to an empirical analysis of extraordinary charisma and plebiscitary institutions. If Weber sought to supplement and balance parliamentary democracy with charismatic leaders, Schmitt sought to replace it with authoritarianism. He believed that it was the only form of government that could overcome the tensions of modernity by virtue of its ability to actualize the serious commitment of genuine politics and engage in decisive action (Scheuerman, 1999a: 185). Schmitt’s political theology radicalizes something akin to charisma into a metaphysics of the exceptional “miracle”—a flash that reveals sovereign transcendence in the otherwise humdrum immanent world.

Schmitt rejects Weber’s depiction of modern law is increasingly coherent allowing experts to administer it in something approaching an objective manner (Scheuerman, 1999b: 13–38, 67–96). Schmitt’s political theology is anti-modern in a way that Weber’s is not. The “greatest and most egregious misunderstandings,” Schmitt (2007) insists, “can be explained by the erroneous transfer of a concept at home in one domain” to “other domains of intellectual life” (p. 85). “Every truth is only true once” because it is only valid in its original, autochthonous domain (Mueller, 1999). The “rationalism of the Enlightenment” is illegitimate because it “rejected the exception in every form” (Schmitt, 2005: 37). It is also hypocritical because behind pretensions to rationality and universality lie concrete decisions. Because concepts are essentially polemical, liberal universalism’s self-identification with neutrality and the supersession of political conflict makes it an incoherent ideology. Even a “decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision” (Schmitt, 2005: 2). Liberalism is the most contradictory of conceptual systems because it defines itself as not political, something no conceptual system can be. The firmest assertion of being unpolitical is necessarily the most rabidly political.

Political

For Schmitt, modernity’s unrequited search for a neutral central domain has unfolded as a series of successive stages, theological, metaphysical, humanitarian-moral, and economic, each a failed attempt to transcend political conflict. Because each attempt has been a more dramatic attempt to escape from the inescapable, there has been a dialectical heightening of contradiction, as ever more radical political extremes lurk beneath the increasingly depoliticized surface. In Schmitt’s age of “technology,” the superlative neutralization of the political is tightly enmeshed with its most extreme antithesis, the total politicization of all life. Schmitt (2005) defines the political, what he calls the “decisive human grouping,” as the distinction between friend and enemy (p. 38). Since nothing can be more serious and less neutral than the specter of violent conflict with the enemy, politics the central domain of life.

The enemy is a myth. This myth is the “borderline” case of the irrational polemical concept. Like a concept, the “creation of a political or historical myth,” Schmitt writes, “arises from political activity” (Mueller, 1999). The myth offers a “great moral decision” that unifies a group and galvanizes collective action. Because myths, like concepts, are inherently polemic, the most extreme myth—the myth that best establishes political unity and action—is a negative one that singles out a concretely, existentially threatening enemy “other.”

Linking political theology to this concept of the political, Schmitt (2005) avers that by “virtue of its possession of a monopoly on politics, the state is the only entity able to distinguish friend from enemy and thereby demand of its citizens the readiness to die” (p. 1). The myth of the enemy entails a critical gloss on the Hobbesian theory of the state. Recrudescent myth in an age of technological neutralization represents a return to the state of nature. Hobbes’ Behemoth, the title of his account of the English civil wars, is, Schmitt (2007) claims, his mythic name for the fearful state of nature (p. 21). Against the state of nature, Hobbes counter-poses another myth, that of the Leviathan. Trading peace for obedience, the Leviathan brings man out of the state of nature, where everyone is everyone else’s enemy. But Schmitt maintains, the possibility of violence neither can nor should end under sovereign authority. The terrifying natural state of violence is latent even in peace and endures in the sovereign prerogative to name the enemy. The lingering fear of the existential foe perpetuates the mythic irrationalism dominant in the state of nature.

The sovereign Leviathan was supposed to unite the political and theological for the sake of peace. But the “Jewish” myth of the Leviathan, dispensed by way of Hobbes’ Protestant sensibility, permitted the private freedom of religious conscience. In this tiny foothold, Schmitt argues, liberalism set down roots and ultimately found the leverage to tear apart the political and theological. By reasserting the enduring sovereign authority to name an enemy, Schmitt hopes to expose Hobbes, whom he describes as the secret founder of liberal pacifism. Critical of the Protestant privatization of faith, Schmitt embraced the Catholic Church as a template for an alternative political form that would maintain the public and political dimension of religion (Schmitt, 1996).

Schmitt (2006) addresses international relations more extensively than Weber, especially in his important 1950 book, Nomos of the Earth. There Schmitt argues that under the traditional Jus Publicum Europaeum, the European balance of power was no anarchic state of nature but a political order grounded on the Christian homogeneity of Europe. War was “bracketed” by common cultural and moral norms. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the European Völkerrecht unraveled, replaced by a “spaceless universalism” and the empty legal normativism of the League of Nations.

For Schmitt, liberalism similarly fails at the international level. Its proponents contend that political conflicts can be resolved by legal institutions. For them, law can be a neutral instrument administered by experts—judges who render decisions by applying transparent legal norms. But the insurmountable and intensely political question of “who decides” remains (Schmitt, 2006: 13). These legal fictions in practice intensify conflicts and, when they recognized for what they are, transform them into crusades in which liberals resort to the most extreme forms of violence, all justified with reference to international law. An “absolute last war of humanity,” a “war against war,” says Schmitt (2006), would be “unusually intense and inhuman” (p. 36). Bracketed warfare is supplanted not by perpetual peace but by total war between enemies.

Schmitt arguably builds on Weber’s belief in empires as increasingly the dominant units of international relations. He describes the Grossraum—a large territorial space in which the state exercises effective, but not necessarily de jure, authority. It is a kind of informal empire. His prime example is the authority the United States exercises over most of Latin America. He envisages a world dominated by a limited number of Grossraüme. Germany too small to be a Grossraum, and during the Nazi era, he hoped that it would achieve it by military and economic means. Schmitt departs sharply from Weber in his concept of law and how authority is exercised in Grossraüme; he reduces law to a mechanism of domination.

Tragic

Schmitt agrees with Weber that rationalization and the onset of modernity imperil moral personality, that the specter of violence is the essence of politics, and that man’s highest possibilities are found in struggle. Schmitt’s pseudo-Catholic public mythology is, nevertheless, a decisive break with Weber’s pseudo-Protestant private ethic of conviction. Private conscience can have no enemy; individualistic Weberian conviction would negate Schmittian political unity and the total commitment it demands. Weber had discovered a polytheism that beset moral commitment with tragic irreconcilability and counseled careful responsibility. His “Here I stand, I can do no other” was recognition of a contradictory and tragic world. Schmitt explicitly worried that the polytheistic proliferation of myths that would lead to a pluralism that undermined the sharp antagonism toward the enemy necessary for action (Mueller, 1999). In place of the tragic tensions of a complicated world that counseled reasoned restraint, he substituted the simplifying absolute opposition of warfare to make irrational action unlimited and dissolve consequentialist considerations of responsibility. Nor would Weber equate liberalism with the “neutralization” of genuine politics. Liberalism could afford a space for genuine political struggle.

With his apotheosis of the extreme, Schmitt rejects ex ante the Weberian pathos of tension, asserting rather that any conceptual opposition is tantamount to an outright contradiction. One of Schmitt’s earliest and best critics, Karl Löwith, argued that the opposition between rational stultification and action spurred by irrational myth leads Schmitt into a self-referential incongruity. His instrumental view of concepts as concrete weapons situated in existential conflict abrades against his essentializing conceptual definitions and assertion that concepts can be “true” but only in their distinctive metaphysical epoch. Schmitt’s critique of substantive metaphysics, Löwith (1995) maintains, commits him to the hollow “decision in favor of decisiveness” (pp. 37–69). Despite his insistence on the specter of the state of nature, there is no “natural” distinction between friend and enemy, but rather it emerges “accidentally or occasionally” (Schmitt, 2007: 147). Schmitt’s (2007) concept of the political reveals a “radical indifference” to “any kind of political content” (p. 150). This arbitrariness is at loggerheads with his proclaimed method. The political is “determined” by “clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and real enemy” (Schmitt, 2007: 37). Yet, his essentializing agenda of creating myths of the enemy as a means of motivating political action depends on these myths being taken seriously. Schmitt’s ideology critique of concepts, argues Löwith, undermines his ideological construction of myths to mobilize political action.

Epistemological

Horkheimer’s seminal 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1975) offers a methodological critique of Weber. He, too, starts from Kant, claiming that the manifold is not in a “pre-established harmony” with the understanding and that “reality is sunk in obscurity.” Kantian epistemology fails to distinguish between natural and social worlds. The “world which is given to the individual,” says Horkheimer (1975), is “a product of the activity of society” and not just of nature. Once understood as an artifact of social activity, the Kantian “two-sidedness” of “supreme unity and purposefulness” and of “obscurity” and “impenetrability,” he contends, “reflects exactly the contradiction-filled form of human activity in the modern period.” Reality’s obscurity is not due to a rift between man and nature but arises because men’s “work and its results are alienated from them.” The social world thus “seems to be an unchangeable force of nature, a fate beyond man’s control” (Horkheimer, 1975).

Horkheimer (1975) argues that the “alienation” described above manifests itself in the Weberian “separation of value and research,” as the scientist “regards social reality and its products as extrinsic to him.” But because the “facts which the individual and his theory encounter are socially produced,” that which is intelligible to the social scientist is determined—if unintentionally—by worldly activity (Horkheimer, 1975). Value relevance is the precondition for the intelligibility of scientific knowledge and is dictated by social organization. In “traditional” theory, which he associates with Weber, Horkheimer claims, “the genesis of particular objective facts” is “taken to be external to theoretical thinking itself.” Moving closer to Schmitt, he argues that the “truth” of facts cannot be decided by “supposedly neutral reflection” but only in “personal thought and action” (Horkheimer, 1975). Attempting to avoid values yields not neutrality but systematic apologies. “[I]f we think of the object of the theory in separation from the theory,” Horkheimer (1975) insists, “we falsify it and fall into quietism or conformism.”

Critical theory, Horkheimer (1975) asserts, endeavors to “transcend the tension” between theory and reality and to “abolish the opposition” between human rationality and the “work-process relationships on which society is built.” Theory cannot and should not maintain the Olympian objectivity that Weber is alleged to have set as the scientist’s vocational ideal. Rather, it must adopt a method that reflexively recognizes its own social “situatedness.” Critical theory emerges as “a protest generated by the order itself” and is committed to changing that order (Horkheimer, 1975). It is “an element in action leading to new social forms” (Horkheimer, 1975). For the critical theorist, “willing and thinking, thought and action” can and must be fused (Horkheimer, 1975).

Sociological

Horkheimer’s essay is an important stepping-stone in the development of the Frankfurt School; with it, the traditional critique of political economy develops into a broader and more abstract critique of “instrumental reason” (Benhabib, 1986). This move reached fruition in Dialectic of Enlightenment, initially published in 1944. Here, Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) radically rescale the Weberian dialectic and trace the genesis of the crisis of reason “incomparably further back” than the late medieval emergence of bourgeois thought and all the way to the beginnings of Western civilization (p. 36). The West begins with fear of the incomprehensible natural powers. The “cry of terror called forth from the unfamiliar becomes its name” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 10). These myths projected anthropomorphic characteristics upon the inscrutable and terrifying forces that determined the fate of human beings. Absent the conceptual distinction between humanity and nature, magical thinking was mimetic; mankind sought to influence the gods and demons by imitating them through effigies or rituals.

Supplanting myth and making humanity the master, not the victim, of nature were long a goal of rationalists. In Homer’s Odyssey, especially the encounter with the Sirens, we discern the primordial rudiments of the dialectic of enlightenment. The Sirens promise knowledge of all that has happened—a metaphor for the dissolution of the self into the unchanging past. To resist their appeal and preserve his individuality and future, Odysseus must do violence to himself by being bound to the ship’s mast and must plug the ears of his crew to ensure their unreflective obedience. By cunningly introverting sacrificial violence, Odysseus extricates the self from nature and its temptations. He makes himself an isolated exception to mythic fate by finding a “loophole.” The saga as a whole can be read as the struggle of its eponymous hero to extricate himself from mythic powers to return home and resume sovereign kingship (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 45).

Enlightenment aims at liberating human beings from fear, dispelling myth with knowledge, disenchanting the world, and installing human beings as sovereign masters over nature. Man knows things to the extent that he can classify and manipulate them. For “totalitarian” enlightenment, exemplified in the language of mathematics, nothing can be allowed to remain outside the system of knowledge; every unknown must be classified and integrated into a new equation and thereby made into something “long familiar.” Animism is then extirpated, and the multiplicity of gods is reduced to the unifying common denominator of universally fungible matter. The “ambiguous profusion” of mythic figures is replaced by a single dichotomy between mankind and the world, between the knowing subject and known object. As with the Schmittian opposition of friend and foe, there is a reduction to a single quintessential binary (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002).

The ever-greater subjugation of the object and abstraction of the subject paves the way for the reversion of enlightenment into myth. The more fully the “machinery of thought subjugates existence, the more blindly it is satisfied with reproducing it” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 20). Inevitable fate—the “eternity of the actual”—is as integral to the “arid wisdom” of mathematical laws, technologies of control, and the unchanging repetitions of worldly organization as it had been to primal myth (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 8, 20). Self-preservation—the purpose of enlightened mastery of the world—is automated, uncoupled from the subject who conjured it. Instruments become autonomous from their creators. Once again, man is brought under the domination of immutable worldly powers.

Political

While Weber coupled his account of the iron cage of social rationalization with the revival of the polytheism of irreconcilable value commitments, the mythology of Adorno and Horkheimer retains only the idea of myth as the accession of the eternal recurrence of irresistible fate. Arguing that modernity imperiled moral personality, Weber stopped short of asserting that it necessarily extinguished it. For Weber, the return of myth was not the final, stifling outcome of a dialectical Enlightenment, but a description of the values that might still enchant in a disenchanted age. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the fatefulness born of world domination turns completely against the impermissibly incongruous and now superfluous subject—closing, so to speak, the loophole.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the abolished subject is replaced by the automatic mechanisms of the modern social order. Human beings are forced into conformity, difference is liquidated, and individuality is subsumed into the “herd”—an entire society of Odysseus’ oarsmen. In “factory and office,” reified and supremely passive human beings must conform in order to survive. While once “[a]nimism had endowed things with souls,” now “industrialism makes souls into things” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 21). Human beings are dissolved back into the “mere nature” from which they had first fled. The “oldest fear” of “losing one’s own name” is fulfilled (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 24). Yet there is no cry of protest because popular culture itself is subjugated by totalitarian reason. Liberalism was supposed to protect the individual, but as capitalism became mass production, the individual was swept up into the mass of stultified consumers. The culture industry provides empty products for easy consumption. Culture reduces to propaganda, and plays its role in pacifying mass society. Their critical theory, then, is in essential agreement with Schmitt’s claim that the pinnacle of enlightened civilization is a cliff over which we fall back into the violent and terrifying state of nature. Their dialectical account further echoes Schmitt in foregrounding the deeply dangerous powers of myth and their perverse capacity to undo their creators. Rationalizing civilization, they conclude, is inextricable from increasingly profound irrational barbarism (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 28).

Tragic

For Adorno and Horkheimer, Fascist politics are the outgrowth of the dialectic of enlightenment. The “moment of mendacity” of the original myths, perpetuated by enlightenment ultimately exposed as pure dominion, triumphs in the “fraudulent myth of fascism” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 37). Racial particularism breaks with civilization and is a “regression to nature as mere violence” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 138). Fascism deploys “oppressed nature’s rebellion” against mankind’s dominion in the service of domination (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 152). Fascist myths and rituals attempt to dedifferentiate subject and world, but by contrast to primeval mimesis in which the subject made itself resemble its surroundings, the “false projection” of the fascist subject demands that its surroundings resemble itself (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 154). In its concomitant “rage against difference,” anything left in the world that stands for difference becomes an enemy that must be liquidated (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 172). Yet in this radically pathological version of the Kantian synthesis of concepts and intuitions, there is nothing substantive left of the “exhausted” self, which has “give[n] up the ghost” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 156). Conscience is liquidated, leaving only a drive for self-preservation, expressed as a blind hostility and lust for dominion turned against humanity. For the paranoid subject, the outside world is a palimpsest for its delusions, which are projected outward to create a unified illusion “petrified as reality” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 170). Dialectic of Enlightenment constitutes no less of a “rejection of Weber’s ambivalent and resigned commitment to modernity” (Benhabib, 1981).

Subsequent generations of Frankfurt school critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib understand that the totalizing rescaling of Weber’s dialectic lead Adorno and Horkheimer into insuperable aporias. Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical theory turns enlightenment as a tool of demystification against enlightenment itself (Habermas, 1987: 1180). But if dominion is inherent in and the fulfillment of reason, then critical theory, itself a species of enlightenment, unavoidably “perpetrates the very structure of domination it condemns” (Benhabib, 1981; Habermas, 1987: 119).

This critique has important sociological ramifications. For Weber, the loss of social freedom imposed by the institutions of rationalized bureaucratic capitalism was causally connected to the erosion of cultural meaning, but it was analytically distinct. It was due to this distinction between social institutions and cultural value that there was any ambivalent space for moral personality to resist the iron cage. By contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer portray culture as nothing but an industry serving as the ideological handmaiden of social organization. Their indictment precludes any recognition of the “achievements of Occidental rationalism” and denies the possibility of anything emancipatory in the “rational content of cultural modernity” (Habermas, 1987: 121). If rationalization has totally absorbed cultural meaning into social production, then “one-dimensional man” has no crisis or conflict tendencies on which to draw in pursuit of change. There are no resources of cultural meaning left on the basis of which to critique the social loss of freedom. Critical theory, Benhabib (1986) argues, accordingly loses touch with any historically situated agents of immanent change oriented toward some sort of social emancipation. By rejecting the “continuum of history” in toto, no constructive vision of an emancipated society can be connected with historically situated needs and aspirations.

Epistemological

Morgenthau followed Weber in finding a profound relationship but equally pronounced tension between theoretical knowledge and practical policymaking. Like Weber, he conceived of the social world as “a chaos of contingencies” but “not devoid of a measure of rationality” (Morgenthau, 1966a). He recognized that theory inevitably reflects our normative commitments and the problems we identity as important. Morgenthau (1966a) puzzled over Weber’s distinction between “fact” and “value,” which he believed English language translations to misrepresent:

I think that this is one of the curses that which a misunderstood Max Weber has inflicted on us. The distinction between facts and values in the social sciences is, I think, extremely tenuous. Every fact in the social sciences that has any relevance is permeated with value; otherwise we would not have chosen it. The very perception of something as a relevant social fact presupposes a value-determined choice among a multitude of facts from which one chooses certain facts which are, for some reason, interesting to one, that is to say, which have a positive or negative value, as the case may be. The problem with which Max Weber dealt was not this problem of values of facts objectively considered, but rather the attitudes which the individual scholar takes toward society in either dealing with it in an explanatory fashion or dealing with in a value-oriented fashion. But I think that even this distinction is very difficult to maintain, so I really do not accept the distinction.

In contrast to Schmitt’s epistemology of ideas as weapons and Adorno and Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical theory, Morgenthau sought to keep alive Weber’s tension between “fact” and “value.” Morgenthau argued that there are nearly endless ways of organizing and describing reality, and the principal step in research is to impose limits on their world. The labeling of something as a “fact” is accordingly a value choice that reflects a researcher’s commitments and interests (Morgenthau, 1946: 108–133). For Morgenthau, the questions we ask and the methods we use to find answers cannot be divorced from our politics. For this reason, scholarly and political questions have important ethical dimensions. Classical realism is not only a framework for studying international relations, but it is a way of doing ethics. The subjective decision to undertake a research program must be based on a commitment to a kind of science that can inform practice. Morgenthau (1946) insists that

All lasting contributions to political science, from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to the Federalist, Marx and Calhoun, have been responses to such challenges arising from political reality. They have not been self-sufficient theoretical developments pursuing theoretical concerns for their own sake. (p. 135)

Great political thinkers confronted with problems that could not be solved with the tools on hand; the role of the theorist is accordingly to develop new ways of thinking that use past experience to illuminate the present (Guzzini, 2013: 124).

For Weber, the danger faced by science is that it will give in to the unscientific temptations, become politically prescriptive, and lose the value neutrality that defines it. For Morgenthau, theory aims at objectivity, not in the Weberian sense of autonomy from value commitments but from the influence of power. Scientists of all kinds must maintain their ethical and political autonomy; once they lose it, the critical edge of their enterprise is blunted. However, social science is a reflection of the power structure, and, not surprisingly, its findings most often justify that structure and buttress its legitimacy. “Truth itself becomes relative to social interests and emotions.” The real danger in Morgenthau’s (1966b) view is that the quest for relevance would transform scientists into dogmatic lapdogs of the establishment.

Ostensible value neutrality is worse, in his view, than outright pandering to power. He condemns American social science for moving in this direction. Economics in particular had reframed social issues as problems of efficiency and tried, by doing so, to depoliticize them, but it only made them more political by smuggling values in through the back door (Morgenthau, 1946: 137–138). Scientism of this kind removes all the critical questions from the intellectual agenda and has lead to “a general decay in the political thinking of the Western world” (Morgenthau, 1946: 6).

Sociological

Morgenthau was a critic of the Enlightenment for many of the same reasons as Weber. He criticizes the Enlightenment’s misplaced faith in reason as the underlying cause of the twentieth century’s horrors. Reason had undermined religion and the values and norms that had previously restrained and channeled individual and collective behavior. It enabled advances in technology and social organization responsible for the modern industrial state, which was the most effective means of exercising power. That state became the most exalted object of loyalty but itself stood beyond value:

While the state is ideologically and physically incomparably more powerful than its citizens, it is free from all effective restraint from above. The state’s collective desire for power is limited, aside from self-chosen limitations, only by the ruins of an old, and the rudiments of a new, normative order, both too feeble to offer more than a mere intimation of actual restraint. (Morgenthau, 1946: 168)

The Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason, Morgenthau insists, is at odds with human nature because it totally ignores spiritual aspirations and needs. By brushing them aside, it guarantees that people will seek to fulfill them by returning to old myths or new ones that promise to restore their human worth. This accounted for much of the appeal to Fascism (Morgenthau, 1946: 10–15).

Morgenthau maintains that the power of the state feeds on itself through a process of psychological transference. Impulses constrained by ethics and law are mobilized by the state for its own ends. By transferring their egotism to the nation, people gain vicarious release for otherwise repressed impulses. What was formerly egotism, and ignoble and immoral, now became patriotism and therefore noble and altruistic. The Bolsheviks and Nazis took this process a step further and encouraged direct violence by citizens against communities and classes they labeled enemies of the state (Morgenthau, 1946: 169). Weber regarded the state as a positive power, loyalty to which could overcome divisive value pluralism. Morgenthau depicts at least some states as villains.

Political

Morgenthau thought about the limitations of political science. As an autonomous sphere of struggle, the extent to which the political could be rationalized by theory is sharply limited. The fallibility of knowledge and the absence of logical foundations ensure the inescapable irrationalism of political life (Morgenthau, 1946: 112–115). Choices, even informed ones, are problematic and possibly tragic because they require difficult and logically indefensible trade-offs between political goals and between them and ethical commitments. Nor is there any guarantee they will produce the results that made them attractive at the time. Theory could help order the social world only insofar as it provides a limited measure of guidance in making political choices. Policy outcomes are unpredictable in their outcomes because of the inherent complexity of the social world. The most a theory can do “is to state the likely consequences of choosing one alternative as over against another and the conditions under which one alternative is more likely to occur or to be successful than the other” (Morgenthau, 1960: 4).

Morgenthau surprisingly found no contradiction between his negative depiction of the consequences of the Enlightenment and his political liberalism, only some tensions that he hoped might be overcome. Like Weber, he considered liberalism the only reasonable response to a world in which all values were subjective. He valued it even more because it guaranteed, albeit imperfectly, he recognized, the rights of individuals and equal treatment of all people under the law. In the 1960s, he was an active supporter of the civil rights movement.

Morgenthau shares Weber’s concern about leadership and frames it in somewhat similar terms. In the 1940s, he was, nevertheless, highly critical of Anglo-American liberalism’s approach to foreign policy. He attributed isolationism to liberalism’s rejection of power politics and its tendency to ignore or downplay the political element in both domestic and foreign politics. It “argues against war as something irrational, unreasonable, an aristocratic pastime or totalitarian atavism which has no place in the modern world” (Morgenthau, 1941: 7). This ideology, he maintained, blinded liberals to the true nature of the fascist challenge and left their countries unprepared to deal with it. Morgenthau nevertheless acknowledged that this was an historical accident and not something inherent in liberalism.

His conception of national interest is of something that is quasi-objective in nature. He is willing to admit alternative conceptions, but they a few in number—two really—and deeply rooted in American political culture. He all but rejects one of them: the Jeffersonian understanding of America’s wider mission to support other democracies (Morgenthau, 1960). He consistently urges American leaders to focus on the national interest. He addresses his pleas to those he understands to be motivated by largely domestic political concerns and those with idealistic visions of the world and America’s role in bringing them to reality. His Jeremiads are not dissimilar from Weber’s.

Morgenthau differs from Weber in that his conception of the national interest is less rooted in Hegel and rather more in his historical reading of regional and international politics. He follows Weber and Nietzsche, but also Hobbes, in believing that politics is a struggle for domination, and international relations more so because there are fewer constraints on actors. States must protect themselves by maximizing their power but also be restrained in using it. To the extent they benefit from existing territorial and other arrangements they must cooperate with other states interested in preserving the status quo to check the ambitions of those who would challenge it.

The same tensions that characterized Weber’s approach to domestic politics characterize Morgenthau’s approach to international politics. The selection process that governs leadership and policymaking in democracies is inimical to thinking and acting in terms of the national interest and is largely anathema to a foreign policy based on the balance of power. Democratic regimes produce leaders focused on domestic issues, and democratic leaders must sell their foreign policy in terms of broader value commitments. Foreign policy risks becoming a crusade, as Morgenthau alleged it had during the first decade of Cold War, at the expense of the national interest. In Scientific Man and Power Politics, Morgenthau (1946) proclaimed,

liberal wars far form fulfilling the liberal hopes [to end war], even brought about the very evils which they were supposed to destroy. Far from being the “last wars,” they were only the forerunners and pioneers of wars more destructive and extensive than pre-liberal ones. (p. 67)

Morgenthau’s critique of liberalism sounds like that of Schmitt. But his analysis fascism is a veiled critique of his political nemesis. The compartmentalization of politics as a separate domain is a justification of pure politics and the use of any means available to achieve your ends. It justifies and encourages rather than seeks to restrain “the will to power.” Fascism is the practical expression of this outlook on life and politics (Morgenthau, 1946: 8–9, 175–178).

Like Weber, Morgenthau displays considerable nostalgia. In his case, it is for the bygone aristocratic age when Europe was a common culture, and aristocratic leaders were allegedly committed to preserving it and its political units by means of the balance of power. The balance of power, he insisted, worked well because leaders, while seeking advantage and recognition, were keen to preserve the order that made status possible. Morgenthau somehow expected the balance of power to function in a very different world, although at times recognized that it could not. He blamed leaders, as much as changes in circumstances, for its failure. Bill Scheuerman (2007) rightly observes that Morgenthau exaggerated the extent to which the balance of power preserved the peace, protected human life, and guaranteed the survival of political units in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Weber’s solution of plebiscitary democracy does not appeal to Morgenthau, who is far more frightened of authoritarian rule than he is of the limitations and interest-based politics of democracies. To the extent that he has a solution, it is the cosmopolitan intellectual steeped in history and its lessons able to educate elite opinion and advise policymakers. Like Weber, he hoped that he might fulfill such a role, and certainly came closer to doing so than his predecessor, but was marginalized, like Weber, in a time of crisis—and for many of the same reasons.

Morgenthau also struggled, largely unsuccessfully, to address the connections and tensions between power and ethics. He hewed closely to the Weberian understanding of the autonomy of the political sphere, defined in terms of the struggle for power. He refers to his mentor’s understanding of the drive for power as the animus dominandi (Morgenthau, 1948: 41). For Weber, power is a tool in the fight for the “greatness” of one’s warring god, most notably, the nation. Morgenthau ignored Weber’s admonition that power was a means to an end and that prestige was the principal substantive goal of states. He reversed the relationship, making prestige subordinate to power and instrumental in achieving it. A state that wants to demonstrate power pursues “a policy of prestige.” It attempts to “impress other nations with the power or one’s own nation actually possesses, or with the power it believes, or wants the other nations to believe, it possesses” (Morgenthau, 1948: 69–82).

Unlike Weber, Morgenthau theorized about how power was achieved and maintained. Toward this end, he conceived of power conflicts among sovereign states as inevitable and, within limits, a rational response to insecurity (Morgenthau, 1948: 125). This helps explain why he downgraded prestige from an end to a means. States, like individuals, he wrote, seek to increase, maintain, or demonstrate their power. The overwhelming primacy of the struggle for power among modern states, as opposed, say, to the pursuit of prestige or justice, made international relations more rational and more intelligible to systematic political science. With this move, Morgenthau appears to have overturned the Weberian identification of modern politics with recrudescent mythic irrationalism. Statesmen are expected to abide by the rational strictures of the “reason of state,” and political science depends on power’s rationality to penetrate into reality beyond the facile “demonological approach to foreign policy.” In Morgenthau’s defense, it can be pointed out that Weber succumbed to the same contradiction. While emphasizing the irrational, he had only sharp words for German politicians who sought refuge in irrational longings for worlds that never were and, by doing so, abdicated their responsibility to their country’s national interests (Lebow, 2017: ch. 2).

Morgenthau’s refusal to recognize the quest for prestige as an end for people and states was also motivated by his political agenda. He considered the struggle for standing and honor and standing as the fundamental cause of World War I. Because Politics Among Nations was intended to be prescriptive as well as descriptive, he made standing and honor marginal to his theory of international relations. Honor was a dangerous motivation that needed to be restrained, if not banished as a motive and policymaking class. A theory that highlighted security as a goal, he hoped, might educate future leaders and make foreign policy more rational and less risk-prone.

Morgenthau was sensitive to inherent contradictions of the accumulation of power to advance the national interest and its misuse in ways that threatened that interest and the global peace. Power is, nevertheless, an unresolved tension in his corpus. It is absolutely central to his effort to define international relations as a field of study in its own right based on the centrality of power (Morgenthau, 1946). Using Weber’s concept of the ideal type, he frames politics as the social domain in which power rules. But this is precisely the world he condemns. He rejected fascism—in which he included Stalin’s Russia—as a movement driven by “the lust for power which knows no limits nor values beside or above it” (Morgenthau, 1962a). Because it seeks power for its own sake, it is divorced from substantive projects that rooted in some principle of justice (Morgenthau, 1960). Morgenthau’s normative agenda took him in a direction at odds with his conceptual formulation of politics, and this tension became more acute in his later life with his pronounced commitment to civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War on ethical and instrumental grounds. In effect, he was making the very kinds of arguments for which he had earlier criticized liberals.

Tragic

In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Morgenthau describes the “pre-rationalist age” as aware of two forces—god and the devil—engaged in a struggle for dominance. There was no expectation of progress, only of continuing and undecided conflict. From this everlasting conflict came a tragic sense of life. Christianity introduced the idea of progress; good would ultimately triumph over evil, and the second coming would usher in a new paradise. The rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment secularized this vision; progress in the form of man’s mastery over nature and social organization now had the potential to produce a happy and just society. Remarkable success in harnessing nature for productive ends encouraged equal optimism about the efficacy of social engineering. Man and the world were assumed to be rational, an assumption, Morgenthau insisted, that was flatly contradicted by the experiences of the age. By denying the tragic nature of existence, the Enlightenment encouraged hubris and made tragedy more likely (Morgenthau, 1946: 174–178).

Ancient Greeks had multiple understandings of tragedy, attributing it to hubris, the opacity of the future, the clash of irreconcilable values, and the necessity of making choices between or among equally admirable goals (Lu, 2012). Morgenthau’s tragic view of life and politics reflected most of these understandings. In his lectures, talks, and articles, he attributed the Suez and Indochina interventions to hubris and frequently spoke out against the deeply entrenched American belief that all problems, domestic and international, were amenable to solutions. He warned that efforts to impose these solutions risked producing outcomes the opposite of those intended, as it had for Oedipus, a play about which he and the author had several long discussions when colleagues at The City College of New York. These efforts were even less likely to succeed in a world characterized by clashing ideologies and values. And despite, or perhaps, because of, America’s power, its leaders consistently refused to make hard choices in their goals and, by overextending themselves, threatened the success of multiple initiatives as well as their power and influence. This need for hard choices and restraint—already foregrounded in the first 1948 edition of Politics Among Nations—would remain central to his writings on foreign affairs. His sense of tragedy also embraced the realm of ideas. Schmitt viewed ideas as weapons. For Morgenthau, they were tools of restraint, and engagement with them could help develop phronēsis or practical wisdom.

Despite the inherent limitations of theory and its potential to encourage tragedy, Morgenthau believed that theory could inform practice. Good policy would, nevertheless, depend on good leaders. He famously observed that the moral quality of leaders would determine whether a bipolar world encourages war or peace. Despite the high premium he places on good leadership, Morgenthau never tells us anything about the conditions under which it can operate effectively. Offering a long train of historical examples but no generalizations, he focused on judging good role models and emulating their behavior.

Morgenthau’s arguments were self-defeating in a parallel way to those of critical theory and Schmitt’s political theology. His desire to establish the autonomy of international relations led him to frame it as a closed system in terms of which philosophical arguments could be presented in the language of science (Morgenthau, 1948). He flirted with a vulgar scientism at odds with his earlier critique and with the more nuanced understanding of foreign policy that he espoused in his latter books and critiques of US policy in Indochina. Many of Morgenthau’s epigones lost sight of the Weberian pathos by following only the Morgenthau of the first chapter of Politics Among Nations. They portray international relations as something, not only closed from other substantive domains but also divorced from ethics, which negates Morgenthau’s endeavor to make theory a vehicle of political self-restraint.

Ironically, or even tragically, Morgenthau’s turn to reason as a possible promoter of constraint had the opposite effect. To appeal to an American readership unfamiliar with metaphysics and steeped in an empirical tradition, he simplified his theory and presented it as a “scientific” one. His only active disclaimer was to distinguish between “the science of politics” (Staatswissenschaft) and the “art of politics” (Staatskunst), but he centered both on the acquisition and use of power (Morgenthau, 1948). By abandoning his earlier and more sophisticated German and French writings to “sell” his arguments to Americans, he encouraged misinterpretation. A reductionist theory encouraged a reductionist understanding of international relations and an overvaluation of the importance of power. Morgenthau’s invocation of reason and downplaying of emotions and nationalism could be interpreted as an effort to pull the wool over the eyes of his readers, and to the extent it succeeded, it had the tragic effect of creating opposite result of that which he intended.

Morgenthau was mortified by readings of Politics Among Nations that were used to justified projects he deeply opposed, such as military intervention in Indochina. In 1965, he participated in two television debates with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy over the wisdom of military intervention in Vietnam. Years later, Bundy told the author that after the debate, the two men talked about Politics Among Nations. Bundy suggested that he could use the arguments of the book to defend intervention. Morgenthau was not pleased. Karl Deutsch made a similar observation. In a more cordial exchange, he told Hans that it is almost inevitable that his theory becomes “hard boiled” in the hands of strategists such as Herman Kahn who know no history. Deutsch (1962) said that it reminded him of the Heine poem describing his dream of a hangman who followed him through the streets of Cologne repeating, “I am the action to your theories.” This cut deep because Morgenthau loved Heine and had excoriated Kahn for treating nuclear war like conventional war and basing his argument on the bizarre belief that human society was “a primitive ant colony” (Morgenthau, 1962b: 62–78). Morgenthau (1966b) understood, in his own words, that “Political ideas have political consequences” and that his writings were often misread. But he never accepted his responsibility for this phenomenon.