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Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society

2006; Palgrave Macmillan; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300213

1476-9336

Michael Lessnoff,

Political Theology and Sovereignty

Politics of Civil Society is based on a prizewinning dissertation presented to the University of Chicago in 1998, and has some faults attributable to this origin -parts of it rehearse familiar material, there is sometimes a loss of focus as the author demonstrates the breadth of his knowledge of source material, and so on.Nevertheless, the book offers an interesting and original angle on Weber.It has a dual focus, only one part of which is indicated in the book's title: equally central is the fate of the individual in modern society.Everyone knows the pessimistic side of Weber's analysis of modernitydisenchantment and loss of meaning; ever-increasing bureaucratization; the 'iron cage'.What prospect, in this setting, for individual freedom, integrity, fulfilment?Weber, Kim tells us, pinned his hopes on the ideal of vocation, of the Berufsmensch, a secularized version of that character which, in its Puritan form, paradoxically, was implicated at the birth of the modern world.If the Protestant ethic begat modernity, modernity has undermined the Protestant and every religious ethic, indeed every objective value, leaving modern man struggling with 'value fragmentation and pluralism' (p.15).Likewise natural science, prized in the early modern period as a revelation of the mind of God, has become utterly destructive of any 'belief that there is something like a meaning of the world' (p.101).Nevertheless, the scientist, for Weber, can and should be a paradigm of the modern Berufsmensch, in whom 'subjective value and objective rationality are wilfully brought together' (p.25), enabling the individual to act on a conception of moral duty to which he has committed himself totally (somewhat like Kant's self-legislating moral person, but without Kant's confidence in objective moral truth), necessarily a specialist but not a bureaucratic 'specialist without spirit' because he is dedicated to his calling for its own sake.Somewhat similarly, as Weber argued in his other famous essay on modern vocation, the genuine politician, the politician who is a Berufsmensch, must be dedicated to a cause, but has to combine the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility, 'hot passion and cool judgment' (p.115).