Asher-'We Are All Ocassional Politicians'-For a New Weberian Conception of Politics

‘We Are All Occasional Politicians’: For a NewWeberian Conception of Politics

Ivan Ascher

“The lecture I shall give in response to your wishes will necessarily disappoint you in anumber of ways” (32, translation slightly modified).1 It is with these words that Max Weberintroduced his lecture on Politics as a Vocation [Politik als Beruf], before an audience ofstudents at the University of Munich in 1919. “In a talk about politics as a vocation,” Weberwent on to say, “you will naturally expect to hear my opinions on topical questions. ButI shall say something about these only toward the end of my lecture, and then in a purelyformal way” (32).

Weber did not say anything in his lecture about what kind of politics should be pursuedor what specific policies should be adopted, for such matters, he maintained, have “noconnection with the general question of what politics is as a vocation, and what it can mean”(32). Instead, Weber went on to offer an account of what a life in politics in Germany hadcome to entail – what it was and what it could be.

My first contention in this article is that Max Weber’s lecture does disappoint. It disappointsnot because it does not deal in politics, but precisely because it does. Or, even more precisely,it disappoints because by positing a distinction between the task of social science – whichis to clarify – and the task of politics – which is to lead – and by insisting on maintainingthis distinction, Weber’s lecture puts into play a certain kind of politics, and a certain kindof science, which together make the state a matter of fact and its rule a matter of individualleadership. Indeed Weber, through this speech and through his writings, did much to definenot only the vision of politics of an entire generation, but also the discourse of politicalscience as it exists today – a science that understands itself to be merely describing theprocesses within the state, rather than shaping them or bringing them into existence as itnames and organizes them in language.

If I propose a return to Max Weber, however, and in particular a new reading of hislecture on Politics as a Vocation, it is on the assumption that this Weberian legacy – aconception of politics as merely the leadership or the exercise of influence on the leadershipof a state, and a conception of political science as merely describing politics without itselfcontributing to shaping it – is not beyond the reach of contestation. Indeed, as I shalltry to show in the following pages, one can derive from Weber’s own text an alternativeconception of politics – a conception of politics that does not require us to submit en masseto the vision of a charismatic leader or to resign ourselves, each of us individually, tothe everlasting rule of a disenchanted bureaucracy. Beyond the familiar antithesis betweenleaderless bureaucracy and a leader-democracy with little space for popular participation, onefinds a third possibility characterized by the potential for widespread engagement. Indeed,one finds in Weber a different conception of politics, one that allows us to recognize notonly the political possibilities inherent in language and interpretation but also as a result thepolitical element inherent in political science itself – be it Weber’s own or that of those wholabor under his shadow.

I shall proceed in three steps. First, I shall follow Max Weber fairly closely as he attemptsto determine – to assess, that is, but also to decide upon – the nature and scope of politics in

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‘We Are All Occasional Politicians’: Ivan Ascher 139

the modern state and as he describes what he takes to be the contrasting responsibilities andvocations of the genuine politician – a rarity – and the ubiquitous official, whose dominancein the modern state Weber cannot help but lament. Then, in the second part, I begin to makethe case that Weber’s own analysis, in Politics as a Vocation, does not in fact warrant thediagnosis and recommendations that Weber himself puts forward. Looking specifically atthose individuals whom Weber calls ‘professional politicians in a second sense’ (38) – peoplewho place themselves in the service of a master but are not leaders themselves – what onefinds is that the crucial actors in Weber’s story are not, in fact, those exceptional politicianswho are genuinely able to lead others into realizing his agenda, or even the bureaucratsdisciplined enough to obey them. They are, rather, the seemingly marginal figures like thelawyer, anonymous individuals who are somehow able to interpret for others, to decidemomentarily on the meaning of a law, on the scope of a rule or regulation or on the meaningof a command.

What this implies – and this is the topic of the third part – is that for all of Weber’sapparent claims to the contrary, the potential for political eruption is no more extinguishedby bureaucracy than it is reducible to the charismatic leadership of an individual. We areall occasional politicians, by Weber’s own admission, and this is so by virtue of politics’unfolding in relations of language. What is more, as Weber well knows, where there islanguage, there is contest over meaning, and thus the possibility of both crisis and renewal.2

1. Politics as a Vocation

Politics as a Vocation was delivered in January 1919 as a speech at the University of Munich,in response to an invitation by the Free Student Association.3 Weber initially rejected theinvitation, recommending alternative speakers whom the students might invite and, when heeventually he agreed to give a speech, it was on his own terms – not theirs.

Weber begins his lecture with a reference to what ‘politics’ mean in everyday language[Was verstehen wir unter Politik?] and observes that the “concept is extremely broad,” sinceit includes “every kind of independent leadership activity” [selbstandig leitender Tatigkeit](32). Such a concept is too broad, Weber contends, and he therefore limits his focus to “theleadership, or the exercise of influence on the leadership, of a political organization – whichis to say, nowadays, of a state” (32, translation slightly modified).

On Weber’s account, indeed, politics nowadays takes place in a very specific context,that of the modern state, and to help his audience understand what this might mean foranyone aspiring to a life in politics – and, in particular, to help them reflect on what itmeans to have a calling for politics in a context where politics has become increasinglyprofessionalized, Weber draws on his now famous typology of the different modes of legiti-mate authority. Specifically, Weber insists on the contrast that exists between what he calledcharismatic authority – the authority exercised by an extraordinary individual by virtue ofhis personal qualities, by virtue of the gift of grace he is believed to have – and legal-rationalauthority – authority by virtue of ‘legality,’” that is, “by virtue of the belief in the validity oflegal statutes and practical ‘competence’ based on rational rules” (34).5

It is this second type of authority – legal-rational authority – that one finds in the modernstate and in the modern “servant of the state” (34). And yet it is to the first type, charismaticauthority, that Weber turns his attention in his lecture, for that is “where we discover theidea of ‘vocation’ [Beruf] in its highest form.” (35) Charismatic leaders, Weber says, arepoliticians “by virtue of their ‘calling’ . . . in the deepest meaning of the word.” They aregenuine leaders who are believed to have been called to the task of leadership.

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In the modern context – and specifically in the modern German context – the leadershipof the state has fallen to what Weber calls “‘professional politicians’ who have no vocation”[Berufspolitiker ohne Beruf] (75), individuals who lack the inner qualities required to turn aman into a leader. Those who might have become leaders have been driven out of politicsby bureaucratization and the demands of professionalization, and with a parliament that isalmost powerless, German affairs are in the hands of bureaucrats, who almost by definitionlack the qualities required for leadership. This is a most deplorable state of affairs, saysWeber, if only because the duties and responsibility of the genuine official are ultimatelyincompatible with the duties and responsibility of the politician, of the political leader.

As Weber sees it, “[w]hen an official receives an order, his honor lies in his ability tocarry it out on his superior’s responsibility, conscientiously and exactly as if it correspondedto his own convictions.” By contrast, the “point of honor of the political leader” is that “heacts exclusively on his own responsibility, a responsibility that he may not and cannot refuseor shuffle onto someone else. (54) That is why good civil servants make bad politicians andwhy – according to Weber – what Germany ultimately needs is an outstanding individualnot confined by any structure, who by his charisma will compel the state and the servants ofthe state to realize his goals. Weber acknowledges that this will mean the spiritual proletar-ianization of the masses, but there is no other choice. Such is the price to pay for genuineleadership.6

2. Professional Politicians “in a second sense”

As he himself warned at the outset, Weber’s lecture in many ways does disappoint. It dis-appoints not for lack of brilliance or persuasiveness, but precisely because of its brillianceand persuasiveness. By the end of Weber’s overview, one cannot but feel overwhelmedand discouraged. Bureaucracy and machine politics have all but extinguished the possibil-ity for political renewal and the only chance for such renewal will have to come from acharismatic leader chosen through popular acclaim. Compounded by his infamous attackon political idealism in his discussion of ethics in the final section, Weber’s lecture, itseems, can only have the effect of disabling the aspirations of those in his audience, mak-ing it clear to them that to pursue their ambitions is most likely delusional and possiblyirresponsible.7

As I would like to argue in this section, however, the apparent diagnosis in Weber’s lecture –that bureaucracy has all but extinguished the possibility for political renewal and that theonly chance for such re-ordering would have to come from the outside, from a charismaticleader chosen through popular acclaim in a plebiscite – is in fact not warranted by Weber’sown analysis. More precisely, I will show that the opposition that Weber so starkly drawsbetween the idealized rule of the genuine politician and the existing rule of the officials infact does not hold. And it begins to unravel as soon as we consider the existence in Weber’snarrative of a third or intermediate figure, the Berufspolitik “in a second sense” (38), whosepolitical importance is undeniable but whose model is neither that of the politician nor thatof the bureaucrat.

We have seen that Weber finds in the figure of the charismatic leader the root of theidea of vocation in the highest sense. This is the prophet, the chosen warlord, the freedemagogue in the city-state. Now, Weber recognizes that these are not the only influ-ential figures in political power struggles. Indeed, as Weber spends much of his lecturedescribing, there developed with the emergence of the modern state a separate category ofpoliticians – individuals who “unlike the charismatic leaders, did not wish to become masters



themselves, but to enter into the service of political masters” (38). These were individualswho, initially, were deployed by the prince, by the monarch, in his efforts to extract from theestates control of the means of administration. In this process, the monarch depended on theexpertise of these politicians, who were drawn from educated classes like the clergy, human-ist men of letters, or university-trained lawyers, and, in exchange, offered these individualsthe means of their material existence, a job, and also a purpose.

The reason Weber mentions this category of politicians is that, on his account of history,they gradually gained a certain ascendancy over their master by virtue of their expertise tothe point that “the rise of princely absolutism at the expense of the estates coincided withthe gradual surrender of the ruler’s autonomous power to the bureaucratic experts to whomhe owed his victory over the estates in the first place” (45).

The reason I mention this category of politicians is twofold. First, they point to theimpossibility of distinguishing so sharply between the genuine politician – the leader whodecides – and the official – whose duty Weber insists is to obey. On the one hand, thesefigures described by Weber – these men of letters or these university-trained lawyers whoplace themselves in the service of a master – are rather like the official. They are not leadersin their own right and politics for them is a job, a profession, rather than a calling. On theother hand, it is also the case that these individuals chose to place themselves in the serviceof a master and indeed derive, as Weber puts it, a life’s ideal in addition to the means forsubsistence. In other words, they retain something of the autonomy that is typically associatedwith the leader.

Secondly, if we consider the detail of what Weber says about these politicians – in partic-ular, his discussion of the lawyers and their importance in the development of Western massdemocracy, what becomes quickly apparent is that the possibilities for political innovationhave in fact not been extinguished any more than the source of such innovation need lieexclusively in the elusive figure of the charismatic leader.

The crucial actors in Weber’s story, it turns out, are neither the leading politicians northe bureaucrats who obey them, but rather are those seemingly marginal figures like thelawyers who, by their skill in argument, are able to decide on the scope of a regulation orthe meaning of a law. In fact, what we find is that it is not even from individuals at all orfrom their individual decisions that re-enchantment is to be expected, but rather from thevery element in which politics is carried out, namely language, the medium through whichthe will is expressed and commands are interpreted.

Let me direct your attention to what Weber has to say about the lawyer: “There is nothingaccidental about the importance of lawyers in Western politics since the rise of politicalparties,” Weber explains: party politics, after all, “just means politics as engaged in byinterest parties;” and to conduct a case “effectively on behalf of interested parties is thebusiness of the trained lawyer” who in this respect is “the superior of any ‘official’” (53). Itis the lawyer’s business [Betrieb] to argue and his training qualifies him as an expert in therelevant legal matters. Weber continues:

In this respect he is the superior of any ‘official,’ a lesson we have learned from thesuperiority of enemy propaganda. Admittedly, a lawyer can emerge victorious in a ‘bad’case, in other words, a case that only has logically feeble arguments on its side; he triumphsby conducting the case ‘ably,’ technically speaking. But it is also true that only a lawyer hasthe skill to plead a cause that has intrinsically ‘powerful’ arguments in its favor and thusto handle a ‘good’ case ‘ably.’ An official acting as a politician all too often turns a ‘good’case into a ‘bad’ one through his technically ‘incompetent’ pleading. This is something wehave learned from painful experience. For politics nowadays is conducted preeminently in



public and through the medium of the spoken or written word. Weighing the effect of wordslies at the heart of the activity of the lawyer but is remote from the skills of the professionalcivil servant, who neither is nor should be a demagogue, and if he nevertheless undertakesto assume the role of a demagogue he normally turns out to do it very badly. (53, emphasisadded)

What is Weber telling us here? On the one hand, it would seem that what qualifies thelawyer to serve as an advocate on behalf of an interested party is his knowledge of the law.The lawyer is university-trained, as Weber is careful to remind us, and it is this training inthe law, this knowledge of the law, presumably, that gives him the requisite skills to arguea case ably. But on the other hand, Weber also makes it clear that it is a particular skill inargument – and not mere knowledge of what is written in the law-books – that makes thelawyer such a uniquely qualified politician and advocate. Even a good case, that is, a case thathas “intrinsically ‘powerful’ arguments in its favor” will be a losing case if it isn’t argued bya lawyer. The language of the law, in other words, is not transparent and it requires, throughthe lawyers’ intervention, a decision on the meaning of the rule. More precisely, what thisreminds us is that even in a context in which legal-rationality is said to prevail, the legalityof the law is itself a possible object of contestation. Even the law must be shown to be legal,in other words, and this requires as much persuasion as does convincing someone of theprophet’s divinity.

If the reason that lawyers figure in Weber’s story among what he calls “professionalpoliticians in a second sense,” that is, among those who serve rather than lead, is that theyargue merely on behalf of an interested party rather than in their own name, it also seemsthat what qualifies them as politicians is the fact that they are able, on some level, to makethe law say what they want it to say. In this, arguably, the lawyer comes closer to the prophetthan to the mere official. But where the prophet speaks in his own name (or that of God)with an authority that functions according to the principle “it is written . . . but I say untoyou,”8 the lawyer does not speak in his own name and his argument would more likely gosomething like this: “I say unto you . . . that it is written.”9

3. We Are All Occasional Politicians

What are the implications of this? If what makes these figures matter – if what makesthe lawyer significant, politically – is his ability to interpret and to provisionally decide, forothers, on the meaning of a law, then it may well be that whatever it is that makes professionalpoliticians is something more equally distributed than Weber would have us believe and moreubiquitous than his focus on charismatic individuals would seem to suggest. And the truthof the matter is, there is an inkling of this in Weber’s talk when he recognizes, almost inpassing, that we are all in some fashion occasional politicians. He says:

It is possible to engage in ‘politics,’ that is to say, to seek to influence the distributionof power between and within political structures, both as an ‘occasional’ and a part-timeor full-time politician, in the same way as with economic activity. We are all ‘occasionalpoliticians’ when we cast our votes or in any similar expression of our will, such asapplauding or protesting during a ‘political’ meeting, making a ‘political’ speech, and soon. And for many people this is the extent of their connection with politics. (39, emphasisadded)

This passage has traditionally been read as marking a distinction between those for whompolitics is a full-time activity and those who pursue it on a merely part-time or occasional



basis. That is certainly the reading that has been privileged by Hans Gerth and C. WrightMills, who in their translation of the text collapse the three terms in Weber’s list – theoccasional, the part-time, and the full-time politicians – into a twofold distinction betweenpolitics as a vocation and politics as an avocation.10 But on closer inspection, if there isone opposition being drawn here, it is the opposition between those who pursue politicsprofessionally – whether on a full-time or part-time basis, and the rest of us who are merelyoccasional politicians [Gelegenheitspolitiker], and do not pursue politics for a living.11 Whatis remarkable, however – and the reason I am drawing the reader’s attention to this otherwiseunremarkable passage here – is that this seemingly residual category – of the ‘occasionalpolitician’ is in fact a universal one. We are all occasional politicians, politics is somethingwe all do, whenever we cast a ballot, applaud or protest at a political meeting, or deliver apolitical speech.

One can only wonder: what is it about these activities that makes us (all of us) ‘political’?Presumably, what Weber means is that the act of expressing our will in a political settingor in a political manner is what qualifies us as politicians. On this reading, it is the fact thatwe, as individuals, are actively and consciously striving “for a share of power or to influencethe distribution of power” (as per Weber’s definition of politics, earlier in the lecture) thatqualifies us as politicians, however occasional. And for many of us in modern democracies,as Weber points out, these infrequent acts of voting or attending a political rally are the extentof our engagement in politics.

But even if we accept this reading, there is room enough to wonder: what is it about theseacts, if anything, that makes them matter to the life of the polity? The committed democrat,of course, will likely contend that these acts are significant as the expression of our will,which is itself the basis for the regime’s legitimacy. But we know better than to think thatWeber would be swayed by such an account. As he put it in a famous letter to Robert Michels,“Such notions as the ‘will of the people,’ the true will of the people, ceased to exist for meyears ago; they are fictions.”12

From a sociological standpoint, then, the significance of these occasional political actsmust lie elsewhere: these acts are significant not because they are expressions of an au-tonomous will, whether individual or collective, but because they somehow serve to sanctionthe legitimacy of a given regime or candidate. At most, one might say that the ballot boothand the political rally matter in the modern constitutional state because, according to thefictions that are operative in such a state, they are where the people’s will is thought to beexpressed and, as such, they serve to validate or invalidate a claim or potential claim tolegitimacy. On this view, what qualifies the acts described by Weber as political is not thatthey are instances of “independent leadership activity,” even if that may be the ideologicalfiction that Weber himself is trying to put forth; rather, they matter politically insofar as theyhave the potential to influence the direction or leadership of the state, even if it is not in anypredictable way. This is not to say, of course, that this is how Weber himself understood thefigure of the “occasional politician,” but rather that Weber’s digression on the “occasionalpoliticians” can be made to reveal interesting tensions in his thought – such as the tensionbetween, on the one hand, a value commitment to affirming the autonomous expression of thewill and, on the other, a sociological awareness that any such expression, however genuineand however codified, always carries an excess of meaning that can have any number ofeffects.

As the above analysis suggests, once we begin to shift our focus away from the individualand train our eyes on the relations of domination in which this individual exists and so longas we remember that these relations are never simply legitimate but always in a process of



being legitimated (or, which is the same thing, at risk of being de-legitimated), one begins todiscern, behind the stark typological and value oppositions that structure Weber’s narrative,a much richer vision of politics than the one with which he is sometimes credited.

It was Pierre Bourdieu who argued some forty years ago already that, once we get outfrom under the shadow of the cultural idealism v. historical materialist debate, it becomespossible to mine Weber’s writings for an understanding of the work of legitimation carriedout by “specialist agents” who are “relatively autonomous” and are invested with the power“to respond to a particular category of needs proper to determinate social groups by adeterminate type of practice or discourse.”13 Bourdieu was writing about Weber’s sociologyof religion, and specifically about the “religious work” carried out by prophets, priests, andmagicians, but one might apply a similar reasoning to the various “professional politicians”evoked by Weber, from the medieval clergymen to the present-day lawyers, who similarlywork to legitimate those who are in power and to provide reassurance to those who are not.

As Bourdieu also points out, Weber himself was the first to recognize the need to examine“the mutual relationships” between such agents, even if many of his readers – blinded,perhaps, by the stark contrast between these ideal-types – may have failed to appreciate theneed for such attention. Yet at the same time as Bourdieu praises Weber for being moreattuned to the interactions between religious agents than his commitment to methodologicalindividualism would seem to imply, Bourdieu also maintains that Weber’s approach remainsmarred by a form of “inter-subjectivism” that leads him to misconstrue relations betweensocial positions as relations between individuals or subjects. In light of this, Bourdieu insistsinstead on subordinating any “analysis of the logic of the interactions that may developbetween agents in direct confrontation with one another” to “the construction of the structureof the objective relations between the positions these agents occupy in the religious field.”14

Again, Bourdieu has in mind the various prophets, priests and magicians that figure inWeber’s sociology of religion, but one can surely do the same with the myriad figures thatcrop up in Weber’s genealogy of the modern state.

This strategy has immeasurable merits, since, as Bourdieu’s subsequent work attests, ithelps document the ways in which a social order reproduces itself and, in particular, the waysthat systems of meaning can be used to legitimate and entrench existing inequalities. At thesame time, while it is possible to convert Weber’s typological distinctions into structuraloppositions in a field, there is also a risk in jettisoning Weber’s distinctions too quickly, lestthe singular field metaphor that replaces them end up concealing as much as it reveals. Toput it differently, there is a risk in trading Weber’s dualism for Bourdieu’s monism, lest itleave us able to name the relations of domination that govern society but unable to imagineanything outside of these relations.

Thankfully, as others have already argued, there are still resources available in Weber’s(or, for that matter, Bourdieu’s) work that allow us to imagine, if not a way out of domination,then a way out of the particular relations of domination that we presently inhabit.15 Indeed,as I hope to have suggested in my own reading of Politics of Vocation, there is in Weber’swork an implicit recognition of the potential inherent in any relation of authority for bothcontestation and a possibly radical re-ordering. With this in mind, I propose returning brieflyto Weber’s characterization of the context in which politics today is carried out – namely thestate.

If we consider the detail of Weber’s description of the state, we find that it contains twonotable features at least. There is, first, the fact that Weber defines the state not by its endsbut by the means specific to it, namely violence. But there is also the fact that, as Weber putsit, the state represents, like all political associations, “a relationship in which people rule



over other people [Herrschaftsverhaltnis]” and, if this relation is to survive, “those who areruled over must always acquiesce in the authority that is claimed by the rulers of the day.”(34) What this suggests, as Andreas Kalyvas puts it very nicely, is that “[w]hat is particularto the state – and to politics more broadly – is not only violence, but also the subterraneanmeanings lurking below the use of such violence and of the command-obedience relationshipit sustains. If violence must be legitimate in order for the modern state to persist, then thesymbolic and cognitive practices that create this legitimacy must also be of primary interestfor understanding the political.”16

From this, two things follow. First, even if one could imagine – as Weber seems to – apolity in which no soldier nor administrator owns the means of violence or administration,the question of the ends to which these means are put remains wide open. Indeed, it is whatmakes the choice of the leader or the principles and process by which he is selected soimportant. Secondly, even if one could imagine such a polity as being ruled according tothe principle of legal-rationality, that is, “by virtue of the belief in the validity of the legalstatutes and practical “competence” based on rational rules,” this belief itself would stillhave to be cultivated and the legality of the laws would have to defended.

In other words, no matter how centralized and no matter how routinized its operations, thestate remains predicated on relations of domination, relations that are themselves mediatedby language and thus open for interpretation and contestation. Weber recognized this, and thatis no doubt why he marveled at the apparent ability of bureaucracy to minimize interpretationby relying on written rules and silent routines – an ability which no doubt he overstated butin which others since him have placed their faith as well. That is also why Weber not onlyunderstood that the emergence of a charismatic leader would always be possible, but alsorecognized that other emergences were possible as well, and why he moved immediately tocontain them, why he intervened at the level of language to limit the vocation of politics tothe individual leader and reduce the role of the masses to that of simply ratifying the leader’sauthority through popular acclaim at a political meeting.

It is also what made it possible for Weber, by attaching to charismatic and legal-rationalauthority different valences of the term Beruf (which in German means at once a vocation orcalling in the religious sense and profession in the more ordinary sense of a job), to assignthe politician and the official to a post and to a duty and thereby allow a scientific distinctionto carry normative weight. In the same vein, it is because Weber recognized the dependenceof the state on a discursive claim to legitimacy that he felt compelled to describe the stateas having successfully claimed a monopoly of legitimate force, thereby effectively declaringthe German state, with all the authority of science, to be legitimate and to declare this attime when the state’s control over its territory was being seriously called into question by asocialist revolution.

Fortunately for us, just as this open-ended character of language makes necessary andpossible Weber’s intervention – in which the meaning of politics is fought over and decidedupon under the banner of science – so too is the meaning and content of Weber’s lectureas it reaches us today available for contestation and re-signification. As I have argued, theopposition that Weber draws so starkly between the genuine leader and the bureaucraticofficial – and hence the ostensible ‘choice’ with which he confronts us between a lead-erless democracy run by bureaucrats and a leadership democracy with a machine – theseoppositions begin to unravel as soon as we consider what Weber himself implicitly rec-ognizes as the importance of language for politics and, therefore, the share that inevitablywe all have in shaping our political existence by virtue of our common dependence onlanguage.



At the same time, the second, implicit opposition that structures Weber’s lecture betweenthe task of science (a collective task, presumably), which is to clarify, and the task of politics,which falls upon the individual politician and which is to decide, also begins to unravel. Itbegins to unravel as we recognize not only that science, by dealing in language not onlyinterprets the reality it purports to describe, but that, in interpreting it, so it necessarily shapesit as well. As I hope to have shown, Weber’s own work can be made to yield not only analternative conception of politics to the one he advised, but one that in turn would make fora different kind of political knowledge than the one pursued in his name – one that wouldnot hew to the objectivist and language-free conceits of contemporary political science andwould therefore begin to avow its own inescapably political dimension.

To conclude, and to illustrate once again both Weber’s interpretive work and its owndemand for interpretation, allow me one final look at Weber’s words. Near the end of histalk, Weber says the following:

I find it immeasurably moving, when a mature human being—whether young or old inactual years is immaterial—who feels the responsibility he bears for the consequences ofhis own actions with his entire soul and who acts in harmony with an ethics of responsibilityreaches the point where he says, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ That is authenticallyhuman and cannot fail to move us. For this is a situation that may befall any of us at somepoint, if we are not inwardly dead. In this sense an ethics of conviction and an ethics ofresponsibility are not absolute antitheses but are mutually complementary, and only whentaken together do they constitute the authentic human being who is capable of having a‘vocation for politics.’ (92)

It is with a reference to Martin Luther – a familiar figure for the author of the ProtestantEthic – that Weber ends his talk, quoting his famous declaration before his judges at Worms,‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ Weber presumably intended for these final remarks to evokethe figure of a political hero, a man of exception with the courage and conviction to act onhis beliefs while recognizing the consequences of his actions. On this reading, it is MartinLuther’s ability to decide, on his own responsibility and against the world’s obduracy, thatqualifies him as having the characteristics of leadership.

That is, at any rate, how many have read these remarks. But there is another way ofreading Weber’s allusion to Luther, another way of hearing Luther’s declaration as it is citedby Max Weber. On this reading, what is distinctive about Martin Luther – and what makeshim politically significant for our story – lies not in his capacity to lead a new religiousmovement, so much as his willingness to refuse the dictates of the Catholic Church. Luther’sReformation was a distinctly Protestant one, after all, and Luther’s declaration before hisjudges only expressed his refusal to obey the dictates of the Church. But what is more, inrefusing the authority of the Church, in refusing to do what was demanded of him, Lutherwas not simply refusing to obey. He was not, that is, simply disobeying, since his refusalwas in the name of the very authority invoked by those whose command he refused. Lutherheard the Word of God, and that is why – not because he had weighed the consequences ofhis actions – he was compelled to say ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’

On this reading, the kind of protest expressed in Luther’s declaration – the kind of activedisobedience, as it were – is one that all of us can partake in, all of us occasional politicians,and one that therefore disrupts the opposition so starkly drawn by Weber between thepolitician who leads and the official who obeys. Even the lowliest of civil servants, indeed,the most disciplined of bureaucrats must necessarily interpret the commands as he obeysthem and in so doing, must not only invoke an authority that guides him in his choice, butmust also say no to all other interpretations.



Max Weber himself, you will recall, began with a warning that he would disappoint.In refusing to speak on the political questions of the day, Max Weber refused, like MartinLuther, to oblige those who had invited him. What is more, just as Martin Luther refusedto obey the dictates of Church in the name of the very God that this Church invoked, soWeber too refused to speak on politics in the very name of political science. Luther, withhis refusal, shattered the existing order and laid the ground for another. Max Weber, in hiscritical gesture, would also unleash a politics and a science that he could not control.

We today are his heirs, like it or not, and the conceptions of politics and science thatWeber has bequeathed us – like the modern state whose features he helped define – cannotbe wished away, any more than they can be uncritically embraced. But as I have also triedto suggest, Weber’s own work allows us to imagine a different politics – one that is moredemocratic, critical, and diffused than the one he proposed. As Weber recognized betterthan most, politics has, at its heart, the task of assigning meaning to human practices andrelations, a task which he thought would be best carried out by individual leaders. As I haveargued above, however, it is not from individuals alone that one should expect meanings tobe created or re-created. The decision over meaning happens with or without a charismaticleader, with or without recourse to Gods. As a corollary, we are all occasional politicians,and this is by virtue of our shared existence in language, and of language’s dependence onour sharing it in common. And even in the pursuit of knowledge, the pursuit of science, wecannot escape being inscribed in the politics that we describe.

NOTES

1. Max Weber, The ‘Vocation’ Lectures, eds. Tracy Strong and David Owen; trans. Rodney Living-stone (Indianapolis: Hackett Press, 2004), p. 32. From here on, the page numbers are indicated in the bodyof the text. This article was much improved by the excellent suggestions of Constellations reviewers. Itsauthor is also grateful to Yves Winter and Wendy Brown for their encouragement and criticism.

2. I am hardly the first to look to Max Weber for an antidote to Weberianism. Nor am I alone inthinking that Weber’s work has continued relevance for contemporary democratic theory. Most recently,Andreas Kalyvas has made a persuasive case for turning to Weber on the question of democratic foundings.In particular, Kalyvas draws attention to the existence in Weber of an oft-neglected theory of collectivecharisma, thereby offering a salutary corrective to the understanding of charisma as the attribute of theindividual alone. See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber,Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). One might also citethe work of Marcus Llanque, who wishes to recover the subtlety of Max Weber’s analysis of politicalidealism from his apparent reputation as a hard-headed “realist,” or that of Tamsin Shaw, whose ownwork suggests ways that Weber might have been less despairing of “the democratic potential of modernpolities” had he excised from his account of democracy a distinctly modern ideal of individual freedom.See Marcus Llanque, “Max Weber on the Relation between Power Politics and Political Ideals,” Constel-lations, Vol. 14, No. 4 (December 2007), pp. 483–497 and Tamsin Shaw, “Max Weber on Democracy:Can the People Have Political Power in Modern States?” Constellations, Vol. 15, No. 1 (March 2008),pp. 33–45.

3. For an exhaustive account of both the context and argument of Weber’s Politics as a Vocation, seePeter Breiner, Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 121–201as well as David Owen’s and Tracy Strong’s introduction to their edition of The ‘Vocation’ Lectures. Onthe account of the state proposed in Politics as a Vocation specifically, see Raymond Geuss’s recent Historyand Illusion in Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 14–68.

4. Weber, The ‘Vocation’ Lectures,, p. 32.5. Of course, what is being described here are ideal types; to speak of a contrast (or even a conceptual

incompatibility) between two types, therefore, does not necessarily imply that aspects of both forms ofauthority may not combine historically. The leader democracy that Weber advocated, at any rate, wouldsurely entail a mixture of charismatic and legal-rational authority.

6. The seeming alternatives I have described, e.g. between bureaucracy and leader-democracy, maybe overdrawn. While charisma and legal-rationality may appear as conceptual opposites, they need not be



incompatible in actuality and Weber was evidently under no illusion that bureaucracy would disappear, evenin a leader democracy (see, among other places, Economy and Society, pp. 268–9). Likewise, whatevercharisma Weber imagines in a leader democracy is necessarily different from the pure charisma of theprophets. On this and related matters, see Jeffrey Green’s excellent discussion of Max Weber and hisreinvention of popular power in The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship (New York:Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 140–177.

7. To say that Weber’s lecture disappoints because of its persuasiveness is to say that Weber’s ideal-types, even if they are meant to serve clarificatory or explanatory purposes, end up defining the situation andthe range of options available to them. Much like Marx (as he imagines him), Weber constructs analyticalcategories only to let them stand as descriptions of things as they are – thereby hypostasizing, as WolfgangMommsen points out, “the concrete conclusion that his analysis [of] contemporary German policy hadreached.” Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans. Michael Steinberg(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 396. At the same time, the fact that Weber’s lectureremains makes it possible for us to revisit its legacy and to register the ambivalence in his account. Indeed,as Thomas M. Kemple aptly notes (though he credits his teacher, H.T. Wilson, for making this insightpossible), “a sustained ambivalence to Weber’s ambivalence – whether personal or political, psychologicalor psychological – is an essential resource for cultivating the modern vocation of critical reason.” ThomasKemple, “The Age of Weber” in H.T. Wilson, The Vocation of Reason: Studies in Critical Theory and SocialScience in the Age of Max Weber, ed. Thomas M. Kemple (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2004), p. xv.

8. Max Weber, Economy and Society, eds. and trans. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1978), p. 243.

9. I should note that it is Weber who claims that lawyers are of particular importance to the story ofthe West, and that is why I concern myself with them here. But it is of course the case that they were notthe only source of professional politicians in history. As Weber explains, monarchs in different times andplaces drew “professional politicians” from varying strata to help them in their struggle with the estates, andthe different attributes of these social strata were of lasting impact on the eventual character of the polity.Thus, for instance, the mandarins, “with [their] conventions derived from Chinese antiquity,” are said tohave “determined the entire fate of China.” In Britain, similarly, the fact that the gentry provided a source ofprofessional politicians (or, more precisely, the fact that the gentry “remained in possession of all the officesof local government”) is, according to Weber, what ultimately “saved Britain from bureaucratization.” Andin continental Europe, lastly, where it was university-trained lawyers who served the prince, Weber claimsthat they were of “crucial importance” for the “entire political structure of the Continent.” (50–51)Weber’s central point in this section seems to be that professional politicians from different strata haddifferent consequences for the character of the polity. But surely the converse is also true, namely, that thekind of staff on which the monarch relied was itself determined (at least in part) by what kind of skillsthey might bring to him. Thus, one would imagine the clergy to be important in a context where religionand religiosity are pervasive. Similarly, the prominence of university-trained lawyers makes sense only in asociety where the law is already reasonably codified. This may seem an obvious point, but it may be worthmaking if it focuses our attention on the one thing that most of these figures had in common – namely, thefact that they were literate, and its potential significance in Weber’s story.

10. See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 83.

11. At least one scholar has called attention to the mistakes in Gerth’s and Mills’ translation: histranslation of the key passage reads: “One can engage in politics—that is, attempt to influence the distributionof power between [and] within political entities—as an ‘occasional’ politician, a part-time, or a professionalpolitician, exactly as in business.” See Arthur B. Gunlicks, “Max Weber’s Typology of Politicians: AReexamination,” The Journal of Politics, Vol. 40, no. 2 (May, 1978), pp. 498–509.

12. Letter to Michels of August 4, 1908, quoted by Wolfgang Mommsen, Max Weber and GermanPolitics, 1890–1920, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 395.

13. Pierre Bourdieu, “Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber’s Sociology of Religion,” inSam Whimster and Scott Lash, Max Weber: Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987),p. 119.

14. Bourdieu, p. 121.15. In this context, the work of Andreas Kalyvas is especially noteworthy, not only because it brings

into view dimensions of Weber’s work that earlier readers have mostly overlooked (indeed, dimensions ofhis work that Weber himself largely disavowed), but because this reinterpretation allows him to developan account of “the politics of the extraordinary” that is richer than those the political theory tradition hasgiven us. Like Bourdieu, Kalyvas turns to Weber’s sociology of religion for inspiration, and like Bourdieu,Kalyvas is suspicious of treating the ‘individual’ alone as a force of political transformation. Unlike Bourdieu,



however, Kalyvas is not afraid to recover from Max Weber forgotten dichotomies, encouraging his readersto imagine something other than ordinary politics (or the “art of the possible”) and envision instead an“extraordinary politics” in which actors strive to “attain the impossible.” See Kalyvas, Democracy and thePolitics of the Extraordinary, p. 34.

16. Andreas Kalyvas, “Charismatic Politics and the Symbolic Foundations of Power in Max Weber,”New German Critique, No. 85 (Winter, 2002), pp. 73–4.

Ivan Ascher is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin,Milwaukee. His current research is on the continued relevance of Karl Marx and Max Weberfor a critique of contemporary capitalism.


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Asher-'We Are All Ocassional Politicians'-For a New Weberian Conception of Politics