Max Weber's solar anus- Part II

R.G Collingwood pointed out that History provides us only a record  of what answers were given to particular questions. It is not a repository of irrefragable facts, nor does it provide evidence of the working of indefeasible Laws.

Weber's infatuation with the German Historical School of Economics led him to become the solar anus of Sociology because he took the opposite view.

Every single historical reference in his 'Politics as Vocation' is utterly and mischievously wrong because he imposes his own prejudiced view of 'the arrow of History' upon it. Consider the following-

In the United States, amateur administration through booty politicians in accordance with the outcome of presidential elections resulted in the exchange of hundreds of thousands of officials, even down to the mail carrier.

Weber makes this sound sinister. But what was the alternative? Elections were a good 'discovery' process. This was a market solution which soon found ways to shift to an Aumann type correlated equilibria based on public signals.

The administration knew nothing of the professional civil-servant-for-life,

 The US grew much more rapidly and became far more powerful than domains where 'professional civil-servants-for-life' ruled the roost. It was precisely because wealth remained in private hands that a small professional Federal Civil Service was considered no threat to the Polity. Then, President Garfield was assassinated by a deranged job seeker. Clearly, politicians needed to have a buffer between themselves and nutjobs denied Federal employment.

but this amateur administration has long since been punctured by the Civil Service Reform.

So as to prevent politicians being punctured by bullets fired at them by nutjobs who think they should be appointed as Ambassadors or Proconsuls.

Purely technical, irrefrageable needs of the administration have determined this development. In Europe, expert officialdom, based on the division of labor, has emerged in a gradual development of half a thousand years.

Nonsense! There is no country of which this is true. 'Expert officialdom' was a  Nineteenth Century invention in England and was based explicitly on the ancient Chinese system. The Prussian 'Beamter' did, it is true, predate the British Civil Servant by fifty or a hundred years but Prussia was a highly unstable Princedom which zigzagged perilously close to utter destruction. Its Army, not its Civil Service, was what gave it salience. Like its Academy, Germany's Bureaucracy steered the ship of State to but Circe's isle. Perhaps this explains Weber's infatuation with 'enchantment'. The 'Schweinemord' killed the wrong little piggies.

The Italian cities and seigniories were the beginning, among the monarchies, and the states of the Norman conquerors.

But these cities and siegniories and Norman states had pre-existing bureaucratic and juristic models. The Romans had a vast bureaucracy as did the Byzantines and the Egyptians and so forth. Much good it did them.

But the decisive step was taken in connection with the administration of the finances of the prince. With the administrative reforms of Emperor Max, it can be seen how hard it was for the officials to depose successfully of the prince in this field, even under the pressure of extreme emergency and of Turkish rule.

God alone knows what this garbled nonsense is supposed to prove.

The sphere of finance could afford least of all a ruler's dilettantism--a ruler who at that time was still above all a knight. The development of war technique called forth the expert and specialized officer; the differentiation of legal procedure called forth the trained jurist. In these three areas-- finance, war, and law--expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century.

Rubbish! If experts were triumphant, then officialdom was defeated. In the Law, lawyers took over. In Finance, financiers took over. In War, professional soldiers came to the fore. It was not the case that bureaucracies produced men of mettle who displaced their patrons. I suppose the German General Staff did displace the cretinous Kaiser in Weber's own time. But that wasn't a good thing. It was a very very fucking bad thing.

With the ascendancy of princely absolutism over the estates, there was simultaneously a gradual abdication of the prince's autocratic rule in favor of an expert officialdom.

This happened nowhere- not even in China. Expert officials quarrel with each other. Generally they turn out to be cretins. Weberians might point to Stalin, the bureaucrat, prevailing over the 'charismatic' Trotsky. But Stalin was a murderous, drunken, thug. He wasn't an expert and he did not belong to 'officialdom'.

Where, in History, do we see a Bureaucracy seizing power? China? Bureaucratic Empires were overthrown by more virile warrior races like the Mongols or Manchus. The Mamelukes?- they were soldiers. The Samurai? Those guys carried swords are were constantly slicing and dicing each other or themselves at every convenient opportunity.

These very officials had only facilitated the prince's victory over the estates. The development of the 'leading politicians' was realized along with the ascendancy of the specially trained officialdom, even if in far less noticeable transitions.

This never happened. Weber can't give a single example of this occurring.

Of course, such really decisive advisers of the princes have existed at all times and all over the world.

So, Weber doesn't really mean what he says. He is just talking, is all.

In the Orient, the need for relieving the Sultan as far as possible from personal responsibility for the success of the government has created the typical figure of the 'Grand Vizier.' In the Occident, influenced above all by the reports of the Venetian legates, diplomacy first became a consciously cultivated art in the age of Charles V, in Machiavelli's time.

 Really? What had Popes been doing all this time? Playing tiddlywinks? Does Weber really not know that Machaivelli's own Histories disprove this contention?  Unlike Weber's shite, ordinary people actually read Machiavelli because he wrote well and had something interesting to say.

Diplomacy is the second oldest profession in the world and initially recruited itself from superannuated members of the first.

The reports of the Venetian legates were read with passionate zeal in expert diplomatic circles.

 Which were wholly composed of people who were not experts and who had not been bred up to be diplomats per se. There is now a large body of professional diplomats with degrees in I.R and other such shite. They read nothing with 'passionate zeal' save pornography. Nobody would give tuppence for their professional opinion on anything. On the other hand, they could probably write a silly article about Weber's 'Politics as a Vocation' and how like Donald Trump is fucking this notion in the ass, with a surprisingly salutary effect, seven ways till Sunday.

The adepts of this art, who were in the main educated humanistically, treated one another as trained initiates, similar to the humanist Chinese statesmen in the last period of the 'warring states.

Fuck off! They treated each other like shit so as to get ahead. There's a good reason Confucius wanted to retire to live among the Nine Yi.  One leader is enough to make a place orderly. Lots of 'expert officials' can turn even the realm of the Jade Emperor into a fucking Chinese fire drill. What? I can say it coz
1) Subhramaniyam Swamy proved that knowing how to pronounce Aiyayo means one can instantly master the Chinese language
2) Gong Linna has explained that her Aiyayo song is based on esoteric 'prana'/'chi' theory such that instantaneous satcitananda is accessed, depassed, and established as dharmic Law which is Universal and so I iz like Chinese blek and can do kung fu so don't fuck with me dude.

Weber didn't know kung fu. But, if attacked, he could spray his adversary with this sort of shite-

The necessity of a formally unified guidance of the whole policy, including that of home affairs, by a leading statesman finally and compellingly arose only through constitutional development.

How can a necessity arise from 'constitutional development' given that it is- as Carl Schmitt showed- 'anything goes'? The First World War disabused Whigs of the notion that Constitutional constraints immunized Polities from the doctrine of exigent circumstances or 'the state of exception'. The Polish Commonwealth may have featured 'Constitutional development' of the type Weber mentions. But, even though 'a leading statesman' finally and compellingly arose, Poland still went under.

Of course, individual personalities, such as advisers of the princes, or rather, in fact, leaders, had again and again existed before then. But the organization of administrative agencies even in the most advanced states first proceeded along other avenues. Top collegial administrative agencies had emerged. In theory, and to a gradually decreasing extent in fact, they met under the personal chairmanship of the prince who rendered the decision. This collegial system led to memoranda, countermemoranda, and reasoned votes of the majority and the minority. In addition to the official and highest authorities, the prince surrounded himself with purely personal confidants--the 'cabinet'--and through them rendered his decisions, after considering the resolutions of the state counsel, or whatever else the highest state agency was called. The prince, coming more and more into the position of a dilettante, sought to extricate himself from the unavoidably increasing weight of the expertly trained officials through the collegial system and the cabinet. He sought to retain the highest leadership in his own hands. This latent struggle between expert officialdom and autocratic rule existed everywhere.

The Russian Empire did feature a bureaucracy of this sort. But, the last Tzar, not content to be a dilettante, took command, disastrously, of the Armies, while his wife presided over the bureaucracy. My point is that Princes- like the last Shah- override their 'cabinets' just as Prime Ministers ignore their Civil Servants. The Bolsheviks, it is true, did retain some Mensheviks in their Ministries but, sooner or later, packed them off to the Gulags. There have been 'dilettante' Kings- like the last monarch of Afghanistan- but, if they kept their heads, it was in exile.

Only in the face of parliaments and the power aspirations of party leaders did the situation change.

In other words, only when Princes were forced to 'reign not rule', did the situation change because...urm the situation had changed completely.

Very different conditions led to the externally identical result, though to be sure with certain differences. Wherever the dynasties retained actual power in their hands--as was especially the case in Germany--the interests of the prince were joined with those of officialdom against parliament and its claims for power.

What happened in Germany was that the General Staff gained absolute power because the Kaiser was a cretin. It wrecked Germany not once but twice till the country was partitioned and occupied and its military became the worst in Europe. Germany is safer now that its soldiers do their drill with broomsticks rather than rifles.

The officials were also interested in having leading position, that is, ministerial positions, occupied by their own ranks, thus making these positions an object of the official career. The monarch, on his part, was interested in being able to appoint the ministers from the ranks of devoted officials according to his own discretion. Both parties, however, were interested in seeing the political leadership confront parliament in a unified and solidary fashion, and hence in seeing the collegial system replaced by a single cabinet head. Furthermore, in order to be removed in a purely formal way from the struggle of parties and from party attacks, the monarch needed a single personality to cover him and to assume responsibility, that is, to answer to parliament and to negotiate with the parties. All these interests worked together and in the same direction: a minister emerged to direct the officialdom in a unified way. 

Where did this happen? Nowhere. An official could not shield the Prince because he was not independent of him. True, he might be made a scapegoat but such sacrifices sharpened the appetite for regicide.

Where parliament gained supremacy over the monarch--as in England --the development of parliamentary power worked even more strongly in the direction of a unification of the state apparatus.

Really? In that case the United Kingdom would have had a 'unified state apparatus' since the eighteenth century. Yet, to this day, Scotland has a different Justice and Educational system.

In England, the 'cabinet,' with the single head of Parliament as its 'leader,' developed as a committee of the party which at the time controlled the majority. This party power was ignored by official law but, in fact, it alone was politically decisive.

Weber was writing this at a time when the UK had a coalition government. The Tory Party's 1922 committee, by its very name, indicates that the even the  majority Parliamentary Party, let alone the rank and file in the shires, may be greatly at odds with the Cabinet and harbor loathing for the Prime Minister.

Very seldom, in British politics, has the Party been politically decisive. That's why Brexit is such a shambles.

The official collegial bodies as such were not organs of the actual ruling power, the party, and hence could not be the bearers of real government.

Yet that is precisely what they were.

The ruling party required an ever-ready organization composed only of its actually leading men, who would confidentially discuss matters in order to maintain power within and be capable of engaging in grand politics outside. The cabinet is simply this organization. However, in relation to the public, especially the parliamentary public, the party needed a leader responsible for all decisions--the cabinet head. The English system has been taken over on the Continent in the form of parliamentary ministries.

But this is not particularly meaningful. So what if a May replaces a Cameron and is replaced by a Johnson? Weber, believing in 'charisma' and 'enchantment', puzzles his head in vain to pierce the occult mystery of who is the true King of England. This is like the plot of 'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell'.

In America alone,

Is Weber going to say something interesting? No.

and in the democracies influenced by America

i.e. all democracies

, a quite heterogeneous system was placed into opposition with this system.

What system? That of Ministries answerable to the Head of State? But America has that to a much greater degree than most European countries.

The American system placed the directly

The President is not directly elected. There is an electoral college.

and popularly elected leader of the victorious party

This cretin did not understand that the American President was very seldom the 'leader' of his party. Indeed, leadership was, more often than not, vigorously contested.

at the head of the apparatus of officials appointed by him and bound him to the consent of 'parliament' only in budgetary and legislative matters.

This was equally true of the British Prime Minister prior to the 2005 Constitutional Reform Act which was required to bring British law into conformity with the relevant European Treaty.

The development of politics into an organization which demanded training in the struggle for power, and in the methods of this struggle as developed by modern party policies, determined the separation of public functionaries into two categories, which, however, are by no means rigidly but nevertheless distinctly separated.

This is nonsense. Which American President or British Prime Minister has been 'trained in the struggle for power'? What about Macron? Surely we all remember his street-fighting years? Merkel, of course, used to beat up people in Beer Halls.

These categories are 'administrative' officials on the one hand, and 'political' officials on the other. The 'political' officials, in the genuine sense of the word, can regularly and externally be recognized by the fact that they can be transferred any time at will, that they can be dismissed, or at least temporarily withdrawn. They are like the French prefects and the comparable officials of other countries, and this is in sharp contrast to the 'independence' of officials with judicial functions.

Officials with judicial functions aren't politicians. However, in America, their selection and confirmation is political.

In England, officials who, according to fixed convention, retire from office when there is a change in the parliamentary majority, and hence a change in the cabinet, belong to this category. There are usually among them some whose competence includes the management of the general 'inner administration.' The political element consists, above all, in the task of maintaining 'law and order' in the country, hence maintaining the existing power relations.

Weber was writing this at a time when a politician who had been appointed Lord Chief Justice resigned that office to become Ambassador to Washington. Later still he was appointed Viceroy of India. The distinction Weber is making had no practical effect.

In Prussia these officials, in accordance with Puttkamer's decree and in order to avoid censure, were obliged to 'represent the policy of the government.' And, like the prefects in France, they were used as an official apparatus for influencing elections.

Which is why German politics was a shit-show as was that of the Third Republic.

Most of the 'political' officials of the German system--in contrast to other countries--were equally qualified in so far as access to these offices required a university education, special examinations, and special preparatory service.

But they were still shite. Lloyd George, a lowly solicitor without a University Degree, did such a good job as Minister of Munitions that he rose to the highest office. In the Second War, Beaverbrook helped win the Battle of Britain as Minister of Aircraft Production. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Britain beat the Hun twice because the British treated claims of high education and expertise with derision.

In Germany, only the heads of the political apparatus, the ministers, lack this specific characteristic of modern civil service. Even under the old regime, one could be the Prussian minister of education without ever having attended an institution of higher learning; whereas one could become Vortragender Rat, in principle, only on the basis of a prescribed examination. The specialist and trained Dezernent and Vortragender Rat were of course infinitely better informed about the real technical problems of the division than was their respective chief--for instance, under Altho in the Prussian ministry of education.

That ship sank soon enough. Who cares what happened to its Vortragenderbending rats?

In England it was not different.

Yes it was, thank goodness!

Consequently, in all routine demands the divisional head was more powerful than the minister, which was not without reason.

It was wholly without reason as the satire 'Yes Minister!' showed. Now, of course, some private contractor is making money and so the civil servants are queuing up for cushy jobs after their 'descent from Heaven'.

Weber gasses on about what we would call 'the divorce between ownership and control' before arriving at a ludicrous conclusion-

The minister was simply the representative of the political power constellation; he had to represent these powerful political staffs and he had to take measure of the proposals of his subordinate expert officials or give them directive orders of a political nature. After all, things in a private economic enterprise are quite similar: the real 'sovereign,' the assembled shareholders, is just as little influential in the business management as is a 'people' ruled by expert officials. And the personages who decide the policy of the enterprise, the bank-controlled 'directorate,' give only directive economic orders and select persons for the management without themselves being capable of technically directing the enterprise. Thus the present structure of the revolutionary state signifies nothing new in principle.

Wow! Crazy nutjobs like Toller or Bela Kun or Lenin 'signified nothing new in principle!'

It places power over the administration into the hands of absolute dilettantes, who, by virtue of their control of the machine-guns, would like to use expert officials only as executive heads and hands. The difficulties of the present system lie elsewhere than here, but today these difficulties shall not concern us.

Coz the freikorps would exterminate those vermin with vim and vigor. That's the problem with wanting to shoot vast classes of people. They may shoot back and exterminate your goons.

We shall, rather, ask for the typical peculiarity of the professional politicians, of the 'leaders' as well as their followings. Their nature has changed and today varies greatly from one case to another. We have seen that in the past 'professional politicians' developed through the struggle of the princes with the estates and that they served the princes.

Weber is speaking of courtiers. However they were useless precisely because they were creatures of the King. They could not shield him from anything and acted not so much as lightning rods but as invitations to further thunderbolts of popular discontent. Genuine politicians were thrown up by different sections of the polity and they aimed to bring about the changes desired by the emergent class they labored for and represented.  No doubt, Weber's Germany had an unusual trajectory- but that is why it crashed and burned.

Let us briefly review the major types of these professional politicians. Confronting the estates, the prince found support in politically exploitable strata outside of the order of the estates. Among the latter, there was, first, the clergy in Western and Eastern India, in Buddhist China and Japan, and in Lamaist Mongolia, just as in the Christian territories of the Middle Ages.

There were no 'estates' in Ashoka's India or the Mongolia of the Great Khans. There were Tribal 'Republics' and Caste based Guilds. The Buddhist or Jain or Ajivika orders were not 'politically exploitable'.
The Church in Europe functioned differently because it was, to some extent, the legatee of the Roman Empire. Thus Bracton could speak of himself as 'a priest in the order of Ulpian'- i.e. Canon Law could burgeon at the same time as Roman Law became normative. The Reformation in the UK proceeded in a different direction such that the 'artificial reason' of the Common Law gained supremacy but this was by the legal fiction that the Druids spoke Latin and Greek!

The clergy were technically useful because they were literate.

But they only became literate once there were written Scriptures. But the script and language of those scriptures was commercial in origin.

The importation of Brahmins, Buddhist priests, Lamas, and the employment of bishops and priests as political counselors, occurred with an eye to obtaining administrative forces who could read and write and who could be used in the struggle of the emperor, prince, or Khan against the aristocracy.

We know which Brahmans became literate- they were the starving kids employed by merchants or tax farmers. The 'purohit' might be illiterate. The 'Niyogi' was accomplished in ars dictaminis. However, what mattered was military might. The sword prevailed over the pen.  True, monastic orders could sometimes found and hold kingdoms. But their 'administrative forces' were worthless in the face of peasants brandishing weapons or mounted nomads sweeping in seeking plunder.

It is quite usual for an impotent and parasitic caste- for such is the clerisy- to vaunt itself as vital to the State- but history shows that bureaucratic protocols and courtly punctilio has no magical effect. The thing is pure pantomime.

Unlike the vassal who confronted his overlord, the cleric, especially the celibate cleric, stood outside the machinery of normal political and economic interests and was not tempted by the struggle for political power, for himself or for his descendants.

Said a guy who hadn't watched 'the Borgias' on Netflix.

By virtue of his own status, the cleric was 'separated' from the managerial implements of princely administration.

Really? How were Cardinals like Wolsey, Richelieu, Mazarin 'separated' from 'managerial implements'? Talleyrand, it is true, turned into a Duke. But he was forced to marry a trollop. He negotiated his way back into the Church with finesse. Had he lived longer, he might have become a Cardinal!

The humanistically educated literati comprised a second such stratum. There was a time when one learned to produce Latin speeches and Greek verses in order to become a political adviser to a prince and, above all things, to become a memorialist. This was the time of the first flowering of the humanist schools and of the princely foundations of professorships for 'poetics.' This was for us a transitory epoch, which has had a quite persistent influence upon our educational system, yet no deeper results politically.

Quite right. There were no 'deeper results politically'. That is why it is pointless to 'mourn the plumage' and forget that the dying bird was actually a carrion eater. 'The Education of Henry Adams' is instructive in this respect. The disillusioned Yankee spent a little time in Germany- then much bruited as the center of pedantry. But he was repelled by its primitive methods. The future, he decided, would belong to the Technocrats- engineers like Pareto, without the polymath pretensions.

In East Asia, it has been different. The Chinese mandarin is, or rather originally was, what the humanist of our Renaissance period approximately was: a literator humanistically trained and tested in the language monuments of the remote past. When you read the diaries of Li Hung Chang you will find that he is most proud of having composed poems and of being a good calligrapher. This stratum, with its conventions developed and modeled after Chinese Antiquity, has determined the whole destiny of China; and perhaps our fate would have been similar if the humanists in their time had the slightest chance of gaining a similar influence.

Mao, I suppose, was the last Mandarin. Some of his poetry is excellent. Still, with the advantage of a century worth of hindsight, we can see that Confucian literary culture is compatible with every possible type of political regime.

The third stratum was the court nobility. After the princes had succeeded in expropriating political power from the nobility as an estate, they drew the nobles to the court and used them in their political and diplomatic service. The transformation of our educational system in the seventeenth century was partly determined by the fact that court nobles as professional politicians displaced the humanist literati and entered the service of the princes.

I suppose what Weber means is that during the course of the Seventeenth Century, Princes of proven martial ability commanded a European market. Thus Aristocracy became divorced from a specific regional identity or the loyalty of a particular clan or cohort. During the same period, a new type of technical education, more particularly in matters related to Naval and Artillery operations, gained currency. However, at the margin, there was increasing competition from the relatively low-born professional soldier or sailor while, at the same time, private mercantile fortunes burgeoned in a manner that undercut the caste privileges of the old Aristocracy.

The fourth category was a specifically English institution. A patrician stratum developed there which was comprised of the petty nobility and the urban rentiers; technically they are called the 'gentry.'

Why was this 'specifically English'? The answer is that in England the mania for titles and blue blooded idleness had not taken hold. An Earl might refuse a Dukedom on the grounds that this would prevent his younger sons from making a fortune in Trade. The 'gentry' eagerly intermarried with urban professionals while a Mercantile Fortune would not need to go begging for lack of an Aristocratic hand in marriage.

There was policy, too, not just an absence of snobbery, in this development. The English were determined to keep Wealth in private hands so as to make the King dependent on Parliament.

The English gentry represents a stratum that the prince originally attracted in order to counter the barons.

The great Whig magnates weren't 'barons'. That class had been squeezed out of existence and, by a statute of 1660, ceased to exist save by writ.

The Tory gentry, in the early Eighteenth Century, did represent, for certain Monarchs, a countervailing power against the Whig magnates. However, it was Parliament which was important, not the distinguishing of a separate social class.

The prince placed the stratum in possession of the offices of 'self-government,' and later he himself became increasingly dependent upon them.

We could with greater truth speak of Princes being manipulated- as Queen Anne most certainly was- by clever arrivistes. Macaulay vents much spleen on Marlborough and his 'forehead of brass'. He could scarcely have written convincingly of any English monarch as other than putty in the hands of some Commoner. William, it is true, was his hero. But William was not English.

The gentry maintained the possession of all offices of local administration by taking them over without compensation in the interest of their own social power. The gentry has saved England from the bureaucratization which has been the fate of all continental states.

Weber spoke too soon- alas!

A fifth stratum, the university-trained jurist, is peculiar to the Occident, especially to the European continent, and has been of decisive significance for the Continent's whole political structure.

Sadly, this plague has affected the whole world. India's 'university trained jurists' have been running amok since 1860. Much good they have done us.

The tremendous after-effect of Roman law, as transformed by the late Roman bureaucratic state, stands out in nothing more clearly than the fact that everywhere the revolution of political management in the direction of the evolving rational state has been borne by trained jurists.

It would be truer to say that Civil Society- not the State- has burgeoned thanks to Jurisprudence being treated as a service industry within a free market regime as opposed to a 'rational State'.

This also occurred in England, although there the great national guilds of jurists hindered the reception of Roman law.

Scotland embraced Roman Law. But this did not mean any very great or substantial difference between outcomes in Scottish as opposed to English courts. Genealogy, it seems, does not matter so long as Economic processes are 'ergodic'- i.e. not path dependent.

Just recently, the British Supreme Court has come down on the side of the Scots against an English High Court. However its ratio is different. This suggests a corollary to Coase's theorem. Economics can proceed without getting hung up on Historical accidents because people are rational- even Judges.

There is no analogy to this process to be found in any area of the world.

The process Weber pretends to find is itself merely an analogy. One analogy has an analogy everywhere else. It is just a manner of speaking is all.

All beginnings of rational juristic thinking in the Indian Mimamsa School and all further cultivation of the ancient juristic thinking in Islam have been unable to prevent the idea of rational law from being overgrown by theological forms of thought.

Nonsense! Mimamsa merely means hermeneutics. Anything can be interpreted any which way. Both Hindu and Islamic law had a utilitarian core. Why? Because there was 'jurisdiction shopping'. Contracting parties elected the venue of justiciability. Some crazy Pundit or Mullah whose thinking was theological found that he was shunned by paying customers. You could issue 'fatwas' and 'siddhantas' in plenty and still be regarded as a laughing stock because they were a drug upon the market.

States either adopted 'rational law' based on incentive compatible mechanisms or they suffered bankruptcy and invasion. A purely economic process was at work. However, there could be irrational shibboleths which served as an obstacle to efficiency. This represented a 'coordination' problem. The Hindus realized, on the basis of their own Navya-Nyaya, that the only way they could rise up a little was through Democratic Legislatures which could negotiate the implementation of needful changes. Islam- being more economically and geographically heterogeneous- has faced a more difficult problem. Yet wherever polities are cohesive, they have moved in the direction of rational codification. Iran under the Ayatollahs is evidence of this.

Weber did read the Arthashastra- which was translated into English in 1915- and pronounced it viler than Machiavelli's 'the Prince'. Why does he mention Mimamsa, not Navya-Nyaya- which Sir William Jones actually studied? The fact is that Hindus abandoned Navadwipa for the British Law Courts because the latter paid better. Economics alone matters. Even theologicans need to eat.

Above all, legal trial procedure has not been fully rationalized in the cases of India and of Islamism.

Nor, to our present way of thinking, had they been fully rationalized anywhere in the world when Weber wrote this.
The fact is, for some purposes, it was better to go to Ayatollah Khomeini- when he was a refugee in Iraq- than to a British Barrister. Why? Khomeini was more expert in the law of Contracts and Trusts of a certain sort. The solution the Imam suggested was 'positive sum'. I believe, British Case Law has since evolved and so what I recall may no longer be the case.

Speaking generally, there is a trade off between 'Akrebia'- rigid rationality- and 'Economia'- discretionary give and take. Economic theory itself suggests that under incomplete contracts, 'fully rationalized legal procedures' will fall short of the mark.

Such rationalization has been brought about on the Continent only through the borrowing of ancient Roman jurisprudence by the Italian jurists.

If the thing hadn't been borrowed, it could have been invented out of whole cloth. Genealogy does not matter. Italian jurists could not save their country from the leaden despotism of the Spaniards and the corrupt mishegoss of the Papal States. What great bulwark against Mussolini's lunacy could they erect?

Roman jurisprudence is the product of a political structure arising from the city state to world domination--a product of quite unique nature.

Unique? Scarcely. If it hadn't been the Romans it would have been the Etruscans or someone else. Rome had a great debt to Greece which had a debt to Persia and Egypt and so forth.

By contrast, Islam is unique in that the language of the Law Court was the same as the language of the Church and the language of the Arab Caliphs. By contrast, in England, King's Equity was Norman-French, Canon Law was Latin, and the Common Law 'Chancery English'.

Nevertheless, Ottoman 'kanun' accepted a doctrine of necessity or overriding public interest- 'maslaha'- which superseded religious law. In particular the legality of a Sultan killing his brothers to prevent 'fitna' (internecine strife) was accepted as positive law. The Islamic Qadis had many of the characteristics of an independent community of legal professionals. However, Gerschenkron type economic 'backwardness' militated for a strong state rather than the organic development of the 'bazaari' middle class.

The usus modernus of the late medieval pandect jurists and canonists was blended with theories of natural law, which were born from juristic and Christian thought and which were later secularized.

All juristic and Christian thought was already secularized in so far as it had an economic aspect. It is not the case that we all started off living in a world of Magic and then little by little that Magic leaked away leaving us forlorn and disenchanted.

This juristic rationalism has had its great representatives among the Italian Podesta,

Those Podestas and Doges fucked up. They lost. Get over it.

the French crown jurists (who created the formal means for the undermining of the rule of seigneurs by royal power),

Screw 'formal means'. Killing the fuckers in the Fronde was what made a difference.

among the canonists and the theologians of the ecclesiastic councils (thinking in terms of natural law),

all of whom were on the losing side of history

among the court jurists and academic judges of the continental princes, among the Netherland teachers of natural law and the monarchomachists, among the English crown and parliamentary jurists, among the noblesse de robe of the French Parliament, and finally, among the lawyers of the age of the French Revolution.

All swept away by Napoleon and his Code.

Without this juristic rationalism, the rise of the absolute state is just as little imaginable as is the Revolution.

If your imagination features Magic and White Wizards and Harry Potter, sure. Otherwise the thing is simply a matter of Arithmetic.

If you look through the remonstrances of the French Parliaments or through the cahiers of the French Estates-General from the sixteenth century to the year 1789, you will find everywhere the spirit of the jurists.

Which expired under the guillotine.

And if you go over the occupational composition of the members of the French Assembly, you will find there--although the members of the Assembly were elected through equal franchise--a single proletarian, very few bourgeois enterprisers, but jurists of all sorts, en masse.

Because lawyers are advocates, paid to advance a given cause.

Without them, the specific mentality that inspired these radical intellectuals and their projects would be quite inconceivable.

The chance of killing your landlord and getting more rent-free land makes Revolution not just 'imaginable' but a paying proposition.

Since the French Revolution, the modern lawyer and modern democracy absolutely belong together.

Rubbish! The Bolsheviks knew better. Their Revolution did not feature any lawyers- till Gorbachev gave up that vocation and became an apparatchik. He tanked the Soviet Union. It is now ruled by lawyers- I don't think.

And lawyers, in our sense of an independent status group, also exist only in the Occident.

Actually, it was only in 1935 that the Legal profession became a 'closed shop'. Hitler's aim was to stop Jews and political opponents from giving legal advise. This provision was lifted after that fucker topped himself, but the closed shop was retained because...urm... lawyers did such a swell job standing up to the Nazis.

Weber did not live long enough to see lawyers, as an 'independent status group' disappearing from a large portion of the Occident, while thriving in parts of the Orient where seditious barristers took over the Viceregal and Gubernatorial mansions of their former Imperial Masters.

Stolypin's attempt at forcing the pace of industrialization did see a burgeoning of the legal profession in Russia. I suppose, if the Kaiser hadn't been so crazy, Russia might have become a country of lawyers like the U.S. After all, lawyers can solve a coordination problem for the market- though, in the face of a predatory state, there are better ways to 'internalize externalities'.

They have developed since the Middle Ages from the Fursprech of the formalistic Germanic legal procedure under the impact of the rationalization of the trial. The significance of the lawyer in Occidental politics since the rise of parties is not accidental. The management of politics through parties simply means management through interest groups. We shall soon see what that means. The craft of the trained lawyer is to plead effectively the cause of interested clients. In this, the lawyer is superior to any 'official,' as the superiority of enemy propaganda [Allied propaganda 1914-18] could teach us.

If Weber was what passed for a Liberal in Germany, the wonder is it did not embrace Nazism sooner.

The craft of the trained lawyer is to foresee contingencies and provide against them in a manner all parties can agree on. This reduces uncertainty and increases uncoerced economic activity. There is no reason to believe lawyers are better at 'black' propaganda than yellow journalists.

Certainly he can advocate and win a cause supported by logically weak arguments and one which, in this sense, is a 'weak' cause. Yet he wins it because technically he makes a 'strong case' for it. But only the lawyer successfully pleads a cause that can be supported by logically strong arguments, thus handling a 'good' cause 'well.'

Weber is speaking of 'defeasibility'- a 'weak' cause can find wriggle room because the law is too strong and equity demands latitude.

Anyone can successfully plead a 'strong cause'. Sherlock Holmes would do a better job than the best Barrister because his arguments are logically very strong and use new types of conclusive evidence of a scientific kind.

All too often the civil servant as a politician turns a cause that is good in every sense into a 'weak' cause, through technically 'weak' pleading. This is what we have had to experience. To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word. To weigh the effect of the word properly falls within the range of the lawyer's tasks; but not at all into that of the civil servant.

This is certainly a reasonable assessment- however, at that time, Governments hired professional Bankers- like Carl Melchior- who were indeed very persuasive. Keynes, who fell under Melchior's influence was, I suppose, a Civil Servant though of somewhat exotic plumage.

The latter is no demagogue, nor is it his purpose to be one. If he nevertheless tries to become a demagogue, he usually becomes a very poor one. According to his proper vocation, the genuine official--and this is decisive for the evaluation of our former regime--will not engage in politics. Rather, he should engage in impartial 'administration.' This also holds for the so-called 'political' administrator, at least officially, in so far as the raison d'etat, that is, the vital interests of the ruling order, are not in question. Sine ira et studio, 'without scorn and bias,' he shall administer his office. Hence, he shall not do precisely what the politician, the leader as well as his following, must always and necessarily do, namely, fight. To take a stand, to be passionate--ira et studium--is the politician's element, and above all the element of the political leader. His conduct is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant. The honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order appears wrong to him and if, despite the civil servant's remonstrances, the authority insists on the order. Without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall to pieces.

Weber was wrong. A Civil Servant must not obey an ultra vires order. There is no 'honor' in holding a bureaucratic rank. Decency demands that you refuse unconscionable orders and resign your post.

It is perfectly possible for a Civil Servant to become a politician if he or she exemplifies a certain conviction and is considered to be an able administrator. However, politics is not about honor or gathering up glittering prizes. It is about serving something higher than oneself. All political lives, as Enoch Powell said, end in failure. But not to have contributed, when called upon, is perhaps a failure of an unforgivable type.

Weber was little better than his generation. He had no understanding of what a Modern Nation State requires from its politicians and public intellectuals. Perhaps, the reason for this is that he did not belong to a viable Nation State. The thing was a Frankenstein's monster. This was not the fault of the German people. Rather it was a case of 'the blindness of the savants darkening the age'.

Shreber's solar anus served a purpose. It helped change the law. Weber's did not. Why? It discovered Laws that couldn't possibly exist.