When the Great War ended, the government of the Kaiser, in Germany, collapsed because, the Army High Command under Ludendorff- the virtual dictator of the country- could not fight any longer. Thus, the Army handed power back to any Civilian who would take it so as not to itself have to shoulder the blame for either losing the war or for having to sign a humiliating peace treaty.
Ludendorff, who had escaped in disguise to Sweden, was surprised to find, on being forced by the Swedes to return to Berlin, that he was still popular with many Germans. He hoped he could regain power through a coup. But the military had no direct experience of running any civilian office. They were used to giving orders to the bureaucrats which were unquestioningly obeyed because, de jure, the Kaiser was still the sovereign. Once the Kaiser was out of the picture, the bureaucrats had no reason to obey Army officers. Thus, the 'Kapp Putsch' failed because the administration collapsed and there was a General Strike. However, subsequent elections revealed that there was a lot of support for right-wing nationalist parties.
This showed the Army that democracy was not necessarily their enemy. Hindenburg's personal popularity- perhaps because of his age and imposing physique- was such that, if there were an elective Presidency, he would win. Meanwhile, the question was whether the leftists would allow the Social Democrats to become a party of Governance in coalition with Farmers, Catholics, Regional parties etc. If not, the SDs would need the army and they would be eager for a modus vivendi. Otherwise, the Army would need to think about how it could create a party for itself. Thus, between the surrender of Germany and the promulgation of the Weimar Constitution, there was a period when the Army- which had tasted supreme power during the War- played a waiting game. Once extreme leftists had thrown a good scare into ordinary people, they cracked down on them. But they were also casting about for their own political vehicle.
A Social Democrat, by the name of Ebert, became President of the new Republic. He was a cautious man and deeply distrustful of the 'Independent' Social Democrats and various new Leftist groups. Thus he did a deal with the army- even going so far as to endorse the 'stab in the back theory' according to which the soldiers would have won if they had not been betrayed by civilians at home- and this Ebert–Groener pact gave the new Republic stability and legitimacy. In other words, the Army was available to put down Leftist uprisings in Berlin, if not everywhere else. But the price was that they retained their separate structure and organization. Would this content them? Perhaps. Civilians understand Economics and Law and Diplomacy. Let them get on with such matters.
In Bavaria, a similar breakdown of authority- after the King released all officials from their oath of loyalty- meant that a journalist, by the name of Kurt Eisner, who had audaciously seized power, could claim to be in charge of the State. He was from the 'Independent' Social Democrat party which was far to the left of the mainstream party. The revolution, based on workers and soldiers council, spread rapidly in Bavaria and was largely peaceful but when elections were held, Eisner's party got only 3 seats out of 180. The biggest winner was the Catholic party followed by the SDs. Eisner was killed by a right-wing fanatic while on his way to submit his resignation. A SD took over but was incompetent. It seems there was no available candidate who could hold power.
The Anarchists took advantage of the situation and forced out the moderates. But, once in power they did silly things. Then they were forced out by the Bolsheviks who did silly things. Then the 'Freikorps' (ex-servicemen) and the Army crushed the Reds. What Bavaria had witnessed was the spontaneous collapse of the old order. But the elections also showed that the vast majority of people wanted only gradual change. There was no widespread revolutionary sentiment. Once the crazy leftists had alienated everybody, the Army stepped in to crush them. In this way, the traditional chain of command was reasserting itself.
Max Weber witnessed some of the craziness in Munich. But he also knew what was going on in Berlin. It was obvious that the new leaders needed to proceed cautiously otherwise they would be pushed out by extremists on the Left who, themselves, would be slaughtered by the Freikorps & the Army. Thus, if you wanted to take up 'politics as a vocation', you needed to tread carefully, speak cautiously, tackle bread and butter issues, and maintain good relations with the Army. Otherwise you would be killed and your administration would vanish like a dream. It didn't matter what your 'convictions' were. To hold power, you had to do sensible things or your power would vanish.
Did Weber say anything sensible at that juncture (or, indeed, any other time)? No. If you have universal suffrage, the vocation of a politician has to do with getting votes. Eisner hadn't gone out and made promises and kissed babies and got votes. He had talked nonsense. Once the election results were in, it became clear that only about 2 percent supported radical policies. Equally importantly, the other South German states were centralist and were opposed to any notion of secession. In other words, the man simply did not have a constituency. Neither did the Anarchists or the Communists. It may be that, initially, the Army deliberately sent a weak force to Munich so that more extreme people would take command. That way they could be sure of mopping up the real hard-core resistance. Of course, when it comes to soldiers who have spent the last 4 years fighting, a lot can remain unsaid. Explicit orders don't have to be issued. Strategic thinking has become second nature.
On the other hand, the new political circumstances were putting many officers under mental strain of a type they were unused to. In other words, the far right harboured just as many crazy people as the left. The difference was the right-wing nutters tended to get off with lenient sentences.
The disastrous Kapp Putsch, ostensibly led by a civil servant but actually organized by a Naval officer endorsed by the Berlin military commander, showed the danger of the chain of command collapsing or of soldier being called upon to fire upon fellow soldier. More importantly, it showed that a General Strike could paralyse the administration. Ludendorff had been involved in this but, wisely, had declined to take a leadership role. He showed less wisdom three years later in the 'Beer Hall putsch'. Still Hindenburg didn't run against him in the first round of the 1925 Presidential election where the younger man got very few votes. In the second round, Hindenburg's majority wasn't that big and so he remained more of a father figure for the nation than a Chief Executive. Perhaps, people hoped, Hindenburg's age and aura would prevent any future attempts at army coups.
What lessons can we learn from the Weimar Republic? None, unless we live in a country where the Army is itching to take over or to pursue a maximal plan of conquest. A 'Caesarian' constitution is bad for a Republic if it actually has potential Caesars who dream of invading neighbouring countries. The problem is, if the people of the country think conquest is the path to prosperity, Caesars are bound to exist.
Writing for Project Syndicate, Enrique Krauze takes a different view
Max Weber’s Lessons for Democracies Under Siege
Weber had been invited by Prof. Hugo Preuss to join the drafting committee for the Weimar Constitution in 1918. Weber vigorously urged the case for a plebiscitary President even though he knew that Napoleon III had used this method to make himself Emperor in France. Moreover, Ebert, the Social Democrat President, was not directly elected. If his term had not been extended, he would have lost to Hindenburg, who got elected in 1925 after Ebert died. In other words, Weber helped doom Weimar by creating the possibility that a Hindenburg or a Hitler could assume supreme power and rule by decree. Still, it must be said, there was a perception that the German President was 'weak' (i.e. not executive) whereas in reality his emergency powers were exceptional.
Oddly, Weber had previously expressed enthusiasm for the British system. But that entailed 'first part the post' which promotes a two party system. Weimar chose proportional representation probably because Preuss & Weber's party would have got no seats under the British system. After the Kaiser abdicated, Weber lost his taste for the Westminster model. He emphasised the ' necessity for a leader to provide decisive
political direction and a focus for national unity'. He believed this ' could ... only be met by divorcing him from
Parliament and giving him a separate power base in a direct presidential election.'
Weber fully understood the danger of Proportional Representation. He said Parliament would '. . . become a body within which those personalities who care nothing for
national politics set the tone, and who, in the nature of things, will rather
act according to an ‘imperative’ mandate from those with particular
economic interests. It will be a parliament of philistines - incapable of
being in any sense a place where political leaders are selected.'
Weber was not afraid to call his plebiscitary President a dictator. He wrote- 'Let the Social Democrats remember that the much-discussed ‘dictatorship’ of the masses does indeed require the ‘dictator’, chosen by them, to
whom they subject themselves just as long as he retains their confidence.'
To be fair, Weber wasn't saying that there should be no check on the power of the President. But he outlined the conditions under which the Constitution could permit a slide into totalitarian dictatorship.
'Previously, in the authoritarian state, it was necessary to advocate the
increase of the power of the parliamentary majority,
previously, people like him had wanted the Legislature to have more power so it could act as a check on the Kaiser and those he appointed. By contrast, in liberal countries, Taxation is linked to Representation. The Legislature grows used to considering how it will have to pay for any measure proposed by the Government- more particularly those with profound fiscal consequences. In Germany, the War was paid for by borrowing not taxes. Legislators preferred to buy into the fantasy that French reparations would pay off the debt rather than apply their minds to how the debt would be serviced. Had they done so, they would have foreseen the possibility of hyperinflation and tried to make the Central Bank independent. They would also have raised the tax burden progressively so as to keep the debt-servicing burden in check. If you want your country to remain liberal, you can't be too generous in your budgets. Sound finances are the key to stable governments. If Parliament has little role in deciding whether or not to go to War, there is a risk of 'Caesarism'. This is what happened in Imperial Germany. The Legislature merely voted to increase borrowing, not taxes, to finance the War. But the Army High Command (OHL) then took over all important decision making. Both the Kaiser and any Chancellor he appointed, as well as the Legislature, became irrelevant. Ludendorff even side-lined the much older Hindenburg. He was the virtual dictator of Germany. It was only when he saw defeat and the collapse of the Army was inevitable that he passed power back to the Civilians. He escaped to Sweden in disguise. However, the Swedes subsequently found him and sent him back. By then, there were many who blamed the Civilians for everything because the Army had been pushing a 'stab in the back' theory. Ludendorff hoped to return to power through the Kapp putsch or the later Munich putsch. He had gone quite mad. It was only his decisive defeat in the first round of the 1925 Presidential election which put an end to his political fantasies. He then seems to have founded a new religious sect which was as hostile to Catholics as to Jews and Freemasons.
so that eventually
the significance and thus the standing of parliament would be enhanced.
This can only be done by making the elected house of Parliament supreme- at least when it comes to 'Money Bills'. The problem is that if legislators believe a 'Caesar' can pay for a war through reparations extracted from conquered territory, they will acquiesce in that 'Caesar' taking control of every aspect of Government so as to gain that territory rather than suffer defeat- in which case taxes will have to be raised to pay off the war debt or, as happened, in Weimar Germany, hyperinflation is resorted to.
Today the situation is that all constitutional plans have fallen victim to
an almost blind faith in the infallibility and omnipotence of the majority
- not the majority of the people but of the parliamentarians,
nothing wrong with that. The parliamentarians have to consider whether tax money, or money raised by selling consols, is wisely spent. The majority of the people may think the Kaiser or the Fuhrer or Il Duce is real smart and that by conquering neighbouring countries, the country will become so rich that its people won't have to pay taxes. But, if the guys they elected tell them that they have run the numbers and that defeat is more likely than victory, then the majority of the people, albeit in a sullen mood, accept that Parliament must do its job and check the vaunting ambition of the would be 'Caesar'.
which is the
opposite, but equally undemocratic, extreme.
It really isn't. I may want my Doctor to make me immortal. Instead he tells me that I have to stop smoking and drinking and eating junk food. Otherwise I will die soon. I am unhappy about this outcome but I understand that the Doctor is doing the job for which he gets paid. Similarly, members of Parliament are paid to run the numbers and reject crazy proposals even if they are very popular.
When Weber says it is 'undemocratic' for Parliament to oppose the will of the majority of the people he is making as crude an error as I am when I demand a truly democratic Medical profession which will tell people like me that we will become healthier and gain greater longevity by smoking and drinking and eating too much. But such a Medical profession would consist only of sociopathic quacks.
We must restrict the power
of the popularly elected President as always . . . But let him be given firm
ground under his feet by means of the popular election. Otherwise every
time there is a parliamentary crisis - and where there are four or five
parties involved these will not be infrequent - the whole edifice of the
Reich will totter.'
This is exactly what happened. The S.Ds surrendered power to President Hindenburg so he could rule by decree. But he was virtually senile and had no understanding of economics. All he cared about was state assistance to Junker landlords like himself. Weber should have foreseen that Hindenburg and Ludendorff would have a political role sooner or later because they were considered great generals. Indeed, the Army was pushing the line that Germany would have won but for a civilian, possibly Jewish, 'stab in the back'. The only reason Ludendorff, rather than Hindenburg, didn't become President was that Ludendorff had gone completely mad. It is one thing to be anti-Semitic. You can't also be anti-Catholic when one third of the population is Catholic.
It must be said that there was some push-back against Weber's 'Caesarist' President. Still the Constitution retained three Weberian features. First, the office was elective by universal suffrage. Second, the duration of the President’s tenure of office was fixed at seven years with no limits on the number of terms the President could serve. And third, the President was invested with the powers to initiate
elections and referenda, so as to enable decisive action in the event of party deadlock. This was not a recipe for Democracy. It made Dictatorship all but inevitable unless the Communists formed a 'Popular Front' with the S.Ds.
With this background information in mind, let us now return to Krause's article.
Amid the chaos of the 1918-19 Munich Revolution, the sociologist Max Weber delivered an urgent warning about the perils of demagoguery, fanaticism, and charismatic leaders who confuse conviction with sound judgment. His words fell on deaf ears then, but they remain eerily relevant.
Ex-servicemen from the Freikorps put down the Red revolutionaries. Fine words buttered no parsnips.
MEXICO CITY – How can one reconcile politics and ethics, or, more realistically, manage the tension between them?
Politicians gain by acting ethically when it is their duty to do so. People trust them more. If their policies are working well, they will get re-elected unless the other side has a better candidate. As in any other field, ethics is not 'in tension' with doing your job. Rather, it provides guidance.
This the question the German sociologist Max Weber grappled with in “Politics as a Vocation,” a lecture he delivered before the Free Students’ Association on January 28, 1919, during the short-lived Munich Revolution.
In Constitutional terms, its effect was to cause increased Emergency powers for the President and reduced opposition from Bavaria to centralization and the withdrawal of 'reserved rights'. This is because the Bavarians had to call in Federal troops to crush the Reds.
Politically, its most important result was the genesis of the Nazi party which, under Hitler, carried forward the Army's maximal program, initially with great success. Carl Schmitt's work built on that of Preuss but his theory of the total state is irrelevant. The Weimar Constitution mandated 'Führerprinzip' for dealing with 'states of exception'- i.e. Emergencies or exigent circumstances. Thus, there was no need to adopt a new Constitution to express the spirit of the Nazi State. As a matter of positive law, the Weimar Constitution was good enough for its establishment and burgeoning. I suppose it could be argued that this permitted some pushback by the judiciary against Nazi policy. But it also permitted what was seen at the 'Judges trial' at Nuremberg- viz. supposedly upright Judges being revealed to have been anything but.
More than a century later, his essay still serves as a stark reminder of the overlapping dangers of demagoguery,
Eisner wasn't a great orator. Hitler was.
charismatic leadership,
Weber was wrong about Eisner having any charisma or leadership qualities
and ideological fanaticism.
Confusion in Eisner case.
I have discussed Weber's essay elsewhere. If politics is your chosen vocation, identify those who are good at it and go and try to learn from them even if their policies are not to your taste. They have organizational, communicative and negotiating skills which you would do well to emulate. Vocational instruction tends to be 'on the job' instruction. It isn't theoretical. It is practical. True, on specific matters- e.g. National Accounts or Fiscal Policy- you may consult an expert or undergo a course of studies. But 'doing politics' means doing what other politicians are doing but, hopefully, doing it in a better or more appealing way.
At the heart of Weber’s essay is a critical question: What is the ethical foundation of politics?
Politics tackles 'collective action problems'. There is a 'moral hazard' or 'agent-principal problem' such that those who get resources to tackle a common problem, behave selfishly and reward themselves while neglecting the common good. Stupidity, laziness, incompetence etc. could also be a problem. But Germany's problem was crazy Caesarism.
His answer lay in the now-famous contrast between the “ethics of conviction” and the “ethics of responsibility.”
There is no connection between the two things. Speaking generally, it is ethical to act according to your stated convictions. However, if you are entrusted with a particular responsibility, then your convictions are irrelevant. You must resign if you won't do what is required of you.
While he acknowledged the moral force of the former, Weber favored the latter.
The problem is that if you are known to have certain convictions and you are entrusted with great power and responsibility, you may think that you have been given a license to act according to your own convictions. You begin to think that the 'ethics of responsibility' for everybody else entails their following your lead. The great flaw in the Weimar Constitution, which Weber is partially responsible for, was the conviction that a Caesar might be necessary to save the country. Yet there had been a Kaiser and then a General who usurped that Kaiser's authority both of whom had fucked up Germany and Europe and the old 'Classical Liberal' World Order. The Weimar Constitution provided no defence against a repetition of this. Weber and Preuss were fortunate to die before this became obvious.
What should have been done was to use the Army against the Reds and then the tool of 'General Strike' against the Army, till Parliament became supreme. The Army had to be reduced to obedience to Parliament. It could not have a separate existence as it had under the Kaiser. Parliament raised the taxes which paid soldiers' salaries. It should have had the whip-hand. Why didn't it? The answer was that Proportional Representation had vitiated its ability to act cohesively. Look at Macron's France at this moment. Parliament can't tackle the fiscal deficit. But neither can the President. He is now on his fifth Prime Minister in just two years.
The problem with Professors like Preuss & Weber was that they had some complicated metaphysical notion of the State which meant they thought they could ignore empirical evidence or just plain common sense.
To him, a true “political vocation” demanded passionate commitment to a cause,
in other words you don't have to be good at the thing. You don't even have to be sane. You just need to be very passionate about some crazy shit.
but one tempered by restraint,
don't knife people
detachment,
don't kill yourself anytime you lose an election
and – above all – a profound sense of responsibility. Only a politician with such qualities, he argued, deserved to “put his hand on the wheel of history.”
In other words, only a deserving statesman deserves to be a statesman. Weber missed out the only important aspect of 'politics as a vocation', viz. the identification of 'collective action problems' and organizing people to solve those problems. Weber's brother, an economist, wasn't happy with Weber's hysterical romanticism. The truth is, the fellow was a little touched in the head. He never consummated his own marriage.
By contrast, Weber warned, the demagogues of his time embodied a dangerous tendency. “Acting under an absolute ethic,” he wrote, these leaders felt responsible “only for seeing to it that the flame of conviction is not quelched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustices of the social order.”
Correcting injustice is a collective action problem. Good 'mechanism design' raises general purpose productivity and hence increases prosperity. An orator is only dangerous if what he is advocating is stupid. Why not try to convince him to adopt sensible policies? In any case, in politics, it is understood that you may say one thing but do another.
If their actions do not achieve the desired end, “they will hold the world responsible, the stupidity of men, or the will of God who made them so.”
This is mere rhetoric.
Weber likened that period’s German revolutionaries to the seventeenth-century theologians who awaited Christ’s imminent return: both exhibited an “orgiastic chiliasm” and a fervent belief in an “eschatological opening of History.” Demagogues, revolutionaries, and prophets alike proclaimed a radiant future that was always just beyond reach. To hasten its arrival, nothing seemed off-limits. But no end, however sacred, could justify ignoring the real consequences of the means.
Weber was saying- 'them Bolshies by kray kray'. This was obvious enough.
Weber’s critique extended even to pacifists.
People like him had hoped Germany would get a lot of gold in reparations from France. Also, they'd have liked to annex Poland, Ukraine, etc.
Since force is the inescapable and defining instrument of power, Weber cautioned against “the naiveté of believing that from good comes only good and from evil only evil.” All too often, he argued, the opposite is true, and “anyone who did not see this was a child, politically speaking.”
Actually, electing a Pacifist would have been a good idea. It would help Germany shake off pariah status more quickly.
From that paradox, he drew a broader lesson: nowhere was the “tragic warp” of the human condition more obvious than in politics.
This was not obvious in the politics of peaceful, prosperous, countries.
For that reason, he viewed politics as the “slow drilling of hard boards.”
That is manual labour. Politics is about solving collective action problems.
But while Weber did not offer prescriptions for salvation or happiness, nor did he advocate passivity, conservatism, or reactionary politics.
He advocated a Caesarian 'plebiscitary' President with the powers of a Dictator.
Instead, he proposed a passionate yet realistic way to defend humanity’s highest values. This, for him, was the essence of the “ethics of responsibility.”
No. He talked bollocks. He was a stupid man.
The unnamed demagogues, revolutionaries, and pacifists Weber criticized in his lecture – the standard-bearers of the “ethics of conviction” – were Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Kurt Eisner, leader of the Munich Revolution and then head of Bavaria’s revolutionary government. Attendees recalled Weber citing them by name, yet he omitted them from the printed version, which was published months after the revolution collapsed.
They had been killed. It was obvious that the way to deal with Bolshie nutters was to shoot them. Gassing on about the ethics or the metaphysics of this or that was utterly useless.
Weber also left another character unnamed in his lecture: the “pure type” of politician who embodied the “ethics of responsibility.”
Weber's wife had a bit of money. Thus, he thought he could be a 'pure type' of politician. Sadly, he was as stupid as shit.
That character was none other than Weber himself.
Weber was 54 when he delivered his Munich lecture. By then, he was widely respected as a sociologist and social philosopher, with a monumental – though still largely unpublished – body of work.
His widow felt guilty about not fucking him and spent some money publishing his shite. It was convenient, at that time, to pretend that there had been 'good' German Professors and that the Great War had been an aberration. This notion was false. The German Professor was a 'beamte'- a civil servant. He believed that if his country conquered territory from its neighbours, then he himself would be better off. After all, Germany had only been able to go on the Gold Standard after getting reparations from France.
He had come to Munich to resume academic life after years of forced withdrawal due to a long and painful depression.
He was batshit crazy.
His political stance at the time defied easy classification.
Verbal diarrhoea. That's the right classification.
Like many of his contemporaries, Weber was an enthusiastic supporter of World War I. “No matter what the outcome, this war is great and wonderful,” he wrote in August 1914. Notably, his support was driven not by pan-German romanticism but by realism.
Germany really really wanted French gold and Polish land.
According to Weber, Germany had an unavoidable geopolitical destiny: while Switzerland could be the guardian of “freedom and democracy” and of “much more intimate and eternal cultural values,” Germany had no choice but to assert its power against Tsarist Russia and Anglo-American hegemony.
It had the choice to fuck itself up. That's what it chose to do- twice.
As the philosopher Ernst Bloch later recalled, Weber dressed in uniform every Sunday. He longed to serve at the front, but his contribution took another form: he devoted himself, with the same disciplined intensity that he put into his scholarship, to running the military hospitals in Heidelberg.
Nope. He quit after a few months. To be fair, he was mentally ill.
Before long, however, Weber’s enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment. The Kaiser’s political, diplomatic, and military strategies struck him as not only wrong but spectacularly stupid.
Austria-Hungary was shit at fighting. It was a worthless ally. Maybe if Schlieffen had been replaced by Hindenburg the German War plan would have succeeded. The war would have been short and quite profitable.
What he had defended as a necessary, defensive war against Russian imperialism
Germany faced no threat.
had transformed into a reckless expansionist enterprise spearheaded by military “madmen” and their industrial allies.
The Kaiser had a direct role. Von Moltke was his appointment. Hitler was brought into politics by the Army and was originally Ludendorff's lieutenant. Their theory was that the Schlieffen Plan could have succeeded. Unfortunately, Ludendorff was completely mad. He hated Catholics as much as Jews. Thus Hitler had to take his place. But his thinking was the same as that of the 'maximalists'. Germany could occupy France and then go on the offensive in the East. What's more, people like J.M Keynes were saying Germany would starve unless it gained land to the East.
Weber denounced Germany’s annexationist policies in Belgium and correctly predicted that submarine attacks on civilian ships would draw the United States into the war. In his view, no political leader was equal to the moment: not Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom he despised, nor the succession of chancellors who capitulated to the military’s arrogance. “There is not a single statesman, just one, to manage the situation! And to think that this man who does not exist is indispensable,” he wrote in 1915 to his old friend, the pastor and liberal politician Friedrich Naumann.
He founded the National Socialist Association and advocated German imperialism in Central Europe. This was very liberal and sweet of him. For some reason, he also supported Muslim Turks massacring Christian Armenians.
For a time, Weber even believed that he could be such a statesman.
Because he was mad.
In 1916, he went to Berlin to try to put his “hand on the wheel of history,” but his efforts came to nothing. Neither his forecasts of the war’s economic consequences nor his plans to act as Germany’s informal representative in Poland – granting that occupied country a measure of autonomy – received any notice. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything in it for me,” he complained. Even his most devoted friends, such as the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, worried that his political pursuits were a distraction from his academic work.
Jaspers should have tried to get him into a padded cell.
Most of all, Weber regretted the futility of being a vicarious politician. Although he confessed to being “fed up with bursting into people’s offices to ‘do something’,” he still held onto hope: “Everyone knows that, if they need me, I will always be at hand.”
Nobody needed him.
Politics at that time, Weber believed, had a single overriding purpose: to secure Germany’s future by pursuing peace.
Germany imposed a punitive peace treaty on the Bolsheviks at Brest Litovsk.
But he did not support peace at any price –
the Bolsheviks did. It was a smart tactical move. Why? European peace is about 'collective security'. Wilson, a smarter Professor than Weber, knew this. If Germany could say to the Entente that it could provide troops to put down the Bolsheviks in Russia (and elsewhere- e.g. Hungary), then it could be admitted to a new 'Concert of Europe' or 'League of Nations' or whatever. By making a separate peace, Germany had thrown away a valuable diplomatic card. Moreover, they had set the example for draconian peace treaties.
least of all the humiliating settlement that, in his view, the pacifists were proposing.
Europe faced a collective action problem. Princes had been no good at solving it (though to be fair, people thought the war of Imperial cousins would 'be over by Christmas'). Where Princes had failed, maybe Pacifists could succeed.
The republic, he believed, could survive only if peace preserved its dignity.
No. It could only survive if ex-servicemen shot Bolsheviks. Sadly, if some thug promoted by the Army became Chancellor, then Germany itself would only survive as a partitioned and occupied country.
What Weber envisioned instead was a constitutional, republican alternative that rejected both pan-German militarism and social revolution.
That's what Germany got. But the Weimar Constitution was crap. Weber had envisioned shit.
Since the Russian Revolution of 1905, and especially after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, Weber had written extensively about socialism, dismissing it as politically and practically unworkable. He saw no plausible path by which the utopian vision of The Communist Manifesto could be realized.
Killing lots of people.
Although politics was Weber’s secret passion, and remained so for the rest of his life, a political role continued to elude him. Unable to advise, influence, command, or directly shape events, he continued to teach while devoting himself to his monumental 1920 book Sociology of Religion.
It is stupid shit. He wasn't religious and didn't understand his subject. He was merely a pedant who repeated the absurd opinions of other pedants.
Young people gave Weber hope, but could he provide them with clarity amid the turmoil they were living through?
No. He was ignorant and mad.
Two years before delivering “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber presided over seminars at Lauenstein Castle in Lower Saxony
the seminars were convened by a publisher. Weber attended but was outshone by Maurenbrecher who was moving to the Right.
that were attended by prominent writers of various political persuasions and a circle of students with liberal, socialist, and pacifist tendencies. As his wife Marianne later recounted in her comprehensive biography, those gatherings became a rehearsal for the generational conflict that would soon spill out of the lecture hall and into the streets of Munich.
Ernest Toller was present. He served for 6 days as the head of a Bavarian Revolutionary Government. If you compare the response of German intellectuals to conditions in 1917 with what Woodrow Wilson and his fellow American (and some Commonwealth) scholars were thinking, you are struck by the provinciality and ignorance of the Germans. What was the German equivalent to Wilson's 14 points? What proposals did they have for collective security? What was their Nationality doctrine? They had none.
Among the young men who attended Weber’s seminars was the intense, tormented poet and playwright Ernst Toller. A severely wounded veteran of the Great War, Toller had moved between psychiatric hospitals and prison cells on account of his pacifist militancy. His concern, as he later wrote in his memoir, went “beyond the sins of the Kaiser or electoral reform,” the topics Weber addressed. He and his comrades wanted nothing less than to “create a new world, to change the existing order, to change the hearts of men.”
He had talent. After achieving some success in America, he gave away all his money to victims of the Spanish Civil War and then hanged himself. He was Jewish.
The students, Marianne Weber recalled, respected her husband’s “controlled ethos” and his “sober incorruptibility,” yet they bristled at “that scientific mind which was incapable of offering a simple way to solve problems and which asked itself about every ‘social ideal’ by what means and at what price it could be achieved.”
The students understood that the pedant was useless. What was needed was a Peace Proposal with broad appeal. Maybe this would permit a short term deal to get in food shipments. Some Germans were literally starving. They needed hope.
But Weber did not despair, urging his students to “crack the hard nuts” of scientific work and pursue knowledge of themselves and the world through objective data rather than through “revelations.”
How soon before these 'students' themselves starved?
He did not believe in social prophecy. Yet, as Marianne observed, he felt a deep kinship not with the misunderstood fathers of science but with the biblical prophet Jeremiah – a “titan of invective” who denounced his king and people alike. With no apostles at his side and no hope of success, Weber pressed on, driven only by the righteousness of his criticism. “He was enveloped,” Marianne recalled, “by the pathos of inner solitude.”
He was mad and useless. Jeremiah had a God.
Where did this tragic realism come from?
Stupidity. He could have been a proper economist like his brother. Instead he wrote ultracrepidarian shite.
From an early age, Weber knew he was immune to the spell and comfort of religion or its ideological substitutes.
He was not immune from the spell of his own conceit. Few people write books about the religions of countries they have never visited.
He understood that spell well enough to make it the subject of some of his greatest works,
if by 'greatest' you mean stupid shite- sure.
but his interests drove him in the opposite direction, toward the scientific work of demystifying the world.
Which is done by actual scientists not pedants teaching worthless, ignorant, shite.
In Weber’s universe, there was no room for illusions or simplifications.
Yet everything he wrote was one or the other.
His concept of “ideal types” offered a framework for understanding economic systems,
It is a simplification which can be useful. But it is a mistake to push the thing too far- e.g. assuming that workers spend all their income while capitalists save all their income. The 'marginal revolution' in Economics was a bit slow to catch on in Germany. They preferred a Historical or 'Institutionalist' approach. But it could be very misleading.
legal institutions,
can only be understood in terms of legal concepts
religious ethics,
which has to do with religious concepts
and the sources of political domination.
which is the same as plain 'domination'.
But if anything defined the human condition, it was the inevitability of conflict.
Nonsense! Conflict is rare. Collective security mechanisms make it rarer.
Faced with this harsh and irreducible reality, Weber regarded politics as the most noble vocation, for no other pursuit touched the tragic core of life so deeply.
The tragic core of life is kids dying and their parents crying. Become a Doctor or Medical Researcher and touch that core by all means. Or, like Herbert Hoover, do Famine Relief work.
At its highest level, political action could elevate existence itself, shaping its moral quality.
This was the hysterical, romantic, aspect of Weber his brother objected to.
But the man who arrived in Munich in November 1918 discovered that the very students to whom he had once preached the “ethics of responsibility” at Lauenstein Castle were now following Eisner – a charismatic leader animated by the “ethics of conviction,” a demagogue drawn straight from Weber’s own pages.
He was a well-known journalist who had led a munition-worker's strike during the War and been imprisoned for it. It was possible that Bavaria could get a better deal from the victors by separating from Prussia. The problem was that he thought Germans should admit some degree of war-guilt. This made him greatly hated. I need hardly add, he was Jewish.
The Munich Revolution unfolded from November 1918 to May 1919 in three escalating stages – social-democratic,
Independent Social Democratic- they had split from the mainstream because they were pacifist. After Eisner was killed a moderate Social Democrat held office till Toller & the anarchists chased him away. They lasted for 6 days before the Communists took over. They brought back Toller who then had to fight the moderate Social Democrat. Finally, the Freikorps put an end to this craziness. Toller had appointed a lunatic as his Foreign Minister. He declared war on Switzerland and sent telegrams to Lenin and the Pope informing them that his predecessor had decamped with the key to the Ministerial toilet.
anarchist, and communist – before being crushed by a nationalist and antisemitic backlash that ultimately gave rise to the Nazi Party.
Bavaria had only joined Germany in 1871. Could it do better on its own? Maybe it could get together with Catholic Austria? Schemes of that type seemed feasible at that time.
It began after Germany’s defeat in the Great War. The exaltation of 1914, the patriotic fervor, and the intoxication of promised glory had by then given way to rationing, hunger, disease, and death. Nearly two million German soldiers had been killed, with more than four million wounded and another million taken prisoner. Bolshevik Russia was already out of the war under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Germany’s fate now rested with France, Britain, and the US.
They decided that Germany must remain more or less unified so ex-servicemen could put down any Bolshevik insurrection. They themselves soon got bogged down trying to help the Whites in Russia.
In Weimar, a republic was proclaimed on November 9 under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). But parliamentary democracy was an intolerable outcome for the revolutionaries who aspired to emulate – and ultimately surpass – Lenin’s achievement.
Indeed. Russia was supposed to be backward. Germany should show the Rooskis how the thing should be done. The problem was that Army morale, and chain-of-command, had not collapsed as had happened in Russia. As in Italy, ex-servicemen would crush the Bolshevik threat.
Uprisings soon broke out in several ports and cities.
In Berlin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg founded the Spartacus League with the goal of creating a free socialist republic. On January 15, both were murdered by soldiers loyal to Gustav Noske, whose disciplined and ferocious forces included thousands of paramilitary volunteers (Freikorps), many of them hardened veterans of Germany’s elite stormtrooper units.
Could the German Left have had a Trotsky? No. The German Army had looked after its soldiers quite well. What about the Kiel mutiny? That was a case of Admirals wanting to attack the Brits and go down in a blaze of glory. The sailors wanted none of it. Still, that was the signal for the collapse of the old regime. My point is, a rotten government was brought down but revolutionary zeal had not infected the sailors.
By then, however, a different kind of revolution had already prevailed in Munich. In November 1918, the Bavarian monarchy collapsed in just five days, brought down by a largely peaceful mobilization of tens of thousands of workers and soldiers. The movement was led, improbably, by Eisner – a 51-year-old Jewish intellectual and editor.
Jews would pay a high price for such antics.
Imprisoned in early 1918 for his militant pacifism and released that October, Eisner emerged as the hero of the moment. His speeches in Munich’s squares, auditoriums, assemblies, and beer halls electrified “the masses” – a central term in both the vocabulary and vision of the revolution, though in reality those mobilized masses amounted to no more than 10% of the population.
It was enough. The question was whether Eisner's party could win a lot of seats in the election.
On November 8, pending parliamentary elections, the Provisional National Council declared Eisner the first minister-president of the People’s State of Bavaria.
Gustav Landauer,
who was murdered in prison
Eisner’s friend and collaborator, described him as a “modest, pure, honorable man, who has earned his living as a precarious writer” and who suddenly became “the spiritual leader of Germany by the mere fact that this courageous Jew is a man of spirit.”
He didn't lead shit. He was on his way to resign when he was killed.
One militant worker echoed the sentiment: “He is the sword of the revolution, he has overthrown the twenty-two kingdoms of Germany, he is our brilliant leader; I will defend him to the death.”
Or till someone else kills him.
Despite his self-deprecating sense of humor, Eisner himself adopted a messianic tone:
“The world seems torn to pieces, lost in the abyss. Suddenly, in the midst of darkness and despair, trumpets sound announcing a new world, a new humanity, a new freedom.”
It was there for the taking. Weimar Germany did indeed become more free. But it never had a plan which involved both collective security and some method to 'recycle surpluses'. What was needed was nice Wilsonian republics in a loose Zollverein type federation doing trade deals with other countries and creating common markets for coal and iron etc. together with an assurance of a stable currency so foreign investors could 'recycle surpluses'. What was not needed was crazy journalists or academics or poets babbling nonsense.
The sudden emergence of a revolutionary government caught nearly everyone by surprise. Its impact was immediate: Eisner championed women’s suffrage and an eight-hour workday, while workers’ councils led by intellectuals rallied to his side, along with soldiers recently returned from the front.
His mistake was to mention German war-guilt openly. But this was because he had gotten it into his thick skull that there had been a conspiracy between industrialists and mad Prussian generals and that he himself had proof of this. He didn't get that the real world doesn't work that way.
But Eisner’s government was met with fierce resistance. The centrist and conservative parties, the bureaucracy, the middle classes, the mainstream press, Catholic clergy and other religious groups (including the Jewish community), the ultra-nationalist brotherhoods, many university teachers and students, the diplomatic missions of Germany’s allies, and most Bavarian farmers all regarded the new regime as an intolerable aberration.
It lacked legitimacy because it wasn't doing the sort of routine, boring, things which legitimize authority. Still, it was an aberration. It could not last anymore than Bela Kun's regime could last.
Almost overnight, the peaceful and cultivated Munich became a stage on which the twentieth century was rehearsing its future. Prominent intellectuals,
i.e. shitheads
writers, and bohemians joined the government, alongside economists such as Edgar Jaffé, Lujo Brentano, and Otto Neurath, and pedagogues like F.W. Foerster, all of whom were convinced that the revolution would mark the dawn of a new era.
Intellectuals were fucking up all over Germany. It was a mistake to put a Professor in charge of drafting the new Constitution.
The city became a crucible. Spartacist revolutionaries mingled with Lenin’s agents, while future Nazis like Rudolf Hess and Ernst Röhm cut their political teeth. Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pope Pius XII – sent reports back to the Vatican. Writers and thinkers like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victor Klemperer, Martin Buber, and Lion Feuchtwanger witnessed the turmoil first hand.
It wasn't as bad as Petrograd. But no possible good could come of it.
And on the margins, a 29-year-old failed painter
he was successful enough- probably because he had no talent
and embittered veteran named Adolf Hitler
he was employed by the Political Wing of the German Army. It was on their orders that he first attended Nazi party meetings.
drifted through rallies and barracks, searching for an outlet for his rage.
Nope. He was a soldier under orders to observe, report & eventually infiltrate a particular bunch of ultra-nationalists.
Violence, however, was slow to erupt. When Weber delivered his lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” on January 28, barely 11 weeks had passed since Eisner’s rise to power.
That's enough time to make it useful to point out what 'collective action problems' politicians should be focusing on.
The revolution was still searching for direction, and the republican order was hanging by a thread.
Governments survive by showing they are tackling collective action problems like ensuring food supply, paying wages and pensions, collecting taxes etc.
In Weber’s view, Eisner’s government was a disaster.
It needn't have been. Germany was bureaucratic. The new politicians start by taking credit for the continued functioning of the administration. Then they find some problem they can solve- e.g. getting in food from a farming district- and trumpet this triumph till a 'feel good' factor is created.
Before beginning his lecture, Weber declared, “This does not deserve the honorable name of revolution: it is a bloody carnival.”
He didn't like it. He said so. Fair play to him. But he didn't say anything useful either.
Among those listening were students who would go on to leave their own mark on history:
academic history, not real history.
the philosopher Karl Löwith; Max Horkheimer, a co-founder of the Frankfurt School;
which was stupid and useless
and Carl Schmitt, who would become one of Nazism’s chief theoreticians.
Nonsense! The Nazis had no time for Schmitt or Heidegger. He curried favour with them but they considered him a bourgeois opportunist. They thought he laid it on too thick. Incidentally, Schmitt drew on Preuss's work- i.e. was equally fucked in the head.
In Munich, Weber confronted the “Aleph of the century”: a country in turmoil, a polarized and feverish city, a charismatic demagogue in decline, a weakened parliament, a revolution rushing toward its apotheosis, and a military-led nationalist backlash that was rapidly gaining momentum. He was horrified.
He would have been even more horrified by the hyperinflation Weimar would unleash.
The convergence of historical upheaval and personal crisis gave his words the gravity of prophetic revelation.
He didn't reveal shit. Would the Lefty nutters be crushed? Yes. They were shit at fighting. What people of his class didn't expect was hyper-inflation. Others did and hoarded 'hard cash' when the Central Bank started buying it up. Since Germany funded its war effort through borrowing not income tax, it had to inflate away its debt to its own people.
His rejection of the present mirrored his anxiety about the future, as he became convinced that the fate of Germany and Europe would be decided there and then. Distilling this moment, “Politics as a Vocation,” though intended to address immediate political circumstances, transcended its time and became a defining text of modern liberalism.
Traditionally liberal countries have 'modern liberalism' because, like everybody else, they exist in 'modern times'. Their politicians don't read stupid shite written by guys from illiberal countries. People from traditionally authoritarian countries may hope they have achieved 'modern liberalism' but are disillusioned on this score sooner or later.
Admonishing his young revolutionary listeners, Weber spoke as a prophet-scholar crying out in the wilderness: “Whoever seeks the salvation of his soul and that of others should not do so by the path of politics, whose tasks are very different and can only be accomplished by force.”
Some of his right-wing pals were pastors. Nothing wrong with clergymen killing Commies before Commies kill them and turn their Churches into 'Temples of Reason'.
His critique of the “ethics of conviction”
caused him to demand that German soldiers renounce their oath of obedience? No. Don't be silly.
was rooted in the recent outbursts of political violence:
“Are we not seeing that the Bolshevik ideologues and the Spartacists produce the same results as those of any military dictator precisely because they use this means of politics?
What his people were seeing was that the military commander was better at using military methods than a rabble of ideologues.
How does the government of the councils of workers and soldiers differ from that of any ruler of the old regime if not in the person of the one who holds power and in his amateurism?
They can get rid of the leader more easily.
How do the attacks of most representatives of (supposedly new) ethics on their adversaries differ from the attacks made by any other demagogue?”
Who gives an actual fuck?
While the Russian Bolsheviks had won, the Spartacists in Berlin had failed in their bid for power. In Munich, however, the “amateur” Eisner stood at the helm. The “attacks” Weber mentioned were ones he had endured. On November 4, 1918, he was shouted down at a rally by two furious representatives of “the new ethics” (the literati, as he mockingly called them): the anarchist Erich Mühsam and the German-Russian Leninist Max Levien.
both were Jews.
He exclaimed,
while shitting himself copiously?
“Will it be said that they are distinguished by their noble intention! Well, but what we are talking about here is the means used, and the adversaries being fought also claim for themselves, with total subjective honesty, the nobility of their ultimate intentions.”
Worse yet, Weber had noticed that people he didn't like used certain words like 'and' or 'the' which he himself used! What a grave injustice!
Although he planned to write a “Sociology of Revolution” – a project he never completed – Weber used his lecture to trace what he saw as a downward spiral occurring before his eyes. Once leaders like Eisner unleash popular passions, they quickly lose control.
He had to unleash passions to become leader. After that he needed to do show he could run things better than his nearest rival.
However noble their ideals, their actions rest on the apparatus they create, and that apparatus is composed not of pure souls but of “the red guards, the rogues, and the agitators,” who inevitably demand their rewards:
Also, if you use words like 'and' or 'the', which I use, then you really ought to say only what I tell you to say.
“In the conditions of the modern class struggle, the leader has to offer as an internal reward the satisfaction of hatred and the desire for revenge … the need to defame the adversary and accuse him of heresy.”
This is the crux of the matter. The Kaiser hadn't taxed the rich. Now, for the proles to get what they want, taxes seem inevitable. Weber's class needed to work out a way this could be done while raising productivity. That way, higher taxes are paid from higher income.
To the apparatchiki, external rewards meant “power, spoils, and perks.” Weber warned the Marxists in his audience, “Let us not deceive ourselves … the materialist interpretation of history is not a chariot that is taken and left at whim, and does not stop at the authors of the revolution.”
It does if they militarily defeat all comers. Napoleon did rather well out of the French Revolution.
Aware that his young listeners would prioritize conviction over responsibility, Weber closed his lecture with a line from Goethe’s Faust: “The devil is old; grow old to understand him.”
So, Weber was a reactionary warning kids against Leftist politics. The problem is that the Constitution he helped author ensured Weimar would turn into a Dictatorship.
His repeated references to the “demonic forces” that pervade politics were prophetic,
they were belated and otiose. The Kaiser had unleashed demonic forces. 2 million German soldiers had died. Three quarter of a million Germans starved. The interwar years were a paradise by comparison.
as he foresaw “an Age of Reaction” settling over Europe in less than a decade. If that were to happen, his listeners’ moral aspirations – which Weber admitted he shared – would become unattainable. Germany faced not “the dawn of summer,” he predicted, but a “polar night of icy harshness and darkness.”
The odd thing is Russians were emigrating to Germany during the inter-war period. However bad it might be, it was better than back home. English homosexuals too found freedom in Weimar Berlin.
His audience was shaken, much as Toller had been at Lauenstein. “Weber tore away all the veils of illusory thinking, and yet no one could fail to feel that at the heart of that clear mind beat a deep human earnestness,” said Löwith. But many were unwilling to abandon their illusions. Horkheimer recalled: “Everything was so precise, so scientifically austere, so free of values, that we returned home completely desolate.”
In other words, Weber was seen as giving a 'positive' (value free) account. In other words he was making a scientific prediction. His listeners didn't know he was a charlatan.
Consider his 'three principles justifying the legitimacy of political domination of the state: traditional authority, charismatic authority, and legal authority'. At first blush they look kosher. Yet no state's domination is actually justified or legitimated on such basis. It is justified by solving collective action problems. If it isn't doing so, it has no domination or hegemony though it may make a claim to both. It is either a failed state or a government in exile. Of course, there can be political domination without a State. Here influence or control over a collective mechanism becomes the basis of the political power of the non-State actor. Equally, you may have a government which is exercising authority but which is doing stupid shit. It isn't solving collective action problems. It is worsening the situation for its people. People may run away from it or overthrow it or simply stay and starve to death. But such a government would be described as moribund.
The illusion lingered, but it was Weber who proved prescient, as the “carnival” had become bloody. Just three weeks after Weber’s lecture, Eisner set out for parliament to tender his resignation and was assassinated by a young aristocrat, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, who sought to prove his “true” German identity to the far-right nationalist Thule Society, which had rejected him because his mother was Jewish.
Things got crazier yet very quickly.
Although Weber did not settle permanently in Munich until June 1919, he witnessed this tragedy’s opening act.
It was a farce.
After Eisner’s assassination, a weak Social Democratic government that included Weber’s close friends Neurath and Jaffé attempted to push through bold and original reforms.
Meaningless gesture political shite.
But it was soon swept aside by the workers’ councils, which on April 6 announced the First Bavarian Soviet Republic – a senseless anarchist experiment that sought to remake the world in seven days. Unlike God, it lasted less than a week before it was supplanted by the openly authoritarian Second Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was crushed on May 1 by Bavarian and Prussian troops. It was in those ranks that the swastika first appeared, a dark omen of what was to come.
It was still better than what came before. Never forget, if Hitler hadn't invaded the Soviet Union, he would have died peacefully in his bed like Franco.
The main protagonists of this drama did not survive its aftermath. Landauer, the intellectual leader of romantic anarchism, was savagely beaten with rifle butts and clubs, then murdered on May 2.
He should have explained to his assailants that what they were doing was illegal. I suppose, as an anarchist, he didn't believe in the law.
Weber also died young.
Not young enough- alas!
After brief and unsuccessful forays into politics, he returned to Munich in June, just as the university and the city were being overtaken by xenophobic, nationalist, militaristic, and antisemitic authorities. Casting himself as a living example of the Protestant ethic he was then studying,
he quickly died. Nothing wrong with a Protestant ethic once it is food for the worms.
Weber threw himself back into writing and lecturing, voicing unpopular liberal opinions that earned him the unfair label of “godfather of the Soviet Republic.”
He retained influence. Many felt he had shown courage in speaking his mind when it was dangerous to do so.
This public struggle unfolded alongside private anguish almost unbearable even for a man of Weber’s stoic temperament: the suicide of his widowed sister,
her lover left her
who left behind four children, and his tortured love affair with Jaffé’s wife, Else
the Protestant Ethic involves fucking your friend's wife, not your own.
– a former disciple with whom he edited the legendary Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (“Archives for Social Science and Social Policy”).
Stupid, ignorant, shite.
Weber was particularly incensed by the “mad anti-Semitism” that poisoned even his colleagues.
Apparently Frege shared those views. Still, it must be admitted, Jews were overrepresented amongst the Red Revolutionaries of the period. There was bound to be a reaction.
Demonstrating his moral independence, he defended his former Jewish adversaries to such an extent that Leo Löwenthal, with Horkheimer a future founder of the Frankfurt School, called him “the great philo-Semite.”
I think this was an important factor in building Weber's reputation abroad after his death.
True to that description, Weber successfully defended Neurath in court
he was released after the Austrian government intervened
and did the same for Toller, arguing that “in an act of rage, God made him a politician.”
Nope. God made him mad. Then he killed himself.
He even publicly acknowledged Eisner’s good faith and spoke in defense of several other imprisoned leaders, explaining to the judges the meaning of the “ethics of conviction.” It was for this reason that he omitted Eisner’s name from the published version of “Politics as a Vocation.”
The question was whether these people had broken any law? The King had fled. Who had jurisdiction?
For all its idealism, the Munich Revolution confirmed Weber’s observation that “good does not follow good, but often the opposite.”
Where was the 'good'? The King had fled. Whoever ran the place competently would be doing good and good would have followed from it. But the place wasn't competently run. Moreover, the claim of German war-guilt was highly impolitic and damaging to the country more particularly because of some purported conspiracy between 'industrialists' and 'mad military men'.
The demagogues, socialists, pacifists, anarchists, and communists leading it had committed the greatest political sin of all: ignoring reality.
Not if they were acting under orders. Don't forget, the Commies did get to rule East Germany. The reality was Munich, at a certain period, was the cool place to be if you were a professional revolutionary. The trick was to get out before it was too late.
As it turned out, politics was not about drafting lofty plans that overlooked practical obstacles.
Nothing wrong with engaging in that type of fantasy. Just make sure you don't get shot on the way to the office.
The working classes were nowhere near a majority in Bavaria or Germany.
What could the Left offer the farmers? One way to find out was to see what they would be willing to barter in return for food stuffs.
Factories, now controlled by bureaucratic and military bosses, did not embrace socialism but remained within capitalist structures.
The bought and sold things. Sad. Money is very evil.
And not all of Eisner and Landauer’s followers were idealists like them; many quickly changed sides, seeking their “internal and external rewards” among the triumphant far-right forces.
Who described themselves as Socialists- albeit Nationalistic ones.
Perhaps most importantly, the revolutionaries were mistaken about their true adversary.
Hunger. Poverty. The cure was boosting productivity not talking bollocks.
It was not the SPD, which they dismissed as timid and reformist, but the pan-German militarism that Weber foresaw and which they failed to confront.
When did Weber confront militarism? It had reached its peak during the Great War.
Convinced that the West had entered terminal decline, the Frankfurt School’s founders escaped to the US,
which is to the West of Europe and wasn't in decline at all. This was merely a case of moving on to greener pastures as millions of German emigrants had done before them. German-Americans are the largest single ethnic group in the USA.
where they freely built an intellectual tradition at odds with their host country’s economic order.
They taught shite to shitheads. Nobody cared.
The revolutionaries, meanwhile, clung to the belief that the constitutional and parliamentary order Weber defended had been buried forever. But by denouncing and banning the “arch-reactionary” Weber, they cleared the way for the real reactionary: Schmitt.
Schmitt & Heidegger were spoiled Catholics and thus could be rehabilitated after the war. Weber could be associated with American Sociology which was kosher in the Fifties. But that doesn't change the fact that he was stupid.
While Weber was right to condemn those romantic revolutionaries, he overlooked some important nuances. Eisner, for example, resembled the moderate Russian socialist Alexander Kerensky far more than Leon Trotsky.
Kerensky wanted to keep Russia in the War. Eisner was a Pacifist. There can be no comparison between them.
Landauer, the anarchist, was a utopian mystic who detested the Marxists’ will to power.
Meaningless jibber jabber. 'Will to power' is Nietzschean shite. Marxists think the economic substructure is what matters.
Politically, was Eisner’s pacifist stance truly so irresponsible?
Yes. He was harming his country by saying he had proof of its war-guilt.
Had it endured, it might have softened the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Not once there was a Red threat. The Entente wanted Freikorps to slaughter Commies wherever they reared their ugly head.
And were Landauer’s communal experiments wholly unrealizable, at least on a modest scale? Not necessarily.
Fair point. Quite a few perfectly respectable people were caught up in the romantic spirit of the period. But the scale of communal experiments had to be very modest indeed. Generally this featured a horny bloke, a fat lady, a thin Lesbian and one or two barnyard animals.
In his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Weber had assumed that “enchantment” could never be restored to the disenchanted, post-Enlightenment world.
It never existed.
Eisner and Landauer, sustained by utopian hope, nonetheless clung to it. Both embodied the “ethics of conviction” to the very end and paid the ultimate price.
You can hold onto any type of ethics without doing stupid shit which gets you killed.
Unlike Weber, these radical leaders failed to grasp the depth of Germany’s centuries-old Jew-hatred, which would ultimately doom their political project.
Compared to Russia, Germany was a paradise for Jews.
From the revolution’s outset, he warned Else Jaffé: “Separatism is raising its head, and it is going to embellish itself with anti-Semitism.”
i.e. those stupid Catholics are going to organize pogroms, Weber was wrong. Hitler was a Pan-Germanist.
The most disastrous consequence of the Bavarian revolution was that it set the stage for the rise of Hitler, beginning with his arrival in Munich in November 1918.
He was a soldier till 1920. In July 1919, he was appointed Verbindungsmann (intelligence agent) of an Aufklärungskommando (reconnaissance unit) of the Reichswehr, assigned to influence other soldiers and to infiltrate the German Workers' Party
While some biographers trace his antisemitism to his Vienna years, others, like Ian Kershaw, see its origins in Munich, where he electrified the very same crowds that Eisner had stirred months before.
He was a soldier under orders when he wrote the Gemlich letter clarifying that the aim was to remove Jews- considered as a race- altogether. It must be done systematically rather than through pogroms.
With the fascist demagogue seemingly emulating the socialist one, Weber’s theory of charisma had been grimly vindicated.
No. Mahatma Gandhi had charismatic authority. If you pissed him off he might go on a hunger strike till you relented. Hitler had you killed if you looked at him sideways. It was the night of the long knives which turned him into a Fuhrer to whom the German Army pledged loyalty. Incidentally, he killed General Schliecher & his wife. Details like that are important.
Weber died of pneumonia in June 1920. His fury against the Treaty of Versailles and the strain of unrelenting, solitary political struggles undoubtedly deepened his exhaustion, though he never lost his resolve.
He helped sabotage the Republic.
Having defended Germany’s fragile constitutional and parliamentary order against the frenzy of revolutionary passion and the lure of nationalist dictatorship,
He was cool with 'Dictatorship'.
he did not live to see the diabolical extremes to which these forces went as the “polar night” he foresaw finally arrived.
If he had died in 1938 he'd probably have agreed that Hitler was God's gift to the German people.
Just as Eisner’s assassination foreshadowed that of foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922,
In November 1919, Hindenburg & Ludendorff attended a court hearing on war guilt. I suppose the Army connected this with Eisner. H&L pushed the 'stab in the back' theory. But Ebert had pretty much endorsed it already. The fix was in.
the upheavals of 1919 presaged the collapse of the Weimar Republic, itself undermined by left-wing factions whose contempt for parliamentary politics blinded them to the dangers of militarism and ultra-nationalism.
They were also blind to the fact that any program they believed in was bound to be stupid shit.
This pattern repeated itself in Spain,
It was worse. Even the most left-wing German didn't think raping nuns was a cool way to pass the time
where ideological hatreds and left-wing disdain for liberal democracy fractured the republic and empowered the nationalist right, culminating in Francisco Franco’s four-decade dictatorship.
Spain, like Portugal, got rid of the Monarchy and turned shittier. Franco brought it back before dying in his bed.
Similar dynamics played out across Latin America, most notably in Chile in the 1970s.
Argentina had it worse.
Weber’s warnings about charismatic revolutionaries and their rigid “ethics of conviction” were further vindicated by the tragic course of the Cuban Revolution.
If a country has always been a dictatorship, chances are it will remain so.
Generations of Latin American students followed the path of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and the outcome of this millenarian worldview remains all too evident in Cuba and Nicaragua today.
Whereas Haiti is a paradise- right?
And the cycle has yet to run its course. Just a few years ago, it seemed unimaginable that our democracies would once again confront the forces that fractured interwar Germany.
Germany wasn't just fractured, it was partitioned for 45 post-war years.
Yet here we are, drowning in what passes for populism.
No we aren't. Keep your wig on.
Despite their differences, figures like US President Donald Trump,
engaged in trade war, not shooting war.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,
who faces a young challenger previously with his own party
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
a democrat with superb governance skills who only got the top job because Rahul Gandhi was chickenshit.
and former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
who rose in the traditional ruling party. The author is Mexican and thus has his knife into Obrador and his successor.
resemble Schmitt’s model of a dictator who understands that all politics boils down to is the friend-enemy distinction.
There is no such distinction in politics. Today's friend is tomorrow's rival or enemy. Modi has been the friend, the enemy, the friend, the enemy and is now again the friend of Nitish Kumar.
Some countries like France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany have not entirely forgotten the lessons of World War II, narrowly resisting the pull of authoritarianism.
The lesson of that war was get nukes. Lots of nukes.
But the US – on the eve of its 250th birthday – is now in real danger of succumbing to it.
Trump may be killed by Vance. He will impose Shariah law.
To be sure, populist leaders are not the only ones who see politics through Schmitt’s flattening, polarizing lens.
Nutters may do so. Actual politicians- popular or not- see that there are no permanent enmities or friendships.
Many university students in the US and Europe, animated by a vaguer, less articulate version of the “ethics of conviction,” have embraced it as well.
Unless they are studying stuff which will get them well-paid jobs.
But unlike the revolutionaries of 1919, who impatiently dismissed Weber’s warnings in pursuit of social and economic justice,
there weren't many of them to begin with and once they started getting killed, they became very thin on the ground.
young people today often conflate altruism with narcissism.
i.e. they jizz copiously while looking at themselves in the mirror and saying 'Free Palestine!'
The youth of 1919 joined the revolution and, like Eisner and Landauer, many of them died for it. What are campus insurrectionists willing to risk? Their predecessors turned away from active politics not to shirk responsibility but to build a framework for social change.
No they didn't. After the war, we may speak of the Bad Godesberg program. Running off to America and teaching there, didn't build shit.
By contrast, today’s student movements seem to lack any coherent utopian vision.
Utopian visions aren't coherent. That is why they can be realized nowhere.
That said, one cause preoccupies today’s young idealists above all: Palestine.
Because Jews are involved. If they keep banging on about the Shoah, why not pretend Israel is committing genocide in Gaza?
But too often, support for Palestinian rights gets entangled with support for Hamas and antisemitism.
It is now entangled with supporting 90 year old Abbas- the President of an imaginary State who is loathed by all of his own 'fellow citizens'.
Just as antisemitism does not justify the carnage in Gaza, neither does the carnage in Gaza justify turning a blind eye to antisemitism or the atrocities committed by Hamas.
What does justify turning a blind eye to a thing is the fact that you can do nothing about it or that you have something better to do.
Here lies another grim echo of 1919.
There are no such grim echoes. Germany had been ruled by Ludendorff. Would he rule it again? No. He was too crazy. Also, Weimar was playing 'extend and pretend'. Once the net inflow of foreign funds stopped (because of the Wall Street Crash) Hindenburg was bound to appoint a Chancellor who could push through the Army's maximal program. The surprise was that Corporal Hitler, not General Schleicher, became that Chancellor.
Much like the Munich idealists, who believed their revolution would usher in an era of universal harmony and dissolve ancient hatreds, postwar Jewish generations naively hoped that the horrors of the Holocaust would overcome centuries of prejudice.
No. They went to Israel and fought Arabs. Winning wars and sending Mossad after terrorists is what helps you overcome centuries of prejudice. At one time, there was a theory that Jews were weak. Sadly, the weak get picked on.
That hope was ultimately dashed by the hostile and violent response to Israel’s creation.
Hilarious! Jews were sitting quietly in Tel Aviv thinking the Egyptian army was coming to bring them nice pressies. They cried and cried when they discovered the Arabs wanted them gone.
Since its founding, Israel has signed peace treaties with several Arab countries and is now pursuing a grand bargain with Saudi Arabia. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains ensnared in communal animosities and Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy.
No. Golda Meier had good relations with some Arab leaders even if they were supposed to be at war with her country.
All this makes clear that “Politics as a Vocation” will never lose its relevance.
Because Professors of stupid shit will always be shitheads.
But a lot of time has passed, and liberal democracy once again finds itself under siege. I wonder: Where are today’s Weberian heroes?
Weber was his own hero. I suppose this guy is his own Weber.
Is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky really the only one up to the task?
If he wins- sure. If he loses, his people will label him a dirty kike who was paid billions to stab his country in the back.
Walking the streets of Munich, I find reason for hope in the way the city acknowledges both its dreams and its nightmares, with memorials to Eisner and Landauer, as well as the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, which stands near the Nazi Party’s former headquarters.
Few think Germany is going to turn Nazi. It may move to the right and get tough on migrants. But, then again, it might not.
In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, I saw people gather in Munich’s main square to listen to a troupe of Jewish singers performing in Yiddish. The moment was fleeting but powerful, a reminder that the struggle against the icy darkness of fanaticism is far from lost.
I have invited the author to India to sign nice Mexican songs. That way the icy darkness of fanaticism will be banished from the country. Modi will resign and voluntarily undergo gender reassignment surgery. He will convert to Islam and marry Field Marshall Munir. In this way Max Weber's vision of a hero imbued with the 'ethics of commitment' will at last be realized. Obrador will cry and cry.
