Weber on Leadership

Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. Today's episode in our series "History of Ideas" looks at Max Faber's lecture on the profession and vocation of politics, delivered in the revolutionary aftermath of the First World War. Faber had a warning for his audience, don't think politics is ever easy or that anyone comes out unscathed. Talking politics "History of Ideas" is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading literary magazine. After each episode continue your exploration of the history of ideas in their unrivaled archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a subscription to the LRB can be an indispensable home learning and student resource by heading over to their website, lrb.me/ideas. That's lrb.me/ideas. It's time for another lecture and by that I don't just mean another lecture by me, I mean I'm going to be talking today about another lecture, this one given in January 1919 by the German sociologist Max Faber in Munich to a group of students. So it's exactly 100 years after the other lecture that I've talked about in this series, Benjamin Constance, the Liberty of the Ancients, compared to the Liberty of the Modens, from 1819. But as I said about Constance, he gave his talk at some remove from the central events of his life and the events he was talking about. He was a little distant from the French Revolution and its aftermath by 1819 and he had the benefit of hindsight. Faber did not have the benefit of hindsight. January 1919 in Munich was the eye of the storm and Faber was there. Munich in Bavaria was going through a revolution, a socialist revolution inspired by the Bolsheviks in Russia, one that had been going for a few months but was about to be snuffed out by a counter-revolution, followed by a lot of bloodshed. Munich in Bavaria was in a country Germany that looked to many people like it was on the brink of a civil war. It had effectively no functioning state. The state had collapsed and it had collapsed because of a catastrophic military defeat. Germany's defeat in the First World War. So this was something like the Hobsian trifecta of political disaster, revolution, blooming civil war, military catastrophe. It's quite hard and we have the benefit of hindsight to recapture just how uncertain, unpredictable, open-ended politics must have seemed in Germany in the aftermath of the First World War. The problem for us is too much hindsight. We know what happened. We know what happened because there was no civil war. Germany did establish a functioning constitution and a functioning state, the Vimer Republic. Though before long that state failed and was replaced by another kind of state, Hitler's Nazi state. And we know what happened there too. So for us the First World War and its end fits into a longer story and there's always a temptation to fold the events of 1918-1919 into that longer story. Weber did not know what was coming. Weber did not live to see it coming because in addition to that trifecta there was another force at work. Something closer to one of the horsemen of the apocalypse, the Spanish flu, which was rampant by the winter of 1918-1919 and within a year it would have claimed among its many tens of millions of victims, Max Weber himself. One way to try and recreate that feeling of uncertainty which really does inform Weber's lecture is to tell a different kind of story of the First World War. We tend to think of it as an epic but grinding, four-year struggle, miserable, often characterised by stalemate, trench warfare, and then it came to an end in a way that produced a victory that was very quickly squandered by a punitive peace and all that followed. But for people who lived through it it wasn't just a four-year grinding struggle and it wasn't just a stalemate, it was more dramatic than that, it was more unpredictable than that and it was less structured than that. One way you can tell the story is actually to say the First World War is really two wars and we've lumped them together into one and given them a single label. The first war which ran from August 1914 to the spring of 1917 was something like a European civil war. It was the war between Britain and France and Russia on one side and the Central European powers the Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the other. It spilled over into the imperial possessions of all those states but it was an internesign European struggle, it didn't make a lot of sense even to some of the participants, the competence were fueled by patriotism and a sense of nationalist further, but that was the war that was a grinding, baffling stalemate. And then two things happened in the spring of 1917 that completely changed the character of the war and turned it into a genuinely global war, the First World War. One was the Russian revolution and that's not the Bolshevik revolution from later in the year, it was the first Russian revolution, the spring revolution in February that replaced the Tsar and the Tsarist regime with an attempt to establish something like a constitutional liberal democracy and one effect of the first Russian revolution was for many people to begin to make sense of the First World War. Because for the first time, it could be said that it was a war being fought by and for democracy. The two European democracies, the major ones, Britain and France, at the start of the war, had been allied with Russia and Russia was nothing like a democracy as Tocfield said in the great epic struggle of the future, he envisaged democracy fighting against Russia. The Russian regime was a kind of medieval theocracy, more than it was a modern liberal democratic state, but that regime collapsed. And when it collapsed, Britain and France and Russia could all claim to be, finally, not just on the same side in the war, but on the same side in politics. And that attracted the attention of the world's greatest democracy, the United States of America. And the second thing that happened in the spring of 1917 is that America entered the war, not exclusively but partly because Russia was now a democracy and needed defending. And so suddenly this looked really bad for Germany and for Austro-Hungary II. The democracies of the world had allied to try and snuff out what to them was the threat of central European autocracy. But if it looked bad for Germany in early 1917, by the end of 1917, it looked really good for Germany. Because the first Russian revolution had been supplanted by the second, that attempt to establish a liberal democratic regime in Russia also failed. That regime barely even took root. The disaster of the First World War for Russia in the end took down the first Russian revolution with it. And the Bolsheviks, when they came to power as almost the first thing they did announced that they wanted to get out of the war. On any terms, it wasn't their war. They weren't going to fight it. They were off to fight different battles. So Lenin surrendered, and it was a complete surrender. And it gave the Germans everything they wanted more or less. And so Germany, which had been under threat throughout this war, by the fact that it was fighting on two fronts in the east and in the west, could turn its attention to the west. Not entirely, because there was always the fear that the Bolsheviks civil war, as it became, would spill over, and German troops would still be needed in the east. But many were able to move to the west, to take on the western democracies. And the other thing that was meant to have happened didn't happen. The Americans had not come to the rescue of the British and the French. They didn't arrive in time. They didn't arrive in big enough numbers. And they didn't make a difference. So by the spring of 1918, Germany was winning the war. And by the summer of 1918, there was panic in London, in Paris, in Washington, as the Germans advanced westward came close to taking Paris, broke through the stalemate of trench warfare, and looked on the brink of victory. The thing that's so hard to remember from this distance is that in 1918, Germany was winning the First World War, and then in a matter of months the tide turned. And the German state collapsed. The German regime collapsed. The army in part collapsed, but never entirely, so there was never a decisive military defeat. The defeat was a political defeat. The German state could no longer sustain the effort that was needed to fight this war. And when that started to collapse, it unraveled very, very quickly. So by the end of 1918, Germany had suffered a complete total defeat in the First Total War. The guys are abdicated. His regime was cast into history and a new kind of state had to be built. That was the context in which Weber was speaking, but the new state hadn't been built yet in January, in parts of the country. There was an attempt to establish a Bolshevik Republic. In Berlin, the early steps were being taken to hold on to a kind of modern constitutional order, the beginnings of what would become the Vyma Republic. And Weber went to Munich in part to tell people to their face what he thought was at stake. And in this case, the people he was speaking to were students in the middle of a socialist revolution. But he was also indirectly addressing the politicians in Berlin as well. He didn't think he could tell people what they should do. As we'll hear the theme of his lecture was that in politics, you can never tell other people, ultimately, who have big political decisions to make. How they should make those decisions, because it's a question of personal choice and personal responsibility. But he did think that there were lots of things that any responsible politician would have to take into account under circumstances of such deep political risk and uncertainty. And his lecture, which was called in German, "Politik als Beruf", usually translated into English that one word "Beruf" as more than one word, politics as a profession and a vocation, because Beruf both means a job, what you do for a living, how you own your money. And also, you're calling the thing that gives your life meaning as well as giving it income. And as Weber was clear in his lecture, politics is always in the modern state, both, both potentially a source of work and potentially a source of meaning. That doubleness is what makes this such a distinctively modern take. He was giving a lecture that turns at its end into a kind of sermon, telling people not what to do but to look into themselves and think about what they might do and what it would mean. In some ways, this is the great secular sermon in the history of modern politics. These circumstances could be described as the rawest form of Hobbesian politics, because so much was at stake, but also because the risk of chaos and unraveling was so high, Germany seemed in early 1919, defeated in war, ravaged by flu, its population starving, its politicians in a panic, revolutionaries on the march, many, many soldiers having come back from the war in their own minds, undefeated and still armed. Germany seemed on the brink of political disaster. So it's a Hobbesian moment in the history of modern politics, and Hobbes would absolutely recognize the stakes, but there are other things too that connect Weber to Hobbes, not directly, indirectly, but there are overlapping interests and overlapping themes. And one is simply this that Weber, before this lecture, in his academic writing, his sociological and political science writing, had given what still probably is the most famous and the pithiest definition of the modern state. Weber tried to sum up the character of a state in just a few words. He said a state, a modern state, is that association which successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate coercion, well that's sometimes translated as the monopoly of legitimate violence. Those five words, successful claim, monopoly, legitimate violence, the two that tend to stand out to people are monopoly and violence. The state is the thing that monopolizes violence. It is the violence machine, and that's the crudest possible reading of Hobbes. But actually if you look at that definition, the thing that makes it Hobbesian, and the thing that gives it force of the other words, so the state doesn't just claim a monopoly of violence, it's legitimate violence. No one can claim a monopoly of violence because there always be some forms of violence that spill out, no state, abolishes violence altogether except its own. But in a modern state, only the state is allowed to do violence, to do coercion, to force people, if necessary, at the point of a gun, to do what it wants. That's Hobbesian. But crucially, it's a claim. The state claims to be able to do this, and a functioning state claims it successfully. So that monopoly depends on people, the people, accepting the claim. So it's an interlocking relationship between the sovereign power and the people. The power of the state comes from the fact that the people accept the claim. But having accepted that claim, the people are then subject to power backed up by violence against which ultimately they cannot make a legitimate rebutting claim. That's Hobbesian, not just that violence is monopolized, but that the monopoly depends on the people accepting that the monopoly is legitimate. And when that happens, sovereign power and the people are locked in it together. Favour once gave a cruder definition of democracy in which he said his understanding of democracy is that we elect someone to take decisions for us, and then if it goes wrong, we send him to the gallows. The sending him to the gallows bit is not very Hobbesian, but the idea that we allow someone to decide for us, and it's a kind of ultimate power, but it's a power that only can make sense because it's being done in our name. That's Hobbesian. Another connection is that Weber was, like Hobbes, a scientist. So Weber was a social scientist, Hobbes would have thought of himself as something more like a natural scientist, though that came to include society too. But the real connection between them is that they were the kind of scientists who, when they thought about politics, thought that their science revealed the limits of science in politics, or in Hobbes' case, the limits of reason. If we go back to Hobbes' argument, essentially what he said was, if you think rationally about politics, you will reach a point where you realise that your rational argument has reached its own limit, because ultimately, political decision-making does not have to be rational. The rational bit is that you have to accept the political decision, even if it's not a rational one. To put it differently, Hobbes never says that the sovereign has to be rational, though it would be good if the sovereign were. Sovereigns who can think clearly are going to do the job much better, but it's absolutely integral to Hobbes' argument that sovereign decision-making only has to be a decision. It doesn't have to be a reasonable one. Weber's version of that argument is that his social science, his sociology, his political science, his history, he thought could teach you an awful lot about how politics works, how its institutions develop, which institutions work better than others, but it couldn't tell you what politicians should do. To put it more bluntly, Weber did not think that social science taught you that you'd be better off being ruled by social scientists. In fact, he thought the opposite. He thought politics was not a business for scientists, and if you live in a state where scientists are taking the decisions you're in trouble, because scientists are not politicians, and what your social science should teach you about politics is a kind of total logical lesson that politics is best done by politicians. It wasn't just scientists that he was wary of. There were all sorts of professions that Weber thought were really ill-suited to politics. Academics were another group. He didn't think politics should be left in the hands of people who aren't very good at reaching decisions, or think that the argument should go on, or should wait for proof or for evidence. The kinds of professions he thought suited, an entryway into politics, were law and journalism, because lawyers and journalists were quite used to making it up as they go along, and there was another group he didn't think were well-suited to politics, and I'll come on to them in a moment. So Hobbs and Weber both thought that if you think scientifically about politics, you realise that politics cannot be left to the scientists. But there were big differences between Weber and Hobbs, and the differences were of course the differences of the more than two centuries between them. Germany in 1919 was really nothing like England in 1649, 1650, 1651. One difference is that that incipient civil war that never quite broke out in Germany in early 1919 was not a two-way contest. So Hobbs was trying to warn against the politics that becomes a choice in either war, king or parliament, this religion, or that religion. He was trying to find an understanding of politics that transcended the binary choice or locked it in together so that it was no longer a choice. In Weber's case, the situation he faced was not two-way, it was at least three-way, a three-way choice. Because one of the things that could be chosen in January 1919 in Germany was the side of the modern state, that is the people in Germany who were not either seeking to promote revolutionary transformation, the Bolsheviks, the Spartacists, the other socialist groups, nor the people who were trying to return the world to the one they thought had been abandoned just a few months earlier, the people who either wished the Kaiser back, or wished to recreate German national imperial power on the model they thought they'd been fighting that war for four years. There were people in Germany who wanted to turn the clock back, there were people in Germany who wanted to turn the clock forward, and there were people in Germany who wanted to hold the line and build Germany from where it was. Those were the people who ultimately would build the Weimar Republic. Many of them were socialists, many of them had been Marxist socialists, with a faith at least in theory of not in practice in Marxist revolution. But after the disaster of the First World War, some of those politicians thought that a realistic appraisal of the situation meant that what Germany needed was something like a liberal constitutional state, and they did what they could to build one. And Weber was partly talking to those politicians, telling them to hold their nerve, telling them to do what needed to be done, telling them to remember that nothing in politics is simple or pure or moral. He was taking aside, unlike Hobbes. Hobbes was trying to get beyond taking sides. Weber wasn't. Weber was taking the side of the modern state. The reason Hobbes couldn't do that is because no Hobbes in state existed in Hobbes' terms. He was both defending whatever happened to be the order and trying to imagine a new intellectual foundation for whatever order you found yourself in. Weber was much closer to the practical business of what we might now call state building. But the other difference, the bigger difference, the one that I've touched on with some of these other talks too, once we get beyond Hobbes, is that people writing about and imagining a future for the modern state have modern states to watch, to study, to look at, and to learn from. There were plenty of examples. And by the time we reached 1919, the story has moved on sufficiently that Weber was able to write a kind of sociological history of the most successful modern states. So the first part, nearly the first two-thirds of Weber's lecture, is a kind of academic account of how modern states work, not in theory, but in practice, based on the historical evidence, not philosophical speculation. And he was particularly interested in the modern British state, which he thought with good reason, was one of, if not the, most successful examples of how this could work. The big change in politics that Weber had seen, not just in his lifetime, but over one or two generations before, was what he called the professionalisation of politics. So politics had become a line of business. And among the institutions that have been created by the professionalisation of politics, was one that I barely touched on in these talks. But has some claims to be the single most important institution of modern politics, the political party. Politics had become party politics, and political parties were, in Weber's terms, machines. That's what he called them, but not just him in the United States. The party was known as the party machine, and it operated mechanically. It was a line of business. It was a soulless enterprise. It employed many, many people to do lots of fairly grubby and mechanical things, prime among which was to get the vote out at election time. Machine politics was the thing that Gandhi hated about modern representative states. Machine politics for Weber was their distinguishing characteristic. So if he was on the side of the state, he had at some level to be on the side of the machine. But he also understood that if politics is just a machine, it genuinely is soulless. Politique Al's Barouf just becomes that part of that word that means professionalisation in its narrowest sense, mechanical, routine, mercenary, unimaginative. And politics for Weber needs always to be more than that. Someone has to supply the vision. Someone has to believe in the cause. Someone has to know what the point of it all is. The name for that person is the leader, the leader of the party, the leader of the state. And Weber thought that the British political system, parliamentary politics on the British model, was very good at producing leaders out of the machine. Not leaders who were above the machine and didn't dirty their hands with the messy business of politics. But leaders who understood that politics was mechanical and yet were able to speak beyond the party machine to the people as a whole, to the nation. The kinds of politicians he had in mind were people like the great Victorian Prime Minister William Gladstone, whom he writes about and talks about in this lecture. As a kind of democratic dictator, that's the word that he uses. Someone capable of adopting that kind of ultimate power, an ultimate voice in the state. Not because Gladstone was some kind of deus ex-macchina coming from outside of politics to supply it with vision. But because he came from inside politics, he worked his way up. What his rival, Disraeli, called the greasy poll, but having reached the top, he was able to supply politics with his vision. The other thing that Weber had at his disposal was a strange and hideous natural experiment between rival political systems to see which one functioned best under stress. And the name for that experiment was the First World War. He had just witnessed four years in which rival political systems had been tested to destruction. And he knew the outcome by January 1919. The winners, the United States, Britain, France were the ones that had as their leaders professional politicians. When the war ended, the victorious American president was Woodrow Wilson. The victorious British Prime Minister was David Lloyd George. The victorious French Prime Minister was George Kym also. Each of them, professional politicians, though Wilson for a while, had been a political scientist, which would have made Weber very nervous. But each of them rose through the party system and reached a kind of position of ultimate authority in the war, not simply by dint of their vision, but by dint of their ability to manage the machinery of modern politics and to supply the machine with the kind of professional expertise it needed, as well as the imagination. And those politicians, each of them ironically, who had built their reputations early on in politics as being against war. And in Wilson's case, had won an election by saying that he would never take America into the First World War. So they were hypocrites too. They were duplicitous. They were all double men, playing two parts. They were all the kinds of politicians that Gandhi absolutely hated. And they were up against a state in Germany that was not run by professional politicians. The German state had two forms of leadership in it. On the one hand, the Kaiser himself, who was, as Weber would have said, an amateur. So politics was not the Kaiser's line of business. He didn't come into it as a career. He was born into it, and he was really bad at it. He made lots of mistakes. He was foolish, but also he hadn't been tested. The parliamentary system tested politicians. It winnowed them out until it found the one or two who could lead. Gladstone was proof of that. Lloyd George was proof of that. The Kaiser couldn't be got rid of, and so he was never tested until he was literally tested to destruction. But during the First World War, Germany ultimately put its fate in the hands of another class of political leader. Because this was a total war, the German state put its faith in military leadership, supplied by soldiers, Hindenburg and Ludendorff. It became a kind of military dictatorship, and it made a certain sort of sense. When you're fighting the ultimate war, don't you need leaders who understand war better than anything? Isn't victory going to go to the people whose leadership is closest to military leadership? And Weber's answer was, no, the First World War proved that. You don't win a war by putting power in the hands of soldiers, because soldiers are not politicians, and this war, more than any other war, was ultimately a war of politics. The toughest political system would win, because the toughest political system would take the decisions that provided military victory. So Weber's lecture was in part a defense of the idea of professional politics, but delivered in the double language of the modern state. To be a professional is to be more than a professional. To do it as a job is to supply it with a vision, if you are one of the few who is cool to political leadership. The final big difference between Weber's vision and Hobbes is, is that Weber does something that Hobbes never did, and probably wouldn't have known how to do. Weber tries to take us inside the mind and the heart of the leader. He tries to tell the story of the doubleness of modern politics from inside the head of the sovereign politician. That is the politician who has to take the ultimate life and death decisions. The decisions that ultimately decide whether you win or lose a war. Weber said that modern politics, professional politics, has to be done with the head and the heart. And the last part of his lecture, the bit that is most like a sermon, not least because it starts to adopt semi-religious language of devils and ghosts and hauntings, is a kind of psychological account of the stresses and strains of trying to live that sort of life, with that sort of responsibility, with both the head and the heart, reason and passion, or as Weber puts it, to live through two ethics simultaneously, the ethic of responsibility, of doing the thing, which is judged on the basis of its consequences, of its outcome, a kind of rationalist approach, and the ethic of conviction, doing something because you believe it's the right thing to do. As Constance said of ancient liberty and modern liberty to his audience, it's not a choice. You have to do both. Weber was saying to his audience of politics, of responsibility and conviction, equally, it's not a choice. To be in politics with aspirations to making the ultimate decisions, you have to do both. You can't just think about the consequences and you can't just think about your convictions. You have to reconcile your convictions with the consequences and that means accepting that whatever you believe and however passionately believe it, some things will happen because of the business that you're in that do not sit easily with your political conscience and you're going to have to live with that. And by implication in Weber's lecture, his rebuke was to all those people he saw in Germany in early 1919, whom he thought had broken the link between conviction and responsibility, particularly the revolutionaries, including the young revolutionaries he might have been speaking to in Munich, in January, who believed in a better world, who believed that it was possible to transform politics beyond the modern state to something like a communist utopia and who therefore thought that the price was worth paying to get there, even if the price was bloodshed and violence and force and misery. It would be wiped away, the slate would be wiped clean when you arrived at the promised land. Those were the politicians who thought that conviction trumps responsibility. And Weber thought that if you go into politics with that attitude, you become profoundly irresponsible because you think that the death that you cause and the violence that you unleash is not your responsibility because the slate will be wiped clean. He also said explicitly that politics is no job for saints. It's no job for people who think that the means and the ends always have to go together. One of those people, though, I don't think this person was for most in Weber's mind, was the subject of the last talker gay, Gandhi, who explicitly said in politics, the means and the ends have to go together. And if you don't force that through, the means will contaminate the ends. Weber thought, indeed, the means will contaminate the ends, and that's the price of politics. It's the price you pay to live a world, a life, a profession, a vocation, knowing that the means will contaminate the ends because the means are the means of violent coercion. So whatever your end is, it will always have that stain on it. Your end could be anything it could be peace. I think Weber thought it ought at some level to be peace like Hobbes, but it's peace through violence. And so any peace that's achieved by violence will always have the stain of violence on it. But Weber also thought there was another temptation in politics, not just to have too much conviction, but to have too much responsibility. That is to be conviction less, not to have faith, not to have beliefs, not to have passions, not to have a cause, but simply to be going through the motions, to be a functionary or a bureaucrat. Modern states depend on functionaries and bureaucrats. Weber understood that as well as anyone. He spent half his life writing about bureaucracy, but he didn't think that bureaucrats could be political leaders. Any more than academics could, or scientists could, or soldiers could. To be a political leader, you have to do more than just way up the consequences. You can't make a political decision on the basis of what it says in your models or your charts. You can't calculate how many deaths are the price worth paying for some particular outcome, because something about that outcome has to have a value for you that goes beyond just calculation, even the calculation of life and death. This was the challenge of modern politics for Weber. You somehow had to be a calculator, and you also had to be a person of conviction. The thing that Weber thought most often happened in politics is that people discounted unintended consequences, and that that was extremely dangerous. They thought there was something that they wanted to do, there was something they wanted to achieve, and they tried to calculate what would happen if they went for that cause, for that goal. But they didn't think hard enough about all the things that would happen without them wishing it, that had nothing to do with that cause or that goal. There were unintended spillovers of the fact that whatever they wanted to achieve, they would be using this huge monstrous instrument to get there, a modern coercive state, and that it was too easy, particularly for revolutionary or transformational politicians, to forget that many of the most important things that happened in politics were not intended by anyone. No one wanted them. They just happened because stuff happens when you use the modern state as your instrument. Weber's lecture tends to get folded into that story I mentioned at the beginning, the one that we know, and we know how it ended, the story that leads from January 1919 to the summer of 1919 when the Weimar Republic is signed into law, and Germany narrowly avoids complete breakdown. The civil war is averted. Then, a few years later, the Weimar Republic comes close to collapse because of the terrible inflation that's allowed to rip through its economy. It's stabilized, and then it's undone again by the Great Depression, and the Great Depression paves the way for the rise of Hitler, who had been fermenting trouble since 1919 in Munich. Weber was very concerned throughout 1919, right up until his death a year later, that the German state was going to make a mistake in its attempt to establish itself as a modern state, a functioning modern state. It would not have strong enough political leadership. What he admired about the British Prime Minister, and also, though to a lesser extent, about American presidents, was their ability to speak for the nation. Gladstone was a party politician who tried to speak at some level for all the people, and the most successful American presidents did the same. They transcended the grounds of their election to become a kind of spokesperson for a nation. And Weber thought the political leadership in a modern state went speaking for the nation as a whole, and he worried that Germany under the Weimar Constitution, which was organized on the principle of proportional representation, so it would be a parliament in which there would be multiple competing sites of authority, and different people claiming to be leaders not of the nation, but of their narrow sectional group, of particular interests, and particular factions, that it would be the kind of party politics that Weber always feared, narrow, functional, unimaginative, professional. He wanted Germany under that constitution to have the possibility of a single source of leadership, and so he was a great supporter of the feature of that constitution, which was the power of the president under what became Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, in a time of crisis to assume an almost dictatorial power, the claim because parliament was no longer working because factions or divisions or the inability to achieve a single voice was preventing anyone deciding anything. Under Article 48 in times of crisis, the president could suspend parliament and assume power in his own person, the assumption being, it would be a hymn, and it was a hymn by the end of the Weimar Republic, it was Hindenburg, the soldier, the soldier politician, and the soldier politician paved the way for another soldier politician, Hitler, who paved the way for the total destruction of the German state. And Weber occasionally gets, in part, blamed for that, anyone who at the birth of the Weimar Republic was advocating for strong, almost unlimited presidential authority in times of crisis, has to carry the can for the fact that that was what opened the door at some level to Hitler, but that's completely unfair because Weber had no idea what was coming and Weber had never heard of Adolf Hitler. If you want a model for a Weberian politician, I think you can look somewhere else. It's not Hitler, we know it's not Hindenburg. Weber had a kind of contempt for soldier politicians. Weber liked the professionals. He greatly admired Gladstone, but I think there's another politician who comes closer than anyone, though Weber doesn't say it to being the kind of politician, who is the ideal Weberian type. And it happens to be, for some people, not for everyone, but for many, the greatest of all modern politicians. The ideal Weberian leader was Abraham Lincoln, because Lincoln is the politician who meets all the criteria. He was a machine politician. He was at some level a hack. He fought his way up and through. He experienced many defeats on his path to the presidency. He was a loser more often than he was a winner in electoral politics. And that was one of the things that Weber liked about British and American democracy. It taught politicians how to lose, not just how to win. The Kaiser never learned how to lose. Ludendorff never learned how to lose. And so when they lost, they lost everything. Lincoln kept coming back, but ultimately he rose above his origins as a hack, a party politician, and a lawyer, the profession that Weber thought was best suited to politics, to become a kind of transcendent national leader who spoke beyond party divisions. Lincoln had a cause. He had something that he passionately believed in. It wasn't exactly a moral cause, and he definitely wasn't a saint. He believed in the union. He believed in the American state. And he thought it was worth doing almost anything to try to save it, which meant that he understood that saving the union might involve the most extreme forms of violence, and it did. And Lincoln had to live with that. The Civil War, the American Civil War, to that point, the worst and bloodiest war in modern history until the First World War replaced it with that title. Was Lincoln's war, and he fought it ruthlessly, passionately, with some imagination, and also with some more than some calculation. And it was an absolute bloodbath. And Lincoln never shied away from the fact that he was responsible for killing on a mass scale. He knew that his decisions would lead to death, that that's what politics was, and that he would have to live with it. And it nearly sent him mad. One of the themes of Weber's lecture is that leadership, not only is not for everyone, political leadership of a modern state, might just be for a narrow, very narrow group of people who can live with the psychological strains of this double life, the life of being a good person and a bad person, of doing good through violence, of having blood on your hands, and not pretending that it's not your responsibility. He thought many people would be sent mad by that, but a few, a very few, could thrive under those conditions. Lincoln came very close to losing his mind during the American Civil War, but he didn't. He even survived the grief of losing his son. And then he did the thing that all they bear in politicians need to do, if they're going to prove that they understand the profession and vocation of politics, he won. To find Weber's lecture and links to reading and other discussions, including a past episode of Talking Politics on this theme, please go to our show notes, or follow us on Twitter @TPpodcast_. Next time we hear about the economist Friedrich Hayek and his faith in the power of the market.