Inside Max Weber’s Head

Leo Strauss had major problems with Weber's breezy dismissal of the philosophical Ought in favor of the "non-judgmental" Is. (Also known as the difference between value and fact.) Nevertheless, Leo called Weber the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. The man could also turn a phrase. Predicting, in that non-judgmental way of his, that the world was headed down a nihilistic slipstream at breakneck pace, Weber said the only two alternatives in the West were between a recrudescence of prophetic myth and what he called the "specialist without spirit, the voluptuary without heart." (That phrase could have been minted by Allan Bloom, Strauss' most famous disciple and the author of the highly judgmental The Closing of the American Mind.)

Anyway, a new bio of Max is out. We learn that he had mommy issues, thought the great Karl Liebknecht "belong[ed] in the madhouse "and the even greater Rosa Luxemburg "belong[ed] in the zoo." Also, he might well have kept that famous professional equilibrium of his had he lived long enough to experience Nazism, facilitated as that was by "charismatic" leadership.

Above all, it is the significance of politics in Weber’s life and work that threatens to disappear from view. Radkau provides some treatment of political events and contexts, and frankly relays some of the more distasteful, for contemporary sensibilities, of Weber’s pronouncements. However, Radkau’s narrative strategy and organizing thesis—perhaps chosen as a counterbalance to Marianne’s Lebensbild, which, understandably, placed much greater emphasis on her husband as a public figure and rather less on his extra-marital dalliances—mean that Weber’s political interventions are all too often used to supplement the main story of his struggle with his inner demons. By the end of this quest, politics appears as that which the hero had to overcome in order to be himself. Radkau seems to take Weber’s by and large unsuccessful forays into politics—attempting an alliance between social democrats and liberals, swaying between left and right rhetoric at the war’s conclusion, outnumbered in the German delegation to Versailles—as confirmation that he was indeed, ‘by profession: a scholar’, as Weber himself declared during the polarizations of 1920, when ‘insanity’ dominated politics ‘from the left to the right’.

Yet at another moment, he had told Mina Tobler that ‘the political’ was his ‘secret love’, and politics clearly played a rather more central role in Weber’s life—scholarly, public and emotional—than Radkau allows. The emergence of ‘charisma’ in Weber’s vocabulary in the immediate pre-war period, for instance, is integrally related to a position discontentedly subaltern to the political culture established by Bismarck, but without concrete alternatives; this may have intersected with, rather than resulted from, a contemporaneous personal experience of ‘grace’. The further development of ‘charisma’ may have occurred at a moment when Weber was blessed with a ‘second chance’ with Else; but it was also when Weber was advocating the need for a ‘charismatic leader’ capable of giving Germany a ‘third chance’.

This is as chilling to read now as is Burke's anticipation, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of the rise of an imperious military general out of the morass of Jacobinism. New Left Review – Peter Thomas: Being Max Weber