Weber’s Useful Political Corrective

This insightful perspective on Max Weber’s relevance to politics today is based on the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that the distinguished political theorist Wendy Brown gave in 2019. Reflecting Weber’s seminal 1917 and 1919 lectures, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” Brown considers how Weber’s work might better equip us to deal with today’s acutely nihilistic political climate, reflected in wide disenchantment prompted by neoliberal over-reliance on market-dominated technocracies, the discrediting of knowledge by fake news, anger politics, excessive rationalism, the rise of demagogic authoritarianism, and polarization between religious extremism and post-modern skepticism.

In the political space, Weber’s solution is his famous stress on “charismatic leadership” over traditional and rational-legal authority. In opposition to Karl Marx or revolutionary communism, Weber’s leader combines an ethic of principled, responsible leadership with a passionate, clear-sighted ability to inspire citizens to engage in the political process. By contrast in the field of knowledge dissemination broadly defined, Weber draws sharp boundaries between education and lived political experience. Scholarship and pedagogy should be value-free and detached from millenarian notions of progress or human perfectability. In the wake of 19th-century romanticized organic theories of social change and post-world War I pessimism, Weber’s demarcation makes sense, but a valuesneutral scholarship (unlike his leadership prescriptions) offers little answer, in Brown’s critique, to the pressing existential challenges of the present.

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber

By Wendy Brown

Yale University Press, 2023, 240 pages, $24.75 (Hardback)