Like the vocational scientist, the would-be politician is on her own.

As to how they can be found, or made, Weber has little to say. What we need are democratic leaders who combine charisma with an ethics of responsibility, politicians for whom politics is a vocation. In “Politics as a Vocation,” he traced the effects of rationalization and bureaucratization on the modern state, laying out the consequent dilemma: machine politicians devoted to power on one side, uninspiring professionals on the other. Fourteen months later, in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War I, Weber returned to Munich to lecture again. Since the scientist is not a prophet, “politics has no place in the lecture room.” But that does not mean we should give it up. the prophet for whom so many of yearn simply does not exist.

For Weber, disenchantment lapses into nihilism:Īnd suppose that Tolstoy rises up in you once more and asks, “who if not science will answer the question: what then shall we do and how shall we organize our lives?” In that event, we must reply: only a prophet or a savior. We no longer pray to spirits but “can in principle control everything by means of calculation.” And while science tells us how to achieve our ends, it does not tell us what our ends should be. Worse still, the upshot of technical progress is a disenchanted world. Weber’s advice to the would-be scientist was, more or less, “suck it up.” The scientist’s vocation lies in pursuing truth, knowing that the fate of her work is to be superseded. His embrace of specialized knowledge-divorced from ethics, politics, and the search for meaning-portrays the advance of science as planned obsolescence. It’s hard to imagine that the students were uplifted by Weber’s lecture. IN NOVEMBER 1917, a group of left-leaning students at the University of Munich invited sociologist Max Weber to lecture on “Science as a Vocation.” They were troubled by the state of the academy in a time of increasing specialization, subject to distorting influences, both economic and political.

Setiya midlife