Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 2 The Weber's private, sex defined values.
38
strategies of Great Britain - for 'the British parliament became, after all, the proving ground
for those political leaders who managed to bring a quarter of mankind under the rule of a
minute but politically prudent minority'
15
- German power can be saved. When Weber wrote
PV the war already had been lost; he speaks no more of military struggle and world
domination:
'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which
group may triumph politically now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost
his rights
.'
16
Weber's militarism has been transformed; elements common to both forms of his militarism,
however, lie behind his treatment of national strategy in PG and his definition of politics in
PV. Politics in general cannot do without 'any kind of independent leadership in action'; he is
going to lecture the students, however, on a narrower concept of politics: 'only the
leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a
state.'
17
The state, in its turn, cannot be defined by its tasks;
18
it can only be defined 'in terms of the
specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical
force.'
19
And therefore 'the decisive means for politics is violence.'
20
Weber's way of defining politics is not without its rhetorical element: at first his concept of
'politics' involves only 'independent leadership', albeit in the broadest sense of the word; it is
only after it has been narrowed down to the level of the state that it is widened to 'influencing
the leadership'. In this process a new emphasis has been created: Weber has now pushed
'independent leadership' into the foreground and any form of collective, or heteronomous,
struggle of the powerless, as well as any struggle to abolish all power, into the background,
never to speak of it again (in PG he condemned syndicalism as 'the unpolitical and anti-
political heroic ethos of brotherhood'
21
). An instinct for power indeed belongs to the normal
qualities of the politician.
22
As Weber writes in PG, it is the task of the politician, as distinct to that of the bureaucrat, to
enter the political arena
23
and fight for his own convictions
24
. This is repeated in PV:
15
'The main point is that to a significant degree this subordination has been voluntary. Where are the comparable
achievements of the much-praised German Obrigkeitsstaat ?' ES p. 1420, GPS p. 343.
16
FMW p. 128, GPS p. 547.
17
FMW p. 77, GPS p. 493.
18
See also ES, p. 55, WG p. 30.
19
FMW p. 77/8, GPS p. 494.
20
FMW p. 121, GPS p. 540.
21
ES p. 1428, GPS p. 354.
22
FMW p. 116, GPS p. 534.
23
See also ES p. 1462, GPS p. 394 on the conditions for the moral claim ('inneren Anspruch')of Germany to
count in the arena of world politics; the end of the final section on Parlamentarisierung und Föderalismus, which
because of its technical character was not included in the translation, elaborates on these conditions: 'Only
"Herrenvölker" have the vocation to intervene in the spokes of the development of the world. If people who lack
this quality try this, then not only the sure instinct of other people resists against it, but they founder at this
attempt also inwardly.' Weber adds that he does not mean 'Herrenvolk' in the racist sense of 'the English
deserter' Chamberlain; a nation however, 'which has o n l y produced good officials, worthy clerks, honest
merchants, sound scientists and technicians and - loyal servants' and lets officials rule it without trying to control
them, is no 'Herrenvolk' and may better concern itself with its everyday business (GPS p. 430).
24
ES p. 1417, GPS p. 339. Cf. ES p. 1399, GPS p. 317 and ES p. 1415, GPS p. 338: 'Wille zur Macht'.
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