Maturity as a Way of Life and the Contradictions of Freedom in Weber’s Political Ethic of Responsibility

In his famous “Politics as a Vocation” lecture, Max Weber (1946) wrestles with the question of the way of life appropriate to the politician given the space of human freedom that has emerged in a purportedly disenchanted world, when both traditional religious faith and modernist faith in human reason have become unbelievable. It is, he suggests, an ethos of maturity. For Weber, the ethos of political maturity takes a stand of self-assertion, of freedom, in the world (Blumenberg 1983). Yet it does so precisely by adhering to an “ethic of responsibility”, an ethic which circumscribes limits to the use of violence because it takes responsibility for the consequences of human action.

Weber insists that an ethic of responsibility is a heroic way of life; it enacts human freedom because it rejects the crutch of appeal to ultimate values. That insistence notwithstanding, this paper explores how Weber’s ethic of responsibility bears the trace of the religious that it disavows. This, the paper argues, can be seen in the influence that the exemplary lives of religious virtuosi exert upon Weber’s ethic of responsibility. Making this claim entails setting aside an intellectualist understanding of religion premised on belief in favour of understanding religion as a desire-driven practice. Shifting to such a register brings into relief how Weber’s notion of maturity as the exercise of human freedom remains tied to the religious virtuosi even when Weber insists that religious belief has become incredible.

Weber contrasts an ethic of responsibility to an ethic of conviction. Problematic about an ethic of conviction is that it prioritizes purity of principle regardless the consequences of political action. Accordingly, it slips easily into chiliasm, into the unlimited use of violence for the achievement of its ultimate ends. An ethic of responsibility, rather, ties the ethical character of political judgment to the effects such judgment initiates in the world. The mature politician alone—no divine entity or trajectory supposedly latent in history—bears responsibility for the outcome of action. Importantly, then, an ethic of responsibility entails not only self-assertion in the world, but also self-limitation in the use of violence. An ethic of responsibility, it should be added, thus avoids the danger of another ethic that Weber critiques—machtpolitik, the logic that might equals right—because it too can equally unleash unlimited violence.

Yet, one might ask how, in seeking to avoid the Scylla of an unlimited violence fuelled by confidence in ultimate ends, Weber avoids the Charybdis of the unlimited violence of a machtpolitik. Otherwise stated, one might ask what grounds Weber’s insistence that the limited use of violence is the stance of maturity, the appropriate exercise of human freedom in the political realm.

Here one must recognize that there is not only activity—heroic self-assertion—in Weber’s notion of the ethic of responsibility, but also passivity. David Owen and Tracy Strong (2004) go too far in their voluntarist depiction of Weber’s ethic. Weber, they suggest, understands the mature politician as acting in a void. There is no guarantee that a political judgment is the appropriate one—it is legitimated only by the impressiveness of the freely-chosen commitment of the one who takes the stand—and yet the politician takes responsibility for assuming it. Weber’s sense of responsibility, claim Owen and Strong, finds its roots in Kant’s discussion of enlightenment as the casting off of the tutelage of tradition, but it represents a radicalization of this line of critical inquiry in a Nietzschean vein in so much as it refuses even the security of the transcendental structures of reason as a source of meaning.

Owen and Strong fail to adequately foreground the dimension of feeling, of being moved, in Weber’s thought. More specifically, they miss altogether the language of being moved that Weber employs with respect to those who take up an ethic of brotherliness in the non-political realm of personal relations. Most interestingly, they miss Weber’s discussion of certain virtuosi of religion—Jesus, the Buddha, and St Francis of Assisi—who he thinks succeed in living a life that is “not of this world” while still working very much in the world, and this without succumbing to the political means of violence.

Weber himself does not fully acknowledge the implications of his admiration for the religious virtuosi. Weber misses how his very inclination to an ethic of limits is mediated by the worlds of brotherliness poetically disclosed by the religious virtuosi which capture his hopeful imagination, spur his desire, and thus motivate his call for a politics of limits. It is precisely these examples of brotherliness that spur Weber to take on the responsibility for political action, and in so doing to guard also against the danger inherent in the responsible use of violence which is the slide into a ruthless machtpolitik. Hence the ethic of responsibility is not a mere exertion of will, but rather the practical judgment of a will motivated by desire for the ethic of brotherliness perceived in poetically-disclosed worlds that capture its imagination.

One might go even further, to suggest that this mediation occurs not simply via the worlds poetically disclosed by such religious virtuosi, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by way of a habitus constituted through embodied traditions—the ways of life—shaped by the exemplary figures that have gone before. On this view, the ethic of responsibility is not an action into a void, but rather the continuation of a historically- and religiously-mediated cultivation of certain desires—in Weber’s case, the desire constituted by an exemplary ethic of brotherliness—over others—the desire spurring pursuit of a machtpolitik.

Attention to Weber’s exploration of the mature exercise of human freedom in the political realm, combined with a notion of religion that shifts from the cognitive register of belief to the register of desire-driven practice, thus holds an important upshot. It reveals that even when, for Weber, ultimate values have become unbelievable in a disenchanted world, the desire-constitutive force of the lives of the religious virtuosi continue to shape his ethic of responsibility.