CALCULABLE RESPONSIBILITY AS THE MARK OF IRRESPONSIBILITY

In “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany” (1978b) and in Economy and Society Weber (Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978a) effectively presents calculable responsibility as the essence of bureaucracy. Rather than rule-following per se (or even specialization of function), Weber identifies a focus on “calculable rules” (berechenbaren Regeln)—rules identifiable by some rational process—as the crucial feature of modern bureaucracy. By operating according to calculable rules bureaucracy serves the demand, arising from modern society's “technical and economic basis,” for “‘calculability’ of consequences” (“Berechenbarkeit” des Erfolges”)Footnote ⁴ (1978a, 975; 1964, 717–18).Footnote ⁵ To be captured in calculable rules bureaucratic duties have to be stable, discrete, and capable of being discharged. Bureaucrats perform bureaucratic duties without any sense of personal responsibility for the ultimate substantive purposes. Weber argues that the lack of personal responsibility allows the quarantining of passions and “personal preference” from bureaucratic actions (1978b, 1404; PB 54). Indeed, bureaucrats strive to ignore or deemphasize incalculable factors that might derail the calculability of consequences: “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation (Kalkul)” (Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978a, 975; Reference Weber and Winckelmann1964, 718). Bureaucracy may fall short of being a closed system of calculable rules—after all, judgment is required in the application of even calculable rules—but bureaucracy's determination to see the world and responsibility as calculable remains definitive for it.

Weber argues that within actual bureaucracies the bureaucratic ethos is appropriate and necessary for the functioning of complex modern societies (PB 54; Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978b, 1394). Isolating the phenomenon of calculable responsibility within bureaucracy enhances our understanding of why Weber is critical of political leaders who adopt a bureaucratic ethos and why they might be tempted by that ethos. Political leaders may rule in the manner of bureaucrats because the ubiquity of bureaucracy encourages political leaders to view their own responsibility as calculable. Bureaucracies shape the ethical dispositions of nonbureaucrats by creating “the settled orientation of man for observing the accustomed rules and regulations” (Weber Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978a, 988). Further, under the influence of bureaucracy's view of responsibility as calculable, political leaders may not rise to the incalculable dimensions of political responsibility. Politics proper is the struggle over “ultimate values,” and political leaders must take a stand on questions of ultimate value if they are truly to assume the burdens of political leadership (PB 53–54, 72, 78; WB 19–25). But according to Weber ultimate values are fundamentally incompatible, and conflicts between them are immune to any rational settlement (WB 27). Thus one's stance on questions of ultimate value cannot be stipulated in advance, and the defense of an ultimate value position is an ongoing task. Calculable responsibility thereby obscures the quintessential political responsibility. By evading the question of ultimate values bureaucratic politicians can focus on the question of suitable means for pre-given, lower level, specifiable ends. Cost-benefit analyses and efficiency conundrums can then substitute for the more amorphous work of thoughtfully attending to how to actualize an ultimate value or of deciding between ultimate values.

Like bureaucratic politicians, conviction politicians—though in their own distinctive manner—also cleave to a picture of the world and of responsibility as calculable and thereby narrow their responsibility. Weber claims that an ethic of conviction and an ethic of responsibility are the “two fundamentally different, irredeemably incompatible maxims” that are available to guide “all ethically oriented action” (PB 83). The simplest, but reductive, distinction between the two ethics is that an ethic of conviction focuses on the purity of intention behind an action and “simply refuses to inquire about “consequences” (Folgen)” (PB 83). But Weber suggests that the conflict between the two ethics is a “conflict of ultimate worldviews (Weltanschauungen)” and so is not simply a conflict between two different ways of reaching a moral decision (PB 79; Starr Reference Starr1999, 409). When the two ethics are understood as two different ways of seeing the world, it becomes clear that the defining difference is that an adherent to an ethic of conviction cannot “tolerate the ethical irrationality of the world (die ethische Irrationalität der Welt” (PB 85) and so, I will argue, embraces the calculable responsibility frame.

Although conviction politicians (Gesinnungspolitiker) are devoted to a “cause,” they take their inner disposition as the primary focus of their attention. The German “Gesinnung” has the senses of “fundamental belief” and “conviction,” on the one hand, and “character” and “disposition,” on the other. Reflecting these two strands of meaning, Owen and Strong also suggest “ideologists” or “politicians of predisposition” as alternative translations of Gesinnungspolitiker (2004, xliv). Weber draws on both strands of meaning by presenting conviction politicians as focused on “intentions”—as focused on nurturing and sustaining a deep inner fidelity to their beliefs: “With an ethics of conviction, one feels ‘responsible’ only for ensuring that the flame of pure conviction (reinen Gesinnung), for example, the flame of protest against the injustice of the social order, should never be extinguished” (PB 84; see also 2012b, 318–19). For some conviction politicians, say Christian pacifists, purity of intention requires purity of the means wielded in the name of their cause so they disavow violence. However, even when conviction politicians wield violent means, say as revolutionary socialists, they still feel morally superior to their opponents because of the “nobility of their ultimate intentions (letzten Absichten)” (PB 81).

What I want to show is that this focus on intentions is tied to a view that the world is ethically calculable (and ultimately to a view of responsibility as calculable). Weber tells us that the conviction politician is a “cosmic ethical ‘rationalist,’” who effectively refuses “the fact that in many cases the achievement of ‘good’ ends is inseparable from the use of morally dubious or at least dangerous means and that we cannot escape the possibility or even probability of evil side effects” (PB 85, 84). Faith in an ultimate moral bookkeeping—where good outcomes reward good intentions and evil outcomes punish evil intentions—is easy to recognize in religious conviction politicians. But Weber attributes cosmic ethical rationalism, albeit an attenuated one, even to secular conviction politicians, such as revolutionary socialists. He tells us that secular conviction politicians approach any bad consequences that arise from their good intentions as an aberration and therefore not something for which they are responsible. Here he offers the example of the syndicalists, who advocated direct action, such as strikes and sabotage, by the working class to overthrow the capitalist order in favor of small self-governing productive associations:

That even secular conviction politicians expect a certain degree of ethical rationality from the world does not seem so outlandish when we recall that the principle of “what goes around comes around” is ingrained in our moral common sense. Weber's criticism of war victors who try to claim “I won because I was in the right” confirms the ordinariness of cosmic ethical rationalism (PB 79). It is also helpful to note that, according to Weber, cosmic ethical rationalism emanates from the deep-seated human need to make sense of a disordered, chaotic world, especially with regard to the distribution of good fortune and suffering (PB 86; Reference Weber and Winckelmann1946b, 275).Footnote ⁶ It makes sense, then, that some secular politicians could be cosmic ethical rationalists. Although their ethical rationalism is different from and perhaps less pronounced than that of avowedly religious politicians, they can still meaningfully be described as adherents to an ethic of conviction. After all, Weber's depiction of an ethic of conviction (like his depiction of an ethic of responsibility) is likely an “ideal type.” An ideal type is an “analytical construct” (Gedankenbild) that is never instantiated in an unalloyed form in the real world, but it helps us recognize both commonalities and differences and thereby make comparisons, across worldly phenomena (Weber Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012a, 124–5; Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012b, 330–331).

Conviction politicians render responsibility calculable in a manner that is different from bureaucrats. Although conviction politicians engage in value struggle, they view that struggle as (at least theoretically) having the possibility of an endpoint. Their view of the cosmos as ethically rational implies a belief that the cosmos is (or could be) ordered in accordance with their ultimate value. Rather than depersonalize their actions, conviction politicians highlight their inner dispositions. This single-minded focus on their pure intentions allows them to separate themselves from the possible or actual undesirable consequences of what they do, because they believe that only good can come from good intentions and only evil from evil. Their responsibility begins and ends with purely intended actions and does not extend to how these actions unfold. Weber's depiction of the syndicalist also suggests that under an ethic of conviction the move from an ultimate value to the specific demands of action is to some extent scripted in advance. Only certain actions are to count as fidelity to the cause—as adequate indicators of pure intention—regardless of their deleterious consequences or whether or not they actually further the cause. It turns out that the performance of specific actions that are more or less identifiable in advance is sufficient to keep the pure flame of conviction alive. For conviction politicians, calculation is less about focusing on measurable features of the world and more about following a series of entailments from an ultimate value, without considering worldly contingencies.

THE INCALCULABLE RESPONSIBILITY TO RESPOND TO THE WORLD

Conviction politicians’ denial of the ethical irrationality of the world underlies Weber's skepticism toward them. What will become of them in the “polar night of icy darkness” soon to envelop Germany? Will they “become embittered or philistine, will they settle for a simple, dull acceptance of the world and their profession or. . .will they attempt a mystical escape from the world?” Of conviction politicians who take any of the latter routes, Weber says, “I shall conclude that they were not equal to the task they had chosen, not equal to the challenge of the world as it really is or to their everyday existence” and that they lacked “the calling (Beruf)Footnote ⁷ for politics” (PB 93). In “Science as a Vocation” Weber also insists on a confrontation with the world “as it really is.” Moderns must face “the challenges of the day,” eschew all comforting illusions and accept the disenchantment of the world (WB 30, 31). The inability to “to look the fate of the age full in the face” is “weakness” (WB 24). One who seeks solace in religion despite its inconsistency with the intellectual standards of the modern world is “unable to endure the fate of the age like a man” (WB 30). Facing, enduring, and rising to the challenge of the world “as it really is” are contrasted to a willfully blinkered or escapist bearing and to resignation—to “dull acceptance” of the world. Here Weber is pointing to an active, though sober, stance that is alert to what is tractable amidst what is intractable. He is pointing to, we might say, a kind of responsiveness to the world.

Weber's imperative tone when discussing responsiveness to the world suggests that we have a responsibility, indeed a fundamental responsibility, to respond to the world “as it really is.”Footnote ⁸ That Weber conceives of such a responsibility is supported by the fact that conviction politicians who fail to respond to the world as it really is are the centerpiece of Weber's discussion of political irresponsibility. In an age of disenchantment, where human beings are desperate for meaning and mistake or substitute “excitement” for “authentic passion,” conviction politicians are, more often than not, reckless grandstanders without any “inner gravity” (inneren Schwergewichts) behind their conviction (PB 92). They do not respond to the disenchanted world, but rather float away from it.

Weber says that anyone who does not grasp the ethical irrationality of the world “is in fact a mere child in political matters”; and he explicitly associates a “mature (reifer) human being” with an ethic of responsibility (PB 86, 92). His treatment of this ethic reveals that facing the ethical irrationality of the world spirals out into a heightened responsiveness to the world and an embrace of the fundamental responsibility to respond to the world as it really is—a responsibility that cannot be stipulated in advance, reckoned up, or discharged. Acceptance of the ethical irrationality of the world involves acceptance of the fragmentation of the world into autonomous orders: religious, economic, political, aesthetic, intellectual, and erotic (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills1946a; PB 87). Each order is rationalized according to the ultimate value it serves. These values are irreconcilable and cannot be brought to a harmonious, ordered peace. Acceptance of this polytheism, which was long effaced by Christian monotheism, is also an acceptance of conflict as an ineradicable feature of human existence (WB 23, 24). This conflict includes the conflict between the god of salvation, who demands moral purity, and the god of politics, in whose sphere the distinctive means are violent (PB 90).

When I accept the ethical irrationality of the world, I see that my political responsibility cannot be exhausted by any moral injunction against violence. If I do not resist force, I am responsible for the consequences of nonresistance (PB 82). Without belief in an ultimate ethical script it is more difficult to separate myself from the consequences of my actions. My part is not specifiable in advance or dischargeable, but is altered by the play of circumstance and by whether other human beings do their similarly contingent part. I am therefore willing to reckon with “average human failings” (PB 84). I recognize that my action itself alters the world that requires responding to and that the world always calls for a further response.

The link between maturity and the responsibility to respond to the world helpfully emerges in Weber's discussion of the fact that it is not age that is decisive for good political judgment but rather “the trained ability to scrutinize the realities of life ruthlessly, to withstand them and to measure up to them inwardly” (die geschulte Rücksichtslosigkeit des Blickes in die Realitäten des Lebens, und die Fähigkeit, sie zu ertragen und ihnen innerlich gewachsen zu sein) (PB 91). This connection between maturity and responsiveness to the world implicates a third Weberian concern: the achievement of “personality” or integrated, sense-giving selfhood. In Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problem of Historical Economics, Weber says I can only attain the deep, enduring relation to an ultimate value that is constitutive of personality if I have deliberately “forged” and “translated” my ultimate values into “purposes” (Weber Reference Weber and Oakes1975, 192; Turner Reference Turner1992, 153–60). Weber's gloss on maturity in “Politics as a Vocation” suggests that the translation of ultimate values into specific purposes occurs through a constant responding to the ever unfolding world. I must not let realities determine me immediately, but I must “withstand” and incorporate them into my relation to my ultimate values, and so “measure up to them inwardly.” If I am mature, I will not try to order the world through cosmic ethical rationalism. Rather, I will assume the ongoing work of becoming a “personality” and strive to make myself “a whole ordered to some purpose, whatever that may be” (Mehta Reference Mehta2001, 223).

Responsiveness to an unfolding world is different from an inherent flexibility or adaptiveness. While political leaders should take the possible consequences of action “into consideration,” Weber also insists that commitments to ultimate values should not readily be displaced, or perhaps displaced at all, by dim forecasts of feasibility. Such displacement could suggest a failure to properly commit to an ultimate value and an avoidance of the ongoing, difficult work of forging an enduring relation to an ultimate value. For Weber one of the traits of those with a calling for politics is that, despite “the collapse of all their hopes” and faced with the “obduracy” of the world, they say “Nevertheless!” and persist with the pursuit of their cause: “[W]hat is possible could never have been achieved unless people had tried again and again to achieve the impossible in this world” (PB 93–4; see also Weber Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012b, 318). Weber laments that the “sacrificing” of ultimate “ideals” to “whatever is successful or promises to be successful” is “glorified by the name ‘Realpolitik.’” He seems more approving of a “narrower” Realpolitik involving the “adaption of the means for the realization of a given ultimate position to the given situation” (Weber Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012b, 318–19).

Weber's third exemplar of irresponsibility in “Politics as a Vocation” is the power politician, who seeks power for the sake of power, lacks belief in a cause, and appears to take the overly reactive posture of lesser Realpolitik (PB 78). Lacking in fundamental commitments, the power politician does not “withstand” the realities of this world, but instead is immediately determined by them. Importantly, the power politician's adaptiveness is consonant with a calculative mode of thinking. For the power politician the ineradicable differences between ultimate values are effaced, all values become fungible, and all positions are measured along the single scale of the acquisition of power.

Weber identifies the “crucial psychological characteristic of the politician” as “a sense of proportion (Augenmaß) . . . the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure. What is needed, in short, is a distance from people and things” (PB 77). Weber contrasts “a cool sense of proportion” with “hot passion” and suggests Augenmaß is a kind of soberness, which reins in any possible recklessness that passion for a cause might invite. But “Augenmaß” also connotes a good eye or good judgment and the capacity to draw by eye; and it can also refer to the kind of approximate judgment that occurs when we eyeball something. Augenmaß, then, is different from the capacity to judge through precise measurements—through calculation. So it is a type of thinking different from calculation that allows “realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure.” Here Weber confirms that an overly calculative posture is consonant with an all too immediate determination by the world (as in the case of the power politician) and with an insulation from worldly realities (as in the case of the bureaucratic politician and the conviction politician). Thus Weber's concern about the overreaching of calculation unifies his criticisms of the bureaucratic politician, the conviction politician, and the power politician.Footnote ⁹

Given Weber's concern for the responsibility to respond to the world as it is and as it unfolds, he sometimes makes a surprising qualification to an ethic of responsibility. He limits responsibility to the “foreseeable” (voraussehbaren) consequences of action (PB 83, 84). Perhaps, for Weber, in the modern world “contingency has been routed by bureaucratized procedures” such that the genuinely unforeseeable is quite limited (Wolin [1960] Reference Wolin2004, 379–80). But his insistence on the “tragic” character of politics suggests that for Weber politics has not been completely routinized, even if the ubiquity of bureaucracy has altered the scope and character of contingency (PB 78; Palonen Reference Palonen1999, esp. 537). Alternatively Weber may think that under an ethic of responsibility the category of foreseeable consequences enlarges. Peter Breiner argues that Weber's extensive diagnoses of the dynamics of modern politics in “Politics as a Vocation” actually expand the category of “sociologically” foreseeable outcomes of different political movements (1989, 551–6). Elaborating this line of thought, when I accept the ethical irrationality of the world I accept its ethical incalculability. If I accept the ethical incalculability of the world—that is, if I accept that good does not necessarily follow from good—then I can make better predictions about how political events might actually unfold. In fact, I would be more open to the insights of science, including Weberian social science. Accepting the ethical incalculability of the world, then, does not entail the belief that politics is utterly incalculable. Instead, such acceptance allows me to cultivate a more nuanced appreciation of what is especially contingent in politics and what might be more available to foresight.

Whenever Weber raises calculation in “Science as a Vocation” he almost always raises its supplementary, necessary opposite and suggests limits to calculation even in the face of rationalization. Scientists must engage in the endless “hard work” of number crunching; for example, the “tens of thousands of quite trivial sums (Rechenexempel)” a sociologist has to perform. But genuine insight depends on a sudden burst of “inspiration” that itself “cannot be produced to order” and “has nothing in common with cold calculation (kalten Rechnen)” (WB 8–10). Similarly, science can (among other things) speak to the proper “techniques” by which to “control life. . .through calculation.” But science offers no way to ground ultimate values. The choice of ultimate value is a matter of “decision,” and the ultimate values that dominate in a given society are a matter of “fate” rather than “science” (WB 25–7, 23). What I am trying to show is that Weber makes the same effort to reveal the limits of calculation in “Politics as a Vocation.”

AN ETHICAL CLAIM BEYOND CALCULABLE RESPONSIBILITY

The emerging portrait of political maturity both finds support in and illuminates the Luther-like moment reachable by a human being with a “calling” for politics in the highest sense:

Scholars agree that in the Luther-likeFootnote ¹⁰ moment an ethic of conviction's dispositional concern appears in an amended form as a concern for the integrity of personality and thereby inflects an ethic of responsibility (Kim Reference Kim2004, 115–17; Owen and Strong Reference Owen, Strong, Owen and Strong2004, xlii–xlv; Selznick Reference Selznick2002, 34–8). Yet scholars retain a residual perplexity about the actual architecture of the moment, even when they concede that it involves an “existential” linkage of the two ethics rather than a full-scale theoretical reconciliation (Owen and Strong Reference Owen, Strong, Owen and Strong2004, xlii). The question of how the two conflicting “worldviews” can actually complement one another as worldviews within the outlook of a single human being remains without a definitive resolution (see Kim Reference Kim2004, 116 n. 60; Starr Reference Starr1999). Schluchter has even toyed with the idea that no genuine cohabitation of the two ethics is possible, especially given the radical difference between them in their openness to science (1979, 87–91). Weber's critique of calculable responsibility can shed further light on how the two “irredeemably incompatible maxims” (unaustragbar gegensätzlichen Maximen) might coincide (PB 83), though it would be folly to claim that the Luther-like moment is thereby fully explained.

In the Luther-like moment a profound ethical claim related to my sense of self arises. This is exactly the kind of claim we associate with an ethic of conviction. However, the imprint of calculable responsibility, which renders an ethic of conviction so problematic, is absent from the Luther-like ethical claim. This absence, I argue, allows the dispositional concern of the ethic of conviction to coexist with the ethic of responsibility. Let us consider the absence of calculable responsibility in the Luther-like moment. First of all, in that moment I experience an ethical claim that did not bind me in advance but emerges over the course of political struggle. My point of departure—Weber clearly states—is an ethic of responsibility (PB 92). Precisely by inquiring into the consequences of an action I discover a claim that is able to override consequentialist calculations. Moreover, because I do not look forward to a final act of moral bookkeeping I can be bound by this ethical claim without any promise of reward or vindication for letting myself be bound. Unexpectedly it is an ethic of responsibility, rather than an ethic of conviction, that properly prepares me for experiencing the fullness of an unconditional ethical claim. I find that unless I take this uncompromising stand I cannot live consistently with my ultimate value. I am also unable to abandon my ultimate value despite the possible consequences of taking this stand. Here an all too brief aside by Karl Jaspers, while drawing on Weber to elucidate Kant, seems apt: “Ethics of responsibility is the true ethics of principle. It does not take mere results or rational principles as its guide but seeks its way in the open area of possibility, pursuing an absolute that is not manifested through any material content, but only through thought in action” (1962, 72–3).

Nor is the ethical claim in the Luther-like moment “impersonal” as is a calculable rule. “Here I stand, I can do no other” is not the same as “In this situation one ought to do no other.” Because I follow an ethic of responsibility, I recognize that ultimate values do not simply exert a universal hold. I myself have made my cause, and the ultimate value my cause expresses, valuable. The ethical claim I feel in the Luther-like moment binds me in particular, and I am very much responsible for this claim. Here it is helpful to note that according to Weber only charismatic leaders are capable of having a calling for politics in the highest sense. Charismatic leaders are those whose authority rests on the “extraordinary quality” of their own person, and, unless they are “narrow-minded and vain upstart[s],” they “live” for their “cause” (PB 34–5). Because of their extraordinariness charismatic leaders can disrupt established values (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills1946b, 295–6) and engage in the value struggles that are the very stuff of politics.

Further, when I take a decisive stand in the Luther-like moment I do not purport to exhaust my responsibility. Rather, I feel responsibility for the consequences of my action with my “entire soul” (PB 92). It is difficult for me to distance myself from the consequences of following an ethical claim that binds me in particular. By finding myself at stake in my cause I also become more aware of the unending work of politics. If I can be so claimed by a cause, then my opponents might also be so claimed (Turner Reference Turner1992, 167). Significantly, Weber does not expressly limit political responsibility to “foreseeable” consequences in or after his description of the Luther-like moment. As a called politician, I take responsibility for even unforeseen consequences—a responsibility that certainly cannot be calculated in advance, reckoned up, and discharged.

Finally, the ethical stand in the Luther-like moment is a refusal: a “No!” Luther refuses to recant. In such a moment there appears a line I will not cross. Here is a profound ethical claim, but beyond the “No!” there is silence. In the Luther-like moment there is no specification of a plan or program of action: I only discover a limit to the purposes that might be consistent with my commitment to my cause, and I still retain the responsibility to move thoughtfully from my commitment to a cause to specific purposes. Although many interpreters of the Luther-like moment do regard it as a moment of refusal, this is certainly not a unanimous interpretation.Footnote ¹¹ We can, however, find evidence for this interpretation in Weber's appeal, in various works, to Plato's notion of a “daimon.”

In “Science as a Vocation” Weber describes the human being with the proper orientation to his or her ultimate value as one who “finds (findet) and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of his life” (WB 31). In “The Meaning of ‘Value Freedom’ in the Sociological and Economic Sciences,” Weber also writes that “life. . .involves a series of fundamental decisions through which the soul, as Plato [describes it], chooses its own fate—the meaning, that is, of its activity and being” (2012b, 315). These references are to the Myth of Er in Plato's Republic, which describes how in a stage of the afterlife souls choose their next earthly lives. Just as Weber tells us that we choose the ultimate value that gives sense to our existence, Plato tells us that we are responsible for our choice of life: “A daimon will not select you, but you will choose a daimon.” The divinity or daimon is “a guardian of the life and a fulfiller of what was chosen” (617d–e; 620d–e). The Goddess Necessity and her daughters, the Fates, weave our choice of life into a destiny. What is highly pertinent is that in Plato's Apology Socrates describes his daimonion (the voice of his daimon) as follows: “[W]hen it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward” (31c–d). Socrates’ daimon may demand restraint, but beyond that it is never prescriptive. Weber actually notes the nonprescriptive nature of Socrates’ daimonion in the course of his analysis of “prophets” in Economy and Society: “[T]he activity of a Socrates. . .must be distinguished conceptually from a prophet by the absence of a divinely revealed religious mission. Socrates’ ‘genius’ (daimonion) reacted only to concrete situations, and then only to dissuade and admonish. For Socrates, this was the outer limit of his ethical and strongly utilitarian rationalism” (1978a, 445–6).Footnote ¹²

If Weber imagines commitment to an ultimate value as akin to finding a daimon and the Luther-like moment as akin to the intervention of a daimon, then it seems plausible to construe the Luther-like moment as a moment of refusal. And it becomes even more possible to recognize that in the Luther-like moment Weber is trying to capture how a deep commitment to an ultimate value need not script all of one's actions and render one unresponsive to the world, even as it still gives rise to profound ethical claims. Many critics of the Weberian political ethos have not recognized this, admittedly implicit, path to a possible reconciliation of responsiveness to the world with deep commitment to an ultimate value. As a result they have expressed concern about the rigidity of outlook they believe must follow from Weber's prescription for single-minded devotion to one of the warring gods (ultimate values) (e.g., Villa Reference Villa1999, 541, 543–549).

In addition to describing a moment in which I find a line I will not cross, the Luther-like moment could also describe the very moment in which I properly commit to an ultimate value. In the moment of refusal I recognize an ultimate value that has a deep claim on me or I realize the depth of my already known commitment to an ultimate value.Footnote ¹³ In this way, Weber points to how commitments to ultimate values can be made in the course of negotiating worldly actualities, and he builds responsiveness to the world into the very act of committing to an ultimate value. As we have just seen, he describes the human being with the proper orientation to his ultimate value as one who “finds (findet) and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of his life” (WB 31). With this turn of phrase—“find” rather than “choose”—Weber discloses something important about the phenomenology of committing to an ultimate value. Most of us do not properly commit to an ultimate value. Instead we live in a nondeliberate fashion (Weber Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012b, 314–15). And yet, just as in the Myth of Er, even those of us who are not careful or self-aware do in a sense choose a life as a whole. In everything I do—in all the individual decisions I make, the whims and passions I follow, the paths I refuse or ignore—I am always choosing my fate by affirming or departing from an ultimate value. Through my everyday decisions and the unwilled circumstances of my life, certain ultimate values come to have more of a claim on me than others. When I properly commit to an ultimate value this act of commitment has the character of “finding” an ultimate value that makes sense of the life I am living and of my current place in the world.

Weber controversially casts our choice of ultimate values as a matter not of “science” but rather of “deciding between them” (WB 27). Leo Strauss famously argues that this decisionism gives a “nihilistic” cast to Weber's thought, in that Weber offers no reasoned path to arbitrating between highest values (Strauss Reference Strauss1953, 42). But, as we have just seen, it seems that for Weber properly committing to an ultimate value has the character of a response to the ways in which I am already claimed by the world. It is true that reason cannot rank these values in an overarching sense, but Weber does suggest that there is a question of fit—of finding the value that befits my own existence. This is evident in Weber's claim that science can offer clarity about what practical stances are consistent with which ultimate values and thus help a person “render an account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions” (WB 26). There is, then, thoughtfulness in a proper commitment to an ultimate value. Proper commitments to an ultimate value are not reducible to an irrational decision even if we cannot wholly explain why a certain ultimate value fits or why our lives have taken a certain character. To the extent that ultimate value commitments can have the nature of a blind brute decision, this occurs when we live our lives mindlessly, do not respond to the world, and hence do not properly commit to an ultimate value.

Further, embrace of the inexhaustible responsibility to thoughtfully respond to the world suggests that I must continually think through my commitment to an ultimate value—not necessarily to revise or relinquish this commitment (though this must surely be a possibility), but to consider how it might translate into concrete action. Thus Breiner has even envisioned a scenario where the Luther-like moment is better understood as the moment when, say, a socialist decides to stop actively pursuing socialism (but not to forsake the inner socialist conviction) because of the inevitable consequences and foreseeable unsuccessful outcome. The constraining character of worldly realities on the choice of ultimate values is, for better or for worse, manifested in Weber's perhaps overly narrow diagnosis of modern political possibilities where any radically socialist or democratic projects are destined to fail (Breiner Reference Breiner1996, 145–67, 193–4). Stephen Turner points out that the two Beruf lectures set the importance of committing to an ultimate value against a sober introductory backdrop of the historical and institutional constraints of modern politics and science and thereby make certain ultimate value commitments much less attractive (2000, 15–17).

The responsive character of Weberian commitments to ultimate values is reflected in Weber's understanding of charisma itself, where charisma may indicate a vital relation to an ultimate value. As Sheldon Wolin points out, Weber's depiction of charisma emphasizes both the bearer of charisma's decision and the fact that charisma itself is a gift: “Throughout, the decisionist element (‘work out your own salvation’) rests uneasily with a necessitarian one (‘God is at work in you’)” (1981, 417). The role of what is gifted or given may underlie some of Weber's criticism of those who seek personality through the accumulation of unique experiences. Instead of seeking meaning by gathering diverse intense experiences (say by falling under the sway of an irresponsible conviction politician or a false prophet) (WB 10–11), I should find the ways in which I am already claimed. I should find the daimon that holds the threads of my existence.

Strauss would (I think) counter that Weber undermines his own commitment to responding to the world “as it really is.” For Weber, Strauss argues, intellectual honesty in facing the world is an era-specific rather than a timeless ideal—an ideal that emerges from the disenchantment of the world. Commitment to this ideal is then a matter of “faith” rather than reason, and this ideal might be surpassed (Strauss Reference Strauss1953, 73–4). Even if the timeliness of an ideal is an argument against its status as an ideal, Weber's ideal of responsiveness to the world seems to be more than a capitulation to the disenchanted, rationalized world. Acceptance of disenchantment itself and of a disenchanted worldview does not exhaust what it is to respond to the world as it is. Weber's critique of calculable responsibility says that the disenchanted view of the world, which casts everything as “in principle” masterable by calculation, can actually be inconsistent with responding to the world as it really is. Properly responding to the world requires us to keep the disenchanted view of the world—and the calculation it valorizes—in its place.

For Weber the pursuit of a calling (Beruf), understood as single-minded dedication to one of the rationalized orders of existence, offers the only path to “personality” or meaningful, integrated selfhood in modernity (Goldman Reference Goldman1992, 60–86). In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber describes how the notion of a calling as a divinely assigned worldly task gave Protestantism a this-worldly orientation (Weber Reference Weber and Parsons1999). In the Beruf lectures he returns to the notion of a “calling” to capture a this-worldly orientation for a disenchanted modernity, where the search for meaning tempts us to flee from or deny the disenchanted world. A danger of the reclaimed calling is that the specific substantive demands of a calling may efface the ongoing call (Ruf) to respond to the world and thereby lead to irresponsibility.Footnote ¹⁴ Weber addresses this danger by insisting that whenever we pursue a calling, whether in politics or science or presumably any other sphere, we must strive to keep calculation in its place. Keeping calculation in its place allows the self-showing of the incalculable responsibility to respond to the world. Only then can commitment to an ultimate value (and the generation of strong ethical claims from that commitment) be reconciled with continued thoughtfulness about the world.

MORALITY'S PLACE

One of our qualms in accepting the Weberian political ethos is our reluctance to remove moral inhibitions from a political actor. By “morality” I have in mind received rules about what is good and what is evil, what is obligatory and what is prohibited. Morality purports to be universal and unconditional and, in addition to conformity to the rules, appraises actions based on the underlying intention. It is from morality that a definitive prohibition against violence can arise. At first glance, Weber's critique of an ethic of conviction, which he associates with moralized political stances, seems to dispense with morality.

Morality's displacement from Weber's political ethos is widely accepted by readers of “Politics as a Vocation.” Thus Michael Walzer claims that Weber frees a political leader to leave morality behind, albeit after much anguish: “[T]he crimes of Weber's tragic hero are limited only by his capacity for suffering. . .there is [no] explicit reference back to the moral code, once it has, at great personal cost to be sure, been set aside” (1973, 179). Walzer's well-known criticism of the Weberian political ethos states,

Walzer worries that any political ethos must leave a spacious place for external and internal moral bookkeeping (a practice that is clearly consonant with calculable responsibility).Footnote ¹⁵ His concern likely rests on a thought we all share: moral bookkeeping seems essential to order, to the curtailment of violence, and to justice. Now Weber would not necessarily rule out the external imposition of determinate penalties on errant political actors, though he would worry about politics becoming immersed in questions of past guilt (PB 80). However, with regard to the internal disposition of a political actor, Weber insists—contra Walzer—that belief in salvation courts rather than inhibits political irresponsibility. Belief in salvation, with its tie to calculable responsibility, can lead to disregard for the consequences of action.

Moreover, although the Weberian ethos may resist morality, in its own distinctive non-moral (as opposed to immoral) way, it could offer some protection from the very evils we, perhaps mistakenly, hope morality will protect us against. Weber's ethos refuses a totalitarian vision, consistent with calculable responsibility, of the political world as completely orderable in accordance with one's ultimate value. Further, an adherent to the Weberian ethos refuses the illusion, which is also consistent with calculable responsibility, that the use of violent means might be justified without a moral remainder. Weber suggests that this illusion grips conviction politicians. Because the “tasks” of politics “can only be accomplished with the use of force” conviction politicians, even those who disavow violent means, are tempted to violence (PB 90). As they succumb to violence, conviction politicians inevitably attempt to “justify” their use of violent means on moral grounds. But Weber says that “with this problem of justifying the means by the ends, we see the inevitable failure of an ethics of conviction in general. And in fact, it logically has only one possibility. That is to repudiate every action that makes use of morally suspect means” (PB 85). Means-ends calculations cannot clean hands or preserve pure dispositions. For Weber it is precisely when conviction politicians betray their ethic and start making means-ends calculations to justify the use of force on moral grounds that they become especially dangerous. They act violently—“the last use of force to end all force” (PB 85)—but retain their sense of separation from the ethical and material consequences of violence.

Thus the Weberian political leader must be able, borrowing from Bernard Williams, “to hold onto the idea. . .that there are actions which remain morally disagreeable even when politically justified” (1978, 64). But this notion suggests that Weber allows much more of a place for an ethic of conviction (and hence for morality) than Walzer recognizes. Although it falls to us to “choose” between the two competing ethics as “ultimate worldviews” (PB 79), Weber indicates that both ethics have a profound, non-extinguishable claim on us. They are the available guides for “all ethically oriented action” (PB 83). Both “invoke ethical maxims” and are “in eternal conflict”—a conflict that “no ethic” can resolve (Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012b, 313–4). As Leo Strauss has pointed out, Weber's “strife-torn world demands a strife-torn individual. The strife would not go to the root of the individual, if he were not forced to negate the very principle of war: he must negate the war from which he cannot escape and to which he must dedicate himself, as evil or sinful” (1953, 65–6). It is not true, as Walzer argues, that after an agonizing moral dilemma a Weberian political leader sets “aside” the moral code. The called political leader never entirely leaves behind the powerful moral claim exerted by an ethic of conviction; rather he or she must always grapple with this claim. A possible inner harmony would deny the conflict that belongs to the polytheistic world. An ethic of conviction, then, continues to offer itself as a model of responsibility for the Weberian political leader. Its continuing claim may thus act as a powerful, though not inviolable, constraint on political violence. Strauss's own observations about Weber, then, reveal further limits to the nihilism Strauss identifies in Weber.Footnote ¹⁶

The fundamental responsibility to respond to the world grounds the need to consider and take account of morality as an always existing claim on us. As Walzer himself emphasizes in another context, “morality refers in its own way to the real world” (1977, 12). This is why Weber refuses to say an ethic of conviction is always unfit for politics: “[W]hether we should act in accordance with an ethics of conviction or an ethics of responsibility, and when we should choose one rather than the other, is not a matter on which we can lay down the law to anyone else” (PB 91–92). He refuses to prejudge whether an ethic of conviction might be appropriate to a particular political context. Weber suggests that sometimes an ethic of conviction may befit a political situation, though we could only come to this judgment honestly via the responsiveness to the world encouraged by an ethic of responsibility.Footnote ¹⁷ So the Weberian political leader always grapples with the claim of an ethic of conviction—which is the claim of calculable responsibility—and asks whether in the political situation at hand it discloses or conceals what we see of the world and our responsibility.

Weber's well-known Nietzschean rootsFootnote ¹⁸ can lend support to our revised portrait of the Weberian political leader. In a broad sense Nietzsche's search for a responsibility beyond Christian morality (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche, Horstmann, Norman and Norman2002) has an analog in Weber's attempt to articulate an ethos that is beyond an ethic of conviction. Weber associates an ethic of conviction with the “ethics of the Sermon on the Mount” (PB 81). The present interpretation of Weber finds more specific support in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, where Nietzsche writes of the “millennia-long battle” between the “two opposed values ‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil.’” These opposed value couplets stand for noble morality and Christian morality, which Nietzsche calls the “morality of intentions,” respectively. Nietzsche ventures that “there is perhaps no more decisive mark of the ‘higher nature ,’ of the more spiritual nature, than to be conflicted in that sense and still a real battleground for those opposites” (Nietzsche Reference Nietzsche, Horstmann, Norman and Norman2002, 33; Reference Nietzsche, Clark and Swensen1998, 30–1). Similarly, we might say, Weber's called political leader keeps alive the tension between an ethic that cleaves to calculable responsibility and an ethic that is sensitive to the incalculable dimensions of responsibility. He does not allow calculable responsibility to be the only word on responsibility.

There are also grounds for arguing that Weber gives calculable responsibility a place in our ethical imaginations that goes beyond an acknowledgment of calculable responsibility's persistence. Weber tells us that bureaucracy is necessary to the order and functioning of complex modern societies (Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978a, 975). So too perhaps calculable responsibility is necessary to everyday order. We need shorthand for responsibility in order to get by. We cannot rethink what is demanded of us with every fluctuation of the world of becoming. Further—and perhaps more decisively—even as bureaucratic routinization may be a source of modern unfreedom, bureaucracy's impersonal rule also brings the compelling idea of “equality before the law” with its “principled rejection of doing business ‘from case to case'” (Weber Reference Weber, Roth and Wittich1978a, 983). As Walzer's criticism of Weber suggests, calculable responsibility constitutes a powerful understanding of justice. There are many important contemporary critiques of morality and the perniciousness of its technical application to politics and political thinking (e.g., Geuss Reference Geuss2008; Honig Reference Honig1993). Weber foreshadows these critiques, but he also perhaps goes further because he provides conceptual resources for the difficult work of delineating morality's appropriate place in late modernity.

AN ETHOS (OPEN TO THE EXTRAORDINARY) FOR ORDINARY POLITICS

Critics find Weber's proposal for a charismatic political leader supported by a devoted but inevitably passive citizenry to be an impoverished vision of democracy (Breiner Reference Breiner1996, 145–232; Villa Reference Villa1999, 542–3, 555–557). This vision is manifest in Weber's fateful contribution to the writing of the Weimar constitution, which provided for the direct election of the president and gave the president emergency powers (Eliaeson, 142–4). I have sought to derive a political ethos (rather than a political program) from Weber's philosophical meditation on political responsibility in “Politics as a Vocation.” In this spirit I propose that we can read his institutional prescription metaphorically as an account of the sway of calculable responsibility. The passive citizenry that does not rise to politics proper in Weberian democracy represents all of us in our ordinary relation to responsibility. Ordinarily we live in a nondeliberate fashion, default to a muddle of received values to which we have not properly committed, and follow the routines of bureaucratized existence (Weber Reference Weber, Bruun and Whimster2012b, 314–15). The charismatic “called” politician is the human being who has left the thrall of calculable responsibility and accepts the full, and ordinarily concealed, burden of human responsibility. But because charisma is always vulnerable to “routinization” (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Wright Mills1946b, 297), calculable responsibility must forever be struggled against.

Weber argues that only those with charisma have the potential for a calling for politics in the highest sense. My claim is that not all charismatic politicians can actualize this potential because not all of them are able to rise to the incalculable responsibility to respond to the world. As other commentators have noted, for Weber political maturity arises from a “trained ruthlessness” (Weber Reference Weber, Mommsen and Schluchter1994b, 86; PB 91) in facing worldly realities, and “Politics as a Vocation” offers a training in this kind of ruthlessness (Owen and Strong Reference Owen, Strong, Owen and Strong2004, xlvi; Strong Reference Strong2012, 129–134). This ruthlessness is not reducible to ruthlessness in making means-ends calculations and in willingness to use violence. I have tried to show that this ruthlessness is also about vigilance with regard to whether we are allowing calculation to obscure the unfolding world and to limit rather than reveal our responsibility.

Not every called political leader will come to a Luther-like moment. That is only a “situation” which “may befall any of us at some point, if we are not inwardly dead” (PB 92). Ordinarily a called political leader will seek compromises, forge consensus, and bend (but not capitulate) to political realities. These actions follow from facing the ethical irrationality of the world, which forecloses any hope that the world could ever be wholly ordered in accordance with one's ultimate value. It is only rarely that the depth of a commitment to an ultimate value becomes politically salient and evident as a non-negotiable claim.

Still, with the Luther-like moment Weber creates a space for strong ethical stands that need not amount to reckless absolutism and a failure to face the world as it is. Here I depart from Steven Lukes (Reference Lukes2006) who argues that principled stands against torture cannot be supported by a Weberian political ethos. Although it may be true that a Weberian political ethos might sanction torture—and I cannot deny this—it can certainly allow a definitive stand against torture as well. The Weberian political leader continues to feel the non-extinguishable moral claim of an ethic of conviction. This leader knows that consequentialist calculations could never cancel out the moral arguments against torture. Moreover, a political leader fully aware of the temptations of calculable responsibility would surely be wary of the ticking time-bomb scenario whereby the torture of x number of terrorists might be balanced against y number of innocent lives saved. Such a scenario is clearly an attempt to render responsibility calculable and should immediately alert a Weberian political leader to actively attend to the incalculable dimensions of the situation at hand (such as, say, the intangible undercutting of the rule of law). Most importantly, although Weber believes that we all see the world in the light of our ultimate value commitments, his political leader attempts to face the situation at hand with as little reliance on the obscuring lens of calculable responsibility as possible. Calculable responsibility is a way of seeing the world that immediately filters the situation at hand so that we do not see the “Technicolor horror show” of torture. To face torture—to see what it is, what it does to the recipient, what it does to the torturer—we must strive to see outside the dimming, flattening lens of calculable responsibility, which presents a “simple menu list of options,”Footnote ¹⁹ a series of quantifiable, comparable units. The Weberian political leader first strives to see otherwise than through calculable responsibility and does not preemptively calculate what to do.