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.309), Weber arguedthat, in the first place, one could satisfy one s ethical needs by identifyingoneself with a cause or ideology.He believed that the actions of those whomerely  lived off politics, who made their living from manipulating powerwithout any fixed principles, led only into  emptiness and absurdity.Onthe other hand, one may devote oneself to a cause to such an extent thatits demands are absolute, make no compromises with reality and blame thedisastrous effects of policies on others.But this absolute ethics or  ethics ofconviction was irresponsible and also potentially disastrous.The genuinevocation of politics involved dedication to a cause, but one modified byan  ethic of responsibility , and making the pragmatic recognition that evilmust sometimes be used to produce good.The acceptance of this  ethicalirrationality of the world is what the pure ideologue cannot accept.Weber had a somewhat bleak view of the nature of politics, whichhe thought was necessarily bound up with violence and never-endingstruggle.Struggle between nations and within nations was inevitable andwould not end in some future utopia of peace and brotherhood  it waspermanent.Weber famously defined the state as an institution that hasa monopoly of legitimate violence within a given territory, and in facthe believed that the politician s capacity to get things done ultimatelyrested upon the threat of physical violence.Politics frequently had to usemorally questionable means to achieve good ends.This gave politics amorally compromised and even tragic dimension.However, politics involved not only power but also authority, andWeber s analysis of different forms of political authority is a central featureof both his political sociology and his own normative political beliefs.He thought that there were three basic types of authority or legitimatedomination: traditional, legal-rational and charismatic.The first two areby far the more common and fit in with his overall account of the riseof modernity and its central characteristic of rationalisation.Traditionalauthority is based on the idea of the sanctity of tradition and prevailed inpre-modern societies.Legal-rational authority is based on the authorityof law and the notion that through law, society is rationally organised.This is closely related to bureaucracy and corresponds to the general riseof rationality that is central to modernity.Charismatic authority, basedon devotion to a charismatic leader, is more rare, but can appear at anytime and cuts across the other two.In the name of new values, the char-ismatic leader can institute change that overthrows tradition, but can alsoset aside the imperatives of legal-rational organisation.167MAX WEBERThis was Weber s  scientific picture of the social world and its historicaldevelopment.It forms a background to his own passionately held ethicaland political commitments, which  as matters of personal choice  hesought to keep rigorously separate from his scientific life.His vocation as a scientist, committed to value-free social science,was deeply important to him on a personal level.At the same time, hewas strongly committed to the cause of German nationalism, althoughhe was not any kind of extreme nationalist.He subscribed to no beliefin the necessity of all Germans belonging to the same state, nor in theintrinsic superiority of Germans or their culture; he merely believed thatthe culture was irreplaceable, just as other cultures were, and the statehad a central duty to preserve it.He also believed that Germany, becauseof geography and history, was fated to play a major role in internationalaffairs.Nationalism was a possible substitute for religion because it cangive death meaning in a disenchanted universe, in the sense of offeringa cause worth dying for.More importantly, Weber was a liberal, although of an unusual kind,deeply influenced by the scepticism and pessimism of Nietzsche.Wehave already seen that Weber believed there was no rational basis for anysystem of values or ethics, but he was also deeply sceptical about whathad been (and for many still remains) a central article of liberal faith: theideal of progress towards a fully rational world.Indeed, Weber was moreinclined to see Western civilisation as being in decline.The ideal of an ever more rational world had been a central liberalideal ever since the Enlightenment, yet Weber saw the progress of ration-alisation as little more than a curse upon humanity.Ever more detailedsocial and economic organisation turned people into cogs in a vastsocio-economic machine that limited their freedom and crushed theirindividuality.Weber expresses this in dark phrases like the  iron cage and(in relation to the development of a welfare state)  the new serfdom [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]