Charisma and Disenchantment by Max Weber

Author:Max Weber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

But that’s not how it is. We face not the flowers of summer but, at least initially, a polar night of harsh and icy darkness, whichever group superficially wins for now. For when nothing is left, not only the kaiser will have lost his rights—the proletariat will have lost theirs too. And when this night slowly recedes, who among those whose spring now seems so lush will still be alive? What will have become of them on the inside? Will they be embittered, or will they have turned philistine, settling for a flat dull acceptance of the world and their job in it, or—a third, not uncommon, option—will they have adopted a mystical escapism, both those with a genuine gift for such an approach and those who, often, damagingly, force themselves into it for fashion’s sake?

In every one of these cases, I will conclude that these people were not up to facing their own actions, nor to facing the world as it really is and their everyday life in it. Objectively, they did not in fact have the vocation for politics, in the deepest sense, that they thought they had. They would have done better to try to foster brotherhood on a personal level and otherwise simply go about their daily business.

Politics is a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards, done with both passion and clear-sightedness. To achieve what is possible in the world, one must constantly reach for the impossible—this is absolutely true and confirmed by everything we know of history. But to do so, one must be a leader—not only that, a hero, in a very literal sense of the word. Those who are neither leader nor hero must nonetheless remain steadfast of heart, undaunted by the failure of all their hopes—otherwise, they will be unable to achieve even what is possible today. Only those who are certain they won’t be shattered when the world turns out to be too ignorant or evil for what they are trying to give it—those who can say, even when faced with all that, “And yet!”—only they are truly called to do the work of politics.

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