Centralized Force and Nonviolence Resistance

Centralized Force and Nonviolence Resistance

Order Description
The paper must include an introduction with a thesis statement (a clear and concise response to your research question) as well as a descriptive outline of the
argument and the structure of the paper.

Examine and evaluate the arguments for necessary or lesser-evil violence in the pursuit of political security as put forward by Machiavelli the prince, max Weber
Politics as a vocation, and Ignatieff Lesser Evils. How do the arguments compare? What do they suggest about theories of nonviolent resistance, and how might theorists
of nonviolent resistance respond? Support your argument with reference to real-world situations and problems.

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May 2, 2004 Lesser Evils
By Michael Ignatieff
I. The Fire Next Time
It has taken nearly three years, but the 9/11 commission and the Supreme Court hearings on enemy combatants have given us our first serious public discussion about how
to balance civil liberties and national security in a war on terror. Even so, we have not begun to ask the really hard questions. The hardest one is, Could we actually
lose the war on terror?
Consider the consequences of a second major attack on the mainland United States — the detonation of a radiological or dirty bomb, perhaps, or a low-yield nuclear
device or a chemical strike in a subway. Any of these events could cause death, devastation and panic on a scale that would make 9/11 seem like a pale prelude. After
such an attack, a pall of mourning, melancholy, anger and fear would hang over our public life for a generation.
An attack of this sort is already in the realm of possibility. The recipes for making ultimate weapons are on the Internet, and the matériel required is available for
the right price. Democracies live by free markets, but a free market in everything — enriched uranium, ricin, anthrax — will mean the death of democracy. Armageddon
is being privatized, and unless we shut down these markets, doomsday will be for sale. Sept. 11, for all its horror, was a conventional attack. We have the best of
reasons to fear the fire next time.
A democracy can allow its leaders one fatal mistake — and that’s what 9/11 looks like to many observers — but Americans will not forgive a second one. A succession
of large-scale attacks would pull at the already-fragile tissue of trust that binds us to our leadership and destroy the trust we have in one another. Once the zones
of devastation were cordoned off and the bodies buried, we might find ourselves, in short order, living in a national-security state on continuous alert, with sealed
borders, constant identity checks and permanent detention camps for dissidents and aliens. Our constitutional rights might disappear from our courts, while torture
might reappear in our interrogation cells. The worst of it is that government would not have to impose tyranny on a cowed populace. We would demand it for our own
protection. And if the institutions of our democracy were unable to protect us from our enemies, we might go even further, taking the law into our own hands. We have a
history of lynching in this country, and by the time fear and paranoia settled deep in our bones, we might repeat the worst episodes from our past, killing our
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former neighbors, our onetime friends.
That is what defeat in a war on terror looks like. We would survive, but we would no longer recognize ourselves. We would endure, but we would lose our identity as
free peoples.
Alarmist? Consider where we stand after two years of a war on terror. We are told that Al Qaeda’s top leadership has been decimated by detention and assassination.
True enough, but as recently as last month bin Laden was still sending the Europeans quaint invitations to surrender. Even if Al Qaeda no longer has command and
control of its terrorist network, that may not hinder its cause. After 9/11, Islamic terrorism may have metastasized into a cancer of independent terrorist cells that,
while claiming inspiration from Al Qaeda, no longer require its direction, finance or advice. These cells have given us Madrid. Before that, they gave us Istanbul, and
before that, Bali. There is no shortage of safe places in which they can grow. Where terrorists need covert support, there are Muslim communities, in the diasporas of
Europe and North America, that will turn a blind eye to their presence. If they need raw recruits, the Arab rage that makes for martyrs is still incandescent.
Palestine is in a state of permanent insurrection. Iraq is in a state of barely subdued civil war. Some of the Bush administration’s policies, like telling Ariel
Sharon he can keep settlements on the West Bank, may only be fanning the flames.
So anyone who says ”Relax, more people are killed in road accidents than are killed in terrorist attacks” is playing games. The conspiracy theorists who claim the
government is manufacturing the threat in order to foist secret government upon us ought to wise up. Anyone who doesn’t take seriously a second major attack on the
United States just isn’t being serious. In the Spanish elections in March, we may have had a portent of what’s ahead: a terrorist gang trying to intimidate voters into
altering the result of a democratic election. We can confidently expect that terrorists will attempt to tamper with our election in November. Condoleezza Rice, the
national security adviser, said in a recent television interview that the Bush administration is concerned that terrorists will see the approaching presidential
election as ”too good to pass up.”
Thinking the worst is not defeatist. It is the best way to avoid defeat. Nor is it defeatist to concede that terror can never be entirely vanquished. Terrorists will
continue to threaten democratic politics wherever oppressed or marginalized groups believe their cause justifies violence. But we can certainly deny them victory. We
can continue to live without fear inside free institutions. To do so, however, we need to change the way we think, to step outside the confines of our cozy
conservative and liberal boxes.
II. The Necessity of Lesser Evils
When democracies fight terrorism, they are defending the proposition that their political life should be free of violence. But defeating terror requires violence. It
may also require coercion, secrecy, deception, even violation of rights. How can democracies resort to these means without destroying the values for which they stand?
How can they resort to the lesser evil without succumbing to the greater?
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Putting the problem this way is not popular. Civil libertarians don’t want to think about lesser evils. Security is as much a right as liberty, but civil libertarians
haven’t wanted to ask which freedoms we might have to trade in order to keep secure. Some conservative thinkers, like those at the libertarian Cato Institute, come
down the same way but for different reasons: for them, the greater evil is big government, and they oppose measures that give the executive branch more power. Other
conservatives, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, simply refuse to believe that any step taken to defend the United States can be called an evil at all.
But thinking about lesser evils is unavoidable. Sticking too firmly to the rule of law simply allows terrorists too much leeway to exploit our freedoms. Abandoning the
rule of law altogether betrays our most valued institutions. To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive
interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or
deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil. The question is not whether we should be trafficking in
lesser evils but whether we can keep lesser evils under the control of free institutions. If we can’t, any victories we gain in the war on terror will be Pyrrhic ones.
III. How to Think About Civil Liberties
Civil liberties are not a set of pesky side constraints, pettifogging legalisms tying democracy’s hands behind its back. Ask what the American way of life is, and soon
we are talking about trial by jury, a free press, habeas corpus and democratic institutions. Soon we are talking about that freedom and that confident sense of an
entitlement to happiness that the Europeans find so strange in this country. Civil liberties are what America is.
Civil liberties may define us, but we have a bad record of jettisoning them when we get scared. We have the A.C.L.U. today because patriotic liberals after World War I
were ashamed that the Russian Revolution of 1917 had terrified us into the Red Scare, the Palmer Raids and the needless roundup, arrest and deportation of mostly
Eastern European immigrants, whose worst offense was that they had socialist, anarchist or communist illusions. We learned from the Red Scare that we need a civil
liberties lobby because frightened majorities do reprehensible things. Between 1917 and 1920, we did ourselves plenty of harm. A congressman, Victor Berger, was denied
his seat in the House after being convicted of espionage for writing an antiwar article, and a presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, was sentenced to 10 years in
prison for delivering an antiwar speech. Aliens were harassed and deported. Legal strikes were smashed, and trade-union leaders were jailed. Indeed, by comparison with
the Red Scare or later shameful episodes like Roosevelt’s detention of Japanese during World War II, there have been no mass detention camps in the United States since
Sept. 11 and no imprisonments for dissent. Not yet anyway.
Even so, after 9/11 we were frightened, and Congress and the government weren’t always thinking straight. After the attack, it may have made sense to detain more than
700 aliens on one immigration pretext or another until we could figure out whether there were other sleeper cells at
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work. But it made a lot less sense to hold them for months (80 days on average) and to deny them lawyers and public due process before we tossed most of them out of
the country. It was shameful, as a Justice Department report found, that many Arab and Muslim detainees were abused and harassed in confinement. Civil libertarians
like Prof. David Cole of Georgetown nobly stood up and denounced such detainments as the abuses that they were.
But being absolutely right on this issue doesn’t make a civil liberties position right on every other issue. Consider the question of a national ID system. Instead of
crying ”1984,” the civil liberties lobby should be taking an honest look at the leaky sieve of the existing driving license ID system and admit how easy it was for
the hijackers to talk their way into the ID’s that got them onto the planes. Instead of defending a failed ID system, civil libertarians should be trying to think of a
better one. One possibility is for Congress to establish minimum national standards for identification, using the latest biometric identifiers. Any legislation should
build in a Freedom of Information requirement demanding that the government divulge the data it holds on citizens and purge data that is unsound.
President Bush has been trying to use civil liberties as a wedge issue, campaigning for the swift renewal of the Patriot Act in an effort to portray his rival as soft
on the war on terror. The civil liberties lobby has taken the bait, leading the charge against the Patriot Act and its renewal. But partisan politics and civil
liberties ideology are making it hard to take an unbiased look at what Bush has actually done. While some aspects of the Patriot Act were vexatious and ill conceived
— for example, giving federal agents the power to force librarians and bookstores to divulge what their customers are reading — other parts of the act (and the
antiterrorism measures in general) are right-minded. Giving the F.B.I. the same powers to wiretap terrorist suspects that they already use against the Mafia and drug
traffickers seems reasonable, particularly because the taps are controlled by court order. Requiring banks and security brokers to file suspicious-activity reports to
prevent money-laundering by terrorists sounds like an overdue reform. Enhancing the ability of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. to pool and share information seems like a good
idea. As the staff reports of the 9/11 commission have shown, neither agency regularly shared its list of Al Qaeda suspects before Sept. 11 or passed the list to the
airlines.
Our vulnerability to attack on 9/11 was not a result just of bureaucratic bungling, dysfunctional Beltway turf wars and plain inertia. The disaster also was a result
in part of the unintended consequences of well-meaning measures taken by civil libertarians in the past. Erecting fire walls between domestic intelligence gathering
and law enforcement seemed like a positive development in the wake of the abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. These same good intentions led Congress in 1978 to pass
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law created a special federal court that meets in secret to rule on requests by counterintelligence officers to put
espionage and terrorist suspects under surveillance. These warrants could be issued on lower standards of evidence than those required under the Fourth Amendment rules
that regulate warrants issued in standard criminal cases. In order to guarantee that law enforcement would not exploit these lower standards, a legal ”wall” was
installed between intelligence gathering and criminal investigations.
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The court could grant F.B.I. intelligence agents a domestic surveillance warrant only if the primary purpose of their surveillance was foreign intelligence, not
criminal prosecution.
Richard Clarke, the former terrorism czar, has wisely proposed lowering the wall between domestic law enforcement and intelligence functions. This would allow us to
pull all our domestic antiterrorism capabilities into a version of Britain’s MI5, an agency charged with domestic intelligence-gathering and counterterrorism but
without law enforcement responsibilities.
A second victory for civil liberties — the taming of the C.I.A. after its excesses during the Vietnam War era — may have also weakened our human intelligence
capacities before 9/11. In the wake of disclosures that the C.I.A. had tried to assassinate foreign leaders as well as thousands of Communist political cadres in South
Vietnam, Senator Frank Church’s Congressional investigation persuaded the Ford administration to rein in the C.I.A. and ban covert assassination activity. At the time,
this seemed like a victory for civilian control of intelligence. But C.I.A. veterans like Robert Baer, a former operative in the Middle East, charge that the post-
Church controls on the C.I.A. inadvertently created a culture in which agents preferred to sit behind Washington desks, reading reports, rather than risking their
lives running informants and agents in the alleyways and tenements of Arab cities. This aversion to risk led the C.I.A. to cease investing in human intelligence and to
rely too heavily on satellite and signals intelligence. The United States appears, for example, to have had almost no one on the ground in Iraq after 1998, hence the
catastrophic misjudgment by U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.
But the problems began much earlier. We know now that the war being waged by Islamic fundamentalists against the United States began in 1983 with the bombing of the
U.S. Embassy in Beirut and escalated through the African embassy bombings and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. As the enemy steadily escalated the fight, the C.I.A.
needed to have operatives in the bazaars, teahouses and mosques of the Arab world, bribing, importuning and, if necessary, eliminating our enemies. Who doesn’t wish we
had killed Osama bin Laden in the late 1990’s? But the rules on assassination were drawn to outlaw it in so-called peacetime. They were at war with us, and we
convinced ourselves that we were not at war with them. Post-Church, we may have betrayed a fatal preference for clean hands in a dark world of terror in which only
dirty hands can get the job done.
But dirty hands need not be lawless. If we need a tough counterintelligence service, we do not want it out of control, bribing, suborning, bugging and assassinating
anyone it sees fit. To paraphrase Cofer Black, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, we may want to put terrorist heads in boxes, but we need presidents, not
C.I.A. operatives or their for-hire hitmen, to decide whose heads we are targeting. There have to be rules, presidential directives controlling the resort to
assassination. Congress should weigh in here and call for new legislation. Three rules for targeted assassination seem relatively obvious: only as a last resort, only
when capture is impossible without undue risk to American lives and only where death or damage to innocent civilians can be avoided. We need to make sure that
assassinations don’t do more harm than good. As the Israelis have discovered through their own assassination policy, killing Sheik Yassin of Hamas and his successor
may only
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strengthen Hamas control of Gaza. A war on terror that succeeds tactically — taking out this potential terrorist, breaking up that potential cell — while failing
strategically, further enraging the Arab populace, is not a success. So we need rules in a war on terror, first of all to keep free institutions intact and second so
that we don’t fail in our strategic objective, which is to make America some friends instead of numberless new enemies.
IV. Striking a Balance
Civil libertarians may tie our hands unduly, while the gung-ho ”anything goes” brigade might bring us tactical victories at the price of strategic disaster. Either
extreme won’t work, so where is the balance to be found?
Let’s not pretend it’s going to be easy to agree about this. Abiding disagreement about the trade-off between liberty and security is a permanent characteristic of any
free society. The founding fathers designed the Constitution to enable our institutions to adjudicate such fundamental disagreements of principle. The key innovation
of American government was the system of checks and balances. The founders required the executive branch to justify coercive measures before Congress, and later
Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison established the principle of judicial review. This system of ”adversarial justification” is what keeps us free. Presidents are
just like the rest of us: they can justify anything if they have to justify it to only themselves. Our system of government, like trial by jury, puts all coercive
measures to the test of hostile, questioning review. Our system is supposed to challenge the president every step of the way. Show me, prove it to me, give me the
facts — this is supposed to be the American way.
A war on terror puts this system under real strain. Checks and balances work slowly — Congress must deliberate; the courts must review — and meanwhile, the crisis
calls out for decisive action. This is why terrorism’s chief impact on democracy — not just in the United States but also in every other free society and especially
in Spain and Britain — has been to strengthen the power of presidents and prime ministers at the expense of legislatures and the courts and to increase the exercise
of secret government. Much of the war against terror has to be fought in secret, and the killing, interrogating and bribing are done in the shadows. This is
democracy’s dark secret — the men and women who defend us with a bodyguard of lies and an armory of deadly weapons — and because it is our dark secret, it can also
be democracy’s nemesis.
The key question is whether free institutions — Congress, courts and the press — are strong enough to keep this secret army under control. Its budget is offline, and
its operations are below the Congressional radar. Despite the 9/11 commission’s remarkable exercise in public education, the government is still trying to make the war
on terror ever more secret. The administration has fought attempts by the A.C.L.U. to force the Justice Department to disclose how often it has used its expanded
authority under the Patriot Act. It has successfully resisted attempts to require disclosure of the names of those detained in investigations after Sept. 11, and an
executive order of the president has clamped down on the release of public information relating to critical infrastructure. Obviously it’s a good idea to keep recipes
for ricin off government-financed research
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Web sites, and it’s not a good idea to have target detail on critical infrastructure available for download. But adversarial review, as intended by the founding
fathers, can’t work if ordinary citizens are denied the information they need.
Keeping the war on terror under control also requires judges who are unafraid to challenge presidential power. For nearly two years, the courts deferred to the
president’s powers as commander in chief, refusing to deny him authority to designate American citizens as ”enemy combatants” and allowing him to imprison foreign
combatants at Guantánamo beyond the reach of American courts. The president created military tribunals to try foreign combatants, but kept these tribunals free from
review by federal courts and free of the due process safeguards that apply in U.S. military courts-martial. To their credit, a group of military defense lawyers
assigned to these tribunals has gone public to question whether their defendants stand a chance of a fair trial.
The courts have watched these developments with growing alarm. The judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, even when refusing to grant
habeas corpus review to Yaser Esam Hamdi, one of the American enemy combatants currently held in a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., sounded troubled by the president’s
powers. The government, they wrote, seems to be ”embracing a sweeping proposition — namely that with no meaningful judicial review, any American citizen alleged to
be an enemy combatant could be detained indefinitely without charges or counsel on the government’s say-so.” Now, at last, the Supreme Court is reviewing these
presidential powers, and to judge from questioning at the Guantánamo hearings, many justices are troubled by them. As Justice Stephen Breyer said during oral
arguments, ”It seems rather contrary to an idea of a Constitution with three branches that the executive would be free to do whatever they want, whatever they want
without a check.” Just as no justice wants to second-guess a president’s decision to commit U.S. forces, so no court can afford to defer to the president on the
fundamental civil rights of American citizens. The Supreme Court will have to determine whether it was ever in the intentions of the founders to give the president the
power to imprison a citizen at pleasure and to hold him beyond the reach of the law, and if these were not their intentions, whether emergency or wartime situations
could ever justify such a departure from constitutional safeguards.
Whatever the court decides, Congress may eventually have to decide how much emergency power the president should wield. Bruce Ackerman, a liberal law professor at
Yale, has recently proposed a wholesale revision of the president’s current power to declare a national emergency, suggesting that if terrorists strike again, the
president should be given the authority to act unilaterally for a week and to arrest anyone he sees fit. After a week, Congress would have to vote to renew his powers
for a period of 60 days. Thereafter, an overwhelming majority would be required to extend the term further. Better to formalize and control emergency power, Ackerman
argues, than to allow the president to slowly accumulate the power of tyranny.
Yet Congress, with rare exceptions — like the joint Congressional inquiry of 2002 into Sept. 11 and the powerful Senate dissents of Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy —
has become as reluctant as the judiciary to subject the president’s powers to proper scrutiny. The first Patriot Act was large,
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cumbersome and poorly drafted, and it passed both the Senate and the House so quickly that it is doubtful Congress really knew what was in it. As the sunset provisions
of the act come up for renewal in 2005, Congress has an opportunity to redeem itself.
Thus far, it has not been Congress but the bipartisan commission on 9/11 whose public hearings have focused national debate on civil liberties. It was not Congress
that uncovered evidence that the United States has been handing terrorist suspects over to foreign governments like Morocco, Egypt and Jordan for possible torture but
diligent reporters like Barton Gellman and Dana Priest of The Washington Post.
Only if our institutions work properly — if Congress reviews legislation in detail and tosses out measures that jeopardize liberty at no gain to security, if the
courts keep executive power under constitutional control and if the press refuses to allow itself to become ”embedded” with the government — can the moral and
constitutional hazards of lesser evils be managed.
V. The Detention Archipelago
Even if our institutions do their jobs, the hazards they must manage are considerable. Consider the issue of preventive detention of terrorist suspects. All the major
countries on the front line of the war on terror are currently detaining such suspects, often for indefinite periods of time. It is hard to see how a successful
counterterrorism campaign can succeed unless the police can arrest and detain suspects on standards of evidence lower than those required for proof of guilt in a
criminal trial. Waiting until police have met the Fourth Amendment’s exacting standards for search, seizure and arrest would expose innocent civilians to unnecessary
risk of terrorist attack. Who doesn’t wish the 9/11 hijacker who was pulled over for speeding in the weeks before the attack had been detained until police could check
his ID against C.I.A. and F.B.I. watch lists?
Currently, terrorism suspects in the United States can be detained as enemy combatants, held as material witnesses or detained for immigration violations. We do not
even know how many suspects are being held under these categories. If we were to add up all the suspects, citizens and noncitizens held in U.S. institutions, together
with those in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia and U.S. brigs and stockades in between, the number might run into the thousands. No one knows how many
detainees there are, and that is the crux of the problem: the United States may be operating a global archipelago of detention beyond the law and ken of its citizens.
Clearly, there need to be rules to govern detention, and the key rule — one that defines democracy itself — is that no one, citizen or otherwise, should be held
without access to public review of his detention by independent judicial authorities. Where they are held, whether offshore or at home, should be immaterial. If they
are detained by Americans, they are America’s responsibility, and basic due process standards should apply.
Philip Heymann of Harvard Law School has argued that we have to stop holding American citizens indefinitely without charge. We should try them or let them go. If a
suspect cannot be brought to trial without revealing evidence that would endanger key informants, then a federal judge could
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order further detention, but only for a maximum period of two years. After that, the person would have to be brought to trial or released.
Overseas, in Guantánamo, Iraq and elsewhere, where combatant or terrorist detainees are held, the government should create military tribunals that offer detainees the
right to challenge the basis of their detention with the assistance of counsel. Of course, this is costly, and of course, some bad characters may talk their way out of
America’s clutches. Release upon detention, though, does not preclude surveillance upon release. These are hard choices, but we would be better advised to let a few
bad characters go than to continue to run a global network of detention facilities that, right now, are an open invitation to abuse.
VI. Torture
The abuse we need to talk about is torture. Torture, our founding fathers said, was the vice of tyrannies and its absolute exclusion the mark of free government. At
the same time, keeping torture, or at least what used to be called ”the third degree,” from creeping back into our police squad rooms at home has required constant
vigilance by D.A.’s and honest cops. Now it may be creeping into our war on terror. There is some evidence that the United States has handed key suspects over to
Middle Eastern governments for torture. In the metal containers stacked up behind rings of razor wire on Bagram air base in Afghanistan, beatings are reportedly
routine, and at least two suspects have died during secret interrogations. It is possible that similar physical methods have been used against detainees from the
Hussein regime at Baghdad airport.
Some observers believe such physical methods are inevitable if we hope to break terrorists who are willing to die in attacking us. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law
School supports an outright ban on torture, but argues that if the United States is going to rely on it, Congress should regulate it by law. Interrogators would at
least be required to apply to a court for a ”torture warrant,” which would set limits to the practice. The evidence extracted by torture would remain inadmissible in
court, but it could be used to prevent impending attacks.
Dershowitz’s ideas suggest that it is possible to bring the rule of law into the interrogation room, but as an exercise in the lesser evil, it is likely to lead to the
greater. Once you allow warrants for genuine ”ticking bomb” cases — situations in which torture can prevent an imminent calamity from occuring — little by little,
torture may be used when there is no immediate danger. There has never been any certainty, moreover, that information extracted by torture is more reliable than
information coaxed out of a suspect by persuasive means. Why should we suppose that pain produces truth? And how can we forget what everyone who has ever been tortured
always tells us: those who are tortured stay tortured forever. If you want to create terrorists, torture is a pretty sure way to do so.
Israel has thought hardest about torture in terrorist cases. After watching how interrogation degenerated into torture when the Landau Commission of 1987 allowed
physical force in questioning, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that shaking suspects and confining them in
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chairs tipped forward in painful positions for long periods were violations of Israel’s national and international commitments against torture.
Yet the Israeli Supreme Court also conceded that physical force against suspects sometimes prizes out information that saves lives in ticking-bomb cases. So it allowed
interrogators a justifying excuse. Torture was banned absolutely, but interrogators charged with torture could enter evidence that they were seeking to save lives in
order to plead to reduced sentences for breaking the rules. An outright ban on torture, rather than an attempt to regulate it, seems the only way a democracy can keep
true to its ideal of respecting the dignity even of its enemies. For that is what the rule of law commits us to: to show respect even to those who show no respect for
us.
To keep faith with this commitment, we need a presidential order or Congressional legislation that defines exactly what constitutes acceptable degrees of coercive
interrogation. Here we are deep into lesser-evil territory. Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or
physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce stress. What crosses the line into the
impermissible would be any physical coercion or abuse, any involuntary use of drugs or serums, any withholding of necessary medicines or basic food, water and
essential rest.
Fine idea, you say, but who is to enforce these safeguards? It ought to be the rule that no detainee of the United States should be permanently deprived of access to
counsel and judicial process, whether it be civilian federal court or military tribunal. Torture will thrive wherever detainees are held in secret. Conduct disgracing
the United States is inevitable if suspects are detained beyond the reach of the law.
VII. Controlling the President
So far, the basic rules for regulating a war on terror look relatively simple: first, make sure all measures are subjected to review by Congress and the judiciary;
second, make sure the law keeps watch over detainees and suspects. In a word, we need to ensure that we wage a war for the rule of law and not a war against it and
that we wage it by means of democratic consent rather than by presidential decree. We have enough of an imperial presidency as it is.
Keeping the president under democratic control is not going to be easy. The dilemmas here are best illustrated by looking closely at pre-emptive war. It is a lesser
evil because, according to our traditional understanding of war, the only justified resort to war is a response to actual aggression. But those standards are outdated.
They were conceived for wars against states and their armies, not for wars against terrorists and suicide bombers. Against this kind of enemy, everyone can see that
instead of waiting for terrorists to hit us, it makes sense to get our retaliation in first. The problem with pre-emption is keeping the president’s war power under
democratic control.
The president’s power to make war is supposed to be balanced by Congress’s power to declare it, but in practice, since Vietnam, Congress has not been able to rein in a
president bent on the use of force overseas. A war on terror, declared against a global enemy, with no clear end in sight, raises
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the prospect of an out-of-control presidency. As we learned in the run-up to the war in Iraq, the case for a pre-emptive war is always bound to be speculative, based
on doubtful intelligence that will be hard for either an electorate or its representatives, let alone the bureaucracy, to assess for credibility. In the pre-emptive
wars of the future — Iraq will not be our last exercise in this moral hazard — our leaders will try to secure our consent by alternately threatening and reassuring
us with the phrase ”If you only knew what we know.”
But as we have found to our cost, this is not nearly good enough. The facts may not be as clear before the event as they are likely to be afterward, but voters must be
told what we need to know, before government commits to war in our name. Over Iraq, our name was taken in vain.
We need national and international rules to control such wars. This may require both Congressional legislation and United Nations resolutions. Pre-emptive war can be
justified only when the danger that must be pre-empted is imminent, when peaceful means of averting the danger have been tried and have failed and when democratic
institutions ratify the decision to do so. If these are the minimum tests pre-emptive war has to meet, the Iraq war failed to meet all three.
Even those — like me — who supported the Iraq war because it might bring freedom and democracy to people who had been gassed, tortured and killed for 30 years had
better admit that if our grounds for war had been squarely put to the American people, they probably would have voted to stay home. Worse still, Congress failed to put
the president’s case for war to adversarial scrutiny and debate. The news media allowed itself to be managed and browbeaten. The war may or may not bring democracy to
Iraq eventually, but it hasn’t done democracy any good at home.
VIII. A Warrior’s Honor
Regulating a war on terror with ethical rules and democratic oversight is much harder than regulating traditional wars. In traditional wars, there are rules, codes of
warriors’ honor that are supposed to limit the barbarity of the conflict, to protect civilians from targeting, to keep the use of force proportional and to keep it
confined to military objectives. The difference between us and terrorists is supposed to be that we play by these rules, even if they don’t. No, I haven’t forgotten
Hiroshima and My Lai. The American way of war has often been brutal, but at least our warriors are supposed to fight with honor and can be punished if they don’t.
There is no warrior’s honor among terrorists.
The real moral hazard in a war on terror emerges precisely here, in the fact that no moral contract, no expectation of reciprocity, binds us to our enemy. Indeed, the
whole logic of terrorism is to exploit the rules, to turn them to their own advantage. If we hesitate to strike a mosque because the rules of war designate it as a
protected place, then the smart thing for a terrorist to do is to store weapons and suicide belts there. If our forces start from the presumption that civilian women
should be treated as noncombatants, then terrorists will train women to be suicide bombers. If all existing codes of warriors’ honor forbid the desecration of bodies,
then it is not just mindless
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brutality but actually a sound terrorist tactic to drag contractors from a car in Falluja, set them alight and display their severed and burned limbs from a bridge.
Such provocations are intended to drag us down to their level.
This is the deepest reason why it is difficult to maintain self-control, let alone democratic control, in a war on terror. We are constantly being tempted to descend
to the logic of terror itself. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but unsaintly men and women, seeing their loved ones maimed
and butchered, may begin to believe vengeance is theirs by right.
The siren song in any war on terror is ”let slip the dogs of war.” Let them hunt. Let them kill. Already, we have dogs salivating at the prospect. A liberal society
cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.
Taunting us until we let the dogs slip is any canny terrorist’s best hope of success. The Algerian terrorists who fought the French colonial occupation in the 1950’s
had no hope of defeating the armies of France in pitched battle. Their only chance of victory lay in provoking the French into a downward spiral of reprisals,
indiscriminate killings and torture so that the Algerian masses would rise in hatred and the French metropolitan population would throw up its hands in disgust. The
tactic worked. Terror won in Algeria because France lost its nerve and lost its control of counterterror.
In Iraq, we had better remember the French lesson: we cannot hope to win a war of occupation with harshness alone. We need a political strategy that undermines the
terrorist claim that they are fighting a just war against military occupation. We need to turn the place back to Iraqis quickly or we will just have created another
losing front in the war on terror.
On all fronts, keeping a war on terror under democratic scrutiny is critical to its operational success. A lesser-evil approach permits preventive detention, where
subject to judicial review; coercive interrogation, where subject to executive control; pre-emptive strikes and assassination, where these serve publicly defensible
strategic goals. But everything has to be subject to critical review by a free people: free debate, public discussion, Congressional review, in camera if need be,
judicial review as a last resort. The war needs to be less secretive, not more. We need to know more about it, not less, even if what we learn is hard. If it comes to
it, we need to know, every time we fly, that in case of a hijacking, the president has authorized our pilots to shoot us down if a crash risks killing still more
people. In a war on terror, painful truth is far better than lies and illusions.
Above all, we need to keep faith with freedom. When terrorists strike against constitutional democracies, one of their intentions is to persuade electorates and elites
that the strengths of these societies — public debate, mutual trust, open borders and constitutional restraints on executive power- are weaknesses. When strengths are
seen as weaknesses, it is easy to abandon them. If this is the logic of terror, then democratic societies must find a way to renew their belief that their apparent
vulnerabilities are actually a form of strength. This does not require anything new or
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special. It simply means that those who have charge of democratic institutions need to do their jobs. We want C.I.A. men and women who understand that the dogs of war
are needed, but that they need to be on a leash. We want judges who understand that national security is not a carte blanche for the abrogation of individual rights; a
free press that keeps asking, Where are the detainees and what are you doing with them? We want a Congress that will not allow national security to prevent it from
subjecting executive power to adversarial review. This, after all, is only what our Constitution intends. Our institutions were designed to regulate evil means and
control potentially evil people.
The chief ethical challenge of a war on terror is relatively simple — to discharge duties to those who have violated their duties to us. Even terrorists,
unfortunately, have human rights. We have to respect these because we are fighting a war whose essential prize is preserving the identity of democratic society and
preventing it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be. Terrorists seek to provoke us into stripping off the mask of law in order to reveal the black heart of
coercion that they believe lurks behind our promises of freedom. We have to show ourselves and the populations whose loyalties we seek that the rule of law is not a
mask or an illusion. It is our true nature.
Photos: Since 9/11, National Guard and police patrols have beome part of the commute at Grand Central Terminal. Security was increased further after the Madrid
bombings. (Photographs by Antonin Kratochvil/VII)
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1
Politics as a Vocation
Max Weber
THIS lecture, which I give at your request, will necessarily disappoint you in a number of ways. You will naturally expect me to take a position on actual problems of
the day. But that will be the case only in a purely formal way and toward the end, when I shall raise certain questions concerning the significance of political action
in the whole way of life. In today’s lecture, all questions that refer to what policy and what content one should give one’s political activity must be eliminated. For
such questions have nothing to do with the general question of what politics as a vocation means and what it can mean. Now to our subject matter.
What do we understand by politics? The concept is extremely broad and comprises any kind of independent leadership in action. One speaks of the currency policy of the
banks, of the discounting policy of the Reichsbank, of the strike policy of a trade union; one may speak of the educational policy of a municipality or a township, of
the policy of the president of a voluntary association, and, finally, even of the policy of a prudent wife who seeks to guide her husband. Tonight, our reflections
are, of course, not based upon such a broad concept. We wish to understand by politics only the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political
association, hence today, of a state.
But what is a ‘political’ association from the sociological point of view? What is a ‘state’? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There
is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those
associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state.
Ultimately, one can define the modern state sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of
physical force.
‘Every state is founded on force,’ said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the
concept of ‘state’ would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as ‘anarchy,’ in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is
certainly not the normal or the only means of the state–nobody says that–but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and
violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions–beginning with the sib–have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today,
however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.
Note that ‘territory’ is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions
or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence. Hence, ‘politics’ for us
means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
This corresponds essentially to ordinary usage. When a question is said to be a ‘political’ question, when a cabinet minister or an official is said to be a
‘political’ official, or when a decision is said to be ‘politically’ determined, what is always meant is that interests in the distribution, maintenance, or transfer
of power are decisive for answering the questions and determining the decision or the official’s sphere of activity. He who is active in politics strives for power
either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as ‘power for power’s sake,’ that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-feeling that power gives.
Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered
to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be. When and why do men obey? Upon what inner
justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest?
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To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination.
First, the authority of the ‘eternal yesterday,’ i.e. of the mores sanctified through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is
‘traditional’ domination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince of yore.
There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or
other qualities of individual leadership. This is ‘charismatic’ domination, as exercised by the prophet or–in the field of politics–by the elected war lord, the
plebiscitarian ruler, the great demagogue, or the political party leader.
Finally, there is domination by virtue of ‘legality,’ by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional ‘competence’ based on rationally created
rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern ‘servant of the state’ and by all those
bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.
It is understood that, in reality, obedience is determined by highly robust motives of fear and hope–fear of the vengeance of magical powers or of the power-holder,
hope for reward in this world or in the beyond– and besides all this, by interests of the most varied sort. Of this we shall speak presently. However, in asking for
the ‘legitimations’ of this obedience, one meets with these three ‘pure’ types: ‘traditional,’ ‘charismatic,’ and ‘legal.’
These conceptions of legitimacy and their inner justifications are of very great significance for the structure of domination. To be sure, the pure types are rarely
found in reality. But today we cannot deal with the highly complex variant, transitions, and combinations of these pure types, which problems belong to ‘political
science.’ Here we are interested above all in the second of these types: domination by virtue of the devotion of those who obey the purely personal ‘charisma’ of the
‘leader.’ For this is the root of the idea of a calling in its highest expression.
Devotion to the charisma of the prophet, or the leader in war, or to the great demagogue in the ecclesia or in parliament, means that the leader is personally
recognized as the innerly ‘called’ leader of men. Men do not obey him by virtue of tradition or statute, but because they believe in him. If he is more than a narrow
and vain upstart of the moment, the leader lives for his cause and ‘strives for his work.’ The devotion of his disciples, his followers, his personal party friends is
oriented to his person and to its qualities.
Charismatic leadership has emerged in all places and in all historical epochs. Most importantly in the past, it has emerged in the two figures of the magician and the
prophet on the one hand, and in the elected war lord, the gang leader and condotierre on the other hand. Political leadership in the form of the free ‘demagogue’ who
grew from the soil of the city state is of greater concern to us; like the city state, the demagogue is peculiar to the Occident and especially to Mediterranean
culture. Furthermore, political leadership in the form of the parliamentary ‘party leader’ has grown on the soil of the constitutional state, which is also indigenous
only to the Occident.
These politicians by virtue of a ‘calling,’ in the most genuine sense of the word, are of course nowhere the only decisive figures in the cross-currents of the
political struggle for power. The sort of auxiliary means that are at their disposal is also highly decisive. How do the politically dominant powers manage to maintain
their domination? The question pertains to any kind of domination, hence also to political domination in all its forms, traditional as well as legal and charismatic.
Organized domination, which calls for continuous administration, requires that human conduct be conditioned to obedience towards those masters who claim to be the
bearers of legitimate power. On the other hand, by virtue of this obedience, organized domination requires the control of those material goods which in a given case
are necessary for the use of physical violence. Thus, organized domination requires control of the personal executive staff and the material implements of
administration.
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The administrative staff, which externally represents the organization of political domination, is, of course, like any other organization, bound by obedience to the
power-holder and not alone by the concept of legitimacy, of which we have just spoken. There are two other means, both of which appeal to personal interests: material
reward and social honor. The fiefs of vassals, the prebends of patrimonial officials, the salaries of modern civil servants, the honor of knights, the privileges of
estates, and the honor of the civil servant comprise their respective wages. The fear of losing them is the final and decisive basis for solidarity between the
executive staff and the power-holder. There is honor and booty for the followers in war; for the demagogue’s following, there are ‘spoils’–that is, exploitation of
the dominated through the monopolization of office–and there are politically determined profits and premiums of vanity. All of these rewards are also derived from the
domination exercised by a charismatic leader.
To maintain a dominion by force, certain material goods are required, just as with an economic organization. All states may be classified according to whether they
rest on the principle that the staff of men themselves own the administrative means, or whether the staff is ‘separated’ from these means of administration. This
distinction holds in the same sense in which today we say that the salaried employee and the proletarian in the capitalistic enterprise are ‘separated’ from the
material means of production. The power-holder must be able to count on the obedience of the staff members, officials, or whoever else they may be. The administrative
means may consist of money, building, war material, vehicles, horses, or whatnot. The question is whether or not the power-holder himself directs and organizes the
administration while delegating executive power to personal servants, hired officials, or personal favorites and confidants, who are non-owners, i.e. who do not use
the material means of administration in their own right but are directed by the lord. The distinction runs through all administrative organizations of the past.
These political associations in which the material means of administration are autonomously controlled, wholly or partly, by the dependent administrative staff may be
called associations organized in ‘estates.’ The vassal in the feudal association, for instance, paid out of his own pocket for the administration and judicature of the
district enfeoffed to him. He supplied his own equipment and provisions for war, and his subvassals did likewise. Of course, this had consequences for the lord’s
position of power, which only rested upon a relation of personal faith and upon the fact that the legitimacy of his possession of the fief and the social honor of the
vassal were derived from the overlord.
However, everywhere, reaching back to the earliest political formations, we also find the lord himself directing the administration. He seeks to take the
administration into his own hands by having men personally dependent upon him: slaves, household officials, attendants, personal ‘favorites,’ and prebendaries
enfeoffed in kind or in money from his magazines. He seeks to defray the expenses from his own pocket, from the revenues of his patrimonium; and he seeks to create an
army which is dependent upon him personally because it is equipped and provisioned out of his granaries, magazines, and armories. In the association of ‘estates,’ the
lord rules with the aid of an autonomous ‘aristocracy’ and hence shares his domination with it; the lord who personally administers is supported either by members of
his household or by plebeians. These are propertyless strata having no social honor of their own; materially, they are completely chained to him and are not backed up
by any competing power of their own. All forms of patriarchal and patrimonial domination, Sultanist despotism, and bureaucratic states belong to this latter type. The
bureaucratic state order is especially important; m its most rational development, it is precisely characteristic of the modern state.
Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and ‘private’
bearers of executive power who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as
politically usable goods of all sorts. The whole process is a complete parallel to the development of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the
independent producers. In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization, which actually come together under a single head. No single
official personally owns the money he pays out, or the buildings, stores, tools, and war machines he controls. In the contemporary ‘state’–and this is essential for
the concept of state–the ‘separation’ of the administrative staff, of the administrative officials, and of the workers from the material means of administrative
organization is completed. Here the most modern development begins, and we see
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with our own eyes the attempt to inaugurate the expropriation of this expropriator of the political means, and therewith of political power.
The revolution [of Germany, 1918] has accomplished, at least in so far as leaders have taken the place of the statutory authorities, this much: the leaders, through
usurpation or election, have attained control over the political staff and the apparatus of material goods; and they deduce their legitimacy–no matter with what
right–from the will of the governed. Whether the leaders, on the basis of this at least apparent success, can rightfully entertain the hope of also carrying through
the expropriation within the capitalist enterprises is a different question. The direction of capitalist enterprises, despite far-reaching analogies, follows quite
different laws than those of political administration.
Today we do not take a stand on this question. I state only the purely conceptual aspect for our consideration: the modern state is a compulsory association which
organizes domination. It has been successful in seeking to monopolize the legitimate use of physical force as a means of domination within a territory. To this end the
state has combined the material means of organization in the hands of its leaders, and it has expropriated all autonomous functionaries of estates who formerly
controlled these means in their own right. The state has taken their positions and now stands in the top place.
During this process of political expropriation, which has occurred with varying success in all countries on earth, ‘professional politicians’ in another sense have
emerged. They arose first in the service of a prince. They have been men who, unlike the charismatic leader, have not wished to be lords themselves, but who have
entered the service of political lords In the struggle of expropriation, they placed themselves at the princes; disposal and by managing the princes’ politics they
earned, on the one hand, a living and, on the other hand, an ideal content of life. Again it is only in the Occident that we find this kind of professional politician
in the service of powers other than the princes. In the past, they have been the most important power instrument of the prince and his instrument of political
expropriation.
Before discussing ‘professional politicians’ in detail, let us clarify in all its aspects the state of affairs their existence presents. Politics, just as economic
pursuits, may be a man’s avocation or his vocation. One may engage in politics, and hence seek to influence the distribution of power within and between political
structures, as an ‘occasional’ politician. We are all ‘occasional’ politicians when we cast our ballot or consummate a similar expression of intention, such as
applauding or protesting in a ‘political’ meeting, or delivering a ‘political’ speech, etc. The whole relation of many people to politics is restricted to this.
Politics as an avocation is today practiced by all those party agents and heads of voluntary political associations who, as a rule, are politically active only in case
of need and for whom politics is, neither materially nor ideally, ‘their life’ in the first place. The same holds for those members of state counsels and similar
deliberative bodies that function only when summoned. It also holds for rather broad strata of our members of parliament who are politically active only during
sessions. In the past, such strata were found especially among the estates. Proprietors of military implements in their own right, or proprietors of goods important
for the administration, or proprietors of personal prerogatives may be called ‘estates.’ A large portion of them were far from giving their lives wholly, or merely
preferentially, or more than occasionally, to the service of politics. Rather, they exploited their prerogatives in the interest of gaining rent or even profits; and
they became active in the service of political associations only when the overlord of their status-equals especially demanded it. It was not different in the case of
some of the auxiliary forces which the prince drew into the struggle for the creation of a political organization to be exclusively at his disposal. This was the
nature of the Rate von Haus aus [councilors] and, still further back, of a considerable part of the councilors assembling in the ‘Curia’ and other deliberating bodies
of the princes. But these merely occasional auxiliary forces engaging in politics on the side were naturally not sufficient for the prince. Of necessity, the prince
sought to create a staff of helpers dedicated wholly and exclusively to serving him, hence making this their major vocation. The structure of the emerging dynastic
political organization, and not only this but the whole articulation of the culture, depended to a considerable degree upon the question of where the prince recruited
agents.
A staff was also necessary for those political associations whose members constituted themselves politically as (so-called) ‘free’ communes under the complete
abolition or the far-going restriction of princely power.
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They were ‘free’ not in the sense of freedom from domination by force, but in the sense that princely power legitimized by tradition (mostly religiously sanctified) as
the exclusive source of all authority was absent. These communities have their historical home in the Occident. Their nucleus was the city as a body politic, the form
in which the city first emerged in the Mediterranean culture area. In all these cases, what did the politicians who made politics their major vocation look like?
There are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ politics. By no means is this contrast an exclusive one. The
rule is, rather, that man does both, at least in thought, and certainly he also does both in practice. He who lives ‘for’ politics makes politics his life, in an
internal sense. Either he enjoys the naked possession of the power he exerts, or he nourishes his inner balance and self-feeling by the consciousness that his life has
meaning in the service of a ’cause.’ In this internal sense, every sincere man who lives for a cause also lives off this cause. The distinction hence refers to a much
more substantial aspect of the matter, namely, to the economic. He who strives to make politics a permanent source of income lives ‘off’ politics as a vocation,
whereas he who does not do this lives ‘for’ politics. Under the dominance of the private property order, some–if you wish– very trivial preconditions must exist in
order for a person to be able to live ‘for’ politics in this economic sense. Under normal conditions, the politician must be economically independent of the income
politics can bring him. This means, quite simply, that the politician must be wealthy or must have a personal position in life which yields a sufficient income.
This is the case, at least in normal circumstances. The war lord’s following is just as little concerned about the conditions of a normal economy as is the street
crowd following of the revolutionary hero. Both live off booty, plunder, confiscations, contributions, and the imposition of worthless and compulsory means of tender,
which in essence amounts to the same thing. But necessarily, these are extraordinary phenomena. In everyday economic life, only some wealth serves the purpose of
making a man economically independent. Yet this alone does not suffice. The professional politician must also be economically ‘dispensable,’ that is, his income must
not depend upon the fact that he constantly and personally places his ability and thinking entirely, or at least by far predominantly, in the service of economic
acquisition. In the most unconditional way, the rentier is dispensable in this sense. Hence, he is a man who receives completely unearned income. He may be the
territorial lord of the past or the large landowner and aristocrat of the present who receives ground rent. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages they who received slave or
serf rents or in modern times rents from shares or bonds or similar sources–these are rentiers.
Neither the worker nor–and this has to be noted well–the entrepreneur, especially the modern, large-scale entrepreneur, is economically dispensable in this sense.
For it is precisely the entrepreneur who is tied to his enterprise and is therefore not dispensable. This holds for the entrepreneur in industry far more than for the
entrepreneur in agriculture, considering the seasonal character of agriculture. In the main, it is very difficult for the entrepreneur to be represented in his
enterprise by someone else, even temporarily. He is as little dispensable as is the medical doctor, and the more eminent and busy he is the less dispensable he is. For
purely organizational reasons, it is easier for the lawyer to be dispensable; and therefore the lawyer has played an incomparably greater, and often even a dominant,
role as a professional politician. We shall not continue in this classification; rather let us clarify some of its ramifications.
The leadership of a state or of a party by men who (in the economic sense of the word) live exclusively for politics and not off politics means necessarily a
‘plutocratic’ recruitment of the leading political strata. To be sure, this does not mean that such plutocratic leadership signifies at the same time that the
politically dominant strata will not also seek to live ‘off’ politics, and hence that the dominant stratum will not usually exploit their political domination in their
own economic interest. All that is unquestionable, of course. There has never been such a stratum that has not somehow lived ‘off’ politics. Only this is meant: that
the professional politician need not seek remuneration directly for his political work, whereas every politician without means must absolutely claim this. On the other
hand, we do not mean to say that the propertyless politician will pursue private economic advantages through politics, exclusively, or even predominantly. Nor do we
mean that he will not think, in the first place, of ‘the subject matter.’ Nothing would be more incorrect. According to all experience, a care for the economic
‘security’ of his existence is consciously or unconsciously a cardinal point in the whole life orientation of the wealthy man. A quite reckless and
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unreserved political idealism is found if not exclusively at least predominantly among those strata who by virtue of their propertylessness stand entirely outside of
the strata who are interested in maintaining the economic order of a given society. This holds especially for extraordinary and hence revolutionary epochs. A non-
plutocratic recruitment of interested politicians, of leadership and following, is geared to the self- understood precondition that regular and reliable income will
accrue to those who manage politics.
Either politics can be conducted ‘honorifically’ and then, as one usually says, by ‘independent,’ that is, by wealthy, men, and especially by rentiers. Or, political
leadership is made accessible to propertyless men who must then be rewarded. The professional politician who lives ‘off’ politics may be a pure ‘prebendary’ or a
salaried ‘official.’ Then the politician receives either income from fees and perquisites for specific services–tips and bribes are only an irregular and formally
illegal variant of this category of income– or a fixed income in kind, a money salary, or both. He may assume the character of an ‘entrepreneur,’ like the condottiere
or the holder of a farmed– out or purchased office, or like the American boss who considers his costs a capital investment which he brings to fruition through
exploitation of his influence. Again, he may receive a fixed wage, like a journalist, a party secretary, a modern cabinet minister, or a political official. Feudal
fiefs, land grants, and prebends of all sorts have been typical, in the past. With the development of the money economy, perquisites and prebends especially are the
typical rewards for the following of princes, victorious conquerors, or successful party chiefs. For loyal services today, party leaders give offices of all sorts –in
parties, newspapers, co-operative societies, health insurance, municipalities, as well as in the state. All party struggles are struggles for the patronage of office,
as well as struggles for objective goals.
In Germany, all struggles between the proponents of local and of central government are focused upon the question of which powers shall control the patronage of
office, whether they are of Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, or Dresden. Setbacks in participating in offices are felt more severely by parties than is action against their
objective goals. In France, a turnover of prefects because of party politics has always been considered a greater transformation and has always caused a greater uproar
than a modification in the government’s program–the latter almost having the significance of mere verbiage. Some parties, especially those in America since the
disappearance of the old conflicts concerning the interpretation of the constitution, have become pure patronage parties handing out jobs and changing their material
program according to the chances of grabbing votes.
In Spain, up to recent years, the two great parties, in a conventionally fixed manner, took turns in office by means of ‘elections,’ fabricated from above, in order to
provide their followers with offices. In the Spanish colonial territories, in the so-called ‘elections,’ as well as in the so-called ‘revolutions,’ what was at stake
was always the state bread-basket from which the victors wished to be fed.
In Switzerland, the parties peacefully divided the offices among themselves proportionately, and some of our ‘revolutionary’ constitutional drafts, for instance the
first draft of the Badenian constitution, sought to extend this system to ministerial positions. Thus, the state and state offices were considered as pure institutions
for the provision of spoilsmen.
Above all, the Catholic Center party was enthusiastically for this draft. In Badenia, the party, as part of the party platform, made the distribution of offices
proportional to confessions and hence without regard to achievement. This tendency becomes stronger for all parties when the number of offices increase as a result of
general bureaucratization and when the demand for offices increases because they represent specifically secure livelihoods. For their followings, the parties become
more and more a means to the end of being provided for in this manner.
The development of modern officialdom into a highly qualified, professional labor force, specialized in expertness through long years of preparatory training, stands
opposed to all these arrangements. Modern bureaucracy in the interest of integrity has developed a high sense of status honor; without this sense the danger of an
awful corruption and a vulgar Philistinism threatens fatally. And without such integrity, even the purely technical functions of the state apparatus would be
endangered. The significance of the state apparatus for the economy has been steadily rising, especially with increasing socialization, and its significance will be
further augmented.
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In the United States, amateur administration through booty politicians in accordance with the outcome of presidential elections resulted in the exchange of hundreds of
thousands of officials, even down to the mail carrier. The administration knew nothing of the professional civil-servant-for-life, but this amateur administration has
long since been punctured by the Civil Service Reform. Purely technical, irrefrageable needs of the administration have determined this development.
In Europe, expert officialdom, based on the division of labor, has emerged in a gradual development of half a thousand years. The Italian cities and seigniories were
the beginning, among the monarchies, and the states of the Norman conquerors. But the decisive step was taken in connection with the administration of the finances of
the prince. With the administrative reforms of Emperor Max, it can be seen how hard it was for the officials to depose successfully of the prince in this field, even
under the pressure of extreme emergency and of Turkish rule. The sphere of finance could afford least of all a ruler’s dilettantism–a ruler who at that time was still
above all a knight. The development of war technique called forth the expert and specialized officer; the differentiation of legal procedure called forth the trained
jurist. In these three areas– finance, war, and law–expert officialdom in the more advanced states was definitely triumphant during the sixteenth century. With the
ascendancy of princely absolutism over the estates, there was simultaneously a gradual abdication of the prince’s autocratic rule in favor of an expert officialdom.
These very officials had only facilitated the prince’s victory over the estates.
The development of the ‘leading politicians’ was realized along with the ascendancy of the specially trained officialdom, even if in far less noticeable transitions.
Of course, such really decisive advisers of the princes have existed at all times and all over the world. In the Orient, the need for relieving the Sultan as far as
possible from personal responsibility for the success of the government has created the typical figure of the ‘Grand Vizier.’ In the Occident, influenced above all by
the reports of the Venetian legates, diplomacy first became a consciously cultivated art in the age of Charles V, in Machiavelli’s time. The reports of the Venetian
legates were read with passionate zeal in expert diplomatic circles. The adepts of this art, who were in the main educated humanistically, treated one another as
trained initiates, similar to the humanist Chinese statesmen in the last period of the ‘warring states. The necessity of a formally unified guidance of the whole
policy, including that of home affairs, by a leading statesman finally and compellingly arose only through constitutional development. Of course, individual
personalities, such as advisers of the princes, or rather, in fact, leaders, had again and again existed before then. But the organization of administrative agencies
even in the most advanced states first proceeded along other avenues. Top collegial administrative agencies had emerged. In theory, and to a gradually decreasing
extent in fact, they met under the personal chairmanship of the prince who rendered the decision. This collegial system led to memoranda, counter- memoranda, and
reasoned votes of the majority and the minority. In addition to the official and highest authorities, the prince surrounded himself with purely personal confidants–
the ‘cabinet’–and through them rendered his decisions, after considering the resolutions of the state counsel, or whatever else the highest state agency was called.
The prince, coming more and more into the position of a dilettante, sought to extricate himself from the unavoidably increasing weight of the expertly trained
officials through the collegial system and the cabinet. He sought to retain the highest leadership in his own hands. This latent struggle between expert officialdom
and autocratic rule existed everywhere. Only in the face of parliaments and the power aspirations of party leaders did the situation change. Very different conditions
led to the externally identical result, though to be sure with certain differences. Wherever the dynasties retained actual power in their hands–as was especially the
case in Germany–the interests of the prince were joined with those of officialdom against parliament and its claims for power. The officials were also interested in
having leading position, that is, ministerial positions, occupied by their own ranks, thus making these positions an object of the official career. The monarch, on his
part, was interested in being able to appoint the ministers from the ranks of devoted officials according to his own discretion. Both parties, however, were interested
in seeing the political leadership confront parliament in a unified and solidary fashion, and hence in seeing the collegial system replaced by a single cabinet head.
Furthermore, in order to be removed in a purely formal way from the struggle of parties and from party attacks, the monarch needed a single personality to cover him
and to assume responsibility, that is, to answer to parliament and to negotiate with the parties. All these interests worked together and in the same direction: a
minister emerged to direct the officialdom in a unified way.
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Where parliament gained supremacy over the monarch–as in England –the development of parliamentary power worked even more strongly in the direction of a unification
of the state apparatus. In England, the ‘cabinet,’ with the single head of Parliament as its ‘leader,’ developed as a committee of the party which at the time
controlled the majority. This party power was ignored by official law but, in fact, it alone was politically decisive. The official collegial bodies as such were not
organs of the actual ruling power, the party, and hence could not be the bearers of real government. The ruling party required an ever-ready organization composed only
of its actually leading men, who would confidentially discuss matters in order to maintain power within and be capable of engaging in grand politics outside. The
cabinet is simply this organization. However, in relation to the public, especially the parliamentary public, the party needed a leader responsible for all
decisions–the cabinet head. The English system has been taken over on the Continent in the form of parliamentary ministries. In America alone, and in the democracies
influenced by America, a quite heterogeneous system was placed into opposition with this system. The American system placed the directly and popularly elected leader
of the victorious party at the head of the apparatus of officials appointed by him and bound him to the consent of ‘parliament’ only in budgetary and legislative
matters.
The development of politics into an organization which demanded training in the struggle for power, and in the methods of this struggle as developed by modern party
policies, determined the separation of public functionaries into two categories, which, however, are by no means rigidly but nevertheless distinctly separated. These
categories are ‘administrative’ officials on the one hand, and ‘political’ officials on the other. The ‘political’ officials, in the genuine sense of the word, can
regularly and externally be recognized by the fact that they can be transferred any time at will, that they can be dismissed, or at least temporarily withdrawn. They
are like the French prefects and the comparable officials of other countries, and this is in sharp contrast to the ‘independence’ of officials with judicial functions.
In England, officials who, according to fixed convention, retire from office when there is a change in the parliamentary majority, and hence a change in the cabinet,
belong to this category. There are usually among them some whose competence includes the management of the general ‘inner administration.’ The political element
consists, above all, in the task of maintaining ‘law and order’ in the country, hence maintaining the existing power relations. In Prussia these officials, in
accordance with Puttkamer’s decree and in order to avoid censure, were obliged to ‘represent the policy of the government.’ And, like the prefects in France, they were
used as an official apparatus for influencing elections. Most of the ‘political’ officials of the German system–in contrast to other countries–were equally qualified
in so far as access to these offices required a university education, special examinations, and special preparatory service. In Germany, only the heads of the
political apparatus, the ministers, lack this specific characteristic of modern civil service. Even under the old regime, one could be the Prussian minister of
education without ever having attended an institution of higher learning; whereas one could become Vortragender Rat, in principle, only on the basis of a prescribed
examination. The specialist and trained Dezernent and Vortragender Rat were of course infinitely better informed about the real technical problems of the division than
was their respective chief–for instance, under Altho in the Prussian ministry of education. In England it was not different. Consequently, in all routine demands the
divisional head was more powerful than the minister, which was not without reason. The minister was simply the representative of the political power constellation; he
had to represent these powerful political staffs and he had to take measure of the proposals of his subordinate expert officials or give them directive orders of a
political nature.
After all, things in a private economic enterprise are quite similar: the real ‘sovereign,’ the assembled shareholders, is just as little influential in the business
management as is a ‘people’ ruled by expert officials. And the personages who decide the policy of the enterprise, the bank-controlled ‘directorate,’ give only
directive economic orders and select persons for the management without themselves being capable of technically directing the enterprise. Thus the present structure of
the revolutionary state signifies nothing new in principle. It places power over the administration into the hands of absolute dilettantes, who, by virtue of their
control of the machine-guns, would like to use expert officials only as executive heads and hands. The difficulties of the present system lie elsewhere than here, but
today these difficulties shall not concern us. We shall, rather, ask for the typical peculiarity of the professional politicians, of the ‘leaders’ as well as their
followings. Their nature has changed and today varies greatly from one case to another.
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We have seen that in the past ‘professional politicians’ developed through the struggle of the princes with the estates and that they served the princes. Let us
briefly review the major types of these professional politicians.
Confronting the estates, the prince found support in politically exploitable strata outside of the order of the estates. Among the latter, there was, first, the clergy
in Western and Eastern India, in Buddhist China and Japan, and in Lamaist Mongolia, just as in the Christian territories of the Middle Ages. The clergy were
technically useful because they were literate. The importation of Brahmins, Buddhist priests, Lamas, and the employment of bishops and priests as political counselors,
occurred with an eye to obtaining administrative forces who could read and write and who could be used in the struggle of the emperor, prince, or Khan against the
aristocracy. Unlike the vassal who confronted his overlord, the cleric, especially the celibate cleric, stood outside the machinery of normal political and economic
interests and was not tempted by the struggle for political power, for himself or for his descendants. By virtue of his own status, the cleric was ‘separated’ from the
managerial implements of princely administration.
The humanistically educated literati comprised a second such stratum. There was a time when one learned to produce Latin speeches and Greek verses in order to become a
political adviser to a prince and, above all things, to become a memorialist. This was the time of the first flowering of the humanist schools and of the princely
foundations of professorships for ‘poetics.’ This was for us a transitory epoch, which has had a quite persistent influence upon our educational system, yet no deeper
results politically. In East Asia, it has been different. The Chinese mandarin is, or rather originally was, what the humanist of our Renaissance period approximately
was: a literator humanistically trained and tested in the language monuments of the remote past. When you read the diaries of Li Hung Chang you will find that he is
most proud of having composed poems and of being a good calligrapher. This stratum, with its conventions developed and modeled after Chinese Antiquity, has determined
the whole destiny of China; and perhaps our fate would have been similar if the humanists in their time had the slightest chance of gaining a similar influence.
The third stratum was the court nobility. After the princes had succeeded in expropriating political power from the nobility as an estate, they drew the nobles to the
court and used them in their political and diplomatic service. The transformation of our educational system in the seventeenth century was partly determined by the
fact that court nobles as professional politicians displaced the humanist literati and entered the service of the princes.
The fourth category was a specifically English institution. A patrician stratum developed there which was comprised of the petty nobility and the urban rentiers;
technically they are called the ‘gentry.’ The English gentry represents a stratum that the prince originally attracted in order to counter the barons. The prince
placed the stratum in possession of the offices of ‘self-government,’ and later he himself became increasingly dependent upon them. The gentry maintained the
possession of all offices of local administration by taking them over without compensation in the interest of their own social power. The gentry has saved England from
the bureaucratization which has been the fate of all continental states.
A fifth stratum, the university-trained jurist, is peculiar to the Occident, especially to the European continent, and has been of decisive significance for the
Continent’s whole political structure. The tremendous after-effect of Roman law, as transformed by the late Roman bureaucratic state, stands out in nothing more
clearly than the fact that everywhere the revolution of political management in the direction of the evolving rational state has been borne by trained jurists. This
also occurred in England, although there the great national guilds of jurists hindered the reception of Roman law. There is no analogy to this process to be found in
any area of the world.
All beginnings of rational juristic thinking in the Indian Mimamsa School and all further cultivation of the ancient juristic thinking in Islam have been unable to
prevent the idea of rational law from being overgrown by theological forms of thought. Above all, legal trial procedure has not been fully rationalized in the cases of
India and of Islamism. Such rationalization has been brought about on the Continent only through the borrowing of ancient Roman jurisprudence by the Italian jurists.
Roman jurisprudence is the product of a political structure arising from the city state to world domination–a product of quite unique nature. The usus modernus of the
late medieval pandect jurists and canonists was blended with theories of natural law,
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which were born from juristic and Christian thought and which were later secularized. This juristic rationalism has had its great representatives among the Italian
Podesta, the French crown jurists (who created the formal means for the undermining of the rule of seigneurs by royal power), among the canonists and the theologians
of the ecclesiastic councils (thinking in terms of natural law), among the court jurists and academic judges of the continental princes, among the Netherland teachers
of natural law and the monarchomachists, among the English crown and parliamentary jurists, among the noblesse de robe of the French Parliament, and finally, among the
lawyers of the age of the French Revolution.
Without this juristic rationalism, the rise of the absolute state is just as little imaginable as is the Revolution. If you look through the remonstrances of the
French Parliaments or through the cahiers of the French Estates-General from the sixteenth century to the year 1789, you will find everywhere the spirit of the
jurists. And if you go over the occupational composition of the members of the French Assembly, you will find there–although the members of the Assembly were elected
through equal franchise–a single proletarian, very few bourgeois enterprisers, but jurists of all sorts, en masse. Without them, the specific mentality that inspired
these radical intellectuals and their projects would be quite inconceivable. Since the French Revolution, the modern lawyer and modern democracy absolutely belong
together. And lawyers, in our sense of an independent status group, also exist only in the Occident. They have developed since the Middle Ages from the Fursprech of
the formalistic Germanic legal procedure under the impact of the rationalization of the trial.
The significance of the lawyer in Occidental politics since the rise of parties is not accidental. The management of politics through parties simply means management
through interest groups. We shall soon see what that means. The craft of the trained lawyer is to plead effectively the cause of interested clients. In this, the
lawyer is superior to any ‘official,’ as the superiority of enemy propaganda [Allied propaganda 1914-18] could teach us. Certainly he can advocate and win a cause
supported by logically weak arguments and one which, in this sense, is a ‘weak’ cause. Yet he wins it because technically he makes a ‘strong case’ for it. But only the
lawyer successfully pleads a cause that can be supported by logically strong arguments, thus handling a ‘good’ cause ‘well.’ All too often the civil servant as a
politician turns a cause that is good in every sense into a ‘weak’ cause, through technically ‘weak’ pleading. This is what we have had to experience. To an
outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word. To weigh the effect of the word properly falls within the
range of the lawyer’s tasks; but not at all into that of the civil servant. The latter is no demagogue, nor is it his purpose to be one. If he nevertheless tries to
become a demagogue, he usually becomes a very poor one.
According to his proper vocation, the genuine official–and this is decisive for the evaluation of our former regime–will not engage in politics. Rather, he should
engage in impartial ‘administration.’ This also holds for the so-called ‘political’ administrator, at least officially, in so far as the raison d’etat, that is, the
vital interests of the ruling order, are not in question. Sine ira et studio, ‘without scorn and bias,’ he shall administer his office. Hence, he shall not do
precisely what the politician, the leader as well as his following, must always and necessarily do, namely, fight.
To take a stand, to be passionate–ira et studium–is the politician’s element, and above all the element of the political leader. His conduct is subject to quite a
different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant. The honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute
conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction. This holds even if the order appears wrong to him and
if, despite the civil servant’s remonstrances, the authority insists on the order. Without this moral discipline and self-denial, in the highest sense, the whole
apparatus would fall to pieces. The honor of the political leader, of the leading statesman, however, lies precisely in an exclusive personal responsibility for what
he does, a responsibility he cannot and must not reject or transfer. It is in the nature of officials of high moral standing to be poor politicians, and above all, in
the political sense of the word, to be irresponsible politicians. In this sense, they are politicians of low moral standing, such as we unfortunately have had again
and again in leading positions. This is what we have called Beamtenherrschaft [civil-service rule], and truly no spot soils the honor of our officialdom if we reveal
what is politically wrong with the system from the standpoint of success. But let us return once more to the types of political figures. Since the time of the
constitutional state, and definitely since democracy has been established, the ‘demagogue’ has been the typical political leader in the Occident. The
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distasteful flavor of the word must not make us forget that not Cleon but Pericles was the first to bear the name of demagogue. In contrast to the offices of ancient
democracy that were filled by lot, Pericles led the sovereign Ecclesia of the demos of Athens as a supreme strategist holding the only elective office or without
holding any office at all. Modern demagoguery also makes use of oratory, even to a tremendous extent, if one considers the election speeches a modern candidate has to
deliver. But the use of the printed word is more enduring. The political publicist, and above all the journalist, is nowadays the most important representative of the
demagogic species.
Within the limits of this lecture, it is quite impossible even to sketch the sociology of modern political journalism, which in every respect constitutes a chapter in
itself. Certainly, only a few things concerning it are in place here. In common with all demagogues and, by the way, with the lawyer (and the artist), the journalist
shares the fate of lacking a fixed social classification. At least, this is the case on the Continent, in contrast to the English, and, by the way, also to former
conditions in Prussia. The journalist belongs to a sort of pariah caste, which is always estimated by ‘society’ in terms of its ethically lowest representative. Hence,
the strangest notions about journalists and their work are abroad. Not everybody realizes that a really good journalistic accomplishment requires at least as much
‘genius’ as any scholarly accomplishment, especially because of the necessity of producing at once and ‘on order,’ and because of the necessity of being effective, to
be sure, under quite different conditions of production. It is almost never acknowledged that the responsibility of the journalist is far greater, and that the sense
of responsibility of every honorable journalist is, on the average, not a bit lower than that of the scholar, but rather, as the war has shown, higher. This is
because, in the very nature of the case, irresponsible journalistic accomplishments and their often terrible effects are remembered.
Nobody believes that the discretion of any able journalist ranks above the average of other people, and yet that is the case. The quite incomparably graver
temptations, and the other conditions that accompany journalistic work at the present time, produce those results which have conditioned the public to regard the press
with a mixture of disdain and pitiful cowardice. Today we cannot discuss what is to be done. Here we are interested in the question of the occupational destiny of the
political journalist and of his chance to attain a position of political leadership. Thus far, the journalist has had favorable chances only in the Social Democratic
party. Within the party, editorial positions have been predominantly in the nature of official positions, but editorial positions have not been the basis for positions
of leadership.
In the bourgeois parties, on the whole, the chances for ascent to political power along this avenue have rather become worse, as compared with those of the previous
generation. Naturally every politician of consequence has needed influence over the press and hence has needed relations with the press. But that party leaders would
emerge from the ranks of the press has been an absolute exception and one should not have expected it. The reason for this lies in the strongly increased
‘indispensability’ of the journalist, above all, of the propertyless and hence professionally bound journalist, an indispensability which is determined by the
tremendously increased intensity and tempo of journalistic operations. The necessity of gaining one’s livelihood by the writing of daily or at least weekly articles is
like lead on the feet of the politicians. I know of cases in which natural leaders have been permanently paralyzed in their ascent to power, externally and above all
internally, by this compulsion. The relations of the press to the ruling powers in the state and in the parties, under the old regime [of the Kaiser], were as
detrimental as they could be to the level of journalism; but that is a chapter in itself. These conditions were different in the countries of our opponents [the
Allies]. But there also, and for all modern states, apparently the journalist worker gains less and less as the capitalist lord of the press, of the sort of ‘Lord’
Northcliffe, for instance, gains more and more political influence.
Thus far, however, our great capitalist newspaper concerns, which attained control, especially over the ‘chain newspapers,’ with ‘want ads,’ have been regularly and
typically the breeders of political indifference. For no profits could be made in an independent policy; especially no profitable benevolence of the politically
dominant powers could be obtained. The advertising business is also the avenue along which, during the war, the attempt was made to influence the press politically in
a grand style–an attempt which apparently it is regarded as desirable to continue now. Although one may expect the great papers to escape this pressure, the situation
of the small ones will be far more difficult. In any case, for the time being, the journalist career is not among us, a normal avenue for the ascent of political
leaders, whatever attraction
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journalism may otherwise have and whatever measure of influence, range of activity, and especially political responsibility it may yield. One has to wait and see.
Perhaps journalism does not have this function any longer, or perhaps journalism does not yet have it. Whether the renunciation of the principle of anonymity would
mean a change in this is difficult to say. Some journalists–not all–believe in dropping principled anonymity. What we have experienced during the war in the German
press, and in the ‘management’ of newspapers by especially hired personages and talented writers who always expressly figured under their names, has unfortunately
shown, in some of the better known cases, that an increased awareness of responsibility is not so certain to be bred as might be believed. Some of the papers were,
without regard to party, precisely the notoriously worst boulevard sheets; by dropping anonymity they strove for and attained greater sales. The publishers as well as
the journalists of sensationalism have gained fortunes but certainly not honor. Nothing is here being said against the principle of promoting sales; the question is
indeed an intricate one, and the phenomenon of irresponsible sensationalism does not hold in general. But thus far, sensationalism has not been the road to genuine
leadership or to the responsible management of politics. How conditions will further develop remains to be seen. Yet the journalist career remains under all
circumstances one of the most important avenues of professional political activity. It is not a road for everybody, least of all for weak characters, especially for
people who can maintain their inner balance only with a secure status position. If the life of a young scholar is a gamble, still he is walled in by firm status
conventions, which prevent him from slipping. But the journalist’s life is an absolute gamble in every respect and under conditions that test one’s inner security in a
way that scarcely occurs in any other situation. The often bitter experiences in occupational life are perhaps not even the worst. The inner demands that are directed
precisely at the successful journalist are especially difficult. It is, indeed, no small matter to frequent the salons of the powerful on this earth on a seemingly
equal footing and often to be flattered by all because one is feared, yet knowing all the time that having hardly closed the door the host has perhaps to justify
before his guests his association with the ‘scavengers from the press.’ Moreover, it is no small matter that one must express oneself promptly and convincingly about
this and that, on all conceivable problems of life–whatever the ‘market’ happens to demand–and this without becoming absolutely shallow and above all without losing
one’s dignity by baring oneself, a thing which has merciless results. It is not astonishing that there are many journalists who have become human failures and
worthless men. Rather, it is astonishing that, despite all this, this very stratum includes such a great number of valuable and quite genuine men, a fact that
outsiders would not so easily guess.
If the journalist as a type of professional politician harks back to a rather considerable past, the figure of the party official belongs only to the development of
the last decades and, in part, only to recent years. In order to comprehend the position of this figure in historical evolution, we shall have to turn to a
consideration of parties and party organizations.
In all political associations which are somehow extensive, that is, associations going beyond the sphere and range of the tasks of small rural districts where power-
holders are periodically elected, political organization is necessarily managed by men interested in the management of politics. This is to say that a relatively small
number of men are primarily interested in political life and hence interested in sharing political power. They provide themselves with a following through free
recruitment, present themselves or their proteges as candidates for election, collect the financial means, and go out for vote-grabbing. It is unimaginable how in
large associations elections could function at all without this managerial pattern. In practice this means the division of the citizens with the right to vote into
politically active and politically passive elements. This difference is based on voluntary attitudes, hence it cannot be abolished through measures like obligatory
voting, or ‘occupational status group’ representation, or similar measures that are expressly or actually directed against this state of affairs and the rule of
professional politicians. The active leadership and their freely recruited following are the necessary elements in the life of any party. The following, and through it
the passive electorate, are necessary for the election of the leader. But the structure of parties varies. For instance, the ‘parties’ of the medieval cities, such as
those of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, were purely personal followings. If one considers various things about these medieval parties, one is reminded of Bolshevism
and its Soviets. Consider the Statuta della perta Guelfa, the confiscations of the Nobili’s estates–which originally meant all those families who lived a chivalrous
life and who thus qualified for fiefs–consider the exclusion from office-holding and the denial of the right to vote, the inter-local party committees, the strictly
military organizations and the premiums for informers. Then consider Bolshevism with its strictly sieved military and, in Russia especially, informer organizations,
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the disarmament and denial of the political rights of the ‘bourgeois,’ that is, of the entrepreneur, trader, rentier, clergyman, descendants of the dynasty, police
agents, as well as the confiscation policy.
This analogy is still more striking when one considers that, on the one hand, the military organization of the medieval party constituted a pure army of knights
organized on the basis of the registered feudal estates and that nobles occupied almost all leading positions, and, on the other hand, that the Soviets have preserved,
or rather reintroduced, the highly paid enterpriser, the group wage, the Taylor system, military and workshop discipline, and a search for foreign capital. Hence, in a
word, the Soviets have had to accept again absolutely all the things that Bolshevism had been fighting as bourgeois class institutions. They have had to do this in
order to keep the state and the economy going at all. Moreover, the Soviets have reinstituted the agents of the former Ochrana [Tsarist Secret Police] as the main
instrument of their state power. But here we do not have to deal with such organizations for violence, but rather with professional politicians who strive for power
through sober and ‘peaceful’ party campaigns in the market of election votes.
Parties, in the sense usual with us, were at first, for instance in England, pure followings of the aristocracy. If, for any reason whatever, a peer changed his party,
everybody dependent upon him likewise changed. Up to the Reform Bill [of 1832], the great noble families and, last but not least, the king controlled the patronage of
an immense number of election boroughs. Close to these aristocratic parties were the parties of notables, which develop everywhere with the rising power of the
bourgeois. Under the spiritual leadership of the typical intellectual strata of the Occident, the propertied and cultured circles differentiated themselves into
parties and followed them. These parties were formed partly according to class interest, partly according to family traditions, and partly for ideological reasons.
Clergymen, teachers, professors, lawyers, doctors, apothecaries, prosperous farmers, manufacturers–in England the whole stratum that considered itself as belonging to
the class of gentlemen– formed, at first, occasional associations at most local political clubs. In times of unrest the petty bourgeoisie raised its voice, and once
in a while the proletariat, if leaders arose who, however, as a rule did not stem from their midst. In this phase, parties organized as permanent associations between
localities do not yet exist in the open country. Only the parliamentary delegates create the cohesion; and the local notables are decisive for the selection of
candidates. The election programs originate partly in the election appeals of the candidates and partly in the meetings of the notables; or, they originate as
resolutions of the parliamentary party. Leadership of the clubs is an avocation and an honorific pursuit, as demanded by the occasion.
Where clubs are absent (as is mostly the case), the quite formless management of politics in normal times lies in the hands of the few people constantly interested in
it. Only the journalist is a paid professional politician; only the management of the newspaper is a continuous political organization. Besides the newspaper, there is
only the parliamentary session. The parliamentary delegates and the parliamentary party leaders know to which local notables one turns if a political action seems
desirable. But permanent associations of the parties exist only in the large cities with moderate contributions of the members and periodical conferences and public
meetings where the delegate gives account of the parliamentary activities. The party is alive only during election periods.
The members of parliament are interested in the possibility of inter-local electoral compromises, in vigorous and unified programs endorsed by broad circles and in a
unified agitation throughout the country. In general these interests form the driving force of a party organization which becomes more and more strict. In principle,
however, the nature of a party apparatus as an association of notables remains unchanged. This is so, even though a network of local party affiliations and agents is
spread over the whole country, including middle-sized cities. A member of the parliamentary party acts as the leader of the central party office and maintains constant
correspondence with the local organizations. Outside of the central bureau, paid officials are still absent; thoroughly ‘respectable’ people head the local
organizations for the sake of the deference which they enjoy anyway. They form the extra-parliamentary ‘notables’ who exert influence alongside the stratum of
political notables who happen to sit in parliament. However, the party correspondence, edited by the party, increasingly provides intellectual nourishment for the
press and for the local meetings. Regular contributions of the members become indispensable; a part of these must cover the expenses of headquarters.
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Not so long ago most of the German party organizations were still in this stage of development. In France, the first stage of party development was, at least in part,
still predominant, and the organization of the members of parliament was quite unstable. In the open country, we find a small number of local notables and programs
drafted by the candidates or set up for them by their patrons in specific campaigns for office. To be sure, these platforms constitute more or less local adaptations
to the resolutions and programs of the members of parliament. This system was only partially punctured. The number of full-time professional politicians was small,
consisting in the main of the elected deputies, the few employees of headquarters, and the journalists. In France, the system has also included those job hunters who
held ‘political office’ or, at the moment, strove for one. Politics was formally and by far predominantly an avocation. The number of delegates qualifying for
ministerial office was also very restricted and, because of their position as notables, so was the number of election candidates.
However, the number of those who indirectly had a stake in the management of politics, especially a material one, was very large. For, all administrative measures of a
ministerial department, and especially all decisions in matters of personnel, were made partly with a view to their influence upon electoral chances. The realization
of each and every kind of wish was sought through the local delegate’s mediation. For better or for worse the minister had to lend his ear to this delegate, especially
if the delegate belonged to the minister’s majority. Hence everybody strove for such influence. The single deputy controlled the patronage of office and, in general,
any kind of patronage in his election district. In order to be re-elected the deputy, in turn, maintained connections with the local notables.
Now then, the most modern forms of party organizations stand in sharp contrast to this idyllic state in which circles of notables and, above all, members of parliament
rule. These modern forms are the children of democracy, of mass franchise, of the necessity to woo and organize the masses, and develop the utmost unity of direction
and the strictest discipline. The rule of notables and guidance by members of parliament ceases. ‘Professional’ politicians outside the parliaments take the
organization in hand. They do so either as ‘entrepreneurs’–the American boss and the English election agent are, in fact, such entrepreneurs–or as officials with a
fixed salary. Formally, a fargoing democratization takes place. The parliamentary party no longer creates the authoritative programs, and the local notables no longer
decide the selection of candidates. Rather assemblies of the organized party members select the candidates and delegate members to the assemblies of a higher order.
Possibly there are several such conventions leading up to the national convention of the party. Naturally power actually rests in the hands of those who, within the
organization, handle the work continuously. Otherwise, power rests in the hands of those on whom the organization in its processes depends financially or personally–
for instance, on the Maecenases or the directors of powerful political clubs of interested persons (Tammany Hall). It is decisive that this whole apparatus of people–
characteristically called a ‘machine’ in Anglo-Saxon countries–or rather those who direct the machine, keep the members of the parliament in check. They are in a
position to impose their will to a rather far-reaching extent, and that is of special significance for the selection of the party leader. The man whom the machine
follows now becomes the leader, even over the head of the parliamentary party. In other words, the creation of such machines signifies the advent of plebiscitarian
democracy.
The party following, above all the party official and party entrepreneur, naturally expect personal compensation from the victory of their leader–that is, offices or
other advantages. It is decisive that they expect such advantages from their leader and not merely from the individual member of parliament. They expect that the
demagogic effect of the leader’s personality during the election fight of the party will increase votes and mandates and thereby power, and, thereby, as far as
possible, will extend opportunities to their followers to find the compensation for which they hope. Ideally, one of their mainsprings is the satisfaction of working
with loyal personal devotion for a man, and not merely for an abstract program of a party consisting of mediocrities. In this respect, the ‘charismatic’ element of all
leadership is at work in the party system.
In very different degrees this system made headway, although it was in constant, latent struggle with local notables and the members of parliament who wrangled for
influence. This was the case in the bourgeois parties, first, in the United States, and, then, in the Social Democratic party, especially of Germany. Constant setbacks
occur as soon as no generally recognized leader exists, and, even when he is found, concessions of all sorts must be made to the vanity and the personal interest of
the party notables. The
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machine may also be brought under the domination of the party officials in whose hands the regular business rests. According to the view of some Social Democratic
circles, their party had succumbed to this ‘bureaucratization.’ But ‘officials’ submit relatively easily to a leader’s personality if it has a strong demagogic appeal.
The material and the ideal interests of the officials are intimately connected with the effects of party power which are expected from the leader’s appeal, and
besides, inwardly it is per se more satisfying to work for a leader. The ascent of leaders is far more difficult where the notables, along with the officials, control
the party, as is usually the case in the bourgeois parties. For ideally the notables make ‘their way of life’ out of the petty chairmanships or committee memberships
they hold. Resentment against the demagogue as a homo novus, the conviction of the superiority of political party ‘experience’ (which, as a matter of fact, actually is
of considerable importance), and the ideological concern for the crumbling of the old party traditions–these factors determine the conduct of the notables. They can
count on all the traditionalist elements within the party. Above all, the rural but also the petty bourgeois voter looks for the name of the notable familiar to him.
He distrusts the man who is unknown to him. However, once this man has become successful, he clings to him the more unwaveringly. Let us now consider, by some major
examples, the struggle of the two structural forms –of the notables and of the party–and especially let us consider the ascendancy of the plebiscitarian form as
described by Ostrogorsky.
First England: there until 1868 the party organization was almost purely an organization of notables. The Tories in the country found support, for instance, from the
Anglican parson, and from the schoolmaster, and above all from the large landlords of the respective county. The Whigs found support mostly from such people as the
nonconformist preacher (when there was one), the postmaster, the blacksmith, the tailor, the rope-maker–that is, from such artisans who could disseminate political
influence because they could chat with people most frequently. In the city the parties differed, partly according to economics, partly according to religion, and
partly simply according to the party opinions handed down in the families. But always the notables were the pillars of the political organization.
Above all these arrangements stood Parliament, the parties with the cabinet, and the ‘leader,’ who was the chairman of the council of ministers or the leader of the
opposition. This leader had beside him the ‘whip’– the most important professional politician of the party organization. Patronage of office was vested in the hands
of the ‘whip’; thus the job hunter had to turn to him and he arranged an understanding with the deputies of the individual election boroughs. A stratum of professional
politicians gradually began to develop in the boroughs. At first the locally recruited agents were not paid; they occupied approximately the same position as our
Vertrauensmanner. However, along with them a capitalist entrepreneurial type developed in the boroughs. This was the ‘election agent,’ whose existence was unavoidable
under England’s modern legislation which guaranteed fair elections.
This legislation aimed at controlling the campaign costs of elections and sought to check the power of money by making it obligatory for the candidate to state the
costs of his campaign. For in England, the candidate, besides straining his voice–far more so than was formerly the case with us [in Germany]– enjoyed stretching his
purse. The election agent made the candidate pay a lump sum, which usually meant a good deal for the agent. In the distribution of power in Parliament and the country
between the ‘leader’ and the party notables, the leader in England used to hold a very eminent position. This position was based on the compelling fact of making
possible a grand, and thereby steady, political strategy. Nevertheless the influence of the parliamentary party and of party notables was still considerable.
That is about what the old party organization looked like. It was half an affair of notables and half an entrepreneurial organization with salaried employees. Since
1808, however, the ‘caucus’ system developed, first for local elections in Birmingham, then all over the country. A nonconformist person and along with him Joseph
Chamberlain brought this system to life. The occasion for this development was the democratization of the franchise. In order to win the masses it became necessary to
call into being a tremendous apparatus of apparently democratic associations. An electoral association had to be formed in every city district to help keep the
organization incessantly in motion and to bureaucratize everything rigidly. Hence, hired and paid officials of the local electoral committees increased numerically;
and, on the whole, perhaps 10 per cent of the voters were organized in these local committees. The elected party managers had the right to co-opt others and were the
formal bearers of party politics. The driving force was the local circle, which was, above all, composed of those interested in municipal politics–from which the
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fattest material opportunities always spring. These local circles were also first to call upon the world of finance. This newly emerging machine, which was no longer
led by members of Parliament, very soon had to struggle with the previous power-holders, above all, with the ‘whip.’ Being supported by locally interested persons, the
machine came out of the fight so victoriously that the whip had to submit and compromise with the machine. The result was a centralization of all power in the hands of
the few and, ultimately, of the one person who stood at the top of the party. The whole system had arisen in the Liberal party in connection with Gladstone’s ascent to
power. What brought this machine to such swift triumph over the notables was the fascination of Gladstone’s ‘grand’ demagogy, the firm belief of the masses in the
ethical substance of his policy, and, above all, their belief in the ethical character of his personality. It soon became obvious that a Caesarist plebiscitarian
element in politics–the dictator of the battlefield of elections–had appeared on the plain. In 1877 the caucus became active for the first time in national
elections, and with brilliant success, for the result was Disraeli’s fall at the height of his great achievements. In 1866, the machine was already so completely
oriented to the charismatic personality that when the question of home rule was raised the whole apparatus from top to bottom did not question whether it actually
stood on Gladstone’s ground; it simply, on his word, fell in line with him: they said, Gladstone right or wrong, we follow him. And thus the machine deserted its own
creator, Chamberlain.
Such machinery requires a considerable personnel. In England there are about 2,000 persons who live directly off party politics. To be sure, those who are active in
politics purely as job seekers or as interested persons are far more numerous, especially in municipal politics. In addition to economic opportunities, for the useful
caucus politician, there are the opportunities to satisfy his vanity. To become ‘J.P.’ or even ‘M.P.’ is, of course, in line with the greatest (and normal) ambition;
and such people, who are of demonstrably good breeding, that is, ‘gentlemen,’ attain their goal. The highest goal is, of course, a peerage, especially for the great
financial Maecenases. About 50 per cent of the finances of the party depend on contributions of donors who remained anonymous.
Now then, what has been the effect of this whole system? Nowadays the members of Parliament, with the exception of the few cabinet members (and a few insurgents), are
normally nothing better than well- disciplined ‘yes’ men. With us, in the Reichstag, one used at least to take care of one’s private correspondence on his desk, thus
indicating that one was active in the weal of the country. Such gestures are not demanded in England; the member of Parliament must only vote, not commit party
treason. He must appear when the whips call him, and do what the cabinet or the leader of the opposition orders. The caucus machine in the open country is almost
completely unprincipled if a strong leader exists who has the machine absolutely in hand. Therewith the plebiscitarian dictator actually stands above Parliament. He
brings the masses behind him by means of the machine and the members of Parliament are for him merely political spoilsmen enrolled in his following.
How does the selection of these strong leaders take place? First, in terms of what ability are they selected? Next to the qualities of will– decisive all over the
world–naturally the force of demagogic speech is above all decisive. Its character has changed since the time speakers like Cobden addressed themselves to the
intellect, and Gladstone who mastered the technique of apparently ‘letting sober facts speak for themselves.’ At the present time often purely emotional means are
used–the means the Salvation Army also exploits in order to set the masses in motion. One may call the existing state of affairs a ‘dictatorship resting on the
exploitation of mass emotionality.’ Yet, the highly developed system of committee work in the English Parliament makes it possible and compelling for every politician
who counts on a share in leadership to cooperate in committee work. All important ministers of recent decades have this very real and effective work-training as a
background. The practice of committee reports and public criticism of these deliberations is a condition for training, for really selecting leaders and eliminating
mere demagogues.
Thus it is in England. The caucus system there, however, has been a weak form, compared with the American party organization, which brought the plebiscitarian
principle to an especially early and an especially pure expression.
According to Washington’s idea, America was to be a commonwealth administered by ‘gentlemen.’ In his time, in America, a gentleman was also a landlord, or a man with a
college education–this was the case at first. In the beginning, when parties began to organize, the members of the House of Representatives
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claimed to be leaders, just as in England at the time when notables ruled. The party organization was quite loose and continued to be until 1824. In some communities,
where modern development first took place, the party machine was in the making even before the eighteen-twenties. But when Andrew Jackson was first elected
President–the election of the western farmers’ candidate–the old traditions were overthrown. Formal party leadership by leading members of Congress came to an end
soon after 1840, when the great parliamentarians, Calhoun and Webster, retired from political life because Congress had lost almost all of its power to the party
machine in the open country. That the plebiscitarian ‘machine’ has developed so early in America is due to the fact that there, and there alone, the executive–this is
what mattered–the chief of office-patronage, was a President elected by plebiscite. By virtue of the ‘separation of powers’ he was almost independent of parliament in
his conduct of office. Hence, as the price of victory, the true booty object of the office-prebend was held out precisely at the presidential election. Through Andrew
Jackson the ‘spoils system’ was quite systematically raised to a principle and the conclusions were drawn.
What does this spoils system, the turning over of federal offices to the following of the victorious candidate, mean for the party formations of today? It means that
quite unprincipled parties oppose one another; they are purely organizations of job hunters drafting their changing platforms according to the chances of vote-
grabbing, changing their colors to a degree which, despite all analogies, is not yet to be found elsewhere. The parties are simply and absolutely fashioned for the
election campaign that is most important for office patronage: the fight for the presidency and for the governorships of the separate states. Platforms and candidates
are selected at the national conventions of the parties without intervention by congressmen. Hence they emerge from party conventions, the delegates of which are
formally, very democratically elected. These delegates are determined by meetings of other delegates, who, in turn, owe their mandate to the ‘primaries,’ the
assembling of the direct voters of the party. In the primaries the delegates are already elected in the name of the candidate for the nation’s leadership. Within the
parties the most embittered fight rages about the question of ‘nomination.’ After all, 300,000 to 400,000 official appointments lie in the hands of the President,
appointments which are executed by him only with the approval of the senators from the separate states. Hence the senators are powerful politicians. By comparison,
however, the House of Representatives is, politically, quite impotent, because patronage of office is removed from it and because the cabinet members, simply
assistants to the President, can conduct office apart from the confidence or lack of confidence of the people. The President, who is legitimized by the people,
confronts everybody, even Congress; this is a result of ‘the separation of powers.’
In America, the spoils system, supported in this fashion, has been technically possible because American culture with its youth could afford purely dilettante
management. With 300,000 to 400,000 such party men who have no qualifications to their credit other than the fact of having performed good services for their party,
this state of affairs of course could not exist without enormous evils. A corruption and wastefulness second to none could be tolerated only by a country with as yet
unlimited economic opportunities.
Now then, the boss is the figure who appears in the picture of this system of the plebiscitarian party machine. Who is the boss? He is a political capitalist
entrepreneur who on his own account and at his own risk provides votes. He may have established his first relations as a lawyer or a saloon-keeper or as a proprietor
of similar establishments, or perhaps as a creditor. From here he spins his threads out until he is able to ‘control’ a certain number of votes. When he has come this
far he establishes contact with the neighboring bosses, and through zeal, skill, and above all discretion, he attracts the attention of those who have already further
advanced in the career, and then he climbs. The boss is indispensable to the organization of the party and the organization is centralized in his hands. He
substantially provides the financial means. How does he get them ? Well, partly by the contributions of the members, and especially by taxing the salaries of those
officials who came into office through him and his party. Furthermore, there are bribes and tips. He who wishes to trespass with impunity one of the many laws needs
the boss’s connivance and must pay for it; or else he will get into trouble. But this alone is not enough to accumulate the necessary capital for political
enterprises. The boss is indispensable as the direct recipient of the money of great financial magnates, who would not entrust their money for election purposes to a
paid party official, or to anyone else giving public account of his affairs. The boss, with his judicious discretion in financial matters, is the natural man for those
capitalist circles who finance the election. The typical boss is an absolutely sober man. He does not seek social honor; the ‘professional’ is despised in ‘respectable
society.’ He seeks power alone, power as a source of money, but also power for power’s sake. In contrast to
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the English leader, the American boss works in the dark. He is not heard speaking in public; he suggests to the speakers what they must say in expedient fashion. He
himself, however, keeps silent. As a rule he accepts no office, except that of senator. For, since the senators, by virtue of the Constitution, participate in office
patronage, the leading bosses often sit in person in this body. The distribution of offices is carried out, in the first place, according to services done for the
party. But, also, auctioning offices on financial bids often occurs and there are certain rates for individual offices; hence, a system of selling offices exists
which, after all, has often been known also to the monarchies, the church-state included, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The boss has no firm political ‘principles’; he is completely unprincipled in attitude and asks merely: What will capture votes? Frequently he is a rather poorly
educated man. But as a rule he leads an inoffensive and correct private life. In his political morals, however, he naturally adjusts to the average ethical standards
of political conduct, as a great many of us also may have done during the hoarding period in the field of economic ethics. That as a ‘professional’ politician the boss
is socially despised does not worry him. That he personally does not attain high federal offices, and does not wish to do so, has the frequent advantage that extra-
party intellects, thus notables, may come into candidacy when the bosses believe they will have great appeal value at the polls. Hence the same old party notables do
not run again and again, as is the case in Germany. Thus the structure of these unprincipled parties with their socially despised power-holders has aided able men to
attain the presidency –men who with us never would have come to the top. To be sure, the bosses resist an outsider who might jeopardize their sources of money and
power. Yet in the competitive struggle to win the favor of the voters, the bosses frequently have had to condescend and accept candidates known to be opponents of
corruption.
Thus there exists a strong capitalist party machine, strictly and thoroughly organized from top to bottom, and supported by clubs of extraordinary stability. These
clubs, such as Tammany Hall, are like Knight orders. They seek profits solely through political control, especially of the municipal government, which is the most
important object of booty. This structure of party life was made possible by the high degree of democracy in the United States–a ‘New Country.’ This connection, in
turn, is the basis for the fact that the system is gradually dying out. America can no longer be governed only by dilettantes. Scarcely fifteen years ago, when
American workers were asked why they allowed themselves to be governed by politicians whom they admitted they despised, the answer was: ‘We prefer having people in
office whom we can spit upon, rather than a caste of officials who spit upon us, as is the case with you.’ This was the old point of view of American ‘democracy.’ Even
then, the socialists had entirely different ideas and now the situation is no longer bearable. The dilettante administration does not suffice and the Civil Service
Reform establishes an ever-increasing number of positions for life with pension rights. The reform works out in such a way that university-trained officials, just as
incorruptible and quite as capable as our officials, get into office. Even now about 100,000 offices have ceased being objects of booty to be turned over after
elections. Rather, the offices qualify their holders for pensions, and are based upon tested qualifications. The spoils system will thus gradually recede into the
background and the nature of party leadership is then likely to be transformed also–but as yet, we do not know in what way.
In Germany, until now, the decisive conditions of political management have been in essence as follows:
First, the parliaments have been impotent. The result has been that no man with the qualities of a leader would enter Parliament permanently. If one wished to enter
Parliament, what could one achieve there? When a chancellery position was open, one could tell the administrative chief: ‘I have a very able man in my election
district who would be suitable; take him.’ And he would have concurred with pleasure- but that was about all that a German member of Parliament could do to satisfy his
instincts for power–if he possessed any.
To this must be added the tremendous importance of the trained expert officialdom in Germany. This factor determined the impotence of . Parliament. Our officialdom was
second to none in the world. This importance of the officialdom was accompanied by the fact that the officials claimed not only official positions but also cabinet
positions for themselves. In the Bavarian state legislature, when the introduction of parliamentary government was debated last year, it was said that if members of
the legislature were to be placed in cabinet positions talented people would no longer seek official careers. Moreover, the civil-
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service administration systematically escaped such control as is signified by the English committee discussions. The administration thus made it impossible for
parliaments–with a few exceptions–to train really useful administrative chiefs from their own ranks.
A third factor is that in Germany, in contrast to America, we have had parties with principled political views who have maintained that their members, at least
subjectively, represented bona-fide Weltanschauungen. Now then, the two most important of these parties, the Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democratic party,
have, from their inceptions, been minority parties and have meant to be minority parties. The leading circles of the Centre party in the Reich have never concealed
their opposition to parliamentarian democracy, because of fear of remaining in the minority and thus facing great difficulties in placing their job hunters in office
as they have done by exerting pressure on the government. The Social Democratic party was a principled minority party and a handicap to the introduction of
parliamentary government because the party did not wish to stain itself by participating in the existing bourgeois political order. The fact that both parties
dissociated themselves from the parliamentary system made parliamentary government impossible.
Considering all this, what then became of the professional politicians in Germany? They have had no power, no responsibility, and could play only a rather subordinate
role as notables. In consequence, they have been animated anew by the guild instincts, which are typical everywhere. It has been impossible for a man who was not of
their hue to climb high in the circle of those notables who made their petty positions their lives. I could mention many names from every party, the Social Democratic
party, of course, not excepted, that spell tragedies of political careers because the persons had leadership qualities, and precisely because of these qualities were
not tolerated by the notables. All our parties have taken this course of development and have become guilds of notables. Bebel, for instance, was still a leader
through temperament and purity of character, however modest his intellect. The fact that he was a martyr, that he never betrayed confidence in the eyes of the masses,
resulted in his having the masses absolutely behind him. There was no power in the party that could have seriously challenged him. Such leadership came to an end,
after his death, and the rule of officials began. Trade-union officials, party secretaries, and journalists came to the top. The instincts of officialdom dominated the
party–a highly respectable officialdom, of rare respectability one may say, compared to conditions in other countries, especially the often corruptible trade-union
officials in America. But the results of control by officialdom, which we discussed above, also began in the party.
Since the eighteen-eighties the bourgeois parties have completely become guilds of notables. To be sure, occasionally the parties had to draw on extra-party intellects
for advertising purposes, so that they could say, ‘We have such and such names.’ So far as possible, they avoided letting these names run for election; only when it
was unavoidable and the person insisted could he run for election. The same spirit prevailed in Parliament. Our parliamentary parties were and are guilds. Every speech
delivered from the floor of the Reichstag is thoroughly censored in the party before it is delivered. This is obvious from their unheard-of boredom. Only he who is
summoned to speak can have the word. One can hardly conceive of a stronger contrast to the English, and also–for quite opposite reasons–the French usage.
Now, in consequence of the enormous collapse, which is customarily called the Revolution, perhaps a transformation is under way. Perhaps– but not for certain. In the
beginning there were new kinds of party apparatuses emerging. First, there were amateur apparatuses. They are especially often represented by students of the various
universities, who tell a man to whom they ascribe leadership qualities: we want to do the necessary work for you; carry it out. Secondly, there are apparatuses of
businessmen. It happened that men to whom leadership qualities were ascribed were approached by people willing to take over the propaganda, at fixed rates for every
vote. If you were to ask me honestly which of these two apparatuses I think the more reliable, from the purely technical-political point of view, I believe I would
prefer the latter. But both apparatuses were fast-emerging bubbles, which swiftly vanished again. The existing apparatuses transformed themselves, but they continued
to work. The phenomena are only symptoms of the fact that new apparatuses would come about if there were only leaders. But even the technical peculiarity of
proportionate representation precluded their ascendancy. Only a few dictators of the street crowds arose and fell again. And only the following of a mob dictatorship
is organized in a strictly disciplined fashion: whence the power of these vanishing minorities.
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Let us assume that all this were to change; then, after what has been said above, it has to be clearly realized that the plebiscitarian leadership of parties entails
the ‘soullessness’ of the following, their intellectual proletarianization, one might say. In order to be a useful apparatus, a machine in the American sense–
undisturbed either by the vanity of notables or pretensions to independent views–the following of such a leader must obey him blindly. Lincoln’s election was possible
only through this character of party organization, and with Gladstone, as mentioned before, the same happened in the caucus. This is simply the price paid for guidance
by leaders. However, there is only the choice between leadership democracy with a ‘machine’ and leaderless democracy, namely, the rule of professional politicians
without a calling, without the inner charismatic qualities that make a leader, and this means what the party insurgents in the situation usually designate as ‘the rule
of the clique.’ For the time being, we in Germany have only the latter. For the future, the permanence of this situation, at least in the Reich, is primarily
facilitated by the fact that the Bundesrat will rise again and will of necessity restrict the power of the Reichstag and therewith its significance as a selective
agency of leaders. Moreover, in its present form, proportional representation is a typical phenomenon of leaderless democracy. This is the case not only because it
facilitates the horse- trading of the notables for placement on the ticket, but also because in the future it will give organized interest groups the possibility of
compelling parties to include their officials in the list of candidates, thus creating an unpolitical Parliament in which genuine leadership finds no place. Only the
President of the Reich could become the safety-valve of the demand for leadership if he were elected in a plebiscitarian way and not by Parliament. Leadership on the
basis of proved work could emerge and selection could take place, especially if, in great municipalities, the plebiscitarian city-manager were to appear on the scene
with the right to organize his bureaus independently. Such is the case in the U.S.A. whenever one wishes to tackle corruption seriously. It requires a party
organization fashioned for such elections. But the very petty- bourgeois hostility of all parties to leaders, the Social Democratic party certainly included, leaves
the future formation of parties and all these chances still completely in the dark.
Therefore, today, one cannot yet see in any way how the management of politics as a ‘vocation’ will shape itself. Even less can one see along what avenue opportunities
are opening to which political talents can be put for satisfactory political tasks. He who by his material circumstances is compelled to live ‘of politics will almost
always have to consider the alternative positions of the journalist or the party official as the typical direct avenues. Or, he must consider a position as
representative of interest groups–such as a trade union, a chamber of commerce, a farm bureau, a craft association, a labor board, an employer’s association, et
cetera, or else a suitable municipal position. Nothing more than this can be said about this external aspect: in common with the journalist, the party official bears
the odium of being declasse. ‘Wage writer’ or ‘wage speaker’ will unfortunately always resound in his ears, even though the words remain unexpressed. He who is
inwardly defenseless and unable to find the proper answer for himself had better stay away from this career. For in any case, besides grave temptations, it is an
avenue that may constantly lead to disappointments. Now then, what inner enjoyments can this career offer and what personal conditions are presupposed for one who
enters this avenue?
Well, first of all the career of politics grants a feeling of power. The knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling
of holding in one’s hands a nerve fiber of historically important events can elevate the professional politician above everyday routine even when he is placed in
formally modest positions. But now the question for him is: Through what qualities can I hope to do justice to this power (however narrowly circumscribed it may be in
the individual case) ? How can he hope to do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him? With this we enter the field of ethical questions, for that is
where the problem belongs: What kind of a man must one be if he is to be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history?
One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
This means passion in the sense of matter-of-factness, of passionate devotion to a ’cause,’ to the god or demon who is its overlord. It is not passion in the sense of
that inner bearing which my late friend, Georg Simmel, used to designate as ‘sterile excitation,’ and which was peculiar especially to a certain type of Russian
intellectual (by no means all of them!). It is an excitation that plays so great a part with our
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intellectuals in this carnival we decorate with the proud name of ‘revolution.’ It is a ‘romanticism of the intellectually interesting,’ running into emptiness devoid
of all feeling of objective responsibility.
To be sure, mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a ’cause’ also makes responsibility to
this cause the guiding star of action. And for this, a sense of proportion is needed. This is the decisive psychological quality of the politician: his ability to let
realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness. Hence his distance to things and men. ‘Lack of distance’ per se is one of the deadly sins of every
politician. It is one of those qualities the breeding of which will condemn the progeny of our intellectuals to political incapacity. For the problem is simply how can
warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul. And
yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone. However,
that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ‘sterilely excited’ and mere political dilettante, is
possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The ‘strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means, in the first place, the possession of
these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.
Therefore, daily and hourly, the politician inwardly has to overcome a quite trivial and all-too-human enemy: a quite vulgar vanity, the deadly enemy of all matter-
of-fact devotion to a cause, and of all distance, in this case, of distance towards one’s self.
Vanity is a very widespread quality and perhaps nobody is entirely free from it. In academic and scholarly circles, vanity is a sort of occupational disease, but
precisely with the scholar, vanity–however disagreeably it may express itself–is relatively harmless; in the sense that as a rule it does not disturb scientific
enterprise. With the politician the case is quite different. He works with the striving for power as an unavoidable means. Therefore, ‘power instinct,’ as is usually
said, belongs indeed to his normal qualities. The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective
and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’ For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in
the field of politics: lack of objectivity and- -often but not always identical with it–irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as
clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon
‘effect.’ He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned
merely with the ‘impression’ he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His
irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the
unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like
braggart with power, and the vain self- reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong
effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. (Among us, too, an ardently promoted cult seeks to glorify him.) In this, the critics of ‘power
politics’ are absolutely right. From the sudden inner collapse of typical representatives of this mentality, we can see what inner weakness and impotence hides behind
this boastful but entirely empty gesture. It is a product of a shoddy and superficially blase attitude towards the meaning of human conduct; and it has no relation
whatsoever to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven.
The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. This is
fundamental to all history, a point not to be proved in detail here. But because of this fact, the serving of a cause must not be absent if action is to have inner
strength. Exactly what the cause, in the service of which the politician strives for power and uses power, looks like is a matter of faith. The politician may serve
national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or religious ends. The politician may be sustained by a strong belief in ‘progress’– no matter in which
sense–or he may coolly reject this kind of belief. He may claim to stand in the service of an ‘idea’ or, rejecting this in principle, he may want to serve external
ends of everyday life. However, some kind of faith must always exist. Otherwise, it is absolutely true that the curse of the creature’s worthlessness overshadows even
the externally strongest political successes.
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With the statement above we are already engaged in discussing the last problem that concerns us tonight: the ethos of politics as a ’cause.’ What calling can politics
fulfill quite independently of its goals within the total ethical economy of human conduct–which is, so to speak, the ethical locus where politics is at home? Here,
to be sure, ultimate Weltanschauungen clash, world views among which in the end one has to make a choice. Let us resolutely tackle this problem, which recently has
been opened again, in my view in a very wrong way.
But first, let us free ourselves from a quite trivial falsification: namely, that ethics may first appear in a morally highly compromised role. Let us consider
examples. Rarely will you find that a man whose love turns from one woman to another feels no need to legitimate this before himself by saying: she was not worthy of
my love, or, she has disappointed me, or whatever other like ‘reasons’ exist. This is an attitude that, with a profound lack of chivalry, adds a fancied ‘legitimacy’
to the plain fact that he no longer loves her and that the woman has to bear it. By virtue of this ‘legitimation,’ the man claims a right for himself and besides
causing the misfortune seeks to put her in the wrong. The successful amatory competitor proceeds exactly in the same way: namely, the opponent must be less worthy,
otherwise he would not have lost out. It is no different, of course, if after a victorious war the victor in undignified self-righteousness claims, ‘I have won because
I was right.’ Or, if somebody under the frightfulness of war collapses psychologically, and instead of simply saying it was just too much, he feels the need of
legitimizing his war weariness to himself by substituting the feeling, ‘I could not bear it because I had to fight for a morally bad cause.’ And likewise with the
defeated in war. Instead of searching like old women for the ‘guilty one’ after the war–in a situation in which the structure of society produced the war–everyone
with a manly and controlled attitude would tell the enemy, ‘We lost the war. You have won it. That is now all over. Now let us discuss what conclusions must be drawn
according to the objective interests that came into play and what is the main thing in view of the responsibility towards the future which above all burdens the
victor.’ Anything else is undignified and will become a boomerang. A nation forgives if its interests have been damaged, but no nation forgives if its honor has been
offended, especially by a bigoted self-righteousness. Every new document that comes to light after decades revives the undignified lamentations, the hatred and scorn,
instead of allowing the war at its end to be buried, at least morally. This is possible only through objectivity and chivalry and above all only through dignity. But
never is it possible through an ‘ethic,’ which in truth signifies a lack of dignity on both sides. Instead of being concerned about what the politician is interested
in, the future and the responsibility towards the future, this ethic is concerned about politically sterile questions of past guilt, which are not to be settled
politically. To act in this way is politically guilty, if such guilt exists at all. And it overlooks the unavoidable falsification of the whole problem, through very
material interests: namely, the victor’s interest in the greatest possible moral and material gain; the hopes of the defeated to trade in advantages through
confessions of guilt. If anything is ‘vulgar,’ then, this is, and it is the result of this fashion of exploiting ‘ethics’ as a means of ‘being in the right.’
Now then, what relations do ethics and politics actually have? Have the two nothing whatever to do with one another, as has occasionally been said? Or, is the reverse
true: that the ethic of political conduct is identical with that of any other conduct ? Occasionally an exclusive choice has been believed to exist between the two
propositions–either the one or the other proposition must be correct. But is it true that any ethic of the world could establish commandments of identical content for
erotic, business, familial, and official relations; for the relations to one’s wife, to the green-grocer, the son, the competitor, the friend, the defendant? Should it
really matter so little for the ethical demands on politics that politics operates with very special means, namely, power backed up by violence? Do we not see that the
Bolshevik and the Spartacist ideologists bring about exactly the same results as any militaristic dictator just because they use this political means? In what but the
persons of the power-holders and their dilettantism does the rule of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils differ from the rule of any power-holder of the old regime? In
what way does the polemic of most representatives of the presumably new ethic differ from that of the opponents which they criticized, or the ethic of any other
demagogues? In their noble intention, people will say. Good! But it is the means about which we speak here, and the adversaries, in complete subjective sincerity,
claim, in the very same way, that their ultimate intentions are of lofty character. ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’ and fighting is
everywhere fighting. Hence, the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount.
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By the Sermon on the Mount, we mean the absolute ethic of the gospel, which is a more serious matter than those who are fond of quoting these commandments today
believe. This ethic is no joking matter. The same holds for this ethic as has been said of causality in science: it is not a cab, which one can have stopped at one’s
pleasure; it is all or nothing. This is precisely the meaning of the gospel, if trivialities are not to result. Hence, for instance, it was said of the wealthy young
man, ‘He went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.’ The evangelist commandment, however, is unconditional and unambiguous: give what thou hast–absolutely
everything. The politician will say that this is a socially senseless imposition as long as it is not carried out everywhere. Thus the politician upholds taxation,
confiscatory taxation, outright confiscation; in a word, compulsion and regulation for all. The ethical commandment, however, is not at all concerned about that, and
this unconcern is its essence. Or, take the example, ‘turn the other cheek’: This command is unconditional and does not question the source of the other’s authority to
strike. Except for a saint it is an ethic of indignity. This is it: one must be saintly in everything; at least in intention, one must live like Jesus, the apostles,
St. Francis, and their like. Then this ethic makes sense and expresses a kind of dignity; otherwise it does not. For if it is said, in line with the acosmic ethic of
love, ‘Resist not him that is evil with force,’ for the politician the reverse proposition holds, ‘thou shalt resist evil by force,’ or else you are responsible for
the evil winning out. He who wishes to follow the ethic of the gospel should abstain from strikes, for strikes mean compulsion; he may join the company unions. Above
all things, he should not talk of ‘revolution.’ After all, the ethic of the gospel does not wish to teach that civil war is the only legitimate war. The pacifist who
follows the gospel will refuse to bear arms or will throw them down; in Germany this was the recommended ethical duty to end the war and therewith all wars. The
politician would say the only sure means to discredit the war for all foreseeable time would have been a status quo peace. Then the nations would have questioned, what
was this war for? And then the war would have been argued ad absurdum, which is now impossible. For the victors, at least for part of them, the war will have been
politically profitable. And the responsibility for this rests on behavior that made all resistance impossible for us. Now, as a result of the ethics of absolutism,
when the period of exhaustion will have passed, the peace will be discredited, not the war.
Finally, let us consider the duty of truthfulness. For the absolute ethic it holds unconditionally. Hence the conclusion was reached to publish all documents,
especially those placing blame on one’s own country. On the basis of these one-sided publications the confessions of guilt followed –and they were one-sided,
unconditional, and without regard to consequences. The politician will find that as a result truth will not be furthered but certainly obscured through abuse and
unleashing of passion; only an all-round methodical investigation by non-partisans could bear fruit; any other procedure may have consequences for a nation that cannot
be remedied for decades. But the absolute ethic just does not ask for ‘consequences.’ That is the decisive point.
We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can
be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility.’ This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or
that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that
follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends–that is, in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’–and conduct that
follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action.
You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in
increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent–and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad
results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God’s will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man
who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right
to presuppose their goodness and perfection. He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them;
he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure
intentions is not quenched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social
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order. To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have
only exemplary value.
But even herewith the problem is not yet exhausted. No ethics in the world can dodge the fact that in numerous instances the attainment of ‘good’ ends is bound to the
fact that one must be willing to pay the price of using morally dubious means or at least dangerous ones–and facing the possibility or even the probability of evil
ramifications. From no ethics in the world can it be concluded when and to what extent the ethically good purpose ‘justifies’ the ethically dangerous means and
ramifications.
The decisive means for politics is violence. You may see the extent of the tension between means and ends, when viewed ethically, from the following: as is generally
known, even during the war the revolutionary socialists Zimmerwald faction) professed a principle that one might strikingly formulate: ‘If we face the choice either of
some more years of war and then revolution, or peace now and no revolution, we choose– some more years of war!’ Upon the further question: ‘What can this revolution
bring about?’ Every scientifically trained socialist would have had the answer: One cannot speak of a transition to an economy that in our sense could be called
socialist; a bourgeois economy will re-emerge, merely stripped of the feudal elements and the dynastic vestiges. For this very modest result, they are willing to face
‘some more years of war.’ One may well say that even with a very robust socialist conviction one might reject a purpose that demands such means. With Bolshevism and
Spartanism, and, in general, with any kind of revolutionary socialism, it is precisely the same thing. It is of course utterly ridiculous if the power politicians of
the old regime are morally denounced for their use of the same means, however justified the rejection of their aims may be.
The ethic of ultimate ends apparently must go to pieces on the problem of the justification of means by ends. As a matter of fact, logically it has only the
possibility of rejecting all action that employs morally dangerous means–in theory! In the world of realities, as a rule, we encounter the ever-renewed experience
that the adherent of an ethic of ultimate ends suddenly turns into a chiliastic prophet. Those, for example, who have just preached ‘love against violence’ now call
for the use of force for the last violent deed, which would then lead to a state of affairs in which an violence is annihilated. In the same manner, our officers told
the soldiers before every offensive: ‘This will be the last one; this one will bring victory and therewith peace.’ The proponent of an ethic of absolute ends cannot
stand up under the ethical irrationality of the world. He is a cosmic-ethical ‘rationalist.’ Those of you who know Dostoievski will remember the scene of the ‘Grand
Inquisitor,’ where the problem is poignantly unfolded. If one makes any concessions at all to the principle that the end justifies the means, it is not possible to
bring an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility under one roof or to decree ethically which end should justify which means.
My colleague, Mr. F. W. Forster, whom personally I highly esteem for his undoubted sincerity, but whom I reject unreservedly as a politician, believes it is possible
to get around this difficulty by the simple thesis: ‘from good comes only good; but from evil only evil follows.’ In that case this whole complex of questions would
not exist. But it is rather astonishing that such a thesis could come to light two thousand five hundred years after the Upanishads. Not only the whole course of world
history, but every frank examination of everyday experience points to the very opposite. The development of religions all over the world is determined by the fact that
the opposite is true. The age-old problem of theodicy consists of the very question of how it is that a power which is said to be at once omnipotent and kind could
have created such an irrational world of undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity. Either this power is not omnipotent or not kind, or,
entirely different principles of compensation and reward govern our life–principles we may interpret metaphysically, or even principles that forever escape our
comprehension This problem–the experience of the irrationality of the world–has been the driving force of all religious evolution. The Indian doctrine of karma,
Persian dualism, the doctrine of original sin, predestination and the deus absconditus, all these have grown out of this experience. Also the early Christians knew
full well the world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for
his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a
political infant.
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We are placed into various life-spheres, each of which is governed by different laws. Religious ethics have settled with this fact in different ways. Hellenic
polytheism made sacrifices to Aphrodite and Hera alike, to Dionysus and to Apollo, and knew these gods were frequently in conflict with one another. The Hindu order of
life made each of the different occupations an object of a specific ethical code, a Dharma, and forever segregated one from the other as castes, thereby placing them
into a fixed hierarchy of rank. For the man born into it, there was no escape from it, lest he be twice-born in another life. The occupations were thus placed at
varying distances from the highest religious goods of salvation. In this way, the caste order allowed for the possibility of fashioning the Dharma of each single
caste, from those of the ascetics and Brahmins to those of the rogues and harlots, in accordance with the immanent and autonomous laws of their respective occupations.
War and politics were also included. You will find war integrated into the totality of life-spheres in the Bhagavad-Gita, in the conversation between Krishna and
Arduna. ‘Do what must be done,’ i.e. do that work which, according to the Dharma of the warrior caste and its rules, is obligatory and which, according to the purpose
of the war, is objectively necessary. Hinduism believes that such conduct does not damage religious salvation but, rather, promotes it. When he faced the hero’s death,
the Indian warrior was always sure of Indra’s heaven, just as was the Teuton warrior of Valhalla. The Indian hero would have despised Nirvana just as much as the
Teuton would have sneered at the Christian paradise with its angels’ choirs. This specialization of ethics allowed for the Indian ethic’s quite unbroken treatment of
politics by following politics’ own laws and even radically enhancing this royal art.
A really radical ‘Machiavellianism,’ in the popular sense of this word, is classically represented in Indian literature, in the Kautaliya Arthasastra (long before
Christ, allegedly dating from Chandragupta’s time). In contrast with this document Machiavelli’s Principe is harmless. As is known in Catholic ethics–to which
otherwise Professor Forster stands close– the consilia evangelica are a special ethic for those endowed with the charisma of a holy life. There stands the monk who
must not shed blood or strive for gain, and beside him stand the pious knight and the burgher, who are allowed to do so, the one to shed blood, the other to pursue
gain. The gradation of ethics and its organic integration into the doctrine of salvation is less consistent than in India. According to the presuppositions of
Christian faith, this could and had to be the case. The wickedness of the world stemming from original sin allowed with relative ease the integration of violence into
ethics as a disciplinary means against sin and against the heretics who endangered the soul. However, the demands of the Sermon on the Mount, an acosmic ethic of
ultimate ends, implied a natural law of absolute imperatives based upon religion. These absolute imperatives retained their revolutionizing force and they came upon
the scene with elemental vigor during almost all periods of social upheaval. They produced especially the radical pacifist sects, one of which in Pennsylvania
experimented in establishing a polity that renounced violence towards the outside. This experiment took a tragic course, inasmuch as with the outbreak of the War of
Independence the Quakers could not stand up arms-in-hand for their ideals, which were those of the war.
Normally, Protestantism, however, absolutely legitimated the state as a divine institution and hence violence as a means. Protestantism, especially, legitimated the
authoritarian state. Luther relieved the individual of the ethical responsibility for war and transferred it to the authorities. To obey the authorities in matters
other than those of faith could never constitute guilt. Calvinism in turn knew principled violence as a means of defending the faith; thus Calvinism knew the crusade,
which was for Islam an element of life from the beginning. One sees that it is by no means a modern disbelief born from the hero worship of the Renaissance which poses
the problem of political ethics. All religions have wrestled with it, with highly differing success, and after what has been said it could not be otherwise. It is the
specific means of legitimate violence as such in the hand of human associations which determines the peculiarity of all ethical problems of politics.
Whosoever contracts with violent means for whatever ends–and every politician does–is exposed to its specific consequences. This holds especially for the crusader,
religious and revolutionary alike. Let us confidently take the present as an example. He who wants to establish absolute justice on earth by force requires a
following, a human ‘machine.’ He must hold out the necessary internal and external premiums, heavenly or worldly reward, to this ‘machine’ or else the machine will not
function. Under the conditions of the modern class struggle, the internal premiums consist of the satisfying of hatred and the craving for revenge; above all,
resentment and the need for pseudo-ethical self-righteousness: the opponents must be slandered and accused of heresy. The external rewards are adventure, victory,
booty, power, and spoils. The
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leader and his success are completely dependent upon the functioning of his machine and hence not on his own motives. Therefore he also depends upon whether or not the
premiums can be permanently granted to the following, that is, to the Red Guard, the informers, the agitators, whom he needs. What he actually attains under the
conditions of his work is therefore not in his hand, but is prescribed to him by the following’s motives, which, if viewed ethically, are predominantly base. The
following can be harnessed only so long as an honest belief in his person and his cause inspires at least part of the following, probably never on earth even the
majority. This belief, even when subjectively sincere, is in a very great number of cases really no more than an ethical ‘legitimation of cravings for revenge, power,
booty, and spoils. We shall not be deceived about this by verbiage; the materialist interpretation of history is no cab to be taken at will; it does not stop short of
the promoters of revolutions. Emotional revolutionism is followed by the traditionalist routine of everyday life; the crusading leader and the faith itself fade away,
or, what is even more effective, the faith becomes part of the conventional phraseology of political Philistines and banausic technicians. This development is
especially rapid with struggles of faith because they are usually led or inspired by genuine leaders, that is, prophets of revolution. For here, as with every leader’s
machine, one of the conditions for success is the depersonalization and routinization, in short, the psychic proletarianization, in the interests of discipline. After
coming to power the following of a crusader usually degenerates very easily into a quite common stratum of spoilsmen.
Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation, has to realize these ethical paradoxes. He must know that he is responsible for
what may become of himself under the impact of these paradoxes. I repeat, he lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence. The great virtuosi of
acosmic love of humanity and goodness, whether stemming from Nazareth or Assisi or from Indian royal castles, have not operated with the political means of violence.
Their kingdom was ‘not of this world’ and yet they worked and sill work in this world. The figures of Platon Karatajev and the saints of Dostoievski still remain their
most adequate reconstructions. He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite
different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence. The genius or demon of politics lives in an inner tension with the god of love, as well as with the
Christian God as expressed by the church. This tension can at any time lead to an irreconcilable conflict. Men knew this even in the times of church rule. Time and
again the papal interdict was placed upon Florence and at the time it meant a far more robust power for men and their salvation of soul than (to speak with Fichte) the
‘cool approbation’ of the Kantian ethical judgment. The burghers, however, fought the church-state. And it is with reference to such situations that Machiavelli in a
beautiful passage, if I am not mistaken, of the History of Florence, has one of his heroes praise those citizens who deemed the greatness of their native city higher
than the salvation of their souls.
If one says ‘the future of socialism’ or ‘international peace,’ instead of native city or ‘fatherland’ (which at present may be a dubious value to some), then you face
the problem as it stands now. Everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers
the ‘salvation of the soul.’ If, however, one chases after the ultimate good in a war of beliefs, following a pure ethic of absolute ends, then the goals may be
damaged and discredited for generations, because responsibility for consequences is lacking, and two diabolic forces which enter the play remain unknown to the actor.
These are inexorable and produce consequences for his action and even for his inner self, to which he must helplessly submit, unless he perceives them. The sentence:
‘The devil is old; grow old to understand him!’ does not refer to age in terms of chronological years. I have never permitted myself to lose out in a discussion
through a reference to a date registered on a birth certificate; but the mere fact that someone is twenty years of age and that I am over fifty is no cause for me to
think that this alone is an achievement before which I am overawed. Age is not decisive; what is decisive is the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of
life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.
Surely, politics is made with the head, but it is certainly not made with the head alone. In this the proponents of an ethic of ultimate ends are right. One cannot
prescribe to anyone whether he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibility, or when the one and when the other. One can say only this much:
If in these times, which, in your opinion, are not times of ‘sterile’ excitation–excitation is not, after all, genuine passion–if now suddenly the Weltanschauungs
politicians crop up en masse and pass the watchword, ‘The world is stupid and base, not I,’ ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the
others whom I serve and whose stupidity or baseness I shall eradicate,’ then I declare
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frankly that I would first inquire into the degree of inner poise backing this ethic of ultimate ends. I am under the impression that in nine out of ten cases I deal
with windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations. From a human point of view this is not
very interesting to me, nor does it move me profoundly. However, it is immensely moving when a mature man– no matter whether old or young in years–is aware of a
responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and
somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ That is something genuinely human and moving. And every one of us who is not
spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of
responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements) which only in unison constitute a genuine man–a man who can have the ‘calling for politics.’
Now then, ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more ten years from now. Unfortunately, for a whole series of reasons, I fear that by then the period of
reaction will have long since broken over us. It is very probable that little of what many of you, and (I candidly confess) I too, have wished and hoped for will be
fulfilled; little–perhaps not exactly nothing, but what to us at least seems little. This will not crush me, but surely it is an inner burden to realize it. Then, I
wish I could see what has become of those of you who now feel yourselves to be genuinely ‘principled’ politicians and who share in the intoxication signified by this
revolution. It would be nice if matters turned out in such a way that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 102 should hold
Our love was new, and then but in the spring, When I was wont to greet it with my lays; As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing, And stops her pipe in growth of riper
days.
But such is not the case. Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.
Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights. When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring
apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive? And what will have become of all of you by then? Will you be bitter or banausic? Will you simply and dully accept
world and occupation? Or will the third and by no means the least frequent possibility be your lot: mystic flight from reality for those who are gifted for it, or–as
is both frequent and unpleasant–for those who belabor themselves to follow this fashion? In every one of such cases, I shall draw the conclusion that they have not
measured up to their own doings. They have not measured up to the world as it really is in its everyday routine. Objectively and actually, they have not experienced
the vocation for politics in its deepest meaning, which they thought they had. They would have done better in simply cultivating plain brotherliness in personal
relations. And for the rest–they should have gone soberly about their daily work.
Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective. Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth –that man would not
have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible. But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as
well, in a very sober sense of the word. And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even
the crumbling of all hopes. This is necessary right now, or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. Only he has the calling for politics
who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this
can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.

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