ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explains that politics is a matter of time. Life is lived in time, and for modern man life is lived in an awareness of time, as the source of our discontents, ultimately our mortality, and of our delights. In the author's argument against Lenin, he has insisted that the monolithic utopia will always founder on the rock of divergent human values. Weber offers the historical analogy of the Egyptian fellah who inhabited those ancient bureaucratic empires. The validity, and the necessity, of politics was what, obliquely but undeniably, was demonstrated so recently in Poland: not the mythical revolutionary qualities of some classical proletariat, but the resilience of the political mind. After forty years of enthusiastic reconstruction in the Leninist-Pharaonic school, 'old European dignity' emerged unscathed and, the author believes, ultimately irrepressible.
