ABSTRACT
Terry Maley argues that Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” offers a politics of affect that is both complex and relevant today. Weber famously argued in the lecture that politics needed to be made by both the head and the heart, by reason, or cool-headed judgment, and passion, or devotion to a cause. In the fluid circumstances that followed Germany’s defeat in WWI and the collapse of the old Wilhelmine monarchy, Weber argued that both the passions of an angry, and possibly revolutionary, working class, as well as the reactions of the old industrial and monarchical elites (and even the middle classes) to the prospect of losing their social status, economic, and political power, could ruin the chances for any kind of liberal-democracy and result in the re-establishment of a reactionary monarchy. In this atmosphere of crisis and working-class revolt, Weber argued for leaders who, in a world of irreconcilable value-plurality in which ‘god was dead’, could balance emotion and reason, making choices rooted in values while being responsible for consequences. Maley contrasts this volatile mix of affective forces with the recent discussion of Weber by feminist political theorist Wendy Brown. Brown argues, in her recent work on neoliberalism and in the Tanner lectures which she gave on the 100th anniversary of Politic as a Vocation, that neoliberalism today is marked by a new nihilism in which both elites and working- (and middle-) class white men are again afraid of losing their power and status. In a time of growing reaction and populism, choices made by leaders and citizens grounded in democratic values are every bit as important as they were in Weber’s time.
