SOURCE: "Modernity," in Max Weber, Stanford University Press, 1983, pp. 166-88.

[In the following essay, Kronman explains Weber's reaction to and interpretation of the trends in modern social life.]

Beneath its richly detailed surface, Weber's Rechtssoziologie exhibits a surprising consistency and unity of purpose. Throughout, Weber is concerned with a single subject—the development of the institutions and forms of thought most characteristic of the modern legal order. 'Our interest', he remarks, 'is centred upon the ways and consequences of the "rationalization" of the law, that is, the development of those juristic qualities which are characteristic of it today.' Whether he is discussing modes of legal analysis, techniques of adjudication, or the forms of contractual association, Weber's fundamental aim is to give an account of those aspects of the present legal order that distinguish 'our contemporary modes of legal thought' from those prevailing in the past.

In this respect, the Rechtssoziologie parallels Weber's writings on authority, religion and economic action, all of which also reflect his predominant interest in the structure and meaning of modern social life. Each of his sociological investigations seeks to explain some distinctive component of modern European civilization—legal-rational authority, bureaucratic administration, capitalist production or the uniquely disenchanting Judeo-Christian conception of god as a supra-mundane, personal lord of creation. Indeed, it would not be too far-fetched to describe the entire corpus of Weber's substantive writings as a sociology of modernity. The Rechtssoziologie is only a part of this larger enterprise. To appreciate its full significance, one must view it in this wider context as a contribution to Weber's general theory of modernity, as one aspect of his lifelong obsession with the meaning of modern social life.

MODERNITY AND RATIONALITY

According to Weber, the institutions of modern society are distinguished by their high degree of rationality. What he means by the term 'rationality' is not always clear; nevertheless, despite his own ambiguous use of the concept, Weber's substantive writings all rest on the assumption that modern occidental culture exhibits a 'specific and peculiar rationalism' which distinguishes it from earlier forms of social life. What gives this 'modern occidental form' of rationality its 'special peculiarity'?

The beginnings of an answer can be found in the following passage from Weber's well-known essay, 'Science as a Vocation'.

Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization which we have been undergoing for thousands of years and which nowadays is usually judged in such an extremely negative way. Let us first clarify what this intellectualist rationalization, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically.

Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may 'count' on the behaviour of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy here in the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money—sometimes more and sometimes less? The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives.

It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally [in principle] there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.

If one asks what makes the streetcar's complicated mechanism intelligible—even if it is not actually understood by those who ride it—the answer would seem to be that its operation can be comprehended, at least in principle, because the streetcar itself was made by human beings acting in accordance with a plan and on the basis of known scientific principles. The same is true of the monetary system and the exchange process; these, too, are the products of purposeful human action, of many human beings acting in deliberately coordinated, though not necessarily cooperative, ways.

This idea can be extended to other important aspects of modern social life. Legal-rational bureaucracies, for example, administer laws which are acknowledged to be the deliberate creations of human beings; indeed, it is the artificiality of these laws—the fact that they have been intentionally posited or promulgated—which establishes their validity and grounds the authority of those who administer them. Similarly, the method of juristic analysis that Weber considered most developed from a purely rational point of view treats the legal significance of events as a human artifact, a product of the various meanings that different individuals assign to them rather than an intrinsic characteristic of the events themselves. In an analogous fashion, the Judeo-Christian conception of ethical personality and the contemporary (Weberian) form of existentialism inspired by it view the human soul itself as something that must be formed in accordance with a plan and that possesses meaning and value only insofar as it displays a deliberately imposed shape of this sort. Finally, even the modern capitalist economy may be viewed as a human artifact to the extent that it rests upon a network of voluntary, purposive contracts rather than prescriptive status relationships thought to be part of a fixed, natural order. Whether one is describing the nature of political authority, the forms of legal interpretation, the meaning of religious ideals or the structure of economic life, the beliefs and institutions that define modern European civilization all rest upon the idea implicit in Weber's streetcar example, the idea that what appears to confront the individual as a given datum (his material circumstances, his political, legal and economic relationships and even his own soul) is in reality a human invention, something that has been deliberately created or arranged by human beings and which therefore belongs to the world of artifacts. It is its artificiality that makes modem social life comprehensible; we can understand its institutions, despite their complexity, because they have been constructed by human beings for reasons or purposes we ourselves can grasp and that need only be recalled for the institutions to become intelligible.

In 'Science as a Vocation', Weber contrasts our world—characterized, he claims, by an 'increasing intellectualization and rationalization' of life in all its departments—with the world of the savage, a world filled with 'mysterious incalculable forces' that must be implored by 'magical means'. If the rationalism of our world is ultimately attributable to the fact that our tools, techniques and institutions are all purposeful human inventions (and known to be such), the mysterious forces that haunt the world of the savage reflect a condition which is just the opposite of this: these forces are mysterious, in some ultimate sense, because they present themselves to the savage as a fateful datum. The powers that confront the savage are not of his own making; they are, in his own eyes, inhuman powers belonging to the world as it is revealed to him in experience, a locus of independent forces. Although it is possible for the savage to achieve (or believe he has achieved) some measure of control over these powers by means of various magical techniques, the control they yield is always tenuous and incomplete, and often entirely illusory. In the final analysis, the limited efficacy of the savage's magic is to be explained by the fact that it aims to control a foreign power, a power that can never be completely understood, even in principle, because—unlike a streetcar or the modem system of economic exchange—it is not itself the product of purposeful human action.

This basic characteristic is reflected in each of the institutions and modes of thought (political, legal, religious and economic) that Weber associates, in a general way, with pre-modern society. All forms of traditional authority, for example, rest on the assumption that social norms, far from being human artifacts, belong to a permanently fixed order and form part of an uncreated, pre-existing world in which individuals are assigned a place by the fateful circumstances of their birth. In this view, relations of domination are unalterable facts of life, like the characteristics of age and sexual identity on which they rest. To the extent that pre-modern forms of economic activity are carried on within the framework of a household (whether large or small) and are oriented toward the satisfaction of traditionally stereotyped, statusbased needs, the same can be said of them as well: the circumstances and goals of all such activities appear to those engaged in them to be conditions fixed by nature or God or immemorial custom rather than the product of a deliberately established economic scheme of the kind every purposive contract might be said to constitute.

The same is true in the legal sphere. Primitive or magical forms of adjudication are not subject to intellectual control. The judgment of an oracle, unaccompanied by supporting reasons, is a fateful decree which men, with their limited powers of comprehension, must accept but can never understand. Only when human beings assume the role played by divine powers in all oracular forms of law-making and begin giving reasons for their decisions—thereby transforming legal judgments into human artifacts—can the adjudicatory process itself be subjected to intellectual control and in this sense rationalized.

The world of the savage, of the traditional master, of magic and oracular adjudication is above all else a world of fateful events and relationships. It is the idea of fate—of what is given to men as a fixed condition of their existence—that best expresses the central, defining quality of this world, a world that provides a home for man and yet confronts him as a fate or destiny rather than the product of his own purposeful activity. In this world, even his most human achievements—the social arrangements under which he lives—belong to a comprehensive, unbroken and unalterable natural order. By contrast, wherever man turns today, he sees only himself, only the artifacts of his own creative industry; today we live in a world that has been humanized and in this sense disenchanted.

The disenchantment of the world, the result of an historical process that 'has continued to exist in occidental culture for millenia', reflects the revolutionary change in perspective produced by the view that human society is an artifact rather than a fateful datum. Only when social relationships and institutions are viewed in this way do they lose their mysteriousness and become fully comprehensible, at least in principle. The social world in which we live today is transparent to reason because it is our own human creation: as Hobbes observed, a scientific understanding of the organization of society is possible precisely because society is itself a human artifact— something of which we are, in his words, both the matter and the maker. It is this Hobbesian thought—echoed in the writings of many other philosophers including Vico, Kant, Hegel and Marx—that underlies Weber's conception of the 'modem occidental form' of rationality and the age-old 'process of disenchantment' that has defined the historically unique career of Western culture.

Anyone familiar with Weber's writings knows, however, that his view of modernity was more complex and ambiguous than what I have said might suggest. The ambiguity in Weber's conception of modernity is most strikingly revealed by his paradoxical assertion that the very process of rationalization which has produced the belief that 'one can, in principle, master all things by calculation', itself represents a fateful destiny. In 'Science as a Vocation', Weber speaks of the 'fate' of scientific work, reminds us of the 'fundamental fact' that we are 'destined to live in a godless and prophetless' age and warns that 'it is weakness not to be able to countenance the stern seriousness of our fateful times.' The 'tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order' itself represents an 'iron cage' whose construction has been decreed by 'fate', the same 'inescapable fate' that underlies the 'sober fact of universal bureaucratization' in the political sphere. This idea runs, like an undercurrent, through all of Weber's writings: modernity means enlightenment and greatly enhanced possibilities for human control, but it also means the increasing domination of fateful forces, among which he includes reason itself.

Weber's emphasis on the fatefulness of modernity is indeed paradoxical. Fate means: what is inexplicable and cannot be controlled; but since Weber himself equates reason with control (control in principle), it is difficult to understand how reason can itself be a fate, how the process of rationalization can be regarded as one that, in some sense or other, is beyond our individual and collective powers of control. To the extent the disenchantment of the world has unleashed forces that today dominate us as a fate, it cannot be said to have unambiguously increased the rationality of social life. When Weber says that 'the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world"', he implies that the rationalization is less complete or unqualified than it might seem, that the modern world is dominated by peculiar irrationalities of its own—different, to be sure, from those that conditioned the magical experience of the savage or the traditional world of the Abrahamite peasant who 'stood in the organic cycle of life', but equally beyond human comprehension and control. What did Weber believe these peculiarly modern irrationalities to be?

FATE AND THE LOSS OF AUTONOMY

This question is more difficult than might appear. The reason for the difficulty is that Weber uses the concept of fate to describe two quite different aspects of the rationalization process. Each use in turn suggests a particular critique of modern social life, but these critiques are themselves different and indeed antithetical. Weber's insistence on the fatefulness of reason thus has an ambiguity of meaning which reveals an underlying ambivalence in his attitude toward the most basic features of modern European civilization.

The first of the two meanings that Weber gives to the concept of fate is most clearly revealed in those passages in which he describes the 'substantially irrational' consequences of modern capitalism—in particular, the enervating system of shop discipline imposed by capitalist entrepreneurs in an effort to achieve a 'maximum of formal rationality in capital accounting'.

No special proof is necessary to show that military discipline is the ideal model for the modem capitalist factory, as it was for the ancient plantation. However, organizational discipline in the factory has a completely rational basis. With the help of suitable methods of measurement, the optimum profitability of the individual worker is calculated like that of any material means of production. On this basis, the American system of 'scientific management' triumphantly proceeds with its rational conditioning and training of work performances, thus drawing the ultimate conclusions from the mechanization and discipline of the plant. The psychophysical apparatus of man is completely adjusted to the demands of the outer world, the tools, the machines—in short, it is functionalized, and the individual is shorn of his natural rhythm as determined by his organism; in line with the demands of the work procedure, he is attuned to a new rhythm through the functional specialization of muscles and through the creation of an optimal economic of physical effort. This whole process of rationalization, in the factory as elsewhere, and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, parallels the centralization of the material implements of organization in the hands of the master. Thus, discipline inexorably takes over ever larger areas as the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly rationalized. This universal phenomenon more and more restricts the importance of charisma and of individually differentiated conduct.

This passage has a sharply critical tone—could have come from Marx's Paris Manuscripts—and it seems clear that Weber considers the 'functional specialization' of the human animal in accordance with the work requirements of the modern factory to be one of the most costly consequences of the capitalist system of production. What is not made clear is why the growth of discipline associated with the rationalization of the production process should be viewed as anything more than a cost that must be incurred to obtain the benefits, such as increased material prosperity, that capitalism offers—a price it is arguably rational to pay so long as the benefits of capitalism outweigh its costs. Weber at times seems to imply that the deliberate mechanization of the human worker in the capitalist factory is substantively irrational because it imposes costs on the worker that are not taken into account in calculating the overall profitability of the enterprise. If that were so, however, the irrationality of shop discipline could be eliminated by making its costs explicit, and by deciding whether the harm it does to the 'psychophysical apparatus' of the individual worker is justified by the increase in productivity and consequent rise in material well-being that such discipline makes possible.

There is, however, a second and more troubling sense in which capitalist shop discipline is irrational. The defining characteristic of modem capitalism is its high degree of calculability, and calculability implies control. Although it can never eliminate all risk or contingency, increased calculability reduces the mysteriousness of economic life by permitting its most fundamental processes—the production and exchange of goods—to be deliberately designed and monitored by human beings. One consequence of capitalist discipline, however, is a loss of control on the part of workers. Above all else, factory discipline means a loss of autonomy for the individual worker, a reduction in his ability to control the conditions of his own employment. This follows inevitably from the entrepreneur's effort to maximize the profitability of his enterprise by adjusting the 'apparatus' of his human workers to the demands of the inanimate objects on and by means of which they perform their various functions. In a capitalist factory, workers are required to sacrifice their own psychophysical independence and to subordinate themselves to the inhuman rhythm of the machine (which Weber elsewhere describes as 'mind objectified'). For the capitalist worker, the machine is a kind of fate to which he must deliver himself—even though, for the entrepreneur, it represents a powerful instrument of control. To achieve maximum control over his own enterprise, a capitalist factory owner must impose a discipline on his workers that deprives them of the control they would otherwise have over the conditions of their employment and even their own selves. Shop discipline is substantively irrational in the sense that it requires some to give up their self-control so that others may increase theirs. Describing its consequences in this way underscores the extent to which the regimentation of factory life represents a departure from the rationalizing tendencies of capitalism as a whole.

It is possible to view the distributional effects of capitalist production in a similar light. A modem capitalist exchange economy rests upon a complex web of purposive contracts. The utilities that are exchanged in an economy of this sort are transferred through the free agreement of the parties—not in satisfaction of status-based obligations of service and support, as was often the case in the past. Weber emphasizes, in particular, the freedom of the capitalist labour contract: before he can appropriate the labour of his workers, a factory owner must contract for the right to do so by entering an agreement which they are, in theory, entirely free to reject. The contractual freedom that an individual today enjoys in defining his economic relationships with others significantly increases his power of control, his ability to determine, for himself, the interests and even the way of life he shall pursue.

This increase in control may, however, lose much of its meaning if an individual lacks the material resources to make his decisions effective, if his choices are in a practical sense narrowly limited because he can afford to make only a few of them. 'The great variety of permitted contractual schemata and the formal empowerment to set the content of contracts in accordance with one's desires and independently of all official form patterns, in and of itself by no means makes sure that these formal possibilities will in fact be available to all and everyone. Such availability is prevented above all by the differences in the distribution of property as guaranteed by law.'

These differences render pointless, for some, the very freedom on which the capitalist order is predicated. Like the intensified discipline of the capitalist factory, the in-equalities in wealth created and sustained by the principle of effective demand—'the ability of those who are more plentifully supplied with money to outbid the others'—entail a loss of control for the disadvantaged. For those who lack the resources to 'make use of [their legal] empowerments', this loss of control transforms the formal freedom of contractual association on which the capitalist order is based into an 'iron cage' that guarantees the preservation of existing disparities in wealth.

In the concluding paragraph of the Rechtssoziologie, Weber describes the analogous loss of control that has resulted from the rationalization of the legal order.

Whatever form law and legal practice may come to assume under the impact of these various influences [Weber has just concluded a discussion of the 'anti-formal tendencies' in modem law] it will be inevitable that, as a result of technical and economic developments, the legal ignorance of the layman will increase. The use of jurors and similar lay judges will not suffice to stop the continuous growth of the technical elements in the law and hence of its character as a specialists' domain. Inevitably, the notion must expand that the law is a rational technical apparatus, which is continually transformable in the light of expediential considerations and devoid of all sacredness of content. This fate may be obscured by the tendency of acquiesence in the existing law, which is growing in many ways for several reasons, but it cannot really be stayed. All of the modem sociological and philosophical analyses, many of which are of a high scholarly value, can only contribute to strengthen this impression, regardless of the content of their theories concerning the nature of law and the judicial process.

According to Weber, 'the notion must expand that the law is a rational technical apparatus', a tool for achieving certain social, political and economic ends that have been chosen on the basis of 'expediential considerations'. He implicitly contrasts this instrumental conception of law with one that ascribes a sacred meaning of some sort to the legal order: modern law is 'devoid of all sacredness of content', and tends increasingly to be viewed as a tool whose value depends entirely on its success in furthering whatever extra-legal goals we happen to have set for ourselves. In this respect, it resembles the 'fully developed bureaucratic apparatus', a form of administration that enjoys a 'purely technical superiority' over every other and 'compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production'.

What this instrumental conception of law expresses, above all else, is the belief that law is a deliberately created artifact, a human invention designed for human ends. Before it can come to be viewed in this way, however, the legal order must be disenchanted and this requires that law be conceived as a product of human legislation. The instrumentalism that predominates today thus presupposes the acceptance of a positivistic conception of law. Acceptance of this idea is also critical to the growth of 'the technical elements in the law and hence of its character as a specialists' domain'. A science of law is possible only if the principles that underlie the legal order—that determine its general structure and define the relationship between its parts—are fully accessible to human understanding. The principles in question can attain this kind of intelligibility, however, only on one condition—that they are themselves conceived, in a positivistic fashion, as rules deliberately formulated by human beings and intentionally employed by them in the construction of the legal order. Modem law resembles Weber's streetcar; we all know that it is fully intelligible in principle and accept the idea of a science of law even though its actual workings are unfamiliar to us. This is because the law is our own human creation. By contrast, primitive law is filled with the same mysterious forces that dominate other aspects of pre-modern life, forces that cannot be mastered except by 'recourse to magical means'. The elaborate techniques of dispute resolution that Weber associates with primitive law are in reality a species of magic which lacks the one distinguishing characteristic of all true science—intellectual control. Primitive law, like primitive life in general, must reckon with 'incalculable forces' that exceed human powers of comprehension; only after these forces have been banished and the responsibility for law-making assumed by human beings, can the legal order be subjected, even in principle, to intellectual control. And only after such control has been achieved can the law be treated as a 'rational technical apparatus' administered by experts in a scientific fashion.

The rationalization of the law has undoubtedly increased the control we have over our own social life. At the same time, however, it has also inevitably increased 'the legal ignorance of the layman', thereby strengthening his dependency on specialists. Legal specialists, in the broadest sense, are a universal phenomenon and have played a role of some sort in every legal system of which we are aware (including even the most primitive ones). Today, however, legal specialists play a larger and more significant role than they have in the past; indeed, Weber describes the increasing importance of legal experts as a 'fate' that 'cannot really be stayed'. For the non-expert, this development entails a loss of control. To an ever greater degree, the layman today requires the assistance of a legal specialist in arranging his personal and commercial affairs, and since he is often not in a position to evaluate, even on purely instrumental grounds, the advice he has been given, he is frequently forced to rely on his legal counsellor for advice of a more substantive nature concerning the ends he ought to set for himself—the things he should care about and strive to attain. In this way, the growing dependence of the layman on legal experts threatens his autonomy in a critical respect by limiting his ability to determine, for himself, the goals that give his conduct direction and meaning.

The transformation of the law into a 'technically rational apparatus' has therefore had the same paradoxical result as the rationalization of other aspects of modem life. We no longer regard the legal order as a medium in which incomprehensible powers declare themselves and determine our destinies, but view it, instead, as a powerful tool for the advancement of human ends, as a device for expanding the deliberate control we exercise over our own social arrangements. At the same time, however, the rationalization of the law has limited individual autonomy by subjecting the layman to an increasing dependence on legal specialists—a consequence that parallels the similar loss of autonomy in the capitalist factory and modem bureaucratic organization (which Weber describes, in a remarkable passage, as a form of 'objectified intelligence' that 'together with the inanimate machine … is busy fabricating the shell of bondage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of ancient Egypt'). The modern legal order, too, represents a 'shell of bondage', an 'iron cage' in which the individual's power of self-control is increasingly limited by the continuous and irreversible growth of 'the technical elements in the law'—a process that resembles (indeed, is merely one aspect of) the 'irresistible advance of bureaucratization' characteristic of modern political and economic life.

Weber describes the increasing 'legal ignorance of the layman' and his growing dependence on experts in the same way that he describes the progress of bureaucratic organization and market-oriented capitalism—as a 'fate'. In this way, he draws our attention to what he considered their common and most paradoxical feature, the fact that in each case men find the control they are able to exercise over their lives increasingly limited by institutions of their own making. In the past, the control a man had over his life was narrowly bounded by forces that were, or were experienced as being, inhuman in character and origin. Today, by contrast, the forces that constrain the individual and limit his power to determine for himself the kind of life he shall have are, to a degree previously unimaginable, forces that have been deliberately created and set in motion by human beings. It is this fact, more than any other, which distinguishes the special fatefulness of modem society. We live in a world dominated by institutions that we ourselves have made, yet which imprison us in an 'iron cage'. We have, in short, constructed our own 'shell of bondage', a shell whose permanence and indestructability are only enhanced by the fact that it is 'as austerely rational as a machine'. It is the paradox of this self-imposed unfreedom that Weber often appears to have in mind when he speaks of the fatefulness of the process of intellectualization which has liberated mankind from the 'mysterious incalculable forces' that have hitherto dominated his existence—but only by substituting for them a prison of his own construction. A man found the Archimedian point, Kafka says in a parable, but used it against himself; he was permitted to find it only on this condition.

FATE AND THE DECLINE OF LEADERSHIP

In 1917, near the end of his life, Weber wrote a long and revealing essay with the title, 'Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany'. The essay is in large part devoted to specific political problems facing Germany at the time. It also contains, however, some of Weber's most general observations regarding the nature of modern society and, in particular, the rationalization of political life produced by what he terms 'the irresistible advance of bureaucratization'. At one point in the essay, a question is raised concerning the character of leadership in bureaucratic organizations. According to Weber the bureaucratization of party politics and of the state's administrative machinery has meant the 'elimination of political talent' and the gradual weakening of those institutions, such as parliamentary government, which in the past have encouraged responsible political leadership and nurtured its development. Similarly, in the economic sphere, the exercise of genuine entrepreneurial leadership has been made increasingly difficult by the rationalization of the firm—a result that Weber believed would only be exacerbated by the nationalization of economic resources under a programme of state socialism. In both realms, 'the directing mind or "moving spirit"'—the politician in one case and entrepreneur in the other—has been replaced by the bureaucratic official with his characteristic 'civil-service' mentality.

The difference [between the bureaucrat and the leader] is rooted only in part in the kind of performance expected. Independent decision-making and imaginative organizational capabilities in matters of detail are usually also demanded of the bureaucrat, and very often expected even in larger matters. The idea that the bureaucrat is absorbed in subaltern routine and that only the 'director' performs the interesting, intellectually demanding tasks is a preconceived notion of the literati and only possible in a country that has no insight into the matter in which its affairs and the work of its officialdom are conducted. The difference lies, rather, in the kind of responsibility, and this does indeed determine the different demands addressed to both kinds of positions. An official who receives a directive which he considers wrong can and is supposed to object to it. If his superior insists on its execution, it is his duty and even his honour to carry it out as if it corresponded to his innermost conviction and to demonstrate in this fashion that his sense of duty stands above his personal preference. It does not matter whether the imperative mandate originates from an 'agency', a 'corporate body' or an 'assembly'. This is the ethos of office. A political leader acting in this way would deserve contempt. He will often be compelled to make compromises, that means, to sacrifice the less important to the more important. If he does not succeed in demanding of his master, be he a monarch or the people: 'You either give me now the authorization I want from you, or I will resign,' he is a miserable Kleber [one who sticks to his post]—as Bismarck called this type—and not a leader. 'To be above parties'—in truth, to remain outside the realm of the struggle for power—is the official's role, while this struggle for personal power, and the resulting personal responsibility, is the lifeblood of the politician as well as of the entrepreneur.

According to Weber, the increasing rationalization of social life threatens to bring about a uniform 'domination by the "bureaucratic spirit" to the disadvantage of real leaders', leaders with 'political ambition and the will to power and responsibility'. Instead of such leaders one finds bureaucratic office-holders, men who possess the expertise required to implement political and economic programmes, but whose 'mentality' or 'spirit' prevents them from exercising genuine leadership. 'If a man in a leading position is an "official" in the spirit of his performance, no matter how qualified—a man, that is, who works dutifully and honourably according to the rules and instruction—then he is as useless at the helm of a private enterprise as of a government.' The rule of officials, of professional civil servants who have neither the desire nor the strength to be held personally accountable for their decisions, 'unavoidably increases in correspondence with the rational technology of modem life'; in this sense, the increasing dominance of the 'civil-service mentality of the official' is an inevitable consequence of 'the irresistible advance of bureaucratization', a process that itself represents the 'unambiguous yardstick for the modernization of the state'.

This is the second sense in which Weber uses the concept of fate: it is our fate to live in a world in which responsible leadership, of any sort, is increasingly rare. The very conditions that today promote the intellectualization of social life discourage all forms of leadership except those based upon a mass following whose trust and faith have been won through popular demagoguery, a type of leadership that in Weber's view is 'always exposed to direct, purely emotional and irrational influence' and whose basic tendency is to frustrate, rather than promote, the formation of consistent, continuous and—above all else—responsible political programmes. Today, according to Weber, our public life is dominated by the apolitical bureaucrat and the irresponsible caesarist demagogue; this is our fate and we must struggle, as best we can, to preserve a few remnants of responsible leadership while recognizing that in doing so we set ourselves against a centuries-old process of rationalization that only the naive can hope to reverse. Even socialism is subject to these same rationalizing forces: although 'a progressive elimination of private capitalism is theoretically possible', the abolition of capitalism would not mean 'the destruction of the steel frame of modem industrial work', but only 'that also the top management of the nationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic.'

Why is the spirit of true leadership, as Weber conceives it, necessarily antithetical to the mentality of the bureaucratic official? Weber's fullest answer is to be found in his essay, 'Politics as a Vocation', where he gives a detailed account of the personal qualities required in a political leader. There are, he says, 'three preeminent qualities [which] are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.' A leader must first of all have passion: unlike the bureaucratic official, he must be passionately devoted to a cause, and to 'the god or demon who is its overlord'. The 'proper vocation' of the bureaucrat is 'impartial administration'. He is therefore forbidden to 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.'

The passion that distinguishes the true political leader from the bureaucrat is not, however, a 'sterile excitation, a "romanticism of the intellectually interesting", running into emptiness devoid of all feeling of objective responsibility.' No matter how strongly it is felt, mere passion 'does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a "cause" also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action.' In this respect, the conduct of the politician

is subject to quite a different, indeed, exactly the opposite, principle of responsibility from that of the civil servant. The honour 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 honour 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.

To feel a responsibility of this sort, however, a politician needs the third of the three qualities that Weber identifies—a sense of proportion.

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 … 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.

Only if he overcomes his vanity by maintaining a distance towards himself can the politician avoid the constant 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.' Vanity, and the lack of objectivity that it encourages, 'tempts [the politician] to strive for the glamourous semblance of power rather than for actual power', an attitude which represents, in Weber's words, a 'sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation'.

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 that 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 his work leads nowhere and is senseless.

For the work of the politician to have any meaning at all, it must be continuously informed by a conception of the programme or goal in whose service he places himself; the true politician, according to Weber, will always be prepared to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of his cause, in a spirit of passionate detachment. To do this, however, a man must be 'not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word … 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.'

The intensity of his commitment and the courage he displays in maintaining his 'sense of proportion'—his distance from men and things and even himself—distinguish the experience and conduct of a leader from that of a mere dilettante and set him apart from those who do not have a calling for politics. This fact is of utmost importance: it is not the substance or content of the goal he has chosen for himself that makes someone a leader—a politician, according to Weber, 'may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly or religious ends'—but the spirit in which he makes his choice and attempts to implement it. The politician not only has a goal, he is passionately devoted to it; and he pursues his goal while struggling against the temptations of vanity—which requires the courage and strength of character to keep his own human impulses at a distance.

To make a choice or commit oneself to a cause is not necessarily to do so with passion and courage; these are qualities that any particular commitment, whether shortlived or longlasting, may or may not possess. Since courage and passion are qualities that do not accompany every choice, they must owe their existence to some aspect of a person's character—some part of his soul—other than the will, understood simply as the power of affirming or disaffirming, the power of saying 'yes' to one thing and 'no' to another. Every choice necessarily involves the exercise of this power, but for a choice to possess the special qualities that distinguish a genuine leader's commitment to his cause from the 'sterile excitation' of the political dilettante, something more is required. Courage and passion are qualities that must be brought to the choices we make and although it is by no means clear where these qualities come from or how they are to be summoned, there is nothing in the simple act of choice itself that determines their existence or non-existence. The true politician is distinguished by the fact that he is able, for whatever reasons, to draw upon powers in his soul quite different from the general capacity, which he shares in common with other men, for making choices and setting ends. What is decisive, in this respect, is a 'trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.' He who possesses this ability is, in Weber's phrase, a 'mature man' (whether he is young or old in a chronological sense), and it is this quality that we find 'genuinely human and moving' in the actions of such an individual when, with a full sense of responsibility for the consequences of his conduct, he 'reaches the point where he says: "Here I stand; I can do no other."

The qualities that Weber emphasizes in describing the prerequisites for responsible political leadership—the leader's passionate devotion to his cause, and his courageous self-discipline in maintaining a sense of proportion by resisting the distorting influence of ordinary human vanity—are present either not at all or in a much altered form in the ideal bureaucrat. The perfect bureaucrat, the one who fully lives up to the demands of his vocation, executes his duties with complete impassivity and in a spirit of disinterested neutrality. In contrast to the politician, the bureaucrat strives to eliminate all passion from his work since passion is a personalizing force—passion is the feeling we have for those things that matter to us personally—and it is the bureaucrat's fundamental responsibility to administer the law without regard to his own personal concerns (as distinct from the objective requirements of the legal order, as he conceives them). A genuine politician, on the other hand, identifies in a personal sense with his own programme—it is his cause and he takes responsibility for it.

Weber recognizes that the civil servant's tasks, like the politician's, sometimes requires 'moral discipline and self-denial'—as, for example, when he is asked to execute an order that he considers wrong and nevertheless strives to do so 'exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction'. But the courage required of a politician is different and more demanding, for a politician must be prepared to do something that no bureaucrat need ever do, at least in the performance of his official duties: he must ask others to make sacrifices in order to further a cause for which he alone is personally accountable. Every politician, if he aspires to genuine leadership, must accept the terrible burden this implies, a burden far greater than that associated with even the most extreme acts of self-sacrifice. The need for courage cannot be avoided in the struggles of political life; a bureaucrat, by contrast, is not required to be a hero in Weber's sense in order to perform his task (although his work, like that of anyone with a principled vocation, may give him an opportunity to display a heroic devotion to his calling).

There is, however, another and even more fundamental difference between the political leader and the bureaucrat. According to Weber, modern bureaucratic organization 'has usually come into power on the basis of a leveling of social and economic differences', and inevitably accompanies 'mass democracy'. The leveling tendencies of bureaucratic administration and its close connection with modern mass democracy derive from what Weber calls its 'characteristic principle'—the 'abstract regularity of the exercise of authority, which is a result of the demand for "equality before the law" in the personal and functional sense …' When a civil servant issues a command or makes a decision, he does so not in his own name, but in the name of the law; the authority he claims for his official acts is independent of any personal quality he himself happens to possess. Both the bureaucrat issuing an order and the person to whom the order is issued are bound by the system of 'intentionally established' norms that justify the command in question; these norms constitute, in Weber's phrase, an 'impersonal order' to which even the person exercising authority is subject.

Officeholder and private citizen owe obedience to this impersonal legal order only insofar as its rules have been deliberately established by an organization of which each is a member. In their capacity as members of such an organization, the bureaucrat exercising authority and the person subject to his command are 'equals before the law'. Leadership, by contrast, is importantly non-egalitarian. The 'warm passion' and 'cool sense of proportion' that must be 'forged together in one and the same soul' if a man is to be a responsible leader—if he is, in Weber's words, 'to be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history'—are qualities that are not distributed equally among men. Men differ in the extent to which they possess the 'preeminent qualities' needed for political leadership and hence in their ability to live up to the demands of politics; only he who is able to combine passion and courage in the way Weber suggests can sustain his commitment in the face of the world's stupidity and preserve a sense of responsibility while struggling against both the temptations of vanity and 'the diabolic forces lurking in all violence'. To have a calling for politics, one must have a 'knowledge of [the] tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven' and be able to act without denying this knowledge or collapsing under its weight. Politics requires an inward strength which only a few men possess and the true leader—the leader who is 'more than a narrow and vain upstart of the moment'—is therefore, in the most literal sense, an extraordinary individual, a 'hero … in a very sober sense of the word'.

Nothing could be more alien to the leveling democratic spirit of bureaucratic rule with its characteristic principle of equality before the law. A genuine political leader not only reminds us that men are differentially endowed with respect to those personal qualities that are necessary for responsible leadership, he also insists, up to a point, that these same qualities give him the right—a right others do not have—to make demands on himself and his followers. Every true politician, in Weber's sense, feels himself to be an 'innerly "called" leader of men' and finds in this feeling the legitimation for his demand that others, too, make sacrifices on behalf of the cause which is 'the guiding star' of his action. To this extent, all true political leadership has a personal quality that sharply differentiates it from the impersonal authority of the civil servant—indeed, that contradicts the egalitarian premises of bureaucratic rule. 'The devotion of [a leader's] disciples, his followers, his personal party friends is oriented to his person and to its qualities.' This explains why the 'irresistible advance of bureaucratization' poses a threat to the continued exercise of responsible leadership: wherever the bureaucratic spirit prevails, the demands a leader makes on his followers must appear suspect since they are in part legitimated by the possession of extraordinary personal qualities not shared by others. The increasingly bureaucratic world in which we live is a world that has no room for heroes—not for accidental reasons but because bureaucracy itself is predicated upon an egalitarian conception of legitimacy that does not allow us to recognize, as a source of authority, the exceptional personal qualities which all heroism reveals.

The meaning of this last point should perhaps be stated more precisely. To say that our world no longer has room for political heroes does not mean that individual acts of heroism are impossible, but only that we lack confidence in, and to some extent view as illegitimate, the institutions that historically have served as recruiting grounds for political leaders. The very idea of an institution whose fundamental purpose is to foster and reward leadership in Weber's sense must appear suspect from the standpoint of an anti-heroic bureaucratic ethic. According to Weber, the gradual decay of these institutions—in particular, those associated with parliamentary politics—has weakened the conditions necessary for responsible leadership and encouraged a shift in the method of choosing leaders towards what he calls 'the caesarist mode of selection', the selection of leaders through mass acclamation achieved by means of demagoguery and tending, at the extreme, to the 'irrational mob rule typical of purely plebiscitary peoples'. To counteract this tendency, which he considered a consequence of 'active mass democratization' , Weber argued that faith must be restored in those institutions that in the past have been training grounds for political heroes. This requires, however, that we affirm the value of leadership and hence take a stand against the levelling spirit of bureaucratic rule that increasingly dominates every aspect of our public and private lives. If we do not, we can expect to live in a world divided between the bureaucrat and the plebiscitarian demagogue. This is our fate, a fate that cannot be avoided so long as the responsible heroism which Weber considered the highest form of politics continues to seem an embarrassment from the perspective of the egalitarian ideals that underlie our bureaucratic civilization.

WEBER'S AMBIVALENT CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY

The peculiar rationality of modern European civilization is to be explained by the fact that its political and economic institutions are deliberately created artifacts which are, in principle at least, intelligible to the human beings who have made them. In Weber's view, however, the rationalization of modem society itself represents a kind of fate or destiny. One encounters this idea in each of Weber's works, including the Rechtssoziologie (whose final paragraph characterizes the transformation of the legal order into a 'rational technical apparatus' as an inevitable development that 'cannot really be stayed'). Weber's description of the rationalization process as a fateful destiny seems to be a contradiction in terms: reason means understanding and control, while fate implies a domination by uncontrollable powers. How can reason itself be a fate? This is the fundamental question that any reader of Weber is eventually led to ask.

I have attempted to clarify Weber's concept of fate by describing the two different ways in which he uses it. Weber sometimes uses the concept of fate to describe the loss of individual autonomy that has accompanied the rationalization of political, legal and economic life. Today, we live in a self-imposed shell of bondage 'as austerely rational as a machine', with little control over the forces that determine our material opportunities, work conditions and legal status. It is to the paradox of this self-created unfreedom that Weber is sometimes referring when he speaks of the fatefulness of the intellectualization process. However, Weber often uses the idea of fate to describe a different aspect of modem European civilization—the relentless expansion of the 'bureaucratic spirit', with its profoundly anti-heroic ethic and horror of all personal privilege. This, too, represents an irresistible fate, one that means, above all else, the elimination of real leaders with 'political ambition and the will to power and responsibility'.

Each of these two ways of understanding the fatefulness of the rationalization process—as the paradoxical loss of control that has accompanied the triumphal spread of reason itself or as the disappearance of heroes from a bureaucratically levelled world—provides the foundation for a critique of modem society. Although Weber did not develop either critique in a systematic fashion, there are hints—or more accurately, chronic eruptions—of each in his writings. The first of these two critiques is suggested by certain passages in the Rechtssoziologie and by his analysis of the substantive irrationalities of modern capitalism. It can be summarized in the following way: The modern legal order is predicated upon the related ideas of freedom and equality. Today, individuals are free to construct their own legal relationships through voluntary contractual arrangements with others, and consider themselves entitled to equal treatment before the law, regardless of their status or class position. However, despite the very extensive formal freedoms which the modern legal order confers on every individual, material circumstances—in particular, the distribution of wealth and the conditions of work—deprive these formal freedoms of their meaning or value. Freedom and equality cannot be realized in a concretely meaningful sense until property has been re-distributed and work routines reorganized so as to eliminate, or at least reduce, the disparities of wealth and the inhuman discipline associated with the capitalist system of production. There must therefore be a fundamental alteration in the material conditions under which individuals exercise their formal freedoms if the egalitarian ideal that justifies these freedoms is actually to be achieved.

This first critique, which Weber states sympathetically without ever actually endorsing, is of course most often associated with the Marxist left, which helps to explain why some Marxist writers have regarded Weber as a cautious fellow-traveller, a materialist who could never quite rid himself of his idealist tendencies. However, it is not the Marxist overtones of this first critique that I want to emphasize, but rather its basic acceptance of equality and autonomy as moral ideas. Someone who accepts this first critique believes that redistribution of wealth and abolition of the factory system are necessary to establish conditions under which individual freedom can flourish to a degree not possible in a society based upon market-oriented capitalism. To this extent, advocates of Weber's first critique embrace the ideal of individual autonomy and disagree with apologists for the existing order only in maintaining that material conditions must be rearranged if a meaningful degree of autonomy is to be secured for everyone. The capacity for autonomous action that will be liberated by a change in material conditions is one that every man possesses and has an equal right to exercise, subject to a similar right in others. Because it celebrates the notion of autonomy as a moral ideal and endorses an egalitarian conception of society, the first critique of modernity implicit in Weber's writings marks an extension or development, rather than a repudiation, of the normative principles that underlie the modern bureaucratic order at its deepest level.

The same cannot be said for Weber's second critique of modern society. This critique challenges rather than supports the ideal of impersonal equality and seeks to rehabilitate the legitimacy of personal leadership in a world dominated by the levelling tendencies of bureaucratic rule. The egalitarian ideal on which the bureaucratic order rests is threatened by the appearance of a leader with courage and passion and a sense of responsibility. A true leader feels entitled, by virtue of his own extraordinary qualities, to call on his followers to make the sacrifices he believes they must; nothing could be further from the attitude of the bureaucratic official who seeks, so far as possible, to eliminate everything strictly personal from his dealings with peers and clients and to perform his duties in a spirit of studied passionlessness. The bureaucrat is devoted, above all else, to the principle that every citizen is equal before the law, regardless of the distinctive personal qualities he happens to possess: from the perspective of the ideal bureaucrat, qualities of this sort can never be a basis for the exercise of authority. A leader, on the other hand, is an extraordinary man who demands to be recognized as such and claims the right to rule others on the ground that only he has both the passion and courageous self-discipline required to lead them, in a responsible way, toward the goal he champions. Every genuine leader draws attention—by his actions and the claims he makes on his followers—to those personal qualities that set him apart as a leader of men and that justify, in the eyes of those devoted to him, the often strenuous demands he makes in the name of his cause. Weber's second critique of modern society insists on the need for responsible leadership in political affairs and hence on the necessity of counteracting the growth of a bureaucratic spirit incapable of tolerating the claims to personal authority which the exercise of genuine leadership always entails. The point of this critique is not to emphasize the extent to which the egalitarian ideals of the legal-rational bureaucratic order remain unfulfilled, but to question these ideals themselves in a fundamental respect. To this extent, it represents a deeper or more radical critique of modern society than the first one.

If the first critique of modern society implicit in Weber's writings is broadly suggestive of the criticisms developed by Marx and his followers, the second parallels, in many respects, the critique of modern society that Nietzsche offers, especially in his later writings. Weber's account of political leadership in 'Politics as a Vocation' reminds one of many similar passages in Nietzsche's own writings and his deliberate use of Nietzschean phrases seems calculated to draw attention to the similarity in their views. In his account of political leadership, Weber stresses the same personal qualities that Nietzsche does—courage, passion, self-discipline, a heightened sense of responsibility, a distance from oneself and the world—and emphasizes (again, as Nietzsche does) the rarity of these qualities and the anti-democratic consequences of treating their possession as a justification for the exercise of authority. Anyone who accepts the democratic principle of equal respect for persons—as the bureaucratic official and Marxist critic of modern society both do—will reject and perhaps even regard as offensive Weber's limited endorsement of Nietzsche's ideas. Similarly, anyone who is sympathetic to Nietzsche's critique of modern society, as Weber obviously was, will dismiss the Marxist programme of reconstructing the material foundations of society in order to achieve a fuller and more meaningful freedom for everyone as a symptom of our disease rather than its cure.

Between these two positions, and the different critiques of modem society they imply, no reconciliation is possible since one embraces egalitarian ideals while the other challenges them. That Weber, at least in a limited and tentative way, adopted both positions reflects an ambivalence in his own attitude toward modern society and the process of rationalization that he took to be its defining characteristic. Weber was by no means a spokesman for the virtues of contemporary European civilization, despite the fact that he made its institutions the point of departure for all his sociological and historical investigations and devoted a lifetime to explaining their development and meaning. But the two criticisms of modernity implicit in his writings—to which his frequent, indeed obsessive, use of the idea of fate provides an important clue—point in different directions and express fundamentally different attitudes toward the egalitarian ideal associated with formal legal rationality and bureaucratic rule. There is, in this regard, something in Weber's writings that can almost be described as an intellectual (or moral) schizophrenia, an oscillation between irreconcilable perspectives that helps to explain why he has found supporters as well as detractors on both the Left and Right.

Whether these two critiques of modernity are justifiable and if so, how one is to choose between them, are questions that lie beyond the limits of this book. In concluding, I shall attempt only to close the circle of my argument by clarifying the connection between the ideas developed in this chapter and the main themes of the book as a whole.

I have called Weber's theory of value positivistic in order to underscore his belief that every value is a posit, the product of a deliberate choice or decision on the part of the individual whose value it happens to be. This theory is to be contrasted with all those that ascribe to the world an inherent meaning or value of its own, a value that antedates the choices and commitments of individual human beings. According to Weber, the very concept of value has no meaning apart from the acts of choice that alone generate norms, norms which the objective 'world-process' can never yield. This positivistic theory of value is the one Weber defends in his methodological writings. It also provides the implicit foundation for his discussion of: the three pure types of authority, the nature of formal legal rationality, the forms of contractual association, modern capitalism, and the Judeo-Christian conception of God.

In addition, Weber's theory of value is associated with a particular conception of personhood. I have defended this claim on independent philosophical grounds, but Weber's own writings—for example, his account of the difference between status and purposive contracts and his description of the Judeo-Christian ideal of ethical personality—suggest that he was himself aware of the connection between these ideas. The conception of personhood associated with Weber's positivism gives prominence to the power of choice exercised in every value-creating act; for this reason, I have called it a will-centred conception of personhood. To be a person, to be qualified to participate in the moral life of the species, one must, on this view, be endowed with the power of deliberate choice—with a capacity for purposeful action or action in accordance with the conception of a rule. Only those beings who possess such a capacity are persons, and Weber's own positivistic theory of value implies that no other quality or characteristic of human beings can have an intrinsic worth of its own—as distinct from the worth it acquires by being affirmed or disaffirmed through an act of choice. Because the capacity for purposeful action is a necessary and sufficient condition for personhood and because it is distributed on a species-wide basis, no human being can be more of a person or have a fundamentally different moral status than any other. The concept of personhood associated with Weber's positivistic theory of value is profoundly egalitarian.

Of the two critiques of modern society implicit in Weber's writings, the first, which emphasizes the loss of individual control resulting from the rationalization of social life, is consistent with the will-centred conception of personhood that I have just described. To be sure, Weber's first critique recognizes—indeed, insists upon—the important influence that material conditions (the distribution of wealth, nature of work, etc.) have on the exercise of human freedom; but it also treats the idea of freedom as the standard against which all social arrangements and programmes of reform are to be evaluated from a moral point of view. It is entirely consistent with this view to assert that human beings have the right to be recognized as persons and enjoy the moral status they do—a status that entitles each individual to a real or effective freedom as great as anyone else's—just because they are autonomous beings with a capacity for purposeful action. Indeed, to the extent that it has been defended on philosophical grounds, the first critique of modem society implicit in Weber's work has typically been justified by an appeal to just such a will-centred conception of the person. In any case, even if the critique in question can be defended on other grounds, it is certainly consistent with Weber's own theory of value and the conception of personhood implied by it.

By contrast, Weber's second critique of modernity challenges this conception. The true leader is set apart from other men by virtue of his special personal qualities—his passion, courage and ability to resist the temptations of vanity by maintaining what Weber calls a 'sense of proportion'. Every political leader chooses a goal of some sort as his 'guiding star', but it is not this choice alone that distinguishes him from other men. Rather, it is the spirit in which the choice is made, the special qualities of character that he displays in making his commitment, which set the leader apart. Even if each of us chooses his own values, some do so with greater passion, courage, steadfastness and modesty than others; these are qualities that are not evenly distributed among men, as the capacity for purposeful action, understood in the most general sense, might be said to be. They are therefore qualities that must be thought of as having their foundation in a part of the soul other than the choosing part, the part that establishes a person's value commitments by affirming some norms and disaffirming others, since there is nothing in the exercise of this capacity alone that can account for the difference between heroes or leaders, on the one hand, and ordinary men on the other. In short, every genuine leader is distinguished by personal qualities not shared by other men, qualities that are rooted in or expressive of some part of the soul other than the will, understood in an abstract sense as the faculty of choice.

From the standpoint of the leader, the possession of these qualities is itself a ground or warrant for the exercise of authority: a genuine leader feels entitled to make special demands on his followers because his courage and self-discipline endow him with a sense of responsibility they do not share. This view is incompatible, however, with a will-centred conception of personhood. For someone who believes that the special qualities of the leader give him a right to exercise authority over others, the possession of a capacity for purposeful action can at most be a necessary but not sufficient condition for determining the moral status of an individual—for deciding what he may rightly demand from others and owes them in return. It is also necessary to ask, on this view, whether the individual in question possesses the special qualities of character that set the true leader apart from ordinary men. A leader is justified in doing things that ordinary men are not and in this sense has a status or identity fundamentally different from theirs. It is uncertain what alternative idea of personhood is implied by the acknowledgement of such differences, but Weber's own will-centred conception must either be abandoned or modified in essential respects if one ascribes inherent value to personal qualities, like passion and courage, in the way his notion of responsible leadership invites and perhaps requires.

That such an incompatibility exists does not mean we must reject Weber's positivistic theory of value; it only means that Weber was himself more uncertain in his commitment to this theory and the conception of personhood associated with it than might appear. Weber's uncertainty is reflected in the ambivalence of his critique of modern society, which as we have seen is really two critiques pointing in different directions, only one of which is consistent with a will-centred conception of the person. Weber never confronted the ambivalence in his criticisms of modern society, and we can only guess how he would have responded if he had. Perhaps he would have said that these are questions for a professional philosopher, a title he emphatically denied for himself.

Despite his disclaimer, Weber's writings are informed by a powerful philosophical intelligence, and I have written [Max Weber] to clarify the neglected philosophical dimension of his work. Anyone who reflects on Weber's critical account of modern rationalism must eventually confront the questions raised in this chapter. To pursue these questions further, however, would lead us into the domain of moral philosophy. But for those who make the effort, the writings of Max Weber will remain a source of insight and inspiration. No one has thought about these matters on the same scale, or with the same passion as Weber and the fact that his work raises disturbing philosophical questions that it fails to answer is the best proof of his achievement as a philosopher.