Weber’s tragic legacy
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088216672241 |
| Author | Richard Ned Lebow |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
Journal of International Political Theory
2017, Vol. 13(1) 37 –58
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088216672241
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Weber’s tragic legacy
Richard Ned Lebow
King’s College London, UK
Abstract
Weber’s corpus is characterized by four tensions: the epistemological between subjective
values and objective knowledge, the sociological between social rationalization and
irrational myths, the political among conflicting values, and the tragic between human
conscience and worldly affairs. I explore how three of Weber’s successors struggled
with these tensions. Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in the early postwar
writings, sought to resolve them, as did Carl Schmitt—although in diametrically opposed
directions. Hans Morgenthau sought to keep them alive but did not refine them. They
remain very relevant to contemporary international relations theory.
Keywords
Adorno, epistemology, ethics, Horkheimer, Morgenthau, myth, rationalization,
Schmitt, Weber
Much of what makes Max Weber immensely interesting are the deep tensions with which
he wrestled but could not resolve. They are the epistemological between subjective val-
ues and objective knowledge, the sociological between social rationalization and irra-
tional myths, the political among conflicting values, and the tragic between human
conscience and worldly affairs. Weber was a man of his times, and the tensions he identi-
fied captured especially well the intellectual, ethical, and political problems of the first
decades of the twentieth century.
The German thinkers who were Weber’s immediate successors lived through Weimar’s
failure, Hitler’s rise to power, World War II, and the Holocaust. His corpus was immensely
alluring and provocative for them. Joseph Schumpeter, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau,
Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, among others, were deeply affected by Weber’s
substantive and epistemological writings. They reinterpreted his ideas for their time and in
the process faced a difficult problem: Were Weber’s four tensions an enduring challenge or
Corresponding author:
Richard Ned Lebow, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, London, WC2R 2LS UK.
Email: nedlebow@gmail.com
672241IPT0010.1177/1755088216672241Journal of International Political TheoryLebow
research-article2016
Article
38 Journal of International Political Theory 13(1)
impetus to social science and political philosophy or had they been somehow heightened to
the point where they became outright contradictions?
Writing in the Weimar era, Carl Schmitt, articulated a polemical, anti-rational, agonis-
tic, and illiberal political theology. He attempts to dissolve the Weberian tensions by
transforming them into contradictions or oppositions. By radicalizing Weberian thought,
Schmitt honed it into a weapon against modern liberal democracy, for which his writings
are still being used today.
After World War II and the Holocaust, German thinkers again turned to Weber to
understand why their world had collapsed and what, if any, possibilities for order and
human fulfillment existed in the one that was emerging. Weber’s influence is deeply
imprinted on the famous early postwar writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. Like
Schmitt—if in an utterly different direction—Adorno and Horkheimer transform
Weberian tensions into outright contradictions.
Hans Morgenthau’s early postwar oeuvre retains Weber’s tensions; they guide his
analysis, although he does little to refine them. It is conventional wisdom to pair
Morgenthau with Schmitt as their critique of international law and emphasis on power
has much in common. When comparing these several thinkers in terms of their response
to Weber, the more appropriate pairing is Schmitt and Adorno and Horkheimer. By con-
trast, Morgenthau’s greater engagement with the practice as well as theory of interna-
tional politics may have heightened his sensitivity to unavoidable contingencies and
unresolvable practical dilemmas. He did not come to discern contradiction but continued
to feel potentially tragic tensions.
Tragic tensions
The four key tensions run through Weber’s extensive and subtle corpus and were very
much on the minds of some of his most influential successors (Lebow, 2017a, 2017b).
Epistemological
Weber’s epistemology begins with the Kantian manifold of an “infinite multiplicity of
successively and coexistently emerging and disappearing events” that in-themselves are
neither lawful nor rational. According to Weber, we categorize and select a “finite part”
of that reality is “worth knowing about” (Weber, 2012: 114). Only what we think of as
“value-relevant” is likely to receive our attention. “[E]ven purely empirical scientific
research is guided by cultural interests—that is to say: value interests” (Weber, 2012:
317). Only because of values do specific facts become intelligible. Social science is an
immensely creative practice. The “ideal-types” central to this neo-Kantian vision of
social science are “utopian” mental constructs formed by imaginative “one-sided accen-
tuation” that in their “conceptual purity.” They “cannot be found empirically anywhere
in reality” (Weber, 2012: 125). They are theoretical abstractions created as analytical
tools to “grasp the elements of reality which are significant in a given case” selected out
from the “infinite abundance of reality” (Weber, 2012: 34). Weber is, nevertheless, ada-
mant that while facts become intelligible through the prism of value, empirical social
science can offer no prescriptions. “An empirical science,” must be robust in its methods,
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