Description
In his famous “Politics as a Vocation” lecture, Weber advocates for an ethic of responsibility over an ethic of conviction. The latter, on Weber’s view, fails to live up to the “demands of the day” because it prioritizes purity of principle regardless the consequences of political action. The former, to the contrary, ties the ethical character of political judgment to the effects it initiates in the world. Importantly for Weber, responsibility is not realpolitik, for it entails self-limitation at the same time as self-assertion. In this respect only, an ethic of responsibility is also an ethic of conviction, the conviction that, in a disenchanted world, the mature politician alone—no divine entity or trajectory latent in history—must bear responsibility for the outcome of action. This paper explores how the importance Weber accords to responsibility arises from the value he sees in brotherliness, a quality he associates with the so-called “world religions” and sees as under threat with modern rationalization. Weber’s ethic of responsibility, this paper suggests, is best understood as his attempt to sustain brotherliness in the context of the disenchantment of the world—which marks also international politics, as Morgenthau recognized—an attempt marked by tensions and aporias.
