Politics as a Vocation
Max Weber
THIS lecture, which I give at your request, will necessarily disappoint you in a number of ways. You will
naturally expect me to take a position on actual problems of the day. But that will be the case only in a
purely formal way and toward the end, when I shall raise certain questions concerning the significance of
political action in the whole way of life. In today's lecture, all questions that refer to what policy and what
content one should give one's political activity must be eliminated. For such questions have nothing to do
with the general question of what politics as a vocation means and what it can mean. Now to our subject
matter.
What do we understand by politics? The concept is extremely broad and comprises any kind of independent
leadership in action. One speaks of the currency policy of the banks, of the discounting policy of the
Reichsbank, of the strike policy of a trade union; one may speak of the educational policy of a municipality
or a township, of the policy of the president of a voluntary association, and, finally, even of the policy of a
prudent wife who seeks to guide her husband. Tonight, our reflections are, of course, not based upon such a
broad concept. We wish to understand by politics only the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership,
of a political association, hence today, of a state.
But what is a 'political' association from the sociological point of view? What is a 'state'? Sociologically,
the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association
has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to
those associations which are designated as political ones: today the state, or historically, those associations
which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately, one can define the modern state
sociologically only in terms of the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely,
the use of physical force...........
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