Transcription
Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to this year's Tanner lectures at Yale University, hosted by the Whitney Humanities Center. I'm Gary Tomlinson, the director of the Whitney. We're gathered, of course, to hear from Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Chair Professor of political theory and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Brown is unquestionably one of our most important voices of analysis and critique of that liberal neoliberal economic rationality that has come to dominate our modes of governance, our values, and our democracies. And her achievement reaches much farther than this, into many other areas of political and social theory and activism. But I leave further introduction of Professor Brown to my colleague Paul North. Her talks today and tomorrow will be politics and knowledge in nihilistic times, as you've seen on the poster. Today, politics, tomorrow, knowledge.
My task, instead, in my brief introduction here, is to outline the schedule of Tanner events over the next 2 days and to say a few words about the Tanners as an institution. First, the schedule. This afternoon, we hear the first of Professor Brown's two lectures. Afterwards, you're all invited to a reception here at the Whitney, straight down the hall directly behind you. Tomorrow, again at 5:00, Professor Brown will present her second lecture on knowledge. After that, there will be a short question and answer session. And then on Thursday morning, finally at 10:30, we reconvene here for a discussion among Professor Brown, Professor North, and Professor Katie Lofton, Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, and Divinity, and the acting Dean of Humanities here at Yale. At that session, there will be additional opportunity for questions from the audience.
As to the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, they were established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner and his wife Grace Tanner. For many years, a professor at the University of Utah and a scholar of the New Testament, educated at Harvard and Stanford, Tanner also founded in 1927, early in his adulthood, a jewelry company in Salt Lake City. The company later expanded into broad areas of human resource consulting and employee recognition programs, and it is on this base that the Tanner Foundation and Obert and Grace Tanners philanthropic efforts were built. These efforts include today the Tanner Lectures at Yale and at a number of other universities in the US, the UK, and beyond.
The purpose Obert Tanner envisioned for the Tanner Lectures is to advance and reflect upon scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values. In creating the lectureships, Professor Tanner knowingly left this purview very broad. He wrote, and I quote him, "I see these lectures simply as a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values. This understanding may be pursued for its own intrinsic worth, but it may also eventually have practical consequences for the quality of personal and social life."
At Yale, the Tanner Lectures are selected by the president, Peter Salovey, in consultation with the director and executive committee of the Whitney Humanities Center. We're very indebted to Peter for his assistance in bringing today's speaker to us. Appointment as a Tanner Lecturer is in is a recognition of uncommon achievement and outstanding abilities in the area of human values and studies, and we are truly honored to add Professor Brown to the list of distinguished scholars and humanists whom Yale has so honored.
Last but not least, I am directed by Yale Legal Counsel. This is a symptom of the world we live in to read the following paragraph. Our events may be recorded or live-streamed or photographed for educational, archival, or promotional purposes, including use in print, on the internet, and in other forms of media. All attendees and participants, or parents or guardians of minors attending the event, agree, by virtue of their attending the event or otherwise participating in the event It's a paragraph I wouldn't accept from any Yale undergraduate, but there it is. Agree to the possibility of their voices or likenesses being captured by these means and used for such purposes without compensation to them, and they hereby waive any related right of privacy or publicity. I'll probably read I'll probably read that again tomorrow, but you would you would be surprised at the stories about those who do want compensation.
Now, it is my pleasure, at any rate, to welcome to the podium Paul North, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale, to introduce our speaker. Thank you very much.
THANKS, GARY, AND TO EVERYONE WHO participated in bringing Wendy Brown here. I'm speaking also in the name of my colleague Katie Lofton, who will join us for a discussion on Thursday. It's really a privilege to welcome Wendy Brown to Yale. Wendy Brown, as you heard, is Class of 1936 First Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with so many departments, I can't list them. But definitely the Department of Rhetoric and the Program in Jurisprudence and Social Policy in the Law School, among others. Before Berkeley, she was Professor of Women's Studies, Legal Studies, and the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where she moved after teaching at Williams College and receiving her PhD at Princeton. Everyone wants a piece of her time, it seems, and she has given unstintingly on guest professorships all over the world, which you can look up on her CV. Unless I miscount, she's managed at the same time to publish six monographs, as we call them, and two collections of essays, along with articles, book chapters, and guest lectures as numerous as the stars in the sky. If there is a room in The Good Place, for those of you who watch cable, for people who got the most prestigious awards in this life, she will doubtless have the first seat in the room.
But now onto the substance, which I realize I'm going to give a kind of quick survey that looks kind of like the guide to your cable channels, but go and watch the programs, I advise you. At one point in his early critique of Hegel, Marx admits that Hegel got one thing correct. Historical phenomena do have a logic immanent to them. And yet, he says Hegel is still wrong. All historical phenomena do not conform to one and the same logic. Each major historical phenomenon has its own logic, and the task of the critical theorist is to describe the logic of a particular complex. Marx gave us the logic of industrial capital. Professor Brown has, over the past 5 years or more, given us the logic of neoliberal capital, along with its ramifications for democratic politics, for the self-understanding of individuals and groups around the planet. And now, in the most recent book, for the very existence of a social sphere.
For those of us who learned from Professor Brown how to register the political and social effects of, "wounded attachments," in the book from 1995, States of Injury, how to construe the relationship of political thought to its history in Politics Out of History, from 2001, how to recognize the tensions in the late 20th century security state in Walled States Waning Sovereignty, from 2010, the turn to studying what she sometimes calls the neoliberal order of reason could be seen as a plausible step. Like Marx and like Max Weber, with whom she will debate and think over these days with us, but also like her other Mitdenkenden Menschen, as Benjamin called them, her co-thinking people, which includes Marx and Foucault, among others, Professor Brown is not only a theorist of political technologies. She is one, but she also constantly returns to political experience, to life among the nets of ideas and practices in architectures of power. She repeatedly asks, "What is it like to live under this or that political technology, in this or that situation? What is it like to live, for instance, under a politics associated with manhood, which she defines once as the gesture of transcending above living, climbing to detached heights of reason, power, and free enterprise?" This is in her first book, Manhood and Politics, from 1988. "What is it like as a contemporary political subject to tolerate and be tolerated?" As she puts it in Regulating Aversion, from 2006, "What kind of political discourse, with what social and political effects, is contemporary tolerance talk in the United States?"
One of her sources for the experience of politics is precisely this, the discourses that justify this or that power arrangement. Another source is the discourses' effects, what she calls once in an offhand phrase, which I love, "a few small voices." These few small voices always speak up in Professor Brown's discourse, no matter how much she's theorizing the big machines of power, and they have a lot to say. The small voices are always ready to contest one or another discourse by describing its effects on them. The work on neoliberalism's logic is no exception. In Undoing the Demos, Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, which it could be argued has engendered a whole set of debates, from 2015, she presents that logic and its effects on diverse lives caught within it. Most recently, in The Ruins of Neoliberalism, The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West from 2019 tells a horror story on par with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, on which he's also written. A misguided monster, a mode of economic reasoning, sneaks into the public sphere and gradually, over three or four decades, emboldens itself enough to make a series of once unthinkable demands. Society must be dismantled. Politics must be dethroned. The personal must take over from the public and common. And personal freedom must, under no circumstances, be traded for equality. The last thing we noted learn in the new book is that neoliberalism's special logic depends on an extreme existential commitment. It is nihilistic. It believes in its heart of hearts there is no future for it. And this no way out mentality unleashes the sublimated will in violent and unpredictable ways. One might not immediately think that the recent street taking in Chile, Lebanon, and Ecuador counts as the contestation of this nihilism, which Brown says, "looks like freedom, but shores up the domination of the status quo." But in part tries to believe that the recent uprisings may well be.
Her Tanner lectures this week have a collective title to do with nihilism, politics and knowledge in nihilistic times, thinking with Max Weber. And as Gary said, tonight she will present one called politics. PLEASE WELCOME WENDY BROWN.
THANK YOU, PAUL. THAT WAS ENORMOUSLY generous and interesting to me. Um Thank you, Paul and Katie for agreeing to be my interlocutors this week. Thank you, of course, to President Salovey and Gary Tomlinson for inviting me. And uh Sandra, who may or may not be here, who made my being here possible with all the logistical details, without which we don't exist. Um Cuz I have a back problem, I'm sitting at the lectern, which is an unusual thing to do, but I trust you can still see me. Um And uh and that you can still hear me. The honor of these lectures is great. Living up to it, difficult. I take it they're meant to be mature reflections on fundamental things. But such a posture is inimicable inimical to the deeply disorienting features of our times.
There's the rise of ferociously anti-democratic forces in settled, but also relatively newer liberal democracies. Their open affirmations of autocrats, supremacies, and violent exclusions. There are the deep corruptions of electoral systems from within and without, above and below. From the capture of politicians by dark money to the capture of electorates by trolling, social, and mainstream media to the warping of elections by corporate funding and foreign influence. There's the digital revolution, continuously revolutionizing work, knowledge, governing, social relations, psyche, soma, subjectivity, and bearing, along with its enhancements of human capacities, novel ways of estranging and manipulating those capacities. There's the economic revolution that has unleashed finance as a force more powerful and less bound to human and planetary thriving than even capitalist commodity production. There's the chaos of the interregnum between the Westphalian system of nation-states and whatever is coming after. A chaos marked by the unprecedented boundary trespass and policing of ideas, peoples, capital, labor, technologies, violence, and goods. And of course, there's the existential emergency posed by climate change, plummeting biodiversity, and the debris of a retrospectively reckless century of production piling up un metabolizable in floating ocean islands and earthly fields of waste. This last includes vast populations themselves cast off as waste. One in eight of our species, the human species, now live in makeshift shantytowns, slums, or homeless camps within and abutting cities across the globe without access to what we consider the most basic civilizational elements.
How to understand and plot possibility within this novel present? For me, paradoxically, apprehending the new often wrestle involves wrestling with earlier thinkers who were struggling for a cartography of their own time. And that's what I want to do with Max Weber in these lectures. Of course, there's irony here. Weber's often held responsible for setting 20th century social science knowledge on a dangerous course course of worshipping faux objectivity and ethical neutrality, intense knowledge specialization, and in the object world, worshipping capitalism and state power. He's identified politically with intense German nationalism, anxious masculinism, and early attraction to ordoliberalism. It's easy to cast him as complicit, if not an architect of, some of the more sinister forces contouring our present. But there's more to Weber than this, especially in politics as a vocation and science as a vocation, the two lectures he delivered near the end of his life, approximately 100 years ago, that are my focus during these evenings.
Weber was a dark thinker. This was not only a matter of his temperament or times, though each was treacherous. As important was his unrivaled appreciation of certain logics of modernity, its signature rationalities and forms of power, its generation of human machineries with unprecedented capacities for domination, its simultaneous proliferation and depreciation of values, the inadequacy of democracy to resist or transform these developments, and the enormous challenge of cultivating responsible political leadership amidst these powers. In a world he viewed as nearly choked by destruction of the human spirit and human freedom, as well as forthrightly dangerous, Weber sought to craft practices by which both scholars and political actors might hold back the dark with their work. This is one reason for turning to him now. We need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism, pipe dreams of total revolution or redemption by the progress of reason, yet aim to be more than Bartlebys or foot soldiers within current orders of knowledge and politics.
A second reason for turning to Weber today pertains to his confrontation, especially in the interwar period, with one of the deepest intellectual and political crises of liberal democracy in the West prior to our own. Intellectually, Weber took Marx and Nietzsche to be the major influences of his time, and he sought to repel the anti-liberal critiques from the left and the right that each inspired. Politically, Weber took liberalism to be endangered by anti-democratic mass movements, hard nationalists, vain, politically irresponsible demagogues, and the appeal of bureaucratic legal statism to solve all of this, technocracies fantasized by academics and embraced by some politicians. Now, Weber's response to the crisis of his time was not to rehabilitate the liberal statesman or representative. Rather, it was to cultivate leaders as rulers, investing his hope in those who would honor the rule of law and liberal limits on government while carefully using their power to build political futures that could slip the constraints of bureaucratic administration, yet move beyond the imaginary of liberal democracy. If today we face Baudlerized versions of this on the right in Bolsonaro, Trump, Orban, Erdogan, Modi, and others, we still may want to ask about this possibility on the left. That is, whether we want to rescue or throw in the towel on liberal democracy, it seems to me the left has become newly invested in the question of leadership, leadership for large-scale transformations that exceed parliamentary tinkering, but are short of revolution. This makes Weber's unblinking confrontation with the crisis of liberal democracy in his time, especially in politics as a vocation, potentially illuminating for the one that we face 100 years anon.
A third reason for thinking with Weber now, and the main one animating these lectures, pertains to his deep confrontation with the predicaments of a nihilistic epoch. The problem with which I concluded, as Paul mentioned, the most recent book I've written in the ruins of neoliberalism, but did not manage to plot a way through the problem. If Weber's better known for his formalizations of methods and ideal types, folding hermeneutics into objective studies of social action, his unique reformulation of materialism to center the values. This list occludes his effort to combat nihilistic effects in both knowledge and politics. This feature of his thought is overtly signaled by his frequent allusion to Tolstoy's conclusion that in modernity death and hence life have lost meaning. And his allusions to Dostoevsky's portrait of the ethical irrationality of the world. Hardly nihilism's most complex theorists, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Rorty, Rosen, Pippin, and others offer deeper philosophical accounts, Weber may still be its most political. He understands nihilism as conditioning contemporary political life and at the same time identifies politics as the vital platform for nihilism's overcoming. It's the domain in his view to articulate and pursue what he calls ultimate values or tellingly godheads, divine qualities detached from a divinity in the aftermath of God's death.
There are many ways to account for the contemporary rise of anti-democratic forces and opportunistic masters of power politics drawing succor from them in the West. Only one of these would feature the political expression of nihilism, a plant that Nietzsche predicted would take 200 years to bloom from the grave of the gods and ideals toppled by science and the Enlightenment. Nihilism is manifest today as ubiquitous moral chaos or disingenuousness, but also in assertions of power and desire shorn of accountability to truth, justice, consequences, or futurity. Nihilism is revealed in the careless, even festive breaking of the social contract with others and succeeding generations, the whiting indifference to a fragile planet and fragile democracies. It manifests as ubiquitous criminality, lying, and dishonesty, but also as mass withdrawal into the trivial, immediate, and personal. Nihilism is evident in the purely strategic drape of traditional morality over ambitions to resecure historical supremacies of race, gender, and ownership. It's inscribed in crass practices of reputation repair, shifting with the winds opportunism of even the most self-serious public figures. Nihilism rests in unprecedented popular indifference to consistency, accountability, even veracity in political leaders. It appears in the shrill epistemological standoff between right and left, the ferocious defense of religion and tradition on the one side, reason and progress on the other with neither giving quarter or avowing the quicksand in which both flags are planted and on which the battle is being played out. And this list is just limited to its political expressions.
So, the question for those who want to draw the earth, democracy, care for justice back from the brink, what prospects are there for a politics that would overcome, dispel, or work through nihilism? And how might knowledge generating it, curating it, transmitting it not only be protected from nihilistic forces, but employed for their overcoming? Weber confronted precisely these questions, especially in his two famous vocation lectures, the focus of mine this week. By nihilism, I am not suggesting, nor was Weber, that all value has disappeared from the world or that life is widely held to be without purpose or meaning, its popular understandings. Rather, understood as a condition rather than an attitude, nihilism generates distinct predicaments for meaning in modernity.
On the one hand, it's difficult to find criteria for meaning and value without appealing to discredited sources, religion, tradition, logic. A discrediting that makes such appeals inevitably reactionary, shrill, or defensive. On the other hand, faith in progress is revealed as a secularized version of the Christian millennium and is empirically confounded by modernity's failure to deliver generalized peace, prosperity, happiness, or freedom. When appeals to origins and telos thus falter, change itself loses its compass as if, in Nietzsche's words, we unchained the earth from the sun. Spinning without tether, this last lost ground for knowing what to affirm and negate, and this lost temporality for a motion of history strips both purpose and judgment naked, unbearably so.
There's more. For Weber, science, Wissenschaft, all systematic and transmissible academic knowledge, not just the hard sciences, science undercuts the basis of religion, but not its continued existence. Rather, Weber argues, in a rational and rationalized world, to be religious, he says matter-of-factly, requires a necessary sacrifice of the intellect. Religion must reject science on the most fundamental question of how we know what we know. As problematic as science topples religion from the throne of truth, it does not and cannot replace religion's meaning-making power. Thus, does science change the nature, reach, and implications of truth with a capital T. Science can unveil the mysteries of the world, the process Weber calls disenchantment, but it cannot generate or rank value. Cost-benefit analysis can even reveal what values may be lost as others are pursued, but it cannot decide the question of what matters or why. It cannot answer Tolstoy's what shall we do and how shall we live. Moreover, when cost-benefit analysis pretends that it can do this, as happens with neoliberalism, a new threshold of nihilism is reached, one Weber anticipated generically without knowing what its precise form would be.
While science unmoors meaning from its religious and moral foundations, values are also eroded, according to him, by the spread of instrumental reason. Itself enabled by freedom from ethical constraint and gaining ground by virtue of its sheer power in relation to other modes of thought and action where means and ends remain bound together. That is, instrumental reason comes to be embodied in giant human machineries built from it and encasing us within their power. In Weber's time, these were bureaucratic states and capitalism. Today, obviously, we would add digital technologies and finance. Darker still, more than merely independent of value, instrumental reason bears an innate tendency to destroy value. It over- overtakes ends that it was designed to serve or it converts ends themselves into means, ultimately destroying what Weber calls substantive or value rationality with instrumental rationality. Again, finance and digitalization are the latest instances of what started as instruments morphing into apparatuses of domination beyond human control, now so powerful that that they not only govern us, but could crash the planet into catastrophe overnight.
In sum, for Weber, in modernity on the one hand, all meaning is revealed as made, not discovered, and values are undecidable. And on the other hand, established meanings are relentlessly unmade by forces of disenchantment and rationalization, the usurpation of myth by science, the cannibalization of ends by means in a world governed by instrumental rationality. This much is all familiar to even the most beginning Weber's reader. The problem of nihilism for Weber, however, exceeds the value-depleting powers of disenchantment and rationalization. Rather, it rests in the consequential intervals opened up between knowledge, politics, and religion in modernity, especially the oppositions developed between science and religion, politics and religion, and knowledge and politics.
In modernity, knowledge features the value neutrality generative of objectivity, politics features value struggle combined with steely-eyed appreciation that this struggle comprises human rather than divine purposes and powers. And religion rebuffs both sets of assumptions to affirm values derived from otherworldly sources. These partings between knowledge, politics, and science, I'm sorry, knowledge, politics, and religion produce novel political effects seen at once in the way that Weber shapes the vocations for science and politics in his two lectures. Drawing the notion of vocation, Beruf, from the Protestant imperative to serve God through earthly practices, Weber iterates vocations for politics and science that are not bound to God but Godheads, again religious remainders after the divinity is gone, to avoid descending into raw self-gratification and the will to power in these two domains. Vocation, as Weber crafts it, entails near superhuman attainments of post-nihilist dispositions, of selflessness, maturity, and responsibility. At the same time, isolating religion from Wissenschaft and politics and modernity strips religion itself of accountability to truth or power. Thus, when the religious-minded do not stay in their quarter but attempt to exercise epistemological or practical power in the political domain or the knowledge domain, the effect for Weber is a special kind of corruption, one he understands as nihilistic.
To put the matter the other way around, paradoxically, the only responsible actor in a nihilistic age, the only one able to carry us beyond a nihilistic condition, is one who fully confronts the predicaments posed for meaning-making now. If modernity is structured by unbridgeable chasms between knowledge and politics and between knowledge and belief, only those who can face those chasms and who can craft their passions and endeavors in an ethical relationship to them are capable of being responsible scholars and political actors. For Weber, the absence of foundations for values simultaneously reveals them as inherently imbricated with power, as contestable, and as available to critical analysis, even if they do not spring from reason or refer to reason for legitimacy. These same features are what make values essentially political and also make politics the domain for struggling over values. More than only affected and infected by nihilism, which they are, Weber casts politics as the distinctive venue for countering nihilism's dangerous potential inversion into indifference or worse, fatalism, cynicism, narcissism, unaccountable deployments of power and violence. In a secular, rationalized, and nihilistic age, when religious and cultural authority have disintegrated, politics acquires unprecedented importance for the articulation, the justification, contestation, and pursuit of values. Put another way, when, in Weber's understanding, nihilism is full-blown, ultimate values are at once politicized in a trivial way, but also enlarged as the ultimate stakes of politics.
On the one hand, ubiquitous politicization of taste, consumption, diet, pastimes, pleasures, appearance, family form, parenting practices, lifestyle, even body type, all of this the politicization of all of these things is itself a symptom of nihilism. On the other hand, formal political life becomes a theater of nihilism. It's where nihilism is played out in raw form and is a site for its potential overcoming. This paradox, the political sphere as ravaged by nihilism and as a venue for overcoming it, arises because, for Weber, the political is quintessentially partisan. It is by nature interested rather than objective, though not therefore purely subjective or reducible to interest. The relentlessly partisan nature of political life binds it to value struggle and the inherently non-foundational character of value in modernity binds it to politics. As one interpreter writes, for Weber, values came to be the symbolic equivalent of politics, which is why he banishes them from all knowledge production and teaching. But the reverse is also true. Values are irreducible in politics and cannot be extinguished without extinguishing political life as such, and that's the threat that Weber saw in reducing politics to administration or technocracy or raw interest or power play. Again, then, while politics is itself saturated with nihilistic effects in modernity, it also has unique potential for enunciating, mobilizing, fighting over ultimate human purposes after their moral, religious foundations have been shattered by disenchantment and rationalization. At the same time, since the currency of politics is power and its ultimate instrument, according to Weber, is violence, and since the essence of politics is partisanship, there can be no political neutrality, objectivity, or peace ever. Thus, value struggles are eternal. Cold comfort for those still invested in narratives of progress.
All right, so that dizzying thing I just told you is the capsule version of my argument and for the next half day and tomorrow, going to lay it out slowly. The capsule version of my argument a essentially offers you a sense of why I think Weber's anti-nihilistic orientation to politics and knowledge may have some use today. Weber's account of nihilism's effects is informed by yet varies from Nietzsche's. For Nietzsche, nihilism devalues values, including the value of truth itself, while keeping values and truth around. For Nietzsche, the foundation eroded, values do not vanish but rather become malleable, fungible, trivial, instrumentalizable, easily trafficked for purposes beyond themselves. Contemporary examples abound in commerce, politics, religion, and the branding of everyone and everything. Indeed, when values become capital-enhancing, as they are today for individuals, corporations, schools, nonprofits, cities, and states, their trivialization and instrumentalization are complete.
But for Nietzsche, the devaluation of values also entails a radical reduction in the force of conscience. The sublimation of instincts or desires, required by the authority of values, is, when values are devalued, lightened, even reversed. The The result is antisocial eruptions. Again, examples are abundant. Disinhibition, including aggressive and violent forms, is increasingly routine in the world today and accompanies accompanies cynicism and contractualism in the domain of values. The conscience at the heart of the liberal democratic social contract is also thrown off. Obligations to fairness, inclusion, the rule of law, and future generations becomes increasingly easy to violate or suspend. One more effect worth underscoring in Nietzsche's account of nihilistic symptoms before turning to Weber's is hyperindividualism. The social contract with others and with past and future now broken, we fall into a world of one, a world of now. Again, this formation dovetails neatly with neoliberal encomiums of the past half century. Nihilism both facilitates the acceptability of neoliberal reason and is intensified by it.
Truth, Nietzsche argues, is devalued along with every other value in a nihilistic age. More than strategically overwhelmed by propaganda, fused with commerce, manipulated by opportunistic demagogues and Russian trolls, truth in a nihilistic condition, like its cousins honesty, integrity, and accountability, cannot survive the degrounding and diminution of value. So also does the sharp opposition between science and religion abet truth's slide. If religion doesn't have truth, then it doesn't want it, need it, admire it, burnish it, or protect it.
Now, this condition, still with Nietzsche, generates several possible formations. What Nietzsche calls the pale atheists dwell in irony, skepticism, and above all themselves. Narcissism is a boom industry in a nihilistic age. With all value diminished, only immediate gratifications and security remain compelling in Nietzsche's view. And again, comport easily, we would say today, with the governing rationality of both neoliberal but also securitarian authoritarianism. For Nietzsche, ardent religious on the other hand, clutch their crosses and refuse intellection. Today, making them easily available to mobilization by a Bolsonaro or a Trump. Both tendencies, narcissistic self-indulgence and religion without depth, express what Robert Pippin terms the failure of desire that is nihilism. It's lost want of world. It's lost want of the other or even its own life.
Now, for Nietzsche, working through nihilism involves culturing value at a deep and non-reactive level and seeking to instantiate it or legislate it in and for the world. Importantly, such conviction for Nietzsche does not arise from deliberation or choice, but shares the non-rational, non-strategic character As Pippin puts it, something grips us, something we can't help caring about. It would not be love if it were in the service of some instrumental strategy and far more than simply a felt desire, it involves a wholehearted, passionate commitment to and identification with a desired end. So, for Nietzsche, overcoming nihilism does not mean rationally deciding what to value across a diverse order of objects and possibilities, which would in any case hoist that fiction of that little changeling, the subject, the doer behind the deed, the neutral substratum that is before willing, but rather it involves arriving at this value, the value of what to value, affirming some value in the world from a wellspring of passionate attachment. Of course, this attachment can be shaped by education or influence or experience and we'll want to come back to this, but that passion is now at the root of value means its post-nihilist version is divorced not only from authority but from cultural reproduction and saturation, from foundations that would secure its truth, but also from a homogeneous culture everywhere generating it and reflecting it. Even if widely accepted and successfully legislated, this novelty would remain.
So, the reversal of the origin of value in late or post-modernity from inculcation by world to overt legislation by power is one reason that Weber, a very serious student of Nietzsche, will locate post-nihilist regeneration of value at the site of charismatic leadership. Having said that, Weber's account also diverges from Nietzsche's. For Weber, disintegrated foundations entail less the weakening and trivialization of values than their proliferation and diversification. The authority that would secure a single and common truth gone, we now live, he says, as the ancients did when they would, "bring a sacrifice at one time to Aphrodite, at another to Apollo, only now the gods have been deprived of the magical and mythical but inwardly true qualities that gave them such vivid immediacy, end quote." Weber's invocation of the Greeks here is laden. With ultimate values undecidable, we're returned to a certain pre-modern, pre-Christian condition and breaking of the enlightenment promise. It's dethroning rather than crowning of truth in the domain of value. Having lost its ground in truth, supported neither by science nor capitalism, this makes liberalism and the values it subtends deeply vulnerable. Nothing guarantees liberalism's survival when, as Weber puts it, each individual has to decide for himself which is the devil and which the god for him. Indeed, as values proliferate and diversify in Weber's view, peoples and nations will inevitably be splintered and riven, not only facing the external clashes of civilization wrought today by globalization, but rather the kinds of things that we offer through our nomenclatures of cultural wars, extreme political polarization, though these inadequately capture the historical condition that Weber charts. For him, the lost foundation is primary in fracturing values. So, things like neo- neoliberal deracinations, religious-secular and rural-urban divides, these only fertilize that already um strong ground.
If deep divisions generated by proliferating values are one political expression of nihilism for Weber, destructive hyperpoliticization is another. Everything in a nihilistic age becomes iconic of the struggle over values. Again, today these include things like consumption practices, family forms, home style and decor, gun ownership, curriculums, sports, psychological practices, fashion, sexuality, diet, exercise, and more. At the same time, hyperpoliticization means that force and fraud contaminate value everywhere. More than merely deployed for branding, moral values and knowledge itself are instrumentalized for power purposes. Law and religion, too, shed even the pretense of non-political status. Hence, the depoliticization, for example, of judicial appointments, interpretations, and decisions and of bids by mega-churches to throw off legal constraints on political engagement. These moves, of course, in turn deepen skepticism about truth, deepen skepticism about the integrity of faith, and about the value of law as neutral arbiter and protector. And this in turn intensifies the nihilistic downward moral.
How then, for Weber, does politics, as struggle over ultimate values, counter nihilism? How is religious and moral authority waned and politics itself is saturated with nihilistic effects, how might political life be a stage for renewing value and human integrity? Weber's genius is to dive right straight into the predicaments of nihilism, to insist that political leadership take its bearings and develop its ethics from the loss of moral foundations and from the permanent imbrication of all political purposes with what he calls diabolical powers. Let us turn to this work.
In the dismal, intentionally tedious first two-thirds of Politics as a Vocation, Weber details the effects of rationalization in modern politics, its generation of bureaucratic and administrative mentalities on the one hand, and its party machines with their hacks and spoils on the other. There are also the stupid masses thirsty for demagoguery who cannot appreciate the complex internal and external relations of modern states and thus, for Weber, cannot be represented, only led. Weber crafts the ideal political leader in relation to these conditions, but also as a mode of rising above them and redeeming grander possibilities of political life. The political hero, the political leader, the political actor, as he designs it, has a love of power but is without vanity, is committed to realizing a political vision, but in a responsible, non-obsessional fashion, is charismatic, yet restrained, ethical, capable of withstanding endless setbacks and disappointments without giving up. Each of these is a retort to the depredations of rationalization and of nihilism. Each centers value and decenters ego and cheap spectacle.
This also means there's nothing organic about Weber's ideal politician. It's not immanent to the present conditions, but called from sources external to them, even as it has to be completely savvy about them. Nor is this a calling from God. Rather, again, Weber gives us vocation secularized and constructed, a constructivism so obvious he does not bother underlining it. Arising neither from dialectics nor immanence, informed neither by social science nor religion, political possibility against the darkness emerges from a leader bearing the spirit, force, and stamina to resist all features of a nihilistic age with a passionate public purpose. This is Weber's wager, not a revolutionary overthrow of the forces of the present, from which he feared only a different machinery of domination, but the singular promise of political leadership that could re-center the human capacity to forge common life on the basis of of that capacity to determine what to value.
What's the part of charisma, in Weber's project of overcoming nihilism in politics? Here, Weber's not just capitulating to contemporary demands for demagoguery. Rather, of the three kinds of authority Weber famously charts, charismatic, traditional, rational-legal, charisma alone compels through promise of emancipation. Emancipation from the givenness and the routines of the present. Charisma attracts and especially attracts its followers by leading somewhere, aspiring to something new, and in this counters the nihilistic depression of value itself. Revolutionary in a non-Marxist sense, charisma also challenges the value-depleting characteristics of rational-legal authority. It promises to re-enchant as it reforms the world, yet in Weber's account is distinguished from other revolutionary modalities by balancing what he calls inner determination inner restraint. Much of its force arises from this vital tension between determination and restraint. Raw determination by itself easily becomes reckless ambition. Restraint alone veers toward reluctance or compromise. Thus, the charismatic that Weber depicts in this essay combines what he calls heated passion and a cool sense of proportion to achieve again quoting a trained ruthlessness towards one's own cause, what some have called political Kantianism, and a distance to things and men. All of this, passion for an impersonal cause, restraint, determination, a sense of proportion, the pathos of distance, challenge the desublimated aggressions, the petty preoccupations, the rancorousness, self-absorption, and desire for immediate satisfaction that nihilism generates. These qualities also oppose what Weber takes to be other political motives of the day, administrative, legalistic, or technocratic orientations, sensibilities he disparages as sterile excitement, those of the revolutionaries, naive idealism, those of the purists and the moralists, and frivolous intellectual play, those of us in the academy. More about this in a moment.
Sober, dogged, responsible pursuit of an impersonal cause, of course, is not passion's quotidian form, especially, but not only, in a nihilistic age. Rather, the bearing and the ethos that Weber depicts requires routing passion away from its natural course, deferring or altogether denying its gratifications, and coloring it with what he calls habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. So, Weber has drawn a nearly impossible figure, a charismatic personality with a strong instinct for power, yet animated exclusively by a worldly cause, whose daily work he refers to as slow boring through hard boards, struggling against the established machineries of power, and who is restrained, sober, detached, and consummately responsible.
Now, before we pursue this problem further, we need to ask, why does Weber keep drawing on responsibility rather than reason as political passion's harnessing force? In an age dominated by instrumental rationality, Weber fears, reason alone adds only calculation to deliberation. And calculation combined with passion would lead to the most dangerous of political tendencies, in which the end justifies the means, and everything from laws to constitutions to other causes to humans may be instrumentalized for one's purposes. So, not calculative reason, but a distinctive ethic of responsibility for all effects of an action, including collateral and unintended ones, is required to guide without choking political passion. In addition to avoiding instrumentalism, this ethic is intended to curb vanity, which Weber considers among the most deadly forces of contemporary political life. For Weber, vanity stands for the moment when the political power instinct, so essential in political actors, overrides the cause to which they are committed to become self-intoxication. Vanity signals identification with rather than distance from the course of history that one is trying to shape, and from the power that one wields for that aim. When a leader becomes the cause rather than the vessel for it, detachment, restraint, responsibility, and reflection fall away, and the thrill of power takes center stage. Weber dwells at length on this problem because he sees vanity not merely as an attribute of certain personalities, but endemic in politics, especially when nihilism is in full bloom. When Weber says, "The demagogue is forced to play for effect, he always runs the risk both of turning into an actor and taking too lightly his responsibility for his actions." Weber's judgment here is ferocious. Quote, "Although or rather because power is an unavoidable tool of politics and the striving for power therefore one of its driving forces, there is no more destructive distortion of political energy than when the parvenu swagger around boasting of his power, conceitedly reveling in its reflected glory." Weber damns the quote impoverished and superficial indifference toward the meaning of human activity embodied in this pose. A pure expression of nihilism, its lack of commitment to anything other than itself, and its corresponding lack of responsibility for its actions comprise the two kinds of what he calls mortal sins in the field of politics.
Apart from the problem of vanity, Weber's argument for a distinctive political ethic of responsibility is conventionally read as a response to the unpredictable effects of action, what he sometimes calls the tragedy of action, in a dynamic sphere suffused with diabolical powers, including violence. But it's also aimed at contesting both rationalization and nihilism. The former's swallowing of freedom and greatness and the latter's reduction of politics to exercising power without right, violence without responsibility, and instrumentalizing, hence erasing, value. Bound to leadership, the ethic of responsibility aims to re-center values and politics as their province after secularism destroyed their foundation, after rationalism destroyed their place, and after nihilism destroyed their depth and dignity. It aims to recover politics as the domain of the struggle over ultimate values without allowing values to become religious dogma or pure weaponry. It seeks to embed values in a project of overcoming nihilism both in individuals and society writ large. And it seeks to re-establish responsibility in the context of an ethically irrational order in which what we have shaped is never fully in our control. Each of these is a post-nihilist strategy.
Discussion of the ethic of responsibility comes near the end of politics of a vocation, but it's set up early. Weber opens his lecture by defining politics annoyingly narrowly as leadership of a political organization, and then he says, "In other words, a state." And then he declares curiously that the modern state may be sociologically stipulated only with reference to its peculiar means, namely, its monopoly of political I'm sorry, its monopoly of physical violence. Now, Weber knows there's more to states. Much of his essay is dedicated to their emergence and consolidation, their apparatuses and institutions, their distinctive organization of political life. So, why define states in terms of violence when even their distinctive means includes law and bureaucracy? In part, Weber is setting up his critiques of socialism, revolution, and Christian pacifism, doctrines he believes disingenuously and dangerously isolate their virtues from their imbrication with state violence. Weber, consummate theorist of power, of means separated from ends in capitalism and bureaucracy, is also finally attuned to the wreckage unleashed by political causes whenever ends are said to justify the means. Hence, what he's trying to do with this ethic is conceptually resuture the ultimate modern political means, state violence, to all political purposes or ends. He underscores the use of violence and accidental unleashing of violence as an inescapable feature of politics. This potential hovers over every political act and event, whether the aim is to lead, seize, or smash the state, to prevent, start, join, or or stop stop a war, to initiate reform or overturn a law. Again, Weber centers violence in politics not to affirm it as the essence of politics. It's only an instrument. But instruments are also never only for Weber, this master theorist of the capacity of means to swallow ends. So he aims to throw on their feet and take the chair away from those who clutch their principles or defend their actions in politics without reference to this instrument. His strategy is to continuously burden actors with responsibility for both means and ends while treating them as distinctive from one another. The same action or actor is responsible for both, and politics always comprises both. Hence, for Weber, neither abstract principle, nor raw calculation, nor realpolitik have a place in post-nihilist politics.
In formulating his ethic of responsibility, Weber famously contrasted with two others. One he calls an absolute ethic, bound solely to a moral code, such as Christian virtue or pacifism. Adherents of this ethic ignore the tragedy of action, that delinking of motive, aim, and effect that for Weber comprises the political realm, the nature of the political realm. Responsibility is required because motive and effect are delinked. The absolute ethic, or what he sometimes calls an ethic of convection conviction, disavows this part of politics and often ends up, Weber says, decrying a world too stupid or too base for one's principles to govern. Thus does the absolute ethic reveal itself as a form of ressentiment against politics. What Weber calls an ethic of ultimate ends refuses the ethical irrationality of politics in a different way. This ethic is contoured by its commitment to an end state, some rational ideal, one imagined devoid of distortions by power and partisanship, and therefore justifies any means to get there. Now, Weber's main target here is Bolshevism, but it's noteworthy that the classical neoliberals are also vulnerable to this charge. They imagine the power problem in politics conquered by the spontaneous order of markets and morals, and justify a good measure of state violence and other collateral damage to bring into being their idealized orders, from coups and occupations to ordinary downsizing, offshoring, and so forth. Absolute ethics politicians reduce politics to principles, and ultimate ends politicians reduce politics to a teleology of reason. For Weber, both dangerously divide means from ends, and both ignore the specific powers, partisanship, and tragedy of action that are permanent features of politics. Both shirk responsibility for what becomes of what they stand for. Moreover, if each hyper-personalizes the ethical dimension of action, referring everything back to their personal motive or aim, they also radically depersonalize actions' worldly effects, treating principle or reason as governing the meaning of action. And this too avoids responsibility in politics, where intentions and effects effects so often lay worlds apart. And yet, Weber famously concludes this discussion, "Only one who marries an ethic of conviction to an ethic of responsibility has the true calling for politics."
So how are they twinned in a single set of practices, a single being? Weber's vocabulary here is telling. Maturity, sobriety, manly fortitude, restraint, ability to withstand disappointment and setbacks without whining, cynicism, or retreat, the ability to persist despite it all, converting Nietzsche's complex pathos of distance from a class-based sensibility to a personal one, distance from self and things.
Weber invokes Luther's resolute "Here I stand, I can do no other" to dis- to express the moment when conviction reigns supreme. Weightiness, knowingness, tolerance for suffering in place of Nietzsche's gaiety and laughter for overcoming nihilism, building, not breaking things, avoidance of resentment, vengeance, face-saving, avoiding all the reactive and vain temptations.
Above all, the post-nihilist political actor is willing to sacrifice self, but not others, to a political cause, steadfastly refusing nihilistic reduction of everything to individual interest, power, or security. This ethic of responsibility also represents a path through nihilism in its representation of ultimate value in political life, and by inhabiting a set of difficult political epistemological commitments to renew human freedom. Let me turn to these briefly before concluding.
To take one's own values as true with a capital T, and demonize all others, is already, in Weber's view, to inhabit something of the absolute ethic that he criticizes. Conversely, recognizing political godheads as beliefs rather than truths, fosters the objectivism and sense of proportion that he seeks for responsible political action. In a sphere that is partisan all the way down, this recognition builds the sense of proportion that in turn builds responsibility at the site of conviction.
So here Weber is adapting one of Nietzsche's signature moves, in which rejecting the disembodied conceits of science and the absolutism of religion alone allow us to approach the ideal of objectivity. For Nietzsche, recall, only perspectivalism permits the possibility of interpretation beyond the interpreter. For Weber, only recogn- reckoning with the foundationlessness and the irreconcilability of ultimate values retrieves them from nihilistic devaluation, from instrumentalization, from trivialization, and hyper-politicization.
Put the other way around, the ethic of responsibility, in Weber's understanding, entails acting without the conceit that history and humanity have a necessary or nation- natural shape or ethical teleology, or develop from pure intention, reason, God, or science. The ethic of responsibility entails affirming politics as the domain where value is imposed and transformed by the context in which it's enacted, rather than a domain in which immanent or divine value are realized. Both an ethic of conviction and of ultimate ends refuses this, which is why both of them are irresponsible.
That said, Weber's ethic makes an incredible demand on the vanishing human soul that he thinks nihilism produces. The demand is at once to have unblinking consciousness of the contingent nature of our passions, and dedicate ourselves to realizing them. This alone is how we mend the desire that nihilism has broken. It has nothing to do with relativism, subjectivism, or climbing empathy walls. Rather, it's an unprecedented epistemological political consciousness in which one knows one's values to be situated, partial, temporal, geographic, located, yet is no less committed to them by virtue of that knowingness.
Appreciating the ethical irrationality of political life formed by the tragedy of action, the unemancipatory rationalities organizing the present, and the permanent contest of values in a secular order does something else. It brightens the light on immediate political predicaments and possibilities, political dangers, and political openings. These become more legible to actors when they're not measured by moral or behavioral logics.
The ethic also aims to retrieve political life from its overtaking by polit- personality cults and a spirit of ressentiment on one side, and bureaucratization and rationalization on the other. This in turn makes possible bids for the future that are not rooted in grievances against the past or the present, or the nihilistic absorption with the personal and the immediate.
Finally, this approach to political renewal aims to recuperate freedom from its destruction by rationalization and by its nihilistic conversion into irresponsible license. Weber defines freedom mechanically as the absence of constraint in his social science. But in his occasional writings and in the vocational lectures, Weber says it is with the soul that freedom is made. That is, it's about enacting a life we've chosen. Above all, it's living by the lights of our own beliefs. And that is why he places a calling, vocation, finding purpose and crafting a life in accord with it at the very heart of freedom.
Nihilism, generated by the expansion of freedom's mechanical form, extinguishes its soulful form. Just as rationalization usurps this kind of freedom with power, sorry, just as rationalization usurps this kind of freedom with power, as power independent of constraints, building economic and administrative systems that invert freedom into its opposite. More than merely different, the two forms of freedom are thus mutually canceling. Freedom as unconstrained power built on an order in which we are subjectively and practically nearly bereft of the freedom to craft ourselves and the world according to values we affirm.
Weber's bold bid in politics and as a vocation then is to try to reverse this in politics. In foregrounding value actualization as the essence of the political vocation, he aims to retrieve freedom from the dual threat of its domination by the machineries of capital and administration on the one side and the cheapness, frivolity, and indifference to truth, justice, or futurity of a nihilistic age on the other. If politics is saturated with both, indeed, if Weber's greatest dread was giant apparatuses of domination wielded by vain demagogues, it is also where both could be countered.
Politics as a vocation is a vision for working through nihilism by restoring politics to its ancient function, placing at its heart a struggle over who we are and what we should do. It aims to make politics redemptive after the death of God, not by purifying it of diabolical powers or attempting to enshrine values and institutions, but by casting it as the essential domain in which we decide and assert value against the predicaments for value that modernity has produced. It's where humans could become responsible again, not only for their own actions, but for the world in which this capacity is imperiled by the powers that we generate but which have slipped our control.
If Weber was alert to the faint prospects for this project, his antidote to despair was not hope, but grit, emotional, spiritual, political. He concludes the essay, "Only those with the staunchness of heart that refuses to be daunted by the collapse of all their hopes, only those whose spirit will not be broken if the world proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer, and only those who can still say nevertheless, despite everything, only such a person has the vocation for politics." Nevertheless, in spite of it all, these do not leap over the nihilistic predicament, but resist its world-eviscerating force with doggedness, dignity, and responsible handling of power in pursuit of a worldly cause. We could not be further from Nietzsche now.
Two points before we leave this for today. The first about culture, the second about education. Culture. If values involve complex regimes of attachment and desire, and nihilism represents a crisis of desire, failure to love this life and this world, this suggests the importance of the left focusing on political culture. We cannot cling to belief that either reason or interest will awaken those lured and soothed by authoritarian plutocrats. We cannot expect to recruit through rational argument or evidence that a Trump or a Bolsonaro are exploiting fears and resentments and burning all of our children's future. Rather, our task is to kindle desire for a just, livable, sustainable world. This is a cultural project. It's significant that the right has worked for decades at this level, in schools, churches, civic associations, media, of course, and more. The left, notwithstanding Gramsci, Stuart Hall, or the program of the early Frankfurt School, not so much.
Education. As nihilism depresses all value, this includes the value of truth and facticity. This is accelerated by the powers, of course, of unaccountable media, both mass and social, and by the right-wing attack on higher education and intellectualism more generally. Combined, these forces make the masses both highly manipulable and undemocratic in sensibility, a condition that also comports with the larger right-wing assault on democratic values, institutions, and culture.
Weber responded to the crisis of liberalism in his time by giving up on substantive democracy, investing all hope in responsible leadership. However, the wide moat that he built between knowledge and politics, which we'll explore at some length tomorrow, deepened prospects for something else, irresponsible demagogues crassly preying on fear, suffering, wounded supremacism, and scapegoating. Put another way, in confining knowledge to science and politics to value, Weber tore them apart from one another and gave up on educating for democracy, as has much of the West today. One effect is popular support for demagogues unchecked by responsibility to truth, constitutions, ecology, regions, world.
Reversing this rests in revaluing and reinvesting in education for democracy on the one hand and on the other, orienting academic knowledge pursued and dissemination far more closely to worldly ends than it has known in recent decades. This is what we shall pursue tomorrow. Thank you.