Transcription
Hello, this is August Baker. Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts where we interview leading scholars about their recent books. Today I have the privilege of speaking with Wendy Brown about her recent book Nihilistic Times, thinking with Max Weber.
Wendy Brown is UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and was for many years Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books, which have been translated into more than 20 languages, include *In the Ruins of Neoliberalism*, *States of Injury*, *Undoing the Demos*, and *Walled States, Waning Sovereignty*.
And I'd like to include a couple of blurbs to give people an idea of what the book is about. This first one is from Katherine Lofton, author of *Consuming Religion*. She says, "In *Nihilistic Times*, the most important political theorist of her generation models how to think with someone else. Through a spirited engagement with Max Weber, Wendy Brown confronts the challenge of creating meaning in a disturbed age. To read this book is to rediscover what the real work of higher education is."
And the second one, Robert Gooding-Williams, author of *In the Shadow of Du Bois*. "Drawing inspiration from Max Weber as well as Friedrich Nietzsche, Wendy Brown boldly and incisively argues that nihilism underpins our current social, economic, and political crisis. Brown is one of the most original political theorists writing today and her analytically astute engagement with Weber's vocation lectures is essential reading for everyone who harbors hope for a democratic repair of the world."
Welcome, Professor Brown.
Thank you for having me.
I understand this is I see sometimes these books, by the way, this is a great physical copy of the book. It's such a great time.
It's funny that you say that. I was I was a little upset about the size of the font because I'm old and I thought, "Oh, you have to squint to read this."
Yeah. But everybody else has said, "Oh, this is wonderful. I can take it on the subway."
Exactly. In my bag. It's no bigger than a little pad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's right. That's great. And I noticed that it's I sometimes I get these books that are like this one. They are from a series of lectures and I I think I've seen these before, the Tanner lectures. Could you tell us maybe a little bit about how that's different when you're, as opposed to writing a book, when you're invited to give these Tanner lectures at Yale University? I take it you're speaking more to a you're not as footnotes and referring to the literature. You're more talking about your views and your opinions. And how would you put it?
What a wonderful question to start with. I think people approach something like the Tanner lectures somewhat differently. I'll just say what they are. They're called the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. And they were endowed some decades ago by a fellow who was himself not an academic but very interested in the possibility of academic inquiry contributing to not just problem-solving but the production and and the deliberation about human values. And you are absolutely right that for many of us who are invited to give these, and they're they're harbored at at several different universities. So there's Tanner lectures at Berkeley, at Yale, at Princeton, at several other places. And each place they're inflected a little bit differently. At Yale, what I really appreciate is that they want to do exactly what you said, bring scholars who might normally write dense academic monographs to reflect on contemporary predicaments in a thoughtful, potentially philosophical or literary way, but something that has contemporary currency. At Berkeley, they're a little different. They they tend to be contained a little bit more in the analytic philosophical tradition. So they vary in genre at this point, but within those genres, even each scholar does something different.
So just to conclude here, I have been teaching Weber's vocation lectures for a very long time. These are two lectures he gave near the end of his life and the end of World War I where he was invited by students to lecture on the question of politics as a vocation and then science or visa systematic knowledge, scholarship as a vocation. And I'll say more about those maybe later when when we talk about more specifically, you know, what Weber was doing. But I've been thinking about these lectures forever, for decades, and I've never written about them.
And secondly, I've been thinking about the problem of nihilism for decades. And for me also, this problem kind of came to the fore in a beautiful little commentary that my colleague Hans Sluga offered on the occasion of the Trump election, where he brought Nietzsche into the the fore to think about the problem of of nihilism in relationship to truth, to narcissism, to to a series of other things that he thought were at work in the Trump phenomenon. And for me, this became the occasion to just really pull together things that for a very long time I had been teaching about, ruminating about, but now wanted to just gather. And so I gave a lecture, my first Tanner lecture, you give a series, was on politics as a vocation and the second on knowledge as a vocation. And then in the task of turning it into a book, I lost the lecture form a little bit. It got longer. It got about twice as long, but it still has that quality of, "What am I thinking about? What have I been thinking about? It's important for us to think about," as opposed to, "Here's my research and right, and here's what I want, you know, to tell you about." So that was long-winded, August. I apologize, but, uh, you gave me a chance to to reflect on what's so special about doing something like the Tanner lectures or or in Princeton, the Gauss seminars, these occasional things where you just really have the chance, if you take it, if you take that opportunity as a scholar, to step back a little and ruminate and reflect and do so with an audience.
Right. And I thought it was interesting that those that Weber's the texts were also lectures, right? We have lectures on on lectures.
Lectures on lectures.
And it's a it's a different form than I mean, I think as my understanding, Weber was really talking to students about what he learned in his life and what they might take from what he's learned.
He absolutely was. So here the conventional understanding of Weber is this very serious, methodical social scientist who developed a certain approach and method for the social sciences that conventionally we understand as the distinction between fact and value, that he really believed what social science had to do was be relatively value-free in its endeavor and build knowledge. And that's what he did most of his life, except during the decades when he was too depressed to work. But on the occasion of these lectures, he did something really different. And one could almost call them, and they have been called, value lectures. That is, he told students what he thought the value of politics and of knowledge were. And he told students what he thought the appropriate ethic was for each, a very specific ethic that he drew for each.
And he began each lecture by setting out what he considered the kind of terrible conditions at the dawn of the 20th century for both knowledge and politics. In the case of politics, you know, he decried the kind of bureaucratic administrative machinery that had all but extinguished the grand politics that he really believed made the endeavor worthy. He thought very few who really could be political leaders were drawn to the work because they either felt crushed by that bureaucracy or they couldn't survive the party machinery and cronyism and corruption and the rest of it. And he also thought the conditions of politics were very difficult because of what we'll talk about, I think eventually, the problem of nihilism. The problems that a nihilistic age produced for what succeeded in politics, namely, you know, narcissistic demagoguery and what it prevented in politics, namely responsible, charismatic leaders who pursued a cause, but did so with devotion not to their own power and their own aggrandizement, but rather devotion to the world. And he just thought this was all but gone from the 20th century and was really engaged in a kind of, one could almost say, last gasp attempt in these lectures to try to rebuild the possibility of real political leadership that was responsible, that was heroic, that was profound, that was dedicated to a cause. And he was also in the business of scolding students, especially those engaged with Bolshevism and revolutionary fervor, which was not only strong in Russia but in Germany at the time.
And in knowledge, he also thought the conditions for young scholars was pretty terrible, not so different from our own. He decried the cronyism, the the nepotism, um, the favoritism in within the academy, but also the infiltration of the academy by capitalist values. And as he put it, mediocrity. So there he was trying to to argue to students that they really needed to simply care for the work, but in a very selfless way, that they really had to understand that to be dedicated to to have the vocation for science, visa knowledge, knowledge production, one had to accept both those terrible conditions, but also the fact that whatever one did would eventually be overcome by some other development in knowledge, that as it were, you would kind of invent or produce or develop an idea that eventually would wash away with time. You had to accept that you also had to withdraw the self from knowledge production. You had to be really repressed to be able to be a serious scholar. So these were the main themes in in the lectures. And as you say, they were themselves occasions for Weber to say what he really thought about what he called his twin loves, politics and scholarship.
Right. I don't know this about you, but have you been involved in politics at all?
I have.
Oh, you have? Okay.
Yeah. So I I don't exactly identify with Weber. He was he was an extreme conservative and a nationalist and so forth. And politically, I don't identify with him, but I certainly get the twin loves. I have those twin loves myself. And I I think one of the reasons I find Weber's distinctions between the two realms so compelling is that I have long been disturbed by people who try to push them together, who try to imagine that what we do in the classroom and what we do in our research should be suffused and infused by politics and directly relevant to politics. And conversely, that politics ought to be something like a seminar room.
Right.
Understand.
It's very frustrating when you when you bring those two things together. One more thing about the lectures. I when I I know lecture, the word lecture might make us think, oh, as opposed to a seminar, so it's just someone speaking. But I think this is a public lecture, as I understand it, it's to I don't know whether Weber's was or yours were, but it seems to me you're speaking to a not just the people enrolled in a course or and who will get a grade, but you're speaking to a a public group, and they will have the chance to ask questions.
Correct. So I don't in my case, I won't pretend that the Tanners bring a general public. Certainly the public is invited. It's an academic public, but it includes students, undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and certainly could and should include those who are just the educated public who have an interest in these things. And yes, dialogue and questions is is absolutely part of it. And for me, one always, one of the richest parts of giving a lecture.
Yeah. You know, you know what lands and what I mean. There's always some wacky questions. There just are. But, you know, anybody who's been around the block knows how to handle those.
And that's often that that is a very interesting part. Yeah. Let's talk about nihilism. The first thing I'm going to I brought in this quote. This is from I'll talk about nihilism at the time that Weber was writing. This is a book from a book called *The Great War and Modern Memory* by Paul Fussell, 1975. He says he's talking about the devaluation of which you talk about.
He says, "The Great War took place in what was, compared with ours, a static world where the values appeared stable and where the meanings of abstractions seemed permanent and reliable. Everyone knew what glory was and what honor meant. It was not until 11 years after the war that Hemingway could declare in *A Farewell to Arms* that 'abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, and hallow were obscene besides the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments, and the dates.'" Fussell says, "In the summer of 1914, no one would have understood what on earth Hemingway was talking about, but by 1919, everyone would have." Do you think that captures an important part of nihilism at Weber's at the point of time Weber was writing?
Yes and no.
Mhm.
The yes is certainly the destabilization of meaning. For Weber, though, nihilism in itself is a condition that precedes the war by quite a bit. So, just for listeners, you know, many people, they hear the word nihilism and they think, "Oh, I know what that is." That's, you know, when you don't believe anything has meaning, and including life itself, and it's fatalism, it's cynicism, it's relativism, it's punk, it's...
It's a symptom of depression.
Yeah. Yeah. And the tradition from which Weber draws and develops the problem, which he rarely names, but which I insist frame both lectures, it's a different tradition. It's a tradition that would see what I just described as one symptom of nihilism, but not itself comprehensive. So this is the tradition of Nietzsche, but also of the Russians, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, etc., where nihilism is a really saturating condition in the West, in particular, specific to Western modernity, that pertains to the fact that values in modernity have lost their foundations. They haven't gone away. They've lost their religious foundations, and we don't know how to resecure or refound them.
So how does this go? The wellspring is the Enlightenment, what we call sometimes the scientific revolution, secularism, etc., where the authority of religious truth and the values that that authority secures are displaced, not destroyed, but displaced by the authority of science and the authority of reason. So if I ask you, you know, how do you know such and such is true? If you're deeply religious, you'll say because God says so, or the Bible says so, or the Quran says so. But what Weber is getting at is that claim is increasingly challenged or displaced by, "No, I need scientific or logical proof. I need evidence."
Right?
Now, why does this produce nihilism? Because what science does is give us a certain kind of truth. What kind of truth? A truth about how things work, why things work the way they do. But it doesn't tell us what their value is, what their meaning is. So I can tell you, for example, what the development is of the human being from the meeting of sperm and egg through the embryo to the fetus, etc. But I cannot tell you what the value of that is. So I can't settle the abortion question, for example, scientifically. You just can't. We can have arguments until the cows come home about when we think life begins, but even then, we can't settle the question of what the value is. Similarly, reason, let me give you just one more example there. I can tell you that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction due to climate change, and that really we are facing, you know, a dire collapse of species that will only accelerate as climate change itself accelerates. But that does not tell you whether it's a good or bad thing. You and I might both shudder at the thought because we just love the Earth or the planet or species, including the human one. But somebody else might say, "Well, okay, but just that, you know, so what?" And that problem is the problem of science explaining what's happening, how things work, but not telling us what their meaning or their value is. Reason does the same thing. It lets us calculate, deliberate, analyze, scrutinize, but again, doesn't tell us what in life finally is worth doing, or how life ought to be organized, how human life ought to be organized. Doesn't tell us, you know, whether we should be democrats and self-ruling, or autocracy and authoritarianism to be, you know, our form, our political form, because we can't arrive there through logical deduction. And those are values.
And so what Weber's wrestling with is that with waning religious authority, all fundamental values and all meaning, including the very value of truth, these things don't die, but they simply lost their foundations. And that means they lose their status as absolutes. And and they go a little haywire as a result because scientific knowledge and the problem of meaning or value come apart. That didn't happen with religious monotheism. It was all bound together. What was true was also what the meaning of something was. So nihilism for Weber is the condition in which we're in this predicament, but we haven't found our way through it. We haven't found a new way to, as Nietzsche puts it, legislate value, decide what meanings are. And for Weber, for Nietzsche, for others in this tradition, that's a human problem. It's not going to come from the gods or from nature or from science or from logic or anything else. Settling what things mean and what they are worth, what their value is, is a human problem.
So what do I mean finally by things going a little haywire? Well, what Weber understands is that when the value of values themselves declines, including the value of truth, what happens is that values get trivialized, instrumentalized, used for branding, used for power purposes, and so forth. And, you know, you see this everywhere today. Every company attaches itself to some value, whether it's sustainability or or family values. Everyone knows that Donald Trump is no Christian, that he could care less about prayer in schools or religious liberty or being pro-life. But he spied the power potential in those values and he mobilized them. So that's a good example of of values becoming really just totally fungible and instrumentalizable. What you also get is the hyper-politicization of everything. The loss of boundaries for separate zones of life. So, you know, what cuisine you eat, what car you drive, what you wear, all those things signify something about your supposed values. But, you know, that's also a form of trivialization.
And then finally, last point, what also happens with this nihilistic predicament is disinhibition. And by that I mean that when the very value of values declines, what also happens is that their restraining effect on our actions loosens, because, you know, we may say, well, you know, I I believe this is how people should conduct themselves, but I don't, that doesn't deep, that doesn't go all the way down. And so you get a lot of acting out, disinhibited action of all kinds, right, left, and center. It's not exclusive to any party. So that's the predicament that Weber thinks has infected both knowledge and politics. And he thinks what happens is you get, you know, a lot of just pure power politics, pure demagoguery, irresponsible action in politics as a result, and without concern for consequences. And he's trying to figure out how to push through that problem, as it were, refound the value of politics on a different ground, but it's going to be a human ground. And and what he thinks happens in knowledge is that you also get a lot of demagoguery and confusion about preaching and teaching, and students looking for meaning from teachers, or teachers looking for meaning in science. And he's also trying to get us through that problem in in knowledge. Okay, I've set up the problem now for answers. I promise.
No, no, that that's very helpful. I think, um, I don't know if Weber deals with this, but it would seem to me that science does doesn't answer questions, but maybe we kind of feel like it does. Like if I if I view myself as basically I've got certain genes and they've been evolved and I'm so I kind of want to cooperate with people. I also have some aggression and I'm here for a limited time. There's no beyond. There's no transcendent beyond. Which I think science says, then I'm kind of likely not to have some grand morals or or even view myself in a grand way. I'm kind of here for this certain amount of time. I will be with my family and comfort and be comfortable and not depressed. You just get a certain way of looking at your life when you think of yourself through a scientific lens.
So that's one possibility. But look, August, you're also doing this podcast.
Yeah. Yeah. And you're doing it with people often who who think about the problem of the meaning of life and the ways of the world, how we ought to organize human arrangements, social, political, economic, and so forth.
And I think what Weber would say to you is the deflationary side of science that you just described, that says, well, look, you're just a speck. You know, you're just you're you're one of eight billion. It's pretty short time compared to geologic time that you're on Earth. There's, you know, you're just a speck. I think what Weber is saying, in fact, I know what Weber is saying, especially in the knowledge domain, is yes, but we're humans. We are the species capable of crafting lives, of making meaning, and of arranging life according to value. We are unique in that respect. Other animals may do all kinds of amazing things. I think that's one of the things that the new science studies is teaching us is just how wondrous the world of non-human species really is, and how close it is to us. Perhaps remain singular about us is that we create meaning and we create value and we tussle about it. We argue about it. We build lives according to it. Deep, deep, deep nihilism is the abandonment of that project. And so that does return us to that first meaning of nihilism, where it's just you just give up. If science doesn't deliver meaning, if meaning isn't inherent in things, if there's no God, then there is no meaning. And Weber says, "No, we create it, and we've always created it." So we created it in the form of the gods for a long time, and then we created it in the form of elevating science to imagining that it would deliver meaning, but it cannot answer the question, "What am I to do with this life?" and "How ought we to organize ourselves politically, socially, culturally?" And what Weber wants to say is that nothing is more important than having values and struggling to live according to them. That's the personal ethic. And politically, having a cause and struggling to make the world comport with that cause, and that's what he understands real politics to be about.
You know, how and he doesn't think we can ever finally settle those values because they're, as he puts it, warring gods. You know, in politics, where in his time we could now say rising Nazism, but, you know, rising nationalism in Prussia and in all over Europe, you know, in the World War I period, and on the other hand, socialism. And he recognizes there is no settling the question of which is the good. But he does affirm that what politics is about is struggling over that. It's that's what the political struggle is. And if it becomes reduced to pure power politics, as we so often think political struggles are today, when we look at, you know, the GOP and the DNC legislature, you know, it just looks like nobody's really fighting for anything they believe. They're just fighting to destroy the other. That, Weber says, is nihilism. Nobody's really got a cause.
And one of the interesting places you go is to this point about charismatic leadership, that being something maybe we should be more open to.
So let's ask why does Weber think that's the way through nihilism? Well, what he understands about charisma is that it always has to have a value. It's always about producing a certain value, a certain constellation of meaning. You know, we're never just drawn to a personality. There's always something about it. And charismatic political leadership is, whether it's, you know, we can pick whoever your your peeps are here, but let's just pick familiar ones like Gandhi, Martin Luther King.
AOC is a good one.
AOC is a good one. Yeah. Question remains, I think, whether Bernie had charisma or something else, but or has rather. Yeah. But I think what Weber is doing with charisma is recognizing that what it does is it resuscitates value in a world that's extinguishing it, in a world that, you know, through both what he calls rationalization and bureaucratization, and we could call technocracy, that that what charisma embodies is a kind of trace of that older world of not, it doesn't have to be divine or divinely inspired value, but it has kinship with it. So I think the reason that I myself am drawn to the idea is that it seems to me that the left, if we can use that term, struggles and fails over the problem of how to make its vision compelling.
Yes. Because it we so often think, oh, well, if we just expose all the nefariousness of the bureaucrats and the autocrats and the racists and the rest of it, then everyone will come over to our side. And that's just not true for lots and lots of reasons.
Yeah. But I think also that we grew anxious through the 20th century, especially for reasons having to do with fascism earlier in...
Yeah, sure. We became anxious about the idea of a nonrational or highly emotional or now let's just go back to charismatic formation for our vision and our values. And I think I've come to believe that's a mistake. I don't want to go all the way over to like Sorelian myth and, you know, that kind of thing. And I'm not arguing for manipulation of the stupid masses, that that approach.
Yeah. But I do think you mentioned AOC earlier. The reason she got so many people excited was not just that she has the guts to be very clear and no holds barred about her socialist values, but also that she's a very charismatic leader.
Absolutely. And it was just thrilling, you know, you just saw, oh, I guess socialism can be exciting. Yeah. And I just mean beautiful and young and gutsy, but really powerful, really compelling. And I think whether we approach that at the level of the individual or at the level of a movement, I think in parts of the book, I explore this question of whether movements can be charismatic.
Mhm. It's important for us to do otherwise we're just going to keep being overwhelmed by the exploitation of charisma, demagoguery, neofascism on the right, and all the libidinal excitement that that generates, while we are over here trying to be rationalists and foot soldiers, right, in in movements that that just don't seem exciting at all.
Right. And I think it's natural. This is the way when you're growing up, you take on someone. I mean, this is you are around people and a community or a charismatic person, and you kind of soak it in.
Yeah. You want to be part of it.
Yeah. It's not like reading it. It's just it comes in in a very strong way.
Absolutely. The other thing is it seems like Weber has a in when he looks at the science or the u scholarship side, he has a check and balance on that, which is this really fearless scrutiny, right? So that that would any danger of being irrational through some charismatic leader is going to be checked by that.
So yeah, if we really at the kind of mass public, high-quality education that we need, sustained democracy, that would be the aim. So let's go there for a minute. So Weber really wants to draw this distinction between politics and academic life, which includes for him pursuit of values and politics, and the pursuit of knowledge, fact-based knowledge in the classroom or the research domain. But he also is very interested in the problem of how to handle values, including political values, in the classroom.
Right? And as you say, his admonition is not to ignore them and not to simply balance them as we do today, or submit them to a marketplace of ideas where he doesn't think they ever really get scrutinized. But as you say, to scrutinize them, to analyze them, to look at their premises, their entailments, their logics, their, you know, if you hold to this view, what does that imply? Let's explore it thoroughly and fully. And what is he doing? He's breaking values out of the theological or moral castles in which we often lock them. Like, oh, that person has Christian values, we must just respect them, or that person, you know, has this view, that's their opinion, they have a right to it. That's not interesting to him. That's not knowledge. And that's not teaching. Teaching for him is allowing the student to promulgate the value and then saying, "Okay, let's have a look. Let's have a really hard, close, long look." And he, in that way, is trying to, as you say, prevent the problem of both the trivialization and instrumentalization of value, but also, what I think you were hinting at a minute ago, the danger of attaching to the charismatic leader in a blind,
Right? Unknowing, uninterrogated way.
Now, Weber himself was not interested in education for the masses, but he wasn't really a big fan of the masses anyway. So that's another problem. There's lots of places where I have to leave Weber aside to to make what he's doing interesting and useful to our present. That's what it means for me to wrestle with a thinker is not just a cherry-pick, but to allow him to provoke and produce a problem, but not allow him to colonize it completely. Yeah. And so in this case, I the only thing that could possibly repair democracy for us is the combination of refounding, as it were, the importance of higher education for producing citizens, not just for producing job holders, not just for job training. And on the other hand, taking seriously that the value concatenation we have today is something we can work with in the classroom, open up, think about, wrestle with, learn the histories of, consider psychologically, economically, culturally, socially, politically, and historically. And not just treat as a war because ideas, which that's what values are, actually have the capacity to be analyzed. And what Weber's saying is, you know, it's a symptom of our nihilistic age that we just accept that there's this kind of, you know, battle going on that we can't do anything about. That's what education's for.
Let me, um, just read a couple of sections here. I think you've, you've said, I appreciate your from my perspective, you're trying to look at this schism we have and where there are two sides and they don't talk, and you're trying to address both sides, which I appreciate very much. When you say, "Inscribed as hashtags, bumper stickers, yard signs, ephemeral group identities, or advertising bait, values lose their depth and endurance, their relationship to a *Weltanschauung*, their wholesale governing of conduct and conscience, their capacity to shape moral order. Beyond indexing cultural divides, brands identified with feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and non-normative gender on the one side, and with God, heteronormative families, and patriotism on the other, signal values made hollow and huish by nihilism." I find that a very brave thing to say, and this is the sort of thing that one would talk about. I guess to me, what I'm seeing here is some of these values don't apply to everyone, and others are more universal.
Mhm. And some of them feel that it is one side against another, and it's a pushing of one against the other. Do you feel that this is a provocative statement that you've made there?
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, given who my readership is, it's going to provoke that readership because it implicates the left, right? And my readership tends to be from the center to the left, and it will certainly...
That's brave of you. I think.
Yeah, I think it's important for us to see that. I mean, you know, the left is not unconscious about this. We have this phrase called virtue signaling. And I think people have come to to understand that ticking off the list of all the things you stand for and all the things you stand against is maybe not the same as really having earnest political commitment.
Mmm. But I've gone a little further here to say that, you know, maybe taking off the list altogether is paradoxically a trivialization of value. I think about those yard signs, you know, "In this house we stand for" or "We are for," and then there's a list of, you know, all the good things one stands for, anti-racism, you know, etc., etc. And in this house we believe Black Lives Matter, trees have standing, you know, blah, blah. And that's it's a grocery list. It's not that it's a terrible thing, but it's a branding of a house, you know, it's a branding of a household. It's not a deep, deliberative reckoning with, "Where is our world? What does it need? How do we how do we have democracy with people we don't necessarily agree with, with people we need to be in arguments with, with people we need to settle ways forward with?" And I'm not just talking about extreme right and extreme left. How do we do this thing? That's much harder than a brand stuck in your front yard.
Right. So, you're right. I I I suppose as now as I think about it, it's even more of a I didn't mean it to be a stick in the eye. That's not my usual way of writing, but it is true that throughout my work over the last five decades, four decades, I guess, I've always been in a certain sympathetic quarrel with my own people. I've always been in a sympathetic quarrel with the left, with feminists, with anti-racists, and so forth. Them because I'm interested as a political theorist in the problem of what the various forms of discourse that are leading us to speak or iterate problems the way that we do that maybe are reinscribing powers that we actually need to undo, that we actually need to disrupt. And, you know, I I have been doing that over a course of many books and many decades. And I I guess I didn't see until you just asked the question the extent to which I'm also doing that here.
Yeah. No, and I think it's well, it gets to the fearless scrutiny. The other thing I thought is, you know, overall you're talking about nihilism, and then the the question is, well, what does Professor Brown want to do? What's the verb here? Renounce nihilism, overturn it, replace it. And your word is "work through it."
Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. What does that mean to you? I thought that was fascinating.
Yeah. It's interesting because in part that's a psychoanalytic term. He experiments a little bit with with overcoming. That's partly what the Übermensch is about. But I think his more interesting moments are where he's trying to work through it. And and what Nietzsche advocates for working through it is accepting that God is dead and understanding that we must legislate values. For Weber, the working through is a little different. It's about accepting, in an almost Nietzschean way, the conditions of our time, *amor fati*, and then trying to figure out how not to be caught up in the worst effects of nihilism, but instead to navigate or work through them. I do think it's still a bit of an individual task in both Nietzsche and Weber's case. It's not a, as it were, a cultural political project.
But I think in both cases, they're also giving us a an appreciation of the fact that you you don't just resist the thing and you don't jump over it. If we're in nihilistic times, if we're in a nihilistic condition, the task is to model value-making and pursuit that does not pretend it's rooted in God or science or natural law or anything else, but simply insists on this being the good for us. And, you know, that's a political project. You know, this is what I think the good is for us. And to return to AOC, I think that's what she does. It's like, you know, a lot of her time she's just outraged, you know, and and everyone.
Yeah. Yes. Exposing the bad.
Yeah. Yeah. But she's also saying, you know, these are the people we should care about. The poor, the disenfranchised, the people private equity is screwing out of homes or healthcare or other things.
Yeah. And, you know, in some ways, I put Bernie and Elizabeth Warren in the same place. There, you know, these are this is what we should care about. We should care about a burning planet. We should care about the people who are most victimized or made vulnerable by the greatest powers in the world these days, which above all is probably financial capital. And we should be that should be our focus. That is a, what the philosophers like to call, a normative claim that does not pretend to have deep ground. It's an insistence. It's an argument. It's an impassioned conviction, and it's open to being dissected.
Yeah. It's something you can lose sight of, and then if someone says it powerfully, you can say, "Oh, you know, that's right." And you can take it.
Yeah. Yeah. You say, "Oh, yeah. I guess I have just gotten used to the way things are, but boy, there's no reason for us to be going down this road." Yeah. Do you think of working through also as suggesting that this is an ongoing process, not that, okay, yeah, that's...
You know, we constantly are looking for ways to ground and found our values in something deep and secure and unmoving. And I think what Weber and Nietzsche are both telling us is it's never there, but you're it's a constant struggle, you know, and it's it's a constant effort. And of course, what you see largely in evangelical right-wing politics, just that slice of right-wing politics, is that insistence. "God told us this is the way the world is." You see that rea what I I've called in a much earlier book, uh, reactionary fundamentalism, an effort to reground fundamentalism in a reaction to this predicament of violence.
Right? So, yeah, working through is is ongoing. It's never going to be over. But I think that the the heart of it is accepting that values are human-made and that their pursuit is a political project. That that's what is at the heart of politics. And that this is something we also need to recognize as we engage in the world of knowledge in universities, that, you know, values are not things to be just respected. They are things we can analyze. But at the same time, the place where I'd quarrel with Weber here is I don't believe they're ever separable from facts. I don't think you can peel them off of facts. So, that's another conversation for another day.
Well, I really enjoyed this book, and I think it's very, very accessible. And Professor Wendy Brown, I appreciate you talking to me today. The book is *Nihilistic Times, Thinking with Max Weber*. Is it Harvard? Yes. 2023. Yes.
Thank you so much, August. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.