Strategy (56 page)

Sentimentally he remained attached to the notion of a strong German state, was hostile to pacifism, and was angered by the sudden surge of revolutionary activity despite the involvement of a number of his friends.
¹³
He
feared the demilitarization of the country, which would leave it powerless, and was annoyed at the disorder fomented by the revolutionaries. When he spoke in Munich, it was not long after the murder of the Spartacist leaders Luxemburg and Liebknecht, an action that he deplored though he had also recently expressed his irritation with the two theorists (“Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoo”). He had only agreed to give the lecture because he feared that if he did not the lectern would be taken instead by Karl Eisner, the radical head of what Weber considered to be an incompetent Bavarian government.

This was a time when the dilemmas of political life were thrown into sharp relief. Defeat in war and convulsive revolutions illuminated how imperfect could be the fit between ends and means. It led Weber to present an analysis that went to the heart of the tensions in strategic thinking, insisting on the pointlessness of lofty goals if there was no means of achieving them. He continued to stress the need to analyze means by reference to their consequences.

Weber opened his lecture with his customary refusal “to take a position on actual problems of the day.” This was followed with compelling definitions of politics and the state. Politics was about “the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state.” As the state could not be defined by its ends, for there were many possibilities, it had to be defined by its means, “namely, the use of physical force.” By this he was not saying that force was the normal or only means available to the state, just that it was specific to the state. The state was therefore defined as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Only the state could legitimize violence. Once that monopoly was threatened (as it was both externally and internally at that time), then the state was in trouble.

The state's authority would come from one of three sources: tradition, bureaucracy, or charisma. As tradition was no longer available and bureaucracy was too narrow, Weber looked to charisma, by which he meant a certain quality of political leadership, the ability to gain authority through sanctity, heroism, or exemplary character. Charisma was a political quality defining a leader's separate role from a civil servant. The politician must be prepared to “take a stand, to be passionate,” while the civil servant must “execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction.” The issue was how would power best be exercised: “What kind of a man must one be if he is to be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history?”

The choice was between an ethic based on convictions (ultimate ends) and one based on responsibility, between acting according to underlying
principle—even if this was detrimental to the cause—and acting according to the likely outcome. The lecture challenged those who refused to compromise on principle, the “intellectuals in this carnival we decorate with the proud name of ‘revolution,'” for their empty romanticism, “devoid of all feeling of objective responsibility.” Refusing to think about outcomes gave evil its opportunities. He scorned the revolutionaries whose actions favored the forces of reaction and oppression yet blamed others. Pure motives were not enough if they led to bad consequences.

Those who at that time in Germany sought “to establish absolute justice on earth by force,” a number of whom were presumably in his student audience, should think about what this would mean. Could they be sure that their followers shared the same agenda? Might not this really be about the emotions of hatred, revenge, resentment, “and the need for pseudo-ethical self-righteousness,” or else about a desire for “adventure, victory, booty, power, and spoils”? Could such followers be kept sufficiently rewarded and motivated? Would doing so contradict the original motives and objectives of the leaders? Would not this “emotional revolutionism,” therefore, eventually give way—probably quite soon—to “the traditionalist routine of everyday life”? If the revolutionaries really thought the problem was the stupidity and baseness of the world, how did they think they were going to eradicate it? He challenged the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount. The politician, he insisted, must take the opposite view, for without resistance he was “responsible for the evil winning out.”

So Weber was speaking up for an ethic of responsibility, which recognized from the start the deficiencies of others and evaluated actions in terms of likely consequences. Yet he also worried about a politics focused purely on immediate effects without an underlying cause to give it meaning. His ideal was one in which the ethic of ultimate ends and responsibility come together in “a genuine man—a man who can have the ‘calling for politics.' ” Here he was looking for the charismatic figure, a hero as well as a leader, who would not “crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.” He was not optimistic: “Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.” He urged a politics based on “both passion and perspective,” for “man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.”
¹⁴

Weber's distrust of actions based on purity of motive rather than assessment of consequences reflected confidence in the ability to assess consequences and the role of scientific research in facilitating such assessments. Social action might always remain something of a gamble, but the odds
could be shortened by formulating a reasonable hypothesis on what might be expected from alternative courses of action. Without this confidence, how was one proposed course of action to be assessed against another?

If Weber had one figure in mind as representative of the ethic of ultimate ends it was Count Leo Tolstoy. The author was addressing all the issues connected with science, bureaucracy, and modernism that bothered him, but from a completely different perspective. At one point, Weber even thought about writing a book on Tolstoy as the great idealist of his time. Tolstoy, Weber allowed, was at least consistent, if “nothing else,” in opposing both war and revolution, but that left him irreconcilable not only with war but with the world and the benefits of culture.
¹⁵
The preoccupation with Tolstoy was evident when Weber took aim at Tolstoy's antirationalist and antiscientific views in “Science as a Vocation.” In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber picked on Tolstoy's favorite text, the Sermon on the Mount, when mocking the ethic of love which said “Resist not him that is evil with force.”

This was Tolstoy's creed. Through a series of spiritual crises he had come to reject the pomp and privilege of the Orthodox Church and devise his own unique form of Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount and the principle of turning the other cheek was at its core. This led to a set of rules revolving around living in peace, not hating, not resisting evil, renouncing violence in all circumstances, and avoiding lust and swearing. If only these rules could be embraced universally, there would be no more wars nor armies, nor indeed police and courts. He challenged established ecclesiastical and secular power but was also against violent revolution as immoral and futile. He rejected the urban for the rural, and the generation of wealth for communion with nature.

We have already met Tolstoy in his role as an antistrategist. The well-springs are the same. He was deeply skeptical about the ease with which deliberate causes could be linked with specific effects and therefore disdained those who claimed this as their expertise. He despised most of all, noted Berlin, “experts, professionals, men who claim special authority over other men.” In
War and Peace
, he had mocked the presumption of those who claimed that a great general's act of will, expressed through orders delivered down the chain of command, could affect the actions of large numbers of men and so turn history. Generals and revolutionary intellectuals could claim to be following a scientific strategy, but they were deluded because they had become separated from and did not understand the ordinary people upon whom their
schemes depended. Change, for better or worse, was the result of countless decisions of individuals caught up in events. Unfortunately, ordinary people were ignorant and uneducated, connected perhaps through their common feelings and values but unable to make sufficient sense of their plight or come together to create a new world.

Tolstoy might be of the Enlightenment when it came to his search for truth and an intense, gnawing belief that with a determined enough search it could be found, but he was also of the counter-Enlightenment in so many key respects, horrified by modernization and an exaggerated confidence in science, by efforts at political reform that lost sight of what he saw to be the fundamentals of the good life. He could not be “fitted into the public movements of his own, or indeed any other, age. The only company to which he belongs is the subversive one of questioners to whom no answer has been, nor is likely to be given.”
¹⁶
Gallie observed, with understatement, that organized action was not Tolstoy's “forte” and that he was “distressingly weak on the practical side.”
¹⁷
Even his own family was far from convinced about his new way of life.
¹⁸
What he offered, and in his case this was not trivial, was the power of example and many books and articles.

His uncompromising pacifism, challenge to tsarism, and exposés of the sufferings of the poor meant that his core messages were received loud and clear, and his effectiveness as a propagandist for his own views was enhanced by not only the way he lived but his literary gifts. His polemics included vivid descriptions of the struggles for existence in the city slums, the routine cruelties of army life, and the aristocracy's capacity for self-deception. His analyses of the iniquities of militarism and myopic patriotism were laced with sardonic wit and at times prophetic insight. He described the war fever of the future, as priests “pray on behalf of murder” and newspaper editors “set to work to arouse hatred and murder,” and described how thousands of “simple, kindly folk” will be “torn from peaceful toil” and trudge off to war, until these poor souls “without knowing why, will murder thousands of others whom they had never before seen, and who had done nor could do them any wrong.”
¹⁹
In this respect, war for Tolstoy was an extreme version of a much more general malaise, of unnatural divisions within humanity, which it both reflected and aggravated. And to explain how men could allow this to happen to them he deployed his own version of false consciousness—men had been “hypnotized” not only by their governments but, most tragically of all, by each other. Only by exposing the myth of patriotism could the spell be broken. At the heart of his antistrategic vision was the belief that divisions within human society were unnatural, and so if they were healed there would be no need for struggle and conflict.

In 1882, Tolstoy participated in the census of Moscow. He wrote an article that year, asking the “What Is to Be Done?” question that Russians often seemed to ask themselves at this time.
²⁰
Moscow had experienced a period of fast growth, swelled by immigration from the countryside, with all the associated problems of overcrowding, poverty, crime, disease, and exploitation. The census, he explained, was a “sociological investigation.” He added that, uniquely for a science, sociology's object was the “happiness of the people.”
²¹
Unfortunately, despite this objective, whatever “laws” might be elucidated by gathering information, and whatever long-term benefits came through following these laws, little would happen of immediate benefit to the poor people whose lives were being reported. A compelling description of a wretched state of affairs could be an essential first step to action: “All the wounds of society, the wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance—all will be laid bare.” But it was not enough. When encountering someone hungry and in rags, insisted Tolstoy, it was “more moment to succor him than to make all possible investigations.” Instead of scientific detachment and a hurried moving on from one sad case to another, he urged forming relations with the poor and needy.

The true aim should be to break down “the barriers which men have erected between themselves.”
²²
This meant rejecting charity, which did no more than assuage the guilty consciences of the elite while reinforcing divisions. All should work together to heal the wounds of society. His call was to community and fraternity, which required like-minded people to reach out to the poor and oppressed. The benefits would be both material and spiritual. The alternative he warned was class warfare: “It need not be thus, and it should not, for this is contrary to our reason and our heart, and it cannot be if we are living people.”

Unfortunately, as he soon discovered, where he led few followed. Furthermore, as he explored the under-life of the city, the more he concluded that have-nots were as corrupted by city life as the haves. The issue was not just the scale of the problem but the sort of society Moscow had become. He still could find some nobility among the poor, but when it came to drinkers and prostitutes he could make as much sense of them as they could of him. This was an alien culture, resistant to his overtures, surviving in ways that he found disagreeable. The more he explored city life the more his previous hopes appeared naïve. Eventually one night he stopped researching. He felt foolish and impracticable, like a physician who has uncovered the sore of a sick man but must recognize that “his remedy is good for nothing.” He stopped taking notes. “I asked no questions, knowing that nothing would come of this.”
²³
The answer to “What Is to Be Done?” appeared to be “Nothing.”