Weber on Leadership
Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS
Talking Politics
4.8 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Max Weber’s The Profession and Vocation of Politics (1919) was a lecture that became one of the defining texts of twentieth century political thought. In it, Weber explores the perils and paradoxes of leadership in a modern state. Is it possible to do bad in order to do good? Can violence ever be virtuous? Does political responsibility send politicians mad? David discusses the legacy of Weber’s ideas and asks: who is the true Weberian politician?
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Going Deeper:
- Geoffrey Hawthorn on Max Weber for the LRB
- Joachim Radkau, Max Weber (Polity, 2009)
- Talking Politics on ‘Politics as a Vocation’ with Jonathan Powell
- Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting democracy: political ideas in twentieth century Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013)
- David for the LRB on Weber, Tony Blair, and the politics of good intentions
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of talking politics. |
| 0:07.0 | Today's episode in our series, History of Ideas looks at Max Faber's |
| 0:15.9 | lecture on the profession and vocation of politics, delivered in the revolutionary aftermath of the |
| 0:21.6 | First World War. |
| 0:23.0 | Vabor had a warning for his audience. |
| 0:25.0 | Don't think politics is ever easy or that anyone comes out unscathed. Europe's leading literary magazine. |
| 0:43.0 | After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of ideas in their unrivaled |
| 0:49.0 | archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a subscription to the |
| 0:56.0 | LRB can be an indispensable home learning and student resource by heading over to their |
| 1:01.6 | website L.r. |
| 1:03.4 | me forward slash ideas. |
| 1:06.0 | That's L.r. |
| 1:08.0 | dot me forward slash ideas. |
| 1:17.0 | It's time for another lecture and by that I don't just mean another lecture by me. |
| 1:22.0 | I mean I'm going to be talking today about another lecture this |
| 1:26.0 | one given in January 19 by the German sociologist Max Faber in Munich to a group of students. So it's exactly 100 years after the other |
| 1:37.6 | lecture that I've talked about in this series, Benjamin Constance, the Liberty of the |
| 1:42.1 | ancients compared to the Liberty of the Moderns from 1819. |
| 1:46.0 | But as I said about Conston, he gave his talk at some remove from the central events of his life and the events he was talking about. |
| 1:54.8 | He was a little distant from the French Revolution and its aftermath by 1819 and he had the benefit of hindsight. |
| 2:02.3 | Vaver did not have the benefit of hindsight. Vieber did not have the benefit of hindsight. |
| 2:05.0 | January 1919 in Munich was the eye of the storm and Vieber was there. |
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