Max Weber on Value Conflicts: Better than Berlin

The sociologist Max Weber had some important things to say about value conflict and value pluralism, that is the inevitably of many ethical values and conflicts between them. Go here and here for Weber texts online.

The issue of value pluralism and value conflicts within liberalism is often discussed with reference to Isaiah Berlin. Weber’s discussion is more penetrating and deserves to be discussed more. First some clearing of the ground about Berlin’s limitations.

Isaiah Berlin was a distinguished figure in history of ideas, but I can’t really take him very seriously as a thinker about values. His most famous essay in this area, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is much cited, but does not strike me as a very good essay. It gives very little sense of the real richness of the ideas of political and individual liberty, personal and social growth, in the period he is discussing. A book like Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty is based on an extremely dubious premiss, that discussions about liberty can be reduced to football teams of enemies and friends. The ‘enemies’ in question are Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Maistre. 6 very different cases, and maybe none of them are completely innocent of arguments which are bad for liberty, but then who is completely innocent? Certainly Hegel has been rehabilitated by people with political views similar to Berlin, that is left-liberal/social democratic. Some notable French liberals (of a kind similar to Berlin) were members of a Saint-Simon Foundation in France from 1982-99. And so on. Berlin’s numerous contacts and connections, his clear style, impressive personal culture, fame outside scholarly circles, and delightful personality had the unfortunate consequence that simplified versions of the most simplistic elements of his thought have become widespread still, even after becoming at least partly discredited. The irony is that these simplifications have become common place amongst conservative commentators and the more absolutist and more simple minded free market libertarians, who find it helpful to resort to easy oppositions between ‘liberty lovers’ and their supposed enemies.

Back to Weber, who really should be more discussed as a political thinker. There are books and articles around, but not enough in comparison to references to Berlin. However, I am pleased to see that Berlin’s major defender JohnGray has alluded to the importance of Weber, in a recent newspaper review. Max Weber recognised that politics is caught between its more ideal claims and the pursuit of power. Weber also recognised that this is not a question of ethics versus power. The pursuit of an ideal must include the pursuit of the power to implement that ideas. We cannot tidily separate these two activities, even if we can introduce a conceptual distinction. An ethical perspective on a politician must include respect for the willingness to deal with power, and not be just an idealising spectator.

Weber also recognised that this kind of innate value conflict, within the pursuit of a value, is part of the innate value attaching to conflict. There is something deeply valuable about individuals, and groups struggling for their ideal and perspective. Weber was very willing to recognise the value of people he did not agree with engaging in very passionate struggle for their values, e.g. socialists and trade unionists. What Weber feared was that an economic system based on diverse individual initiative, capitalism, and a political system based on the same principles, liberalism, was decaying into conformity inducing bureaucratic states, a and private corporations allying with the state and seeking to stifle competition.

The liberty and strength of the economy, society, and politics, rests on the struggles for values. Struggles which can be defined in less ideal ways as well, but that does not detract from the importance of struggle between different value. It embeds the struggle more deeply. The free individual contains the struggle within, in this tension between abstract ideals and the power to implement ideals. The individual with the deepest calling for politics contains this struggle, and makes it evident, mobilising support for a position through a personal power of persuasion, which can never be purely rational but is not inherently contradictory with reason. Weber’s thoughts on leadership are widely misunderstood. He gave a positive value to persuasion through charisma, through the power of personal style. He thought that this was exemplified by 19th century liberal leaders like Gladstone and Lincoln, operating through democracy, and that this was necessary to the survival of democracy, if it was not going to sink into bureaucratic routine.

Rational bureaucracy is necessary in state and corporation, but the liberal state and the capitalist corporation will weaken if they do not find the means to promote individuality, and the exceptional leader has a necessary role here in enacting and performing strong independent character. The necessary components of depersonalised rules and reason, personal charisma and distinctness of character, along with tradition are conflicting and necessary components of a world of democracy and liberty. Liberty does not just rest on reasoned disputes about liberty equality, law and so on, but on deep conflict within society and inside personalities.

From Weber’s point of view, it is much easier to understand why a Hegel for emphasises the value of the coherence of laws and institutions in the state, a Saint-Simon who emphasised ‘scientific’ state administration, a Rousseau who emphasised the importance of a common political sphere, are not the ‘enemies’ of liberty. Parts of their thought tend away from individualist liberalism, and that leads to some problems to my mind. But, only an adherent of anarcho-capitalism or possibly a purely nightwatchman state, could reject those elements which tend away from pure individual freedom. At some point, the existence of laws and institutions, and some shared values, must restrain pure absolutist individualism. Even anarchism and minarchism cannot escape that dilemma, though it is a necessary aspect of such positions, to try to ignore or abolish it.

Original version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

Politics and Ethics in Aristotle: Agonistic Ethics

Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog, where there is a picture of the agora, not just the link.

Image above is a reconstruction of what the agora may have looked like in Ancient Athens.

I’ve been doing some work on Aristotle’s ethics for next semester’s teaching. Going other Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, I’m struck by how political it is. The good that Aristotle seeks to define is associated with the art of politics which must have the good of the political community as its goal. It’s not just that Aristotle says that politics is a branch of ethics, he says that politics is ethics. The Politics is a parallel treatment of the same subject matter as the Nicomachean Ethics. That is perhaps an exaggeration, but an exaggeration which conveys a truth. What Aristotle regards as the good life is the life of leading citizen of the city in wealth and politics. Certainly the good life requires liberality, and clearly Aristotle thinks you can only manage that with quite a lot of property with which to be generous.

In his ethical inquiries into the Good, Aristotle mentions the city as what educated and conditions its citizens in virtue. How do we get the kind of rulers who will undertake that task. It starts with the pursuit of honour, by which I presume Aristotle largely means liberality and courage. This is a time when a citizen was a soldier so Aristotle is certainly thinking of military courage. Liberality and military courage are marks of aristocracy then and since, and Aristotle clearly does not think the poor and uneducated are capable of much in the way of virtue. Honour is not enough for the good life for Aristotle since it means dependence on the praise of others, so the city’s leading citizens need virtue as a higher goal which makes life truly happy.

Aristotle’s account of virtue is that is not enough in itself, since nobody can be virtuous at all times. He rather quaintly adds that no one can be virtuous in sleep but we should not allow this quaintness to distract us from the basic claim that no one can be constantly virtuous for a whole life time. Virtue itself needs to be embedded, and what embeds it is a life of actions which are unified in three different ways: unified with prudent intentions, unified with each other at any one moment, unified over time between different instance of action at different moments.

This unity of action gives us a happiness which withstands all circumstances, and bad fortune, or at least a lot of them. Aristotle implies there is something rather godlike about such a state, which I take to be a way of saying aristocratic. This is the people who should be running the political community, making and administering its laws, controlling the distribution of property, leading the military forces. Whether we are talking about the Politics or the Nicomachean Ethics, we are talking about the preparation of an aristocracy.

What is the aristocracy? People who compete for honour. Honour needs to become virtue, but virtue still contains honour and competition. The great cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, thought of the Ancient Greek aristocracy as obsessed with competition. Aristotle’s emphasis on temperance perhaps conceals this to a degree, but we see that he thinks the leaders of a political community are motivated by competition. Ancient Athens had democratic competition of a kind Burckhardt does not care for: the competition of demagogues to control public opinion, the competition for other people’s property through the dishonest use of the legal process. For Burckhardt, that is the decadence of Athens, but maybe that was the height of the competitive aristocratic spirit, certainly they can go together.

Aristotle’s ethics and politics are full of contestation, if not directly acknowledged. They also contain notions of being above such things, the Great Soul, the ruler as friend of citizens, the happiness of a life of competition. But all these are the product of an aristocracy driven to compete, in order to distinguish itself from the law goals, and actions, of the poor and uneducated. The competition to seem at least a bit like an Olympian god.

Sometimes, the ethical dimension of politics is seen as something that counters ambition, competitiveness and agonism. Sometimes, the difference between Aristotle and Machiavelli is supposed to be that Aristotle takes politics to be the continuation of ethics, but Machiavelli takes politics to be a separate sphere of activity from ethics. But what if we wee Aristotle’s ethics as competitive, agonistic and ‘Machiavellian’? Aristotle’s Politics is much more agonistic than Machiavelli in The Prince or the Discourses. In the Discourse, we may see a contestatory and agonistic republicanism, a freedom based on political struggle. Maybe we should see a more radical version of it in Aristotle’s ethics and politics, rather than the safe picture of virtue in control. What virtues then? Maybe agonistic virtues?

Maybe we should see Aristotle in relation to the Athenian agora in every respect. The place where commerce takes place, and political and legal struggle, not far from where the theatrical contests take place, events which united the city as much as the politics, law and religion. There are certainly other elements of Aristotle, but maybe the agonistic Aristotle of the agora has not been respected enough.