In the last years of his life, which ended in 1920, he delivered two lectures in Munich, one on the vocation of the scholar and the other on the vocation of the politician. On the page, Weber told a different story. “If one is lucky” in politics, he observed, a “genius appears just once every few hundred years.” That left the door wide open for him. His “secret love,” he confessed to a friend, was “the political.” Even in the delirium of his final days, he could be heard declaiming on behalf of the German people, jousting with their enemies in several of the many languages he knew.
Across three decades of a scholarly career, in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, he made repeated and often failed incursions into the public sphere-to give advice, stand for office, form a party, negotiate a treaty, and write a constitution. A scholar of hot temper and volcanic energy, Weber longed to be a politician of cold focus and hard reason. The sociologist Max Weber spent much of his life seduced by this second fable. The nobility of ideas is preserved, and transmuted, slowly, into the stuff of action. Think Plato’s philosopher-king, or Aaron Sorkin’s Jed Bartlet. The professor becomes a politician, saving the polity from corruption and ignorance, demagoguery and vice. In another myth, they are reconciled, even fused. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. If he hopes to “achieve what is possible,” Max Weber argued, the politician must “reach for the impossible.” Photograph from Zuma / Alamy
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