Politics As a Vocation (Ingles)

Politics as a Vocation

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POLITICS AS A VOCATION

cannot be defined sociologically by enumerating its activities. There is almost no task that a political organization has not undertaken at one time or another; but by the same token there are no tasks of wbich we could say that they were always, let alone exclusively, proper to the organizations that we call political, and nowadays referto as states, or that historically were the forerunners of the modern state. It is rather the case that in the final analysis the modern state can be defined only sociologically by the specific means
that are peculiar to it, as to every political organization: namely,

The lecture I shall give in response to your wishes will necessarily frustrate you in a number of ways. In a talk aboutpolitics as a vocation 1 you will naturally expect to hear my opinions on topical questions. But I shall say something about these only toward the end of my lecture, and then in a purely formal way, in connection with specific questions about the significance of political action in the context of our conduct of life in general. What will have to be completely ignored in the present talk will be allquestions about the kind of politics that should be pursued, that is to say, the specific policies [Inhalte] that should be adopted in the course of our political activities. For such matters have no connection with the general question of what politics is as a vocation and what it can mean. This brings us directly to our subject. What do we mean by politics?2 The concept is extremely broad andincludes every kind of independent leadership activity. We can speak of the foreign exchange policies of the banks, the interest rate policy of the Reichsbank, the politics of a trade union in a strike; we can speak of educational policy in a town or village community, the policies of the board of management of an association, and even of the political maneuverings [Politik] of a shrewd wife seeking toinfluence her husband. Needless to say, this concept is far too broad for us to consider this evening. Today we shall consider only the leadership, or the exercise of influence on the leadership, of a political organization~ in other words a state. But looking at the question through the eyes of a sociologist,
what is a "political" organization? What is a "state"? A state, too,
The German wordBerufhas a workaday meaning of "profession" but, rooted as it is in mfen, "to cali," has strong overtones of "vocation" or "calling." Both mean~ ings are active in Weber's usage, and each has been used here where it seemed
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physical violence. "Every state is based on force," Trotsky remarked at Brest-Litovsk. 3 That is indeed the case. If there existed only societies in which violence wasunknown as a means, then the concept of the "state" would disappear; in that event what would have emerged is what, in this specific meaning of the word, we might call
"anarchy." Violence is, of course, not the normal or the only means

available to the state. That is undeniable. But it is the means specific to the state. And the relationship of the state to violence is particularly close at thepresent time. In the past the use of physical violence by widely differing organizations-starting with the clan-was completely normal. Nowadays, in contrast, we must say that the state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a particular territory-and this idea of "territory" is an essential defining feature. For

what isspecific to the present is that all other organizations or individuals can assert the right to use physical violence only insofar as the state permits them to do so. The state is regarded as the sole
source of the ; 1835) • p. 420 . 74 Th~ Zim,merwald tendency refers to a conference of Socialists held in Zimmerwald m Switzerland in September 1915 to work our an "internationalist" response to...