Welcome back to New Thinkery. My name is David Barr. And before I introduce co-hosts, I'd like to ask listeners to please rate the show as, wherever you listen to your podcast, that helps with our visibility. We can't have the partially examined life with clips anymore.
And it leads to a lot of depression amongst the three of us. So how are you doing? Doing well. How are you doing?
Doing well. And what about you, Greg? Well, I'm depressed as you just alluded to actually, because our fans aren't liking us and rating us. No, no, no, they just don't.
They don't think about it. That's all. Is that all this? I don't know.
Okay. So I'm excited. Are fans are malefactors? Yeah, some of them.
Okay. So I got a few I could name. Yeah. So today, Steve Hayward, as a returning guest, everybody likes Steve, Steve.
But before I introduce you, I listened to you lecture, I was a her talk fellow. And it was for the weekend program for I think people that were mid-career and you lectured on Reagan. It was a statesmanship series of lectures. And it was actually you and your Roberts, a few others.
But you're stood out, in fact, that you were the most beloved of the course of our cohort. Yeah. And you're a tough competition. I should buy a petition now.
So guys, I came across an interesting quote regarding Steve by William F. Buckley. I don't know if Steve has heard this one. So you'll have to let us know.
Oh, yeah. Have I shared this with the two of you before? I don't think so. I'll read it.
So this is what William F. Buckley had to say about our friend, Stephen F. Hayward, Steve Hayward, a man I consider my intellectual superior combines Michael Chiclos' love of justice and Judge Holden's otherworldly strength with the down-home honesty of Mr. Clean and the Michelin man.
Thank you for his twin volume, the age of Reagan. And remember, finally, when at an end of your party for the Nation magazine, some young scam preferred to him as an intellectual Nosferatu and Steve Clean bit him in the arm. Well, that's genius work. Whoever did that.
I was a lot figured. I didn't know who Michael Chiclos was. I don't. He was the detective on the field.
He, uh, the same, you know, love of justice is, uh, is, uh, he had a different understanding of justice than, than, than I think is common, like, observed, but he's like, um, anyway, I don't know. I, he may not have heard some of these episodes. We'll make up on funny background stories. Uh, and, and we will, David, right?
Man's shoulders is appropriately weirded out. But anyway, welcome, welcome back. You have a new book out. Can you?
Yeah. If you wanted, uh, it's a, it's a autobiography of M. Stanton Evans. And that's the title M.
Stanton Evans conservative with the puzzle of freedom. You young guys here, uh, we're all younger than me. Some extent, probably didn't know Stan or don't know much about him. Um, he only died seven years ago in 2015.
He never even retired for a while, of course, but he was a major, major figure in the conservative movement from the late 50s to the late 90s. I think I put it that way and it even beyond. Uh, and I, he was my first mentor right out of college more than 40 years ago. I worked for him for six months as an intern.
Uh, and, uh, you know, I think we need to keep alive the memory of our heroes and her things to be learned from Stan, I think, uh, you didn't have me on do a book talk, but I'll just say that one thing about Stan is, uh, if you didn't know him, he was a very funny guy, not in print. It only came out in person, but he could have been a stand up comic and I had a whole appendix of some of his best jokes. I think, uh, my two favorites, I'll give you one, one was, um, uh, I didn't agree with what Joe McCarthy was trying to do, but I sure admired his methods. That, you know, this town was taking liberally shades and turning them on their head.
Yeah, that's a classic actually. Yeah, he's had out for years. And then the other one, uh, that this come back in the fashion a lot is, um, concern young conservatives had to get over the goldwater defeat in 1964 without grief counselors. You know, having been on the Berkeley campus the day after comp selection in 2016, that is not an exaggeration.
I mean, you know, people, faculty were crying, right? It wasn't just students and, you know, the administration called out grief counseling services over the election. And so, anyway, he was very good at capturing the, um, pretensions and appears to be pretensions of liberal clichés. I was, I was on, I was with my dog today and somebody came up to me, it's a little white fluffy, having his name Freddie and goes, Oh, are you doing it there?
We dog. I was like, no, that's just a dog. Who's with me? They thought I was trying to console students who I don't know what to do.
It's a good way to get chicks. So see, what's, what's a good book to begin with? Uh, with that. Is there a collection that says, well, well, there's, I mean, a little lot of books tied into current events starting in due to the 360s.
This first book called Revolt on the campus is, you know, very dated, 60 years old. What kind of interesting. There are two books that I think stand the test of time and deserve to be on people's bookshelves. One is a theoretical work called the Themist Freedom and it's, you know, his account of the Or is of American Liberty.
I think, by the way, stand in one year of graduate study with lovely Gwan Mises in economics, but he mentioned in English literature at Yale. Um, if he chose to be an academic, I think he would have been, you know, a big name. I think he might have become a theorist like Eric Vogel and something. He liked Vogel, for example.
He was familiar with Strauss. Um, I don't think he accepted all Strauss's arguments about, um, about the role of Locke and so forth. But, uh, he, so his book is actually pretty good. I recommend it say for undergraduates, maybe, um, work reading.
And then he did a really remarkable piece of revisionist history of book that next next to the last book around 2006, I think called Blacklisted by History, The Untold Story of Joe McCarthy. And it is an effort to correct the record of all the distortions that have been made about McCarthy over the years. He doesn't exonerate him for all of his mistakes and character flaws, but he was always frustrated by the myths that grew up around McCarthy. Um, you know, the accounts of particular individuals and episodes that he thought were wrong.
And whether research he did for it was really extraordinary. Um, he got into a lot of previously unavailable FBI files. He chased down stuff all over the country. And it's very well written because Stan was a workaday journalist, but a very solidly documented book.
Do you agree with his analysis? Yes, I think I do. Um, uh, one of the culture tried to write a book the same extent, right? Actually, she borrowed a lot of her work from Stan.
She'd also got to start with Stan as I did. They were friends. By the way, so it's going to be going back in time to those days, the three of you. Well, I wasn't there at the same time as Anne.
She came after me, but her, uh, her, uh, her dust jacket where her Stan's book and paperback was the McCarthy book was, this is the greatest book since the Bible. Typical Anne Colter, right? Do you know Harvey Claire by chance? I've never, yes, I've never met him, but we've emailed a lot become a, he's got to work on this McCarthy business too.
Yes. Um, yeah, he was a colleague of mine briefly in this. Anyway, sir. Well, we move on to the subject of the day.
The publishers. Really quick. It's an account of books who published my last book on, you know, Harry Jeff and Walter Burns. I like encounter.
They do a nice production job. Um, yeah. Awesome. Before we move on, I just want to say like, I think it's excellent doing this.
And you know, I'm, we sort of think that one of the things we're trying to do on this podcast is do something similar. We're trying to keep alive the memories of a lot of folks. And so, uh, we had David Lowenthalon just a couple of weeks ago. And so, you know, we're trying to do the same thing.
And I think it's noble what you're doing trying to keep his legacy alive. So well done. It's one of the many things in the collection of, uh, limerics by David Barr's project. So, uh, you have to buy that book with a, you know, a black dust jacket.
It was happy. What do we talk about? What do we talk about? Well, first I'm going to skip straight to the appendix of, uh, Hayward's book on him, Stan Evans.
But in the meantime, tonight, we're supposed to be talking about, um, Max Weber and he's famous for having, oh, yeah, the guy that did the grill, right? Webber. Yeah. Great.
It's the great grandpa that Andrew Lloyd, I mean, those jokes too. Yeah. He's a bunch of Neanderthals. So we're, um, he's famous, one of written two, he's a lot of stuff, but he's, he wrote two lectures that are sort of famous science, a vocation of politics, a vocation.
It's an I-remes talking about his lecture, um, politics, his vocation. And I thought maybe a good place to start would be maybe Steve could tell us just a little bit about who Max Weber was with folks at home who may not have heard of him. Why is he important to 21st century Americans? That's the word thing.
I thought the word Catholic, is that his, that's the only thing that's working. Yeah. That's, uh, that's the one that's held up the least well, I think. I mean, it's coming for a lot of criticism over the decades.
Uh, and actually a lot of his other work could be criticized too. I think he, um, a lot of defects with the guy. He was the prominent German, you know, philosopher of science, philosopher of social science in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. He's not the father of value-free positive of social science, but he's one of the major theorists of it.
Uh, I think he really is the successor to quamped in some ways. Well, we might say he's straight up quamped. Sorry. That's going on.
Anyway, I think him interesting. I mean, we get to his defects, which, you know, we all smiles was after lots of other people, but I think he's interesting and worth pondering for a bunch of reasons. Um, he was, uh, I say honest and skeptical of his own views, skeptical in this sense. You know, he was a theorist of bureaucracy.
A lot of that work is very boring in terms of getting through, but his point was simple. He said, look, uh, modern industrial societies are going to have to have large administrative apparatus in government and it's going to happen to be bureaucratic. Uh, and I think, you know, that's true to the description where we went, but he was honest enough to say, uh, paraphrase here. It's really going to suck.
Uh, in other words, he anticipates a lot of the criticisms of bureaucracy that the public choice theorists came up with decades later, namely that bureaucrats, you know, for all the skill they might study and acquiring scientific expertise, but they would behave badly, that they would want to keep knowledge secret. They would be self-interested for their bureaus and that this was going to be a big problem for political leaders. So good for him. Um, in other words, he did the different significantly from Woodrow Wilson and those kinds of progressives who thought that bureaucratic administrative government was going to say it must be great and uh, really quick.
I don't mean to interrupt. If I, I met in Austrian, um, uh, or I had some summer internship a number of years ago, it was this Austrian who had worked, uh, for McKinsey and he said that at the office, they would trade vapor. I guess they, you know, in college, they read him, but because they had been given some back contract to do some bureaucratic reform and he knew him as a writer on bureaucracy. He wasn't really familiar with the Protestant work ethic.
It was really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And uh, you know, he, uh, pretty capacious guy, I find his late writings like those two essays, the science has a vocation, politics has a vocation, but he much more interesting than a lot of his big, nor stop books and even I think the Protestant ethic, I've met it once a while back and I thought it was pretty boring actually.
I think his later writers are much more interesting, but how do they come alive because of a little bit like the context we have people like us emphasize on the platonic dialogue, so the setting, the people who were there, uh, they come alive even more, but you know, some of that, which we can get into. Um, before we do that, can I just, there's a couple things? One is I think there was a footnote in that right history that sort of hints at the problem with his, uh, the Protestant work, Protestant work ethic book and that it's that favors seems to not have taken into account fully the work of men like Machiavellian Hobbes and Locke. And so he sort of sees, he sees the modern changes happening through Protestantism and he doesn't see the work of global philosophers.
But while we're praising favor, I think it's probably, you know, I teach him, I, I studied him myself and I was, you know, I'm ultimately, I think he's wrong. It's a fun way to show it into, but I tried to sort of think about what's most admirable about him. And here's what I find most admirable about him. I think he's coming along on the image and he's that sort of theorist of science.
He arrives on the scene at a time when basically all science has been thrown into confusion, you know, by Nietzsche among others, right? And so like there's, there's no knowledge, there's no knowledge at all. And I think that what's admirable about Weber is he's trying to carve out an area over which science can still speak facts. He's like, okay, fine, we'll, we'll give you all the other stuff, but I'll try to carve out this one little ground of territory that we scientists can actually still speak with confidence about facts.
I don't think it's ultimately successful, but I think, I think he saw the problem that he presented clearly and it was a valiant attempt to rescue at least part of science. But whether he was successful, I'm not so sure. Yeah, no, that's later on that point, I think it's important. He, um, he clearly, I mean, he followed the logical consequences of his thought, which was you cannot find any objective ground for moral value, for moral truth.
But he at the same time, I think he was haunted by nihilism personally. Yeah, I haven't, I haven't, yeah, I keep thinking something I'm really going to do a deep and careful study of Weber. And I haven't done that, but I do know that in the late 1890s, he had a nervous breakdown and quit his job teaching. Yeah, I know that.
Yeah, he spent two, three years going from clinic to clinic, tried to restore his mental health and, you know, having, we know, of course, Nietzsche, but not so the end of his life. I do wonder whether that was, you know, was it stress? Was it some other reason or wasn't in fact an intellectual crisis he was having? I wonder about that.
And maybe we'll never figure that out. But I think that's an interesting little fact. And Strauss gets after some aspect of this by, I forget the exact phrases he uses, but I think maybe he's a little too harsh, but, but not unreasonably so, I'll put it that way. About, um, he says, I think the phrase false uses is, uh, Weber seems to be edging towards what we might describe as noble nihilism, you know, thou shalt have values.
That's true. What he said, what the values are, there's no foundation for, but it's important that people have values, which you think would cause Weber to start reopening these questions that he previously closed. And I can see some of these problems come before in the politics lecture for a shot there. And Steve, I'll just mention quickly that David goes through a similar intellectual crisis every time McDonald's gets rid of the grip.
But maybe you can tell us a little bit about, uh, we talked about this, the setting, you, as we corresponded, uh, setting up for this episode, you talked about the setting being important, just like a platonic dialogue. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about the context of this lecture, politics, its location and what's going on in germinate time. Yeah. Well, although I feel obliged to mention David that there is an app you can get for your smartphone that gives you McDonald's locations and have to make rib in stock.
Oh, really? Yeah, John, you asked why because he's a big grip fan. That's a hot tip. Thank you.
I keep saying that we're not the COVID won't really be over till we get all day breakfast back and be done. Right. I mean, that was the only good thing that happened in the Obama years and COVID took away from it. Okay, sorry.
This is actually the setting for this lecture is really serious. I should be the, well, you guys forgot. So you're so pretty. Sorry.
Sorry. Sure. The, uh, he delivered a lecture in January of 1919 to just think of the day. It's only months after the armistice of the war.
He said the setting for the lectures at the university of Munich was in Munich. And what's happening in Munich? If you don't know your media post-war German history, you, which most Americans don't, you essentially had a communist revolution. The socialist government that lost an election was turned out by even more radical communist government.
There were assassinations taking place. And a group of students, I think, is how it goes, ask Weber if he would come and give them a lecture on the subject of politics as a location, the science lecture had been given in 1917 while the war was still going on. And Weber was, and if we didn't indicate this before, he was maybe the leading intellectual in Germany at the time, a very famous figure. So widely respected.
It's hard to think of who you might compare him to today and academia because there's so many more figures around him. Initially, he declined. He didn't want to give a lecture, but then I forget. They said, well, if you, the chancellor, whoever was the university said, well, if you don't get it, give a lecture, I'm going to have to let a guy named Kurt Eisner give a lecture.
He was the socialist premier at the time in Munich, who was later assassinated. And I guess he was something of a rival to Weber, or what David thought was students need to hear from somebody more serious than a politician. I think that maybe a subtexture. So he would like to say that I'll give the lecture.
And it's, you know, it's no short lecture. It's 23,000 words long, which that was that had to have taken a couple of hours to get through. I'm thinking, so you had to have a link of a book there, Steve as a. Well, that's a, that's a big question, right?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's worth the aggression. So four or five years ago now, I saw this interview with Bill Clinton in the New York Times Book Review. And it was essentially a focus group tested list of his favorite books.
It just rained stuff like he did when he was president using focus groups and cyberation to one vacation. And one of the books he mentioned, books he called a book was Politics as a Vocation by Max Faber. So the trick tech was on and finally at the end of the interview, the interview goes back and says, so what's one book you would recommend to someone who's interested in political life or public office. And he said, ah, Max Faber's Politics as a vocation.
And I found this mind-woggling because it's kind of startling to imagine Clinton being hunched over as Max Faber even this is not compared to Faber's big books. And I would really love to know, I think maybe Clint's too old now. I would love to know what he got out of it. I mean, there is people who know Faber even casually will know that Faber was the champion of charisma as one of the claims to rule, I guess you might say, or one of the ways that you would legitimate lead a modern state.
In fact, he's attracted critics for, he died in 1920 or 21, I think, of the Spanish influenza as it happens. But people say, well, he anticipated Hitler, maybe even helped cause Hitler, which I think is a scratching the point. But it was just Clinton who had lots of charisma, no doubt about that. Or because there are a lot of places in the essay, we can talk about some of them, where you'd see that Faber was being very critical of politicians, like Clinton, who were there mostly for vanity and don't really care about their accomplishments.
They just want the status of the office. And it's hard to imagine Clinton reading that without reflecting on his own failures in a lot of ways. Can I actually, because there's a couple moments where he seems a tad critical, or at least he doesn't paint a flattering picture. Are these avoidable features of politics when he tells him that?
Because at times, for instance, on the question of vanity, this is vulgar vanity and says, if you want to maintain your position, you really do need to avoid this risk. But it seems like this, he talks about living for and living off of politics. And that the two, it seems like are only in the most exceedingly rare circumstances altogether separate. So it seems like there's a kind of, on the one hand, a matter of devotion, and then a kind of parasitic, or you have to earn a living, at least at a minimum, right, relationship to politics.
And to work, do you think vanity is just going to naturally arise in that situation? Yeah. Let me put it to you this way. He, well, let me do it hard to figure out that question, because there's so many moving parts to it.
I actually say this essay is comes in two parts. The first two thirds are mostly long descriptions of the way party politics and party organizations unfolded in several countries, including the United States, but especially Britain and Germany. And here, and there are some very interesting observations. And then about two thirds of the way through, it suddenly shifts gears to bring in the subject of ethics.
And that's where it gets kind of confusing, but deeply interesting, I think. And it's a long, it's in this part where it brings up vanity. But I've also thought, I don't think about you guys, because I remember you did an episode on, I think you guys did an episode on Churchill's Mass Effects and Modern Life. Yes.
Didn't you guys remember that? I thought so. And I thought, you know, I was reading through where he says, well, you know, it's hard to figure out what you do in modern politics as a career. You may have to be a party functionary, what does he say?
You might have to join a labor board. And I kept thinking to myself, Churchill put the problem more succinctly and more excessively in Mass Effects and Modern Life, right? There he says, it's diminishing the field for greatness is really what Churchill's saying, right? And that great essay.
And Weber is clearly struggling to try and rescue that potentiality politics. I think what you'd say above all, though, is he's trying to convey to students, young people he's talking to, but many hundreds of them in the audience apparently, is that this is a lot harder than you think. He understood that, I think as we all do that, and as Aristotle did, although Weber seems to ignore or be hostile to Aristotle silently, young people are prone to their passions and their idealism, and to therefore underestimate the rigors of true politics. And partly why this is on his mind, and again, this is part of the backstory, is some of his own students were whipsawed by the crisis that Germany was going through.
And there's one particular case of a student who had been a pacifist during the war, you know, out of Christian faith, then he joins the communist movement in Munich and decides, well, you know, we need to have revolutionary violence to bring about the utopia of communism. And Weber's trying to deflect students from that kind of instability in political life, but also their personal life, and their own approach to politics. But there are a lot of things missing. I'll stop it.
I don't want to go on too long. I'll leave 20 my little speeches here. I love to hear Warren. I mean, but before we do a deeper dive in, Steve, not to put you on the spot, but I provide just a general overview of what's the thrust of what he's arguing in this essay.
For me, I'm really unacquainted. Well, you know, where's grew on Steve, we can do deep dives. Yeah, well, I'll do this. You know, I used to sign the whole essay to students.
And what I found is they bogged down in that first half of it. And so I've changed up on it and saying I do two things. I say only read last third or and or I will tell them start the essay in reverse read the last paragraph first. The last paragraph has that famous phrase.
A lot of people have heard may not know it's from this essay, but it's the one that begins politics as a strong and slow boring of hard boards. Right. In fact, whether it's Mattie and Glacey's guy who's one of those liberals who's sort of defecting to the centralities days is new sub stack is called slow boring. I know it's taken from this.
I know it's you can be kind of boring. So he's pretty okay. And this is quite a remarkable paragraph. I don't want to read to the whole thing.
I'll just give you one. Well, I will give you the end of it in the middle of the says, even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of art, which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes, you know, politics disappoints us frequently, always actually. Only he, oh, sorry, this is necessary right now or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today. I mean, one reading of that is you need to study this furiously if you're going to be ready when the time comes for you to take a role in the world.
Last two sentences. Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all is can say, in spite of it all, has the calling for politics. That's the ending quite almost lyrical, very different in its temperament from Faber's other social science and philosophical writings.
And by the way, it's a quite elevated view of politics too. It is and that's why the last thing I'll say here and then we can do more vectors on it. But when he talks about politics as a vocation, he does mean it in the almost new testament biblical sense of a calling, right, as opposed to just a job or a hobby. He's very down on people who dab in politics as a hobby.
So as furious people in politics have a calling for it, like a vocation, he doesn't, you know, we use the vocation word these days right casually. He meant it in the serious ancient sense of the word. So funny enough, Steve, like when I teach this, when I taught it, I focused on the first few paragraphs. So we're sort of a reverse there.
So maybe I'm one of the students who got so bored halfway through that I didn't make it back to the interesting part again. We don't have a lot, but like that some of the more famous part comes at the beginning, even though like it's not, I mean, it's more famous. That's not to say it's more serious, morality. I like the paragraph you just read, I actually see more meaningful than the first paragraphs, but where he defines the state and talks about legitimacy and these kinds of things.
Yeah. Maybe you're right that that's what Clinton latches onto this kind of charisma as a source of legitimacy. Well, I thought, I mean, you remember, he didn't want to give this lecture, but then did that out of obligation and because he thought that someone else would do it badly. That very first sentence is this lecture, which I give at your requests reminding people these are, luckily, well, that's this, yeah, it will necessarily disappoint you in a number of ways.
In other words, they invite him because these young people want to be told what to do. And a lot of the subtext here is, I can't tell you what to do. I think part of it is there's a bit of again, his intellectual honesty and modesty, but in the midst of the crisis, any plan that he gives, you know, won't work or even if you know, won't persuade people, he's trying to reach people to a deeper level, right? And that's why the second sentence, he says, yeah, yeah, let's do these next two.
You will naturally expect me to take a position on actual problems of the day, but that will be the case only in a purely formal way. And toward the end, when I shall raise certain questions concerning the significance of political action in the whole way of life, I don't want to talk about today's headlines. I want to talk about, you know, much deeper thing for your students, right? Which I fix is a great disposition.
Do you think? Oh, sorry, go on, Greg. Well, I mean, you feel free to jump in. But what my question was, I use you emphasize a few times now that it's sort of young people in the audience, politically ambitious young people who are sort of stirred or emotional or, and you just missed at the beginning, and I agree that sort of favor was any way responsible for Nazi Germany or anything like this.
But one does wonder if he sort of failed to give these young people a serious alternative or, I don't know what, I mean, I mean, like, I'm just imagining a bunch of glaucons. And he's like, yeah, I got nothing to teach you. And let's go to 2030. To take you back off with Greg is saying, my understanding Steve German politics in that time is they were by modern standards and usually violent.
I mean, every party had essentially a militia that was despite and stabbed and beat other party militias in an incredibly violent political atmosphere. And I'm not talking about necessarily Hitler's right, but the violence annotates that. And so, do you think he had a project that kind of defanged what was going on? Yeah, come on, Greg, get back over that real quick.
That's me. You already said no, but I had that feeling too, there's a kind of, it felt like there was a slight, like, just know what you're getting into. You know that this is becoming bureaucratic. It's becoming very sort of dry and the sort of life that you live is not going to be anything.
And I have this in mind, just in my, from what you said about him replacing a possible socialist politician, right? It's a far drier. But maybe for that reason, do you think it was maybe tempering somewhere? I can't, you know, I can't decide if the first two thirds of the lecture, which I describe is, it's not boring.
I mean, like you guys, I find it quite interesting. But for a lot of students today, it's hard to get through. And I've got to think for students in the audience, they thought, you know, why is he giving us this remedial education? And I'm someone who's wondered, again, maybe I'm overdoing a Sproucy reading of this is that he wanted to wear down, how many people sat through the whole thing?
I mean, they're all did. They're all setting their absolute hang on every word. But I can imagine people getting bored and losing their attention and then saving the serious part of it for the last third. Of course, that's a good German because they're not going to get up and leave though.
They're going to stay up and see. They might check out mentally. Also, it's about 20% of the length of German because the words are so compact. It's actually not that long.
It's about 15 minutes. I didn't want to say someone say to Henry Kissinger, can you answer this question in 60 seconds? And he said in 60 seconds, I don't even make it to a verb. So that's the German way, right?
I mean, I think, I think he lays out, we can actually put a band of finder part where he says there's three parts. He has page, I mean, I had the same page in the right sense. There are three pre-eminent qualities that are decisive for a politician because passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. And I'm thinking to myself, is he missing something here?
Or is he trying to describe an older word that all the four of us in the room, which is prudence, right? He stumbles close to saying what is necessary in politics, the highest virtue, the highest skill is prudence. But he never uses that term. And what's doubly interesting about that is a little further down in that same passage where he talks about the vanity of politicians and why he disrespects such vain people.
The very last part of that paragraph, he says, it is a product of a shoddy and superficially blasé attitude towards the meaning of human conduct. And it has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven. I was like to say, students and anybody listen to this. You know, tragedy is not something that modern social science or political science, conventional political science takes seriously or incorporates them to their thinking.
But of course, it's central to the classics as we know, right? And here's Max Weber, sounding like someone who really ought to be transported back to the time of Homer in Aristotle and Pericles, right? But he doesn't develop that thought at all. Except to say later on, he tries to provide the problem into two, saying there's an ethic of responsibility, an ethic of a fault of ultimate ends.
The communist utopian is the person who says the ends justify the means acts of violence are justified. And he says, that ends badly. But the person who believes in judging all their actions by the consequences, who's responsible, that person loses sight of ideals. And then he throws up his hands and says, there's really no way of telling you which is the right ethic to follow in political life.
And I keep thinking, well, Aristotle might have something to say about that. Yeah, undoubtedly, right? That's a really question. I guess in that, I mean, I hate to bring up Strauss again, but I sort of remembering this passage of this writing of his German nihilism, we talked about.
You don't hate it. You love it. Yes. You really love it.
I do. But just how the German youth were new teachers who could explain to them their political longings. And it seemed like Weber favored recognized that a politician couldn't do it, but he stepped up the plate and then he didn't really do it himself either. I don't think because I mean, I don't know what would have been a better way to do it because he's right in a way that modern politics is tedious, is boring in the ways that he's mentioned it bureaucratized.
I mean, we all three of us, Steve, you spent time at U-Must have spent time in DC, right? Like, oh, yeah, gee, I mean, there's so much of it is tedium and boring and not in any way what attraction people to this height of political power, the central Washington DC. I don't know Madison, Cothorne, who indicated to me that it could be kind of fun. Was that a personal outing that you guys spent about this?
So there's no, no, no, I don't know how to do this. David's side. David's side business is he's a party planner. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah. Yeah. Give me one more sentence that, you know, again, it comes after a long chain of argument, but paragraph ends the following way, from no ethics in the world, cannot be concluded when and to what extent the ethically good purpose justifies the ethically dangerous means and ramifications. From no ethics in the world, can we figure out these dilemmas?
And I keep thinking, well, actually, the classical natural right had a pretty firm grasp of how to start thinking about that problem, right? It's some, I mean, we were just saying, Alex's is right, it's that here's a moment where students are sitting on the edge of their chairs because they're in a crisis. You really have an opportunity to get their attention. And I mean, I'm thinking, well, this is probably the best thing that was said to them at the time by anybody.
And from my point of view, it's still the fact, right? It's just the irony here is he brings up the issue of tragedy and there's something tragic about this and him. And he seems to concede the argument to the systemic right, the size of means of politics as violence, he says in the QI graph, his famous definition of politics is nothing but the what is it, the monopoly on the legitimate use of power. Right.
And so, what makes a legitimate right? Well, what makes a legitimate is that it's perceived to be legitimate by whom, it seems like it's sort of a strangely democratic definition, right? If we agree it's legitimate, it's legitimate. And so it's, I mean, it just doesn't seem like it's exalted at all.
And how does this differ from the mafia or any other organization that's sort of in my neighborhood in Queens where I grew up? Fat Tony was in charge and we all agreed he was a legitimate source of authority. And so, so she was, right? Yeah, he can't, he says this is mega famous failing is it's right about this.
He can't give an account for what makes that monopoly on violence legitimate, right? Right. Yeah. Right.
Yeah. So, I'm not even sure how to ask this question, but maybe this is another way of a person the same issue is it strikes me that his manner of proceeding, this is another way pretty is very different from some issues we talked about. His manner of proceeding is very different from his description of statecraft or something like that or the politician. And this might just be my ignorance of favor.
But what is his understanding of the relationship between, you know, value, neutral social science, such as he embodies and actual governance? I'm just wondering, and the reason this comes to mind is if he is not actually speaking to these students directly, like he doesn't really grab them and offer them some sort of, what is he trying to do? We have this one idea of working around about kind of being in the grips of nihilism, trying to say facts is right, right? But for who?
Yeah, I think the problem here is he's unable to either recognize or confront something of a contradiction in his own thought, which is on the one hand, although he says we're going to have a bureaucratic government, we have to have it. He was also instead, it doesn't come through in this lecture, but elsewhere, he was a supporter of, you might say, flobisitoric democracy, you know, in other words, it's not only argument about the charismatic leader, someone who can channel the popular energies of the people, appeal to them, the leader, the way that the way Woodrow Wilson did mean it. And on the other hand, he's also saying that this attracts too many third rate people. But I always, really trying to, I think part of what he's trying to say, again, it comes out at the end is, in fact, he says there's a sentence where he says he seeks the salvation of his soul in politics, she'd do it someplace else.
But that was none of the oddities about Clinton saying he likes this essay, so there's lecture so much is did he ever slip a copy to Hillary before she gave her politics of meaning speech and it takes a village back and back, right? That was, she very much partook of the rhetoric and this postmodern sentiments of, you know, we're going to the politics is going to be human individuals meaning in their lives, right? And anyway, he's trying to very explicitly, he does say in the text that he's paraphrasing here, he's trying to warn people away from political romanticism, especially utopian romanticism, but just romanticism about how political, in other words, he's kind of introducing an element of moderation here, although he doesn't again do it in the Aristotelian fashion, which is unfortunate. It's not going to think a lot of students came out of this, despite some of the really gripping writing in it, I think that most of them had to come away unsatisfied, saying, what do I do now?
He just told me this is really harder than I thought, which is a good lesson, but I think people were hoping, as he indicates in the first sentence, they were hoping to get some instructions from him and said they got problems. You think it was impossible for him to ratchet up the rhetoric in any way that we've been more gripping for a student? I mean, is this simply his manner of proceeding and writing? No, I think the problem is that he couldn't escape the nihilistic consequences of his own thought.
If you can't do that, then you're not going to be able to give something more definite to people, I think. I mean, the instruction he gives, the line that you read at the end is pretty like, don't expect too much from people. I mean, it's very, he does give him instruction, but it's not very, yeah. Why do you think it's been so popular?
I mean, this was a lecture given over 100 years ago. I mean, it's got staying power. What accounts for its staying power? Yeah, if you think about, I mean, I am interested in learning that people still do assign it.
And it's not just people like us. I know some sort of conventional, not the quote unquote mainstream political scientist who assigned it. And with mixed results, I mean, Frances Lee at Princeton, who's especially Congress, she was a Maryland, she was a Maryland we were there David, she was right. And she's now at Princeton.
And she signs this essay and of course, it's similar to one I do. In fact, it was somebody who knew the both of us that you guys should talk. What was that? Well, I inherited a course here at Berkeley that's called in the catalog of the politician.
I've made a course on statesmanship, but it was a course that was taught many years ago by a conservative by God, in standing, you are who's long dead. And then it was the then chairman of the department here, Eric Schickler, who's you could conventional liberal, not crazy, he's actually pretty sensible, some good empirical work on race and such. He said, Oh, you should talk to Frances Lee, that at Maryland. And I did.
And then she sent me her syllabus. And I was amazed how much it was like my syllabus. And she started with this essay. And so we talked a bunch and talked to a person about it.
And the reaction students is different from class to class. And a lot of us depending on what's going on in the background, you know, because the day after Trump selected, might as well be 1919 Munich, for the people who are acting about that, right? And I think part of the reason it's safe is there is, as we've already hinted, a literary quality to this, which is so much better than what anybody else is saying. I think it's still in a certain way, it's a literary character that's hold up today.
I think that's why it has state power. Okay, I mean, I just sort of, yeah, this is a shame. I sort of my impression is that it's still in sociology textbooks, yeah, his definition of the state is sort of maybe modified, but still by and large accepted by contemporary social scientists. Yeah.
And the emphasis on value neutrality, I think that's still there. Yes. I mean, in a way, to compare it to the Protestant work ethic, as you're saying, you were saying, right, doesn't have this age state, it's more theoretical, more broad, less empirical, less susceptible to revision, right? Yeah.
Steven of general principles, I guess. I mean, I guess, I mean, one of the things I find fascinating about Weber and respectable is that it does seem like he has doubts about his own project of social science that keep breaking through here. And I say this may connect to his personal prices in the 1890s. You know, I'm often, I actually hear the empiricists here at Berkeley say, you can't study what you can't measure.
And we've all seen this right, that's empirical social science these days. And I'm always like, I think Weber would have found that statement. I mean, he'd have to agree with the logical premises of it, but I think it bothered him. Right.
And doesn't bother, people say this now doesn't bottom up a bit. And I always sort of raise my hand, meekly and say, you know, we have a brain, we can think about things. There's this stuff called logic, you know, and that's the way we train too many social scientists these days, right? Yeah, that's right.
That's what I meant by him being impressive. I think, even though ultimately, I disagree with him, I think he is really trying to think through these problems seriously, whereas the thought that he seems to have inspired accepts in the way that you just mentioned sort of, they just swallowed full of everything. Yeah. Well, you know, he was involved.
I don't know the many details of this. I just know generally, he was involved in 1919 and then 1920, trying to figure out the Weimar Constitution and how do they put things back together again? And of course, he gets sick and dies at age 62 or something, not that old. And then there is this very arresting sentence, very close to the end where he says, he's drawing a conclusion says now, then ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more 10 years from now.
Unfortunately, for a whole series of reasons, I fear that by then the period of reaction will have long since broken over us. It is very probable that a little of what many of you and I can't really confess I too, I wished and hoped for will be fulfilled. There's some foresight in his part, right? Because we all know what happened 10 years later.
And partly, he's, I think you can extend this and say, he's aware of how precarious the political position is. And he's trying to tell these young people, if you're going to get involved in this, I mean, I'm on the many lessons you can take in this is you need to understand how badly things can go wrong and may well go wrong, because not enough people have mastered the deep problems of political life. I'm struck by the other thing, the way in which he's different than other contemporary social scientists is right at the end of that paragraph, he quotes Shakespeare, a son, he frequently invokes the post away and does to ask, he shows that he's a man that has a wider learning than just only narrow social science, which might have his place, but like he's, I mean, he studied all various world religions, right? Like that was all, yeah, that's just the norm back then.
Maybe that's all or so much more to pay. It was, there was a few are these, the specialization grace had quite, this might be right. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, both Marx and Nietzsche were very well educated men, right?
They do a lot. They don't really know more. I mean, I've skipped over that completely, but his, his interest in religion and the fact they do so much about Easter religions is really amazing. It's fascinating to be sure.
But I'll quickly dismiss this as that Mormon is, for example, is sort of funny. I'm just that, but yeah, it's a crook. It's just obvious to him. Yeah.
Now you're free science there, right? This was great. I learned a lot. I enjoyed making you visiting this text and we're really gracious for your time.
I know you're just, you know, happy to have you want to get up to have you back again. It was just a ballman. I know how much time it takes to shade your head. I'm gonna hit you for that.
I'll switch a little slap across the ether here. Very nice. Very nice. Keep my head out.
Oh, goodness. Well, we'll have to release it. I don't know. I don't know.
This is gonna go on forever. So I've got a little game for you to close out the show. Very exciting. I'm gonna read you two quotes and I want you to listen to the end of the book and you have to tell me who said which, Max Weber or M.
Stan Evans. Okay. Wow. Here's the first quote.
Quote, number one, the honor of the civil servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities exactly as if the order agreed with his own conviction this holds even if the order appears wrong to him and if despite the civil servants' remostances, the authority assists on the order. Quote number two, liberals don't care what you do so long as it's mandatory. Yeah, the first one was paper obviously and of course the second one is one of Stan's famous jokes. Right.
Here's round two. You're one for one. If all political associations which are somehow extensive, that is associations going beyond the sphere and range of the tasks of small rural districts where power holders are periodically elected, political organizations necessarily managed by men interested in the management of politics. Quote number two, Washington DC and the Clinton years.
Welcome to Rotem and Gamora. You're like a South Park guys now. This is easy. Which was which?
The first one was paper obviously. Actually actually you're wrong. The second one was Weber. He was alive.
Round three last one. You're one for one. Oh god. He's two for two.
You don't even understand your you know, he's just pulled your legs. He's the one for one. Weber made the claim. Oh right.
I'm sorry. Excuse me. All right. One for say.
And five last one. In times of unrest, the petty bourgeois has erased its voice and once in a while the proletariat if leaders arose who however, as the rule did not stem from their mess in this phase parties organized as permanent associations be localized do not yet exist in the open country. Only the parliamentary delegates create the cohesion and the local notables are decisive for the selection of candidates. Go number two about members of Congress in general.
If we can't raise their pay, we can at least lower their bail. Listeners, if they're not on there, they can understand why so much of Weber is turgeon and not worth reading. If you're coming away from this, you're trying to decide what to read. You've got Weber and you've got evidence that say you go pick up Steve's book.
Yeah, it means though. I want to give you a close. I'm just going to see what I'm doing here. Shoot.
It's the one where it's the one where Weber says, well, I was in America. I asked a group of workers why do you vote for corrupt politicians? I'm just going from memory here, but it's very close to this. The workers said back to Weber.
Well, because we like electing people who we can spit on, unlike your officials who spit on us. That's not the voice of populism. You know, a hundred and five years ago. Yeah, next time Titus Tichera upsets me.
I'll say that. That must be almost a daily basis. Yeah. Thanks for having you on the show.
I have a political question for you to give us your prediction on midterms. How serious? This is you live and breathe. You're extremely well connected.
What's your sense? Yeah, I think it's going to be a Republican blowout. I mean, to blow out is how you're going to go. Well, right.
I mean, if the election were held a day and I'm not following a district by district, but I'm thinking the Republicans get 25 to 30 house seats. They're pretty high right now. They're just a few seats short. So it's really hard to imagine getting 50 or 60 seats.
I think we're talking that way, but I think that's hard. I think they probably take the Senate. I think they're going to knock off your four Democrats, because Democrats are showing up so bad. But some things could change this.
One is Republicans have an nominate all their candidates yet and they can nominate clunkers as they've done before. That's a primary skill Republicans. Second, it looks like the Supreme Court is going to throttle back Roe versus way. I don't know if they'll directly return or not, but that happens.
The leader's gonna see how it falls out. A lot of Republican strategists are very worried about it. I'm less so, but I don't know. But I think the left is gonna freak out the media will echo it.
And I think there's a risk for Democrats that will overplay their hands. And I think that they are good at it. Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to go to full Kavanaugh confirmation hearing mode over it. And I think that's going to turn off people.
So maybe in that plus for Republicans. So that's for things. All right now, aren't you discounting the reservoir of political charisma that is Joe Biden? Yeah, the raw animal charisma that he has.
Yeah, I mean, that video that's making the rounds now, where he's just isolated. Yeah, it's sad. It's like a grandparent who's lost the family at the Olive Garden. It's, you know, yeah, you wonder how long it's going to go on.
What's that? Are we going to Aldrin? No, yeah, I do wonder about his, it's almost like Elter of you. I mean, speaking of, yeah, I did hear a Joe Biden did read politics as a vocation, as a kind of calling.
And he was he was complaining that his politics never calls me. Yeah, 100 about science as a vocation. Yeah. All right.
Well, listen, I'm going to say this now, or maybe against even go pick up his book M stand Evans with the subtitle again. Conscriptive and went apostle of freedom. Here we go. Take care.