An Ethos of Politics between Realism and Idealism: Max Weber's Enigmatic Political Ethics

Recent scholarship has stressed the centrality of ethical concerns to Weber's thought, while leaving the nature and implications of his ethical stance, and the relationship between his ethical views and political positions, disputed. This article shows how Weber sought to analyze the influence of different types of personal character or spiritor ethoson politics; and to inculcate an ethos that might save politicians from the dangers of moral purism, ruthless moral maximalism, and realist cynicism. A reconstruction of this ethos, and the accounts of political judgment and responsibility to which it was connected, reveal Weber to offer a a more complicated and suggestive account of the ethics of political actionand one with more to contribute to the defense and practice of liberal politicsthan portrayals of him as a champion of political realism and value-neutral instrumental reasoning, or a forerunner of Schmittian decisionism, allow.