Abstract
The following discussion with philosopher and political theorist Wendy Brown revisits some of the arguments of her latest book, Nihilistic Times, in the light of her larger diagnosis presented in Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism. Thinking with and against Max Weber, Wendy Brown guides us through and to ways of doing politics and conducting scholarship capable of informing world-making practices that face up to the challenges of a nihilistic world. Picking up on some topics from a previous interview, the larger questions guiding those of this interview were how to redo the demos and how to remake our world democratically. We would like to thank Wendy Brown for the generous contribution of her time.
The following discussion with the political theorist Wendy Brown revisits some of the arguments of her latest book, Nihilistic Times (Brown, 2023), in the light of her larger diagnosis presented in Undoing the Demos (Brown, 2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (Brown, 2019). Thinking with and against Max Weber, Wendy Brown guides us through and to ways of doing politics and conducting scholarship capable of informing world-making practices that face up to the challenges of a nihilistic world. Picking up on some topics from a previous interview (Burgum et al., 2017), the larger themes guiding the questions of the interview were how to redo the demos and how to remake our world democratically.
In Undoing the Demos, Brown outlines her critical understanding of neoliberalism as a form of governing rationality characterised by the encroachment of market logics into every corner of the social world, even where these spheres of life are not directly monetised or subject to the logic of competition, construing human beings as human capital. She argues that neoliberal reason falsely promises to secure democracy while quietly undoing its most basic elements. By eschewing the notion that there are human aspirations, drives, motivations or modes of being aside from economic ones, neoliberalism perverts the promise and language of liberty and equality, and hollows out the notion of popular sovereignty. The very idea of homo politicus – of the human being as a creature that rules itself and does so as part of a demos – is vanquished, and the institutional scaffolding that renders this idea concrete in different practices is dismantled.
Brown extends and revises this analysis in In the Ruins of Neoliberalism by examining neoliberalism as a ‘markets-and-morals’ project. In other words, the orders that neoliberalism seeks to put in place of democratic ones are disciplined by not only markets but also traditional morality. However, by pursuing this moral-political project and negating the very notion of society or ‘the social’ as something experienced and tended in common, neoliberalism has ironically strengthened and hastened the nihilism of our age. This, coupled with neoliberalism’s accidental wounding of white male supremacy, has produced a kind of apocalyptic politics that would rather destroy the world than see a future in which this supremacy disappears.
In other words, two of the central concerns of Brown’s long-running examination of neoliberalism are, firstly, neoliberalism’s deleterious effects on politics and the very notion of ‘the political’, and secondly, its intensification of nihilism. This provides the immediate context for Nihilistic Times. Here Brown invites her audience to return to Weber’s lectures on politics and science as a vocation to find blueprints to redirect our conduct of life in our neoliberal academy and polity. Brown is by no means paying homage to Weber either as an intellectual hero or to mark the occasion of the recent centenary of both lectures. She is convinced (and tries to convince her readers) that, at least in part, our current predicament meaningfully resembles that of Weber’s lectures, and that – read against his own grain of disillusion, despair and pessimism – we can discern and distil valuable lessons from his stance for purposes with which he might not have agreed. Thinking with and against him, the result is an unorthodox interpretation of Max Weber, which provides some compelling and provoking coordinates to orient our politics and political thinking in our disorienting present. While Brown does not characterise herself as a Weber scholar or as seeking to contribute directly to debates between Weber scholars, Nihilistic Times continues a broader trend in social and political theory of placing Weber in the context of earlier thinkers and authors, including Kant, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.
As its title suggests, Brown’s book is chiefly concerned with the problem of nihilism. Brown’s central thesis is that neoliberalism has furthered the trivialisation and instrumentalisation of values (truth included) that Weber associated with rationalisation, disenchantment and bureaucratisation. While corrupt demagogues obsessed with power, on the one hand, and uninspiring professional politicians, on the other hand, proliferate in a crumbling polity, universities find themselves adrift in a spiral of economic forces, hyper-politicisation and polarisation. The nihilistic condition that Brown charts in our present is characterised more poignantly by the cheapening and devaluation of our commitments, so that we in the present are at odds in facing the fact that we are self-determining value-beings who rely on nothing other than our ethical, political and cognitive capacities to make our way through the world.
Brown has profound disagreements with Weber, yet she urges us to take some of his ideas seriously, particularly regarding the boundaries between different spheres of society, the importance of charisma and responsibility in politics, and the relation between scholarly knowledge and our ethical and political commitments. And at this point precisely we start to see Brown’s productive, yet unconventional, engagement with Weber.
Brown reads Weber’s infamous fact/value distinction in an existential key and beyond the narrow confines of methodological discussions. Hence, we must come to terms with the fact that, while scholarly inquiry can tell us much about how the world works (facts), it can tell us nothing about – or provide knock-down arguments to settle – what we should do (values).
Scholarly inquiry can neither tell us what to do nor ground our worldviews. Science and politics must be clearly distinguished. But Brown, unlike Weber, draws a different conclusion that points towards a humanistic type of education. What we can expect from scholarly knowledge is not just the analysis of our values in their logical and practical entailments and presuppositions, but a larger set of skills allowing students to analyse them historically, hermeneutically and critically. Therefore, scholarly inquiry must not only uphold the cold and impersonal methods of the positive sciences, but also reclaim the ethos and practices of the humanities and critical theory. We see, hence, that Brown agrees with Weber, but turns the fact/value distinction into the existential starting point of an argument that culminates in rejecting the distinction on methodological and ethical grounds.
The intervals between spheres of human activity are also useful for identifying what politics is really about, and for discerning a view of the political (in its ethical complexity and irrationality) to inform our political practice. Politics, in short, does not traffic in truth or justice or goodness. Its medium is violence, Weber tells us, which can seduce and corrupt any political programme. The stakes in conflict are different worldviews rooted in different ultimate values, which must be embodied in leaders without descending into self-obsession. The fate of political intentions is contingent: any action carries within itself a concatenation of unanticipated consequences or effects for which we are nonetheless responsible. This depiction of politics demands a particular and improbable ethics, one that combines passion, responsibility and a sense of proportion. For Weber, the political, when properly understood, is the realm where virtuous agents are called to face the disenchantment of the world and not be disenchanted (see Gane, 1997); or, to put it in Brown’s terms, to rethink populism, prefigurative politics and the politics of occupation in order to develop a political project that can face nihilism and not be nihilistic, fatalistic or unambitious. In Brown’s view, a political project can do this by recovering the powers of charismatic leadership and embedding it in an innerwordly project to reconstruct responsibly the ruins of neoliberalism.
If the existential reading of the fact/value distinction spurs Brown into different conclusions, her emphasis on the notion of responsibility reminds us that Weber’s Kantianism (which coexisted in tension with his Nietzscheanism) went beyond the Neo-Kantianism of ideal-types and into a concern with the struggle for autonomy in a heteronomous world. We would like to thank Wendy Brown for the generous contribution of her time. This interview was conducted via Zoom on 19 May 2023.
For us readers, there’s been a fascinating trajectory from Undoing the Demos to In the Ruins of Neoliberalism to Nihilistic Times. Could you tell us more about this intellectual journey in which you have built a dialogue with Foucault, Marx, various theorists of democracy, and now Weber? How do these theorists help us to think through and out of our neoliberal present?
I have never been a single issue thinker or a single theory thinker. I’m what you might call theoretically polyamorous. I have a lot of different theorists who help me think. They don’t necessarily get along. The big ones include Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx, many 20th century thinkers as well, and of course Weber – we’ll get to that. But, also, I think across domains that include neoliberalism, but are not exhausted by it. Over the last year and a half, my focus in my research since finishing Nihilistic Times has been almost exclusively on the climate emergency. So I’ve been reading a lot of other kinds of thinkers, including Latour, Chakrabarty, Haraway, Tsing. For me, this polyamorousness in theoretical engagement is very important because the really brilliant thinkers of our past and present are always brilliant in a limited way. Nobody gets the whole of our world, nobody thinks well about the whole of our world, and anyone who tries is a totalitarian; that is to say, totalises our world under the rubric of one set of powers or one set of problems. So I’ve never tried to bring these thinkers, as it were, into harmony. It’s their differences and the different angles of vision that are actually most illuminating of contemporary predicaments.
This brings us to your question. Weber is not particularly helpful in illuminating our neoliberal predicament, if by that we mean the world that neoliberalism has brought into being through policies and a form of governing reason. Perhaps he helps us understand the extent to which neoliberalism is a specific form of reason, a specific form of governing rationality, and not simply inevitable or true. But for me, Weber is far more important for two other things. One, he is a thinker who rivals Marx in helping us remember that the specific, the singular thing that humans do is build and unleash powers, enormous powers, that then come to dominate us unless we find a way to harness, govern or organise them in emancipatory ways. Weber and Marx both really help us appreciate that part of our predicament today is that humans as a species are capable of generating extraordinary systematic powers and of being utterly dominated, utterly wrecked by these powers. That’s one thing, but the thing I’m doing in this book of course is focussing on Weber as a thinker of nihilism, and that to me is Weber’s contribution to understanding something about our times that we often simply attribute to modern media technologies or modern political corruption or neoliberalism: forms of power or forms of practice that have eroded authenticity, honesty, accountability, common grounds for conversation. But Weber has a much deeper account, I think, in his appreciation of our nihilistic condition, and that’s presumably partly what we’re going to be talking about today.
It seems to me – and correct me if I am wrong – that the underlying concern of these three very rich books is what we in Foucauldian terms might call an ‘ontology of the present conditions for democratic world-making practices’. While Undoing studied how the economisation of different spheres of human practice has led to the emptying of democratic norms and meanings, Ruins charted a deeper existential condition of nihilism spurred by the occlusion of ‘the social’ in our political imaginaries. It is as though to reconstruct the world democratically we first need to work through the nihilistic texture of our current predicament. Put simply, why Weber now? Does he offer a strategy to redo the demos in our institutions or to retrieve the social in our political imaginaries, or merely guidelines to enact world-making practices in our current, nihilistic predicament?
A certain reading of Weber, perhaps, helps us do that. Let me go back to one of the premises of your question. At the end of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, I was exploring the extent to which neoliberal rationality intersected with and intensified an already nihilistic condition. I think it may be helpful if I spend just a minute saying what I mean by this in my reading of Weber. Let’s start with a popular understanding of nihilism. The most common-sense understanding of nihilism today is that it’s an individual attitude of darkness, despair, or cynicism in which life seems meaningless, without purpose, without point. It’s usually associated with a kind of ennui or depression or ‘funk’, but it’s individual. Now Weber draws from a tradition of thinking about nihilism in which what I’ve just described is a symptom of nihilism, but doesn’t capture the whole of it. This is the tradition we associate with Nietzsche, with the early Russian existentialists, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, where nihilism is a saturating, historical, cultural condition that is specific to the crumbling of religious authority in the West, for which the wellspring is the Enlightenment.
What happens here? Values as a whole begin to lose their foundations as God’s authority wanes. We don’t know how to secure or re-found them when science and reason begin to displace or challenge religious truth. Why does this produce nihilism? Because, Weber reminds us through Tolstoy, science tells us how things work, but not what their value is, not what anything means or how we should judge it. Similarly, reason allows us to calculate, to deliberate, to analyse, to scrutinise, but it doesn’t tell us what the meaning or the value of anything is. Meaning and value on this understanding are human creations, judgements, ascriptions. They are not found in nature, nor do they descend from God.
With waning religious authority, fundamental values, including the very value of truth – these things don’t die, but as they lose their foundations, they lose their status as absolutes, and go a little haywire as a result. Put another way, scientific knowledge and its truth come apart from value, from meaning, from the question of ‘the good’. When the value of values declines, they don’t go away but become trivial, fungible, instrumentalisable. This is our condition today. We see values used incessantly for branding and for power enhancement. Everyone knows, for example, that Trump is no Christian, but he discovered the power of Christian values to mobilise a base to enhance his own power, which in turn is mainly food for his narcissism. For Weber, these are precisely the effects of nihilism. Values are still hanging around – they’re still in the air, as it were – but they’ve lost their depth, their seriousness, their ability to actually shape or guide us in action or make a world. They’ve become instruments of power, branding, narcissistic gratification.
There is another nihilistic symptom of our age, which is a hyper-politicisation of everything. Today, for example, we politicise everything from personal style to what we eat and what kinds of consumer purchases we make. This is individualsed and trivialised politics, not politics that is world-building.
The final thing that is important in the de-grounding of values secured by religious authority is disinhibition. One of the important things that values do, as Nietzsche, Freud and other thinkers teach us, is secure conscience. Human values are guides, ways of understanding what we should and shouldn’t do. And, of course, once values become lightweight, so does conscience. Conscience no longer inhibits action or speech – anything goes. You see this ubiquitous phenomenon across the political spectrum.
So, what Weber adds to an understanding of our time, which you can’t get to by simply thinking about neoliberal rationality, is an appreciation of the already de-grounded character of values, the already nihilistically organised characteristics of both knowledge and politics in our time. These things are not explained by neoliberal rationality, but neoliberalism does prey on them (it’s what makes it so easy for neoliberalism’s own trivial scale of value to take hold) and neoliberal rationality is amplified by them. Why amplified? Because a political rationality that basically says that the value of everything is its capacity simply to enhance capital is itself nihilistic. Capital enhancement is not a value in the sense of answering the question: ‘How do we want to conduct our lives?’, ‘What do we think has meaning?’, ‘What do we think has worth?’, ‘What do we think the world ought to be like?’. Neoliberalism essentially says: ‘Give it up – just turn all these questions over to markets. Let the markets organise everything and tell us what things mean.’
In contrast to other ‘classical’ sociologists, questions of culture are central to Weber’s intellectual project and, as you acknowledge in Nihilistic Times (p. 73), Weber saw culture in terms of values: to be cultural beings is to be ‘endowed with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude towards the world and to lend it significance’. In their own ways, Undoing and Ruins both explore how neoliberalism has not only transformed politics and economics in their narrow senses, but also reshaped our very cultural life. Does Weber add to this analysis of neoliberal culture because he sees culture in terms of ascribing meaning to aspects of reality by relating them to values? In other words, is there something Weber helps illuminate about culture in the neoliberal age that might be harder to illuminate with a theorist who conceives of culture in terms of the interpretative discovery of meaning rather than the creation of value-relations?
Here’s the marvellous thing about Weber and the reason I think he’s so unattractive to undergraduates. On the one hand, he burdens us with making meaning and, on the other hand, he is the master theorist of powers created by human beings that exceed their grasp, turn into giant machineries of domination, organise the world in their own image, after their own fashion, and make it nearly impossible for us to craft our own values, our own understandings of the world, our own worldviews at odds with these giant machineries. That’s why Weber used the famous figure of the iron cage. The iron cage was not a cage of somebody else’s making that put human beings inside it, but a cage of human production – in his understanding, both instrumental rationality and capital covering the Earth with a form of power that together are machineries of domination that human beings increasingly have difficulty escaping. Why do undergraduates have such a difficult time with this? Well, if you tell them ‘It’s up to you to make something of your life, meaning is yours to craft, values are yours to decide upon, but listen, it’s really, really, really hard to resist or contain or escape these extraordinary machineries of power, meaning, and governing that we have unleashed on the Earth’ – that’s a terrible predicament for a young person. I mean, it’s basically to say ‘There’s the steep mountain, it’s a million miles high: climb it. That’s your life task.’
But I think there is another way to understand what Weber is doing and it’s partly what I was experimenting with in both the discussions of knowledge and politics in the book. Weber is inviting us to make meaning through building worldviews, and a politics rooted in them, that are at odds with these governing powers. Weber was pretty dubious about the possibility of recovering human world-making power from the powerful machineries that human beings had unleashed in modernity – and, mind you, he’s writing a hundred years earlier than our time, so he’s not yet dealing with the enormous powers of technology, finance capital, and of course, of the Anthropocene. Yet Weber is also a resistance thinker, one who believes the only point of being human is to act according to values one actually chooses, as opposed to those that are simply given as a result of human-built orders of domination. I think his howl for this resistance is quite loud.
In recent years, scholars advancing a programme of ‘realist political theory’ have turned to Weber – particularly to his approach to the political as a realm of legitimacy that primarily traffics in violence. What do you think is specific about Weber’s definition of ‘the political’, even if the more contemporary distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ was not very clear in his theoretical register? Do you think that the realist attempt to define it in terms of violence and legitimacy captures the complexity of Weber’s view of it?
Wonderful question! I think that seeing Weber simply as a realist because he centred politics on power and violence is a mistake. I think it ignores, among other things, his own histories of the political contained in the volume we call in English Economy and Society. But I think it also ignores the specific problematic of the political that Weber understood under the rubric of the phrase ‘the tragedy of action’. What did he mean by this? We shouldn’t get too fixed on the ‘tragic’ part. What he means is that political action occurs in a sphere already swirling with power and contingency and that it is therefore impossible to control all the effects or consequences of action. So the tragedy of action for Weber is a warning to would-be political actors or leaders that they must not imagine that simply because they’ve set out to do something, whether to build a state or a revolution, that they remain in control of the effects of the action that they have taken.
Now why is this important? Because for Weber, politics requires a specific ethic – an ethic different from an ethic that you might have in teaching or in personal life or in work – precisely due to this feature of political action. This ethic requires that you not ever treat the end as justifying the means because the means can unleash such terrible consequences and the end may never materialise. And it requires that you not bring to politics the kinds of virtues that you might have in individual life or religious life: Christian ethics or personal ethics that are inattentive to the problem of contingency, power, and violence. Weber gives us instead this ethic of responsibility in politics. And by that he means not that the actor can actually control the effects of their actions, but that they must reckon with the fact that they can’t control them and approach this fact with a relentless sense of responsibility for whatever happens. For Weber, politics cannot be a realm in which you say ‘Oops!’, or ‘Oh dear, I was trying to build a socialist revolution, but it turned into a dictatorship’, or ‘Oh dear, the US was trying to rescue people from the Taliban, but instead we actually amplified its power!’.
The responsible political actor has to pursue a cause informed by values, informed by a worldview, a perspective, an aim, an ambition to bring about something in the world, while at the same time being inordinately attendant to this problem of contingency and unintended consequences. Only that kind of character for Weber belongs in politics. The one who is irresponsible has blood on her hands. The one who is simply power-mongering – here we come back to the realism – is a person who has been swallowed, as it were, by the nihilistic age. There are no real values at stake in that case. So, for Weber, politics is this marrying of deep, serious values, concern with and dedication to a cause and responsibility in trying to enact that. I don’t call that realism and I think the realists are engaged in a shallow reading of Weber, just as I think the neopositivists are engaged in a misreading of Weber that doesn’t appreciate his deep hermeneutics.
Underlying most political praxes we find different understandings of ‘the political’. One theoretical definition that has had much influence in recent years has been Carl Schmitt’s. Read along anti-foundationalist lines, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have employed his friend/enemy distinction to articulate a model of agonistic democracy and populism. This model has been very influential in leftist politics and scholarship in Latin America, where many see it as a democratising force, rooted in the notion of ‘the people’, against neoliberalism. You yourself have recently engaged with this strain of Latin American political thought (see Biglieri and Cadahia, 2021). This political model has some convergences with Weber’s thought on the role of charismatic leadership for transformative projects and on the definition of ‘the political’ in terms of ‘the pragma of violence’. Has your engagement with populist thinkers shaped your interpretation of Max Weber’s notion of charisma, particularly its relationship with ‘the people’, ‘the demos’, or the followers of the leader? How might we understand this relationship in post-nihilistic terms that avoid collapsing into forms of political theology or attempts to ‘re-enchant’ the world?
Weber on the demos isn’t so great. He doesn’t have a great regard for the masses. He doesn’t believe that there is much more than plebiscitary democracy possible in the modern age. That has to do with a lot of things we don’t need to go into right now. But Weber on the question of charismatic leadership does connect beautifully with what you just described as the effort by some Latin American critical theorists to redeem populism from the right, to formulate populism as having potential on the left and even to preserve the idea of leadership in relation to a populism that is not authoritarian or demagogic. We in the Global North and the West rush to push together the words ‘right-wing’ and ‘populism’, and ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘populism’, far too quickly.
We need to remember the populist origins of all democracy – the pre-institutionalised, inherently revolutionary quality of all democracy. This is something that thinkers like Wolin, Mouffe, Ranciere and others do appreciate: that raw democracy, democracy before it’s tamed and institutionalised, is the rise of the people against powers that they understand to be monopolised by the elite, by the few, or in our case today, by technocracy, by autocracy, by corpocracy, by finance. To dismiss populism as an inherently massified, mystified, irrational, emotional, manipulable organisation of the people is to fail to appreciate those radical origins of all democracy and it’s also to fail to appreciate the crisis of liberal democracy today and its likely waning as a political form.
So, where does that leave us with Weber? My own effort in this text is to get the left to take seriously the extent to which it is still bound up with the belief that rational exposé somehow will produce a majoritarian left analysis and left mobilisation. We also need to recognise that as long as we continue to have anxiety and allergy toward charismatic leadership on the left, we will cede that enormous power to the right – to the mobilisations we have witnessed, especially in the last decade. Trump and Johnson, Erdogan and Meloni, Modi and Bolsonaro all model what Weber knew would stand in for charisma in a nihilistic age, namely demagogic, narcissistic power-building that would prey, as it were, on manipulable masses. One reason why Weber turns to charisma as a counter to a highly rationalistic and rationalised age of power is that he sees in charisma the capacity to reignite the value of value – going back to that nihilistic deprecation of value here.
For Weber, charisma is the force that holds out an ideal of a different future against the machineries and the rationalities of the present. What could we need more right now? We know that between the crisis of democracy and the crisis of ecology that we are at a disaster point with Western modernity and we desperately need a different way of organising the world. We need different ways of organising production, consumption, housing, health, human and nonhuman relations. Charismatic leadership is what breaks open the ordinary and makes alternatives compelling. The right knows this. We need to be thinking about that on the left. At the same time, we need to be aware of the vulnerabilities in right-wing demagoguery, which represents a kind of negative version of actual charismatic leadership that could build social power, popular education, citizen action, a sense of what we need in common, as opposed to the survivalism for the few that the right wing is mobilising.
In your last interview with Sebastian (Burgum et al., 2017), you mentioned ‘prefigurative politics’ as a praxis that contributes to redoing democracy. As I see it, two aspects of this praxis dovetail awkwardly with Weber’s thought. Firstly, at least some forms of prefigurative politics have certain resonances with Weber’s ethic of responsibility insofar as they anticipate a different world that they set against the present, but also take account of the possible consequences of their actions, including how their actions might affect the ideal that they are trying to make operative. Secondly, prefigurative politics in general seems committed to the sort of value rationality that Weber sees as under threat in an instrumentalising and nihilistic world. Nevertheless, there are many points at which Weberian thinking and prefigurative politics part ways, partly because prefigurativism also incorporates utopian energies that Weber would associate with an ethic of ultimate ends. Do you think that prefigurative politics offers an alternative way of working through or overcoming our nihilistic times, and how might we place Weber’s ideas in constructive engagement with this praxis? Approaching the same matter from the other direction, might this engagement with prefigurative politics help us better understand certain nuances or complexities in how Weber’s writings relate to utopia and anti-utopia? I ask this because, while Weber’s valuing of pluralism and often bitter realism set him against utopia in the sense of an ideal resolution of all major conflicts, there is also that powerful moment towards the end of politics as a vocation where he states that ‘what is possible could never have been achieved unless people had tried again and again to achieve the impossible’, which you quote as an epigraph for the chapter on politics in Nihilistic Times (p. 21).
Weber would have been no fan of prefigurative politics for exactly the reasons that you detail so beautifully in the question. It would have appeared to him as precisely a politics of too much virtue and too little reckoning with power and violence as the currencies of politics. But remember: we started this interview by saying that no thinker for me is the only horse I want to ride.
The risk of prefigurative politics is always that it can easily become absorbed with itself at the expense of transforming the world. That is to say, the risk of prefigurative politics is engaging entirely in prefiguration rather than politics. And yet it’s also important as a way to, as you say, develop values, practise values, experiment with values that we believe we want to be coordinates for a different world.
Now another way to approach this is to challenge the utopianism that you suggest often governs prefigurative politics with something that is very much in the air today: the idea of reparative politics rather than utopian politics. A politics that is oriented towards repairing the worlds that we have inherited: ecologically destructive, racist, sexist, colonial, and, of course, capitalist, producing terrible consequences for both the Earth and the human species. So a reparative politics attempts to remain conscious of all of those things and transform the world according to a vision that doesn’t imagine there is some final end of history, some utopia, but rather attempts to repair from the disastrous historical trajectories that continue to make the present and the future unless we interrupt them.
This orientation might be helpful in preventing the dangers of prefiguration leading to too much self-absorption and too little political resistance and organisation and it might also be helpful in preventing the burnout that results when people who have been intensely involved with left politics for a few years say ‘Oh my God, all I’ve done is go to meetings and be criticised and address our own relations, but we haven’t done a damn thing to stop the world from growing darker.’ So I would conclude by saying that a prefigurative politics that is not also trying to organise and build a movement is not really a politics; but a politics that is only engaged in organising without challenging all the inherited hierarchies and divisions and damages that constitute us is also not a radical politics. We need to find a balance here.
As an aside, quite a bit of what you say there about reparative politics has certain resonances with what’s being written at the moment in utopia studies, dystopia studies, etc., often under the headings of ‘critical utopianism’, ‘critical dystopianism’, etc., but alas, I’ll have to leave that one aside for now because it’s a massive topic in its own right!
It’s totally interesting! Let me just add (we can have a whole other conversation about this!), my own view is that utopia and dystopia probably need to be put in a corner for a while. That does not mean giving up on making a better world, but I think utopia and dystopia very much come out of a certain modernist historiography and narrative about the relationship of past, present, and future that calls for disruption, but that’s a different book, a different paper, a different interview, so we’ll come to that a couple of years from now.
I look forward to that! Relatedly, a political praxis that gained traction in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, concretised in the Occupy Movement, had the assembly model at its core. During the last decade, we have seen different iterations involving civil disobedience and other disruptive practices, where the question of violence becomes increasingly pressing. This range of praxes resonates with Arendtian (or at least Arendt-inflected) notions of ‘publicness’ as the driving force of the political. How can Weber’s thought inform, enrich, or criticise this range of praxes? Conversely, does this praxis de-stabilise Weberian tenets?
It destabilises above all the state-centrism and the anthropocentrism of Weber’s definition of politics, political action, and political leadership. Many of us have also become interested in ‘Occupy’ as eco-politics – indigenous forest protectors in the Amazon, or anarchist forest protectors in Atlanta, Georgia, or at Standing Rock. These practices are so outside of Weber’s understanding of the political, his notion of leadership and action and state-centric organisations of the political just can’t comprise these things. We could stretch Weberian notions of action, responsibility, charisma, to those spaces, but he wouldn’t be happy about it.
I think we have covered a lot on what Weber can teach us for politics today and the other part of your book is on knowledge and knowledge-production. You argue that particular to Weber’s diagnosis of nihilism is the idea that values not only lose their foundations and devalue themselves, but proliferate and diversify. This is why his post-nihilistic strategy polices the boundaries of science, religion, and politics. You interpret and enrich our understanding of the fact/value distinction along these lines: not the methodological foundation for a positivist science, but an existential and political stance to work through (rather than to affirm) the nihilistic texture of our times. At the same time, you do not adhere to Weber’s strict policing of boundaries. One reason for this seems to be that Weber’s approach doesn’t allow for ‘critical’ knowledge about our values. Science, in Weber’s framework, can inform us about the unintended effects, internal structures, and logical entailments of our value commitments. Science in this sense has a clarifying force, but this is not the sort of clarification that we can gain from ‘genealogical’ or ‘conjectural’ thinking, or from forms of ideology critique, which could produce what you call, after Sheldon Wolin, ‘corrected fullness’ in our accounts of political life. Could you please elaborate further on this notion of ‘corrected fullness’? What sort of clarifying force can we expect from science and scholarship?
What Wolin was trying to get at was what was distinctive about the stance of the political theorist in contrast to the political scientist. The political world, the powers that organise it, the histories that arrange it, what we would now call (though Wolin didn’t) the discourses that describe and represent it – these are not observable, countable, or measurable by the tools of social science. They have to be imagined through theoretical language. We have to grasp them through thinking about what is holding things together that is not doing so in a visually observable or measurable way. So ‘corrected fullness’ was the term Wolin used to describe the work of political theory and he was thinking here really about canonical Western theorists – Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, etc. All these theorists worked by giving us a brilliant architecture of a world that you could not actually point to empirically, describe empirically.
And we don’t need to stay with this idea of corrected fullness to see the importance of this in, say, Marx’s Das Kapital. What does Marx tell us in the preface to the German edition? That he can’t simply rely on the observing eye to expose the working of capital. He requires what he calls the force of abstraction. That force of abstraction is what will bring into being the laws, the dynamics, the principles, the interconnections that structure capital as a powerful order – what we will not see if we just look at what economists call today ‘market behaviour’. So that recourse to abstraction for Marx is something that he also knows he has to get readers to be willing to go with because otherwise they’ll say ‘My God, this book is hundreds of pages long and I just want to know the answer to what Marx calls “the secret of capital”. Marx promised to tell me where profit comes from – I just want to know: where does it come from?’
But Marx knows he has to start with the commodity, he has to introduce the difference between use-value and exchange-value, he has to explain how labour-power becomes a commodity, he has to build the importance in capitalism of breaking apart the realm of production from the realm of exchange, and of how value, money, labour and commodities circulate between them. Only through all of that is he going to be able to reveal how profit in the market comes from exploiting labour in the factory. He can’t just point to it – he has to theorise it. The same is true for Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals: he has to induct the reader into what he calls the vertigo of asking ‘But what is the value of morality?’; not just ‘What is morality?’, but ‘What is morality doing beyond what it says?’. This question brings you into a world of power, desires and effects that are not on the surface, that are not visible, countable, measurable, and thus cannot be apprehended by the techniques of social science but only by theory.
This for me is the pith of critical theory. Weber himself offers brilliant instances of this in his theory of disenchantment, of rationalisation and of the iron cage; yet his methodological writings and his strict distinctions between fact and value effectively proscribe this. So here is Weber overflowing, exceeding – violating even – his own methodological precepts in developing his own insights. He’s working against himself in both directions, a kind of perfect Nietzschean subject of self-flagellating and self-denying thought and making demands on the knower, the thinker, the student that are at odds with his genuine creativity in social science.
The fact that Weber wanted scholars to study the world as it is rather than normatively does not mean that he wanted thinkers or students to accept the world as it is. He just understood that scholarship should be animated by seeking to know the world rather than by predetermined convictions about it. And that encomium, though it’s impossible to obey absolutely – because we’re not objective beings, because we are not capable of that God’s-eye view, because we cannot leave our interpretive, located, and situated ways of knowing and apprehending the world – seems to me a useful nudge for left scholars and teachers who may be inclined toward a more polemical or manifesto-like approach to the emergency state that the world is in. We do our best work, we serve our people the most, if we really try our best to help reveal and illuminate the world and its woes. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take positions, but the least persuasive scholarship and politics, I’ve come to believe, is that which mixes them indiscriminately.
This is very interesting, actually. It sounds to me as if there is a way of reading Weber against himself so as to bring him to a more humanistic scholarship revolving around values. And clearly that was there when he talked about the Protestant ethic: he makes allusions to Goethe and many kinds of implicit literary references precisely to imagine the world, to illuminate it. But I have a last question that caught my attention while reading your book, and I think you and I agree on it, though I don’t know if for the same reasons. Many people who are against the positivistic approach to the social world try to say that we have to be more attentive to “lived” experience. They normally talk about empathy. And you seem to reject that as well to some degree, at least the version of empathy as an exercise of ‘climbing empathy walls’. Why is that attitude of climbing empathy walls, reconstructing lived experience, not the correct one in our approach to values if we want to create critical theory?
Weber is really helpful in recalling the importance of an interval between political life and academic life, precisely the one nihilism blurs. Empathy may be useful in political organising. But what we are as scholars or thinkers is best animated not by the effort to be empathetic with somebody’s view, but to study and interpret it.
For Weber, the question is: ‘What are the precepts, what are the foundations, what are the premises, what are the entailments of any particular worldview?’ I would go further because I want to add Nietzsche, Freud, Marx and others in and say ‘What are the historical elements producing this worldview? What are the genealogical dimensions of its particular iteration today, including its psychic and cultural components? The worldviews that we hold today, right and left – the ways of thinking and valuing various identities or religions or family forms, etc – what are the sources of these formulations and attachments?’ That to me is the project of the scholar: to interpret, not just to empathise. Empathy – I don’t know why that would belong in scholarship. We must take very seriously our objects of analysis, but this doesn’t mean we confer goodness on them or defer to them or even have compassion for them. Our task as scholars is to understand, to think, to study, to reveal, not to embrace or affirm.
Obviously, there are different tasks for different disciplines and perhaps an empathetic relationship with one’s subjects is appropriate to certain kinds of sociological or anthropological fieldwork. There, if by ‘empathetic’ one means trying to appreciate and understand rather than criticise, reject or bring unreflexive interpretive lenses to those one is studying, then okay. But that whole empathy business seems to me to belong more in certain kinds of political mobilisations where we try to understand appreciatively why people have the views they do. Not from their personal stories – I mean, you can do that if you want – but from historical ones.
And let me make this last point: what I found so disturbing about the empathy wall trope in Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land is that, basically, she set aside extremely deep and ubiquitous racism in the felt victimisation of her subjects. Yes, they feel victimised, that’s what Trump mobilised in this country – white people who felt victimised: victimised by immigrants, by affirmative action, and by a bunch of other things. But are they? And need we be empathetic with that way of responding to neoliberal dethronement of the working class and poor whites? As political thinkers, we need to analyse and interpret and study it, and then figure out how we might mobilise it differently. To return to Weber’s point about charismatic leadership, might it be possible to mobilise those same subjects not in the direction of hardening and deepening racist entitlement but in another direction?
Weber himself gives you convincing arguments against the empathetic reconstruction of the other’s point of view, and argues instead for interpretative methods that reconstruct value spheres and the like.
Indeed. The point of scholarship isn’t simply to register human cries or demands but to interpret them!
