The Crisis of Liberal Democracy Poli 110DA 03

The Crisis of Liberal DemocracyPoli 110DA 03 The Devil is old. To understand him, best grow older.

Recap • “[T]he state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence.” (33)

Recap • 3 Types of Legitimacy • Traditional • Charismatic • Statutory • NOT a mask for violence

Recap • The historical trend has been toward government by specialized, administrative bureaucracies • A “stark choice” between a democracy • With leaders and a machine, in which followers suffer a “loss of soul”, or • A leaderless democracy, filled with “professional politicians” who lack a vocation for politics, fail to fill the human need for leadership, rule by clique. No soul, no calling at all. • 74-75

In the modern world, one can live either for or from politics as a vocation. • Not mutually exclusive • To live from politics is to make one’s external material living from the political sphere, as a beneficiary or salaried official (42)

To live for politics is to make it one’s life “in an inward sense. Either he enjoys the naked exercise of the power he possesses or he feeds his inner equilibrium and his self-esteem with the consciousness that by serving a ‘cause’ he gives his own life a meaning.” (40)

“To ask what kind of human being one must be to have the right to grasp the spokes of the wheel of history is to ask an ethical question.” (76) • “What qualities does he need to do justice to this power... and hence to the responsibility that it imposes on him?” • What does a real leader look like?

3 qualities are of decisive importance for the politician: • Passion • Responsibility • A sense of proportion • 76-77

Passion • A “commitment to the matter at hand, that is, the passionate dedication to a ‘cause’, to the God or demon that presides over it.” • Not “sterile excitation”, the “romance of the intellectually interesting” • Makes politics an “authentic human activity and not just a frivolous intellectual activity”

Responsibility • Passion makes a politician of no one “unless service to a cause also means that a sense of responsibility toward that cause is made the decisive guiding light of action.”

A Sense of Proportion • “The ability to allow realities to impinge upon you while maintaining an inner calm and composure. What is needed, in short, is a distance from people and things.” • Separates passion from sterile excitement and responsibility from power-mongering & vanity.

Two Ethics of Political Vocation • Yet, “all ethically oriented action can be guided by either of two fundamentally different, irredeemably incompatible maxims: it can be guided by an “ethics of conviction” or an “ethics of responsibility.” (83)

Ethics of Conviction • “With an ethics of conviction, one feels ‘responsible’ only for ensuring that the flame of pure conviction, for example, the flame of protest against the injustice of the social order, should never be extinguished. To keep on reigniting it is the purpose of his actions.” (84)

Ethics of Responsibility • With this ethic, an individual takes humans as they are, he “reckons with exactly those average human failings... He does not feel that he is in a position to shift the consequences of his actions , where they are foreseeable, onto others. He will say, ‘These consequences are to be ascribed to my actions.” (84)

It is not possible to remain pure in politics. • “In politics, the decisive means is the use of force.” (84) • “The early Christians... were well aware that the world was governed by demons and that whoever becomes involved with politics, that is to say, with power and violence as a means, has made a pact with satanic powers.”

“It follows that as far as a person’s actions are concerned, it is not true that nothing but good comes from good and nothing from evil but evil, but rather quite frequently the opposite is the case. Anyone who does not realize this is in fact a mere child in political matters.” (86) • A question of ethical maturity

“Anyone who seeks the salvation of his soul and that of others does not seek it through politics, since politics faces quite different tasks, tasks that can only be accomplished with the use of force.” (90) • “When men strive to obtain such ideal goals [peace, justice, freedom] by political action, they act in the name of an ethics of responsibility and make use of violent methods.” (91)*

Political maturity: Not a matter of age, but of inward strength:“the trained ability to scrutinize the realities of life ruthlessly, to withstand them and to measure up to them inwardly.” • “The Devil is old. To understand him, best grow older.” (91)

Immature: “The world is stupid and nasty, not I. The responsibility for the consequences cannot be laid at my door...” (92)* • Mature: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” • Responsibility and conviction

Return in ten years time. • Not summer’s front, when anything is possible, but “a polar night of icy darkness and harshness”

“The only man who has a ‘vocation’ for politics is one who is certain that his spirit will not be broken if the world, when looked at from his point of view, proves too stupid or base to accept what he wishes to offer it, and who, when faced with all that obduracy, can still say ‘Nevertheless!’ despite everything.” (93-94)

The Crisis of Liberal Democracy Poli 110DA 03