Participant Observation at Its Best: How Max Weber Concluded Nine out of Ten Politicians are Windbags!

It was January 1919, and Max Weber was on a roll in his career as a German politician, journalist, and academic.  Germany had on November 11, 1918, more or less surrendered to the Allied forces of France, Britain, Italy and the United States, and Germany slowly began to collapse into an anarchic state. Bavaria sort of seceded under the apologist Kurt Eisner, and set up its own government—this new government was releasing documents from the Bavarian archives so that the Allies meeting at Versailles could better make the case that World War I was indeed started solely by Germany.

Street demonstrations were erupting in Berlin, and the Spartacist forces of Karl Liebcknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were ruling the streets (Liebknecht and Luxemburg were assassinated that same month, on January 15).

The Rhineland was being occupied, and Max himself was campaigning vigorously as a Center-Left candidate of German Democratic Party, even as he was publishing articles in the German press critical of the Allied role in starting World War I.

It was indeed a lively time.

Let’s see what he had to say as the month went by in his role as a political speechifier, journalist, and academic:

Standing (unsuccessfully) on the German Democratic Party (DDP) list for the new German Parliamentary elections of January 1919, he made speeches proclaiming sentiments like:

We have this revolution to thank for the fact that we cannot send a single division against the Poles.  All we see I dirt, muck, dung, and horse-play—nothing else.  Liebkencht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoological gardens. (see Radkau 2009:507)

In other words Weber knew himself what it felt like to be a full-throated political hack.

It gets better though.   Justifying Germany’s war conduct in an essay “War Guilt” published in the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine in January 1919, in which Weber blamed The Russians and Belgians for provoking World War I:

In the case of this war there is one, and only one power that desired it under all circumstances through its own will and, according to their political goals required: Russia…it never crossed [my] mind that a German invasion of Belgium [in 1914] was nothing but an innocent act on the part of the Germans…

Finally, at the end of the month on January 28, 1919, he was invited to give a speech, the long-winded “Politics as Vocation” by the Student Union of Munich University.  What did he have to say about politics?  He could no longer compare the now-assassinated “revolutionary of the street” Rosa Luxemburg to creatures in the zoo.  So he wrote something that echoes through the annals of social theory even today

 …in nine cases out of ten I was dealing with windbags who do not genuinely feel what they are talking o themselves but who are making themselves drunk on romantic sensations

This is of course the speech that has endured; it is part of “Politics as Vocation” which is considered to be one of the most important essays about the sociology of politics ever written, and which should be part of every liberal education in ways that the two other things cited here should not.

But talk about a participant observation as a research technique!  If anyone was to know about the how and why of political windbaggery, it was certainly Weber.  January 1919 was indeed Weber’s month!

 

Originally Posted at Ethnography.com in March 2014.