Statesmanship and ethics

Aron, Max Weber, and politics as a vocation

Scott Nelson

José Colen

pp. 205-216

in: José Colen, Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (eds), The companion to Raymond Aron, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

Raymond Aron discovered Max Weber around the same time that he discovered Karl Marx—in the early 1930s, during his sojourn in Germany. These thinkers represented a fraction of the total number of German authors he delved into at the time, including Husserl, Heidegger, and the Southwest School of neo-Kantians (Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband).¹ It was in Max Weber's writings that Aron eventually found the resources and the words to express the relationship between politics and morality.² Moreover, Aron also found in Weber an exposition of the tension between knowledge (science) and action (politics). There are genuine trade-offs between a profession that demands the absolute pursuit of truth and one that demands the willingness to compromise not only one's own morals (anathema to the moralist) but even the truth itself (anathema to the scientist). This variance at the root of science and politics is probably why Aron was so fond of "failed" statesmen: Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Weber himself All of them partook to some extent in politics or war, and they were incredibly gifted thinkers who reflected on the nature of politics or war.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Heidegger Martin

Kant Immanuel

Rickert Heinrich

Windelband Wilhelm

Weber Max

Marx Karl