Martin Buber's Theopolitics

The Serpent | 65

East Elbia, even if that ran afoul of the Junkers and the march of capitalism.
“Ostensibly pure scientific value systems of whatever variety always appeared to
stand in the way of such a consciously national economic policy,” according to
Mommsen. “Therefore Weber strove to refute the very existence of scientifically-
valid normative categories. At the outset, his program for a value-free science
rested largely on an effort to establish the ideal of the national state as the sole in-
disputable standard.”^16 Mommsen’s “therefore” may be too strong. Nonetheless,
he demonstrates a connection between Weber’s understandings of power and of
scholarship. Weber himself once put it this way:

Politics is a tough business, and those who take responsibility for seizing

the spokes of the wheel of political development in the fatherland must have

strong nerves and should not be too sentimental to practice secular politics.

Those who wish to involve themselves in secular politics must above all be

without illusions and... recognize the fundamental reality of an ineluctable

eternal war on earth of men against men.^17

This eternal war, according to Weber, is what social science, including the science
of politics, must acknowledge first if it is to maintain its status as a science. This
science, in turn, is the necessary basis of what Weber repeatedly calls “secular”
politics. As Leo Strauss would later comment: “Conflict was for Weber an unam-
biguous thing, but peace was not: peace is phony, but war is real.”^18 This view of
conflict as fundamental extends to the realm of values. Some scholars, drawing
on Weber’s own image of incommensurable values as warring gods demanding
allegiance, have called this his “polytheism.”^19 For Weber, political decisions al-
ways refer to values and are ultimately nonrational. This is another reason why
they cannot be based on an objective social science (which can recognize the fact
of eternal conflict but cannot tell us what to do about it), and why the increasing
bureaucratization of politics, the attempt to make it function according to set
regular laws, endangers the ability of politics to preserve a space for individual
decision at the highest level.^20
Weber defined himself on many occasions as a “bourgeois” politician. This
meant that he lacked sympathy for the claims of the dying aristocratic landowner
class, which was struggling during the Wilhelmine twilight to retain its oligar-
chic privileges. However, he also cast a skeptical eye on the quest of the orga-
nized working class to seize power. He argued that Marxism could have validity
either as a diagnostic scholarly apparatus submitting falsifiable claims to social
science in an attempt to increase understanding of modern capitalist societies or
as a purely ethical call to overthrow an unjust social order, but never both. Be-
cause the majority of the organized working class in Germany operated through
the German Social Democratic Party, which was officially committed to an “or-
thodox” formulation of Marxist doctrine, this meant that few socialist activists
framed their work in a manner acceptable to Weber. When he encountered ones