Living (Together) with the Consequences of Value Struggle

In his influential account of value pluralism Weber forecloses an architectonic intellectual resolution of value conflict and valorizes value struggle itself as a site for the achievement of personality. Weber is, therefore, a potential source of insight about how to live with political others amidst ongoing value conflict. We can glean such insight from a political ethos of concern for consequences, which is discernible in Weber’s late political writings and is more expansive than the “ethic of responsibility” he articulates for political leaders in “Politics as a Vocation.” This broader ethos encompasses a mode of political argument, kinds of political objectivity meriting political inclusion, and practices of engagement outside the political sphere, all of which support cohabitation amidst intense value struggle by keeping a polity’s members oriented to value struggle’s worldly consequences and thereby attuned to the polity as a shared “fate.” This ethos underscores Weber’s solicitude for the participation of the masses within value struggle, despite his well-known emphasis on the need for leaders to direct that struggle. It also helps disclose the lingering ethical quality that marks Weber’s political realism, as well as his own occasional susceptibility to political moralism and the desire to settle value conflict.

Environmental ethics · Ethos · Morality · Political science · Politics · Polity · Sociology · Value (mathematics) · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Law · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory