Revolution and authority: Max Weber and German Social Democracy

The dissertation argues that the political theory of Max Weber was decisively altered by the German revolution of 1918-1919. Specifically, the revolution marked a turning point in Weber's conceptualization of democracy and political action. His earlier political writing favored democratization, parliamentarization, "political education," and citizen participation. In this regard Weber was well within the Western liberal tradition, and occupied a position on the left of German bourgeois politics. During and after the revolution, in contrast, Weber developed the theory of "plebiscitary leader democracy," in which a popularly elected leader with charismatic qualifications acts unilaterally above a politically passive "mass" and a pliant parliament. Here, Weber stepped out of the liberal tradition onto the reactionary ground of Fuhrerdemokratie, which excluded the very social forces he had previously sought to bring into German politics. By calling for order in the political arena, Weber abandoned his advocacy of political struggle, and became what he had previously condemned: an "Ordnungsmensch.";Weber's transformation mirrored a similar conversion experience on the part of the German Social Democratic Party. Weber's relationship to German Social Democracy was one of the most important issues in his life. Weber was attracted to Social Democracy because it attempted to infuse the political realm with a transcendent meaning politics had come to lack in the "disenchanted" modern era. The SPD seemed to offer an alternative to the predictable party politics of Wilhelmine Germany. But the party Weber admired as the only party in Germany that truly embodied political struggle became, once in power at the conclusion of the War, a party of order. The party that formerly called for the overthrow of the imperial state now employed the services of the imperial army and the fascist Freikorps to put down the very revolution that had brought it to power. For the SPD, as for Weber, the revolution of 1918-1919 was a turning point in its political development. Neither the party nor the political theorist could accommodate the mass expression of rage and frustration with the old order that the revolution aroused. Both renounced long held principles in order to achieve political stability.