Max Weber responds to Carlos Peña

Carlos Peña is to be thanked for having contributed to revalue the legacy of Max Weber in various written interventions and interviews. The reflections of the great German thinker have been and will continue to be a very valuable source of intellectual and political inspiration and it is an indisputable merit to have brought them up in times of crisis such as this.
There is also a parallel between both figures that we find interesting to highlight. Like Weber, Peña is an intellectual with a high motivation for politics, always open to dealing with issues of public interest and without avoiding controversies. Possibly for this reason, one of his great questions to academics, intellectuals and politicians is his supposed lack of reflective and critical spirit. 
At the same time, a cursory investigation of the way in which Peña reads Weber and the conclusions he draws from that reading show us that his is a narrow, partial and also historically decontextualized interpretation. Moreover, in some fundamental points, Weber is in the antipodes of Peña. Indeed, as will be recalled, Max Weber’s main political adversary was German conservatism, nationalist and militarist, which sought to maintain the monarchical regime in Germany and defended the war that began in 1914 as a struggle against “the ideas of 1789”. This conservatism considered that Germany had followed its own path (Sonderweg) which separated it and opposed other great European nations, such as France and England. 
Max Weber unreservedly criticized these approaches. Although he was also a nationalist and, therefore, the aggrandizement of Germany was a higher end, he considered that, for this, it was necessary to establish a parliamentary regime and abolish the existing monarchy. The administration of the State should also be improved, incorporating in it professionals dedicated to technical matters and whose performance is in accordance with a statutory right. In short, a modern bureaucracy had to be constituted. The same should apply to political parties. In terms of industrial development, Germany also had to imitate the most advanced nations if it was to have an important place in the world concert. 
Weber’s thought, with all its tensions and ambiguities, represented in the society of his time a democratizing and fundamentally anti-conservative force. Once democracy was established, in 1918, Chancellor Friedrich Ebert (Social Democrat) even considered appointing him Minister of the Interior. He also collaborated on some points in the drafting of the Weimar Constitution. On the contrary, Carlos Peña has stood out in the last decade for his strong opposition to progressive ideas, which he describes as utopian and voluntarist. With nuances more or less -such as the valuation of the recognition of indigenous peoples-, his has become a basically conservative position, in terms of defending the current political and economic model and questioning those who intend to make substantive reforms. It would be, in his opinion, a society that has experienced a successful process of modernization, reducing inequality and maintaining the full validity of a democratic regime. Thus, a radical transformation can only generate disorder and, in the long run, the destruction of democracy. His model might be Burke, but not Weber. 
Max Weber was a radical critic of emancipatory utopias, as is Peña. He criticized socialism and any idea of ending “the domination of man by man,” which he rightly considered a “farce” (Letter to Robert Michels, August 4, 1908). He also advocated political realism, arguing that all political activity necessarily involves clashing with one’s convictions, “agreeing with demonic powers” (Politics as a vocation-profession, 1918). That is why the ethics of conviction must be combined in politics (Gesinnungsethik), that is, loyalty to our principles, with the ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungethik), which means always weighing the consequences of one’s actions. 
Weber explains that these ethics are not in opposition, but complement each other and that both are part of those who have politics as their vocation-profession (Beruf). It also criticizes a politics of power for power’s sake (Machtpolitik), which, although it can be effective, “leads to emptiness and nonsense.” and concludes with a vindication of utopia: “Politics consists in drilling slowly and vigorously some hard boards with passion and prudence at the same time. It is indeed true, and all historical experience confirms it, that the possible would never have been achieved if the impossible had not been attempted” (Science as a vocation-profession, 1918). Nothing is further than the thinking that Peña has shown in recent times. In the midst of the “social outbreak” of October 2019, he affirmed, with conviction worthy of a partisan, that from this “youth revolt” a new constitution could not be expected. Although he later toned down his analysis, he proposed in a November 2019 column, titled “The Constitutional Debate,” only to modify some quorums constitutional and the Constitutional Court. Despite this, he said in January 2020, in an interview with La Tercera: “I don’t think I’ve been wrong about anything at all.”
In relation to the above, it is evident that Peña has collected from Max Weber only one great aspect, political realism, but has left aside the other, no less important, the value of ideals and even utopias, without which politics is meaningless. On the other hand, and as will be recalled, Weber considered values (ideas, doctrines, conceptions of the world) as the greatest source of human creativity and estimated that the process of rationalization – dramatically described in the final pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) and other texts- threatened the source of social change by abandoning society to the predominance of efficiency, order, and leveling of individuals.
It is precisely this second dimension that also appears in relation to Weber’s aspect that Peña emphasizes most, that of strength in politics. Peña maintains that, according to the author, “the main function of the government is to maintain order,” but this requires rectification. When Weber defines the State sociologically, he clarifies that it cannot be done by the functions it fulfills, since these can be very diverse, but by the means it uses. That is, it is not a question of the tasks of the State but of what means it is proper to: the monopoly of physical violence. But he adds that it is legitimate violence, that is, that society recognizes as a right of the State. Peña will probably agree that one of the great contemporary problems and of Chilean society in particular lies precisely in the violence, not only that of radical groups – which is condemnable in itself – but also, and above all, that exercised by the State and the need for it to conform to a democratic legal-constitutional framework. That is, it is exercised according to the predominant form of legitimacy in the modern world, according to Weber, legality. 
The relationship with legitimacy opens a third aspect of Weber’s thought equally neglected by Peña. Weber asserts that, to be stable, state domination cannot rest solely on force, but requires legitimacy; The consensus of the dominated around the intrinsic validity of an order of domination. That is why Weber defines this set of beliefs as “internal justifications” (innere Rechtfertigungen), implying that there is an essential link between domination and legitimacy, which then allows it to distinguish three types of domination according to the form of legitimacy on which they are based: charismatic, traditional and rational legal.

One might serenely ask whether an analysis of the various protest movements and, particularly, the one that took place in Chile since October 2019, could not begin precisely here, from an analysis of the crisis of legitimacy of the State, seeking to understand the motives, beliefs and ideals of those who actively challenged it and, on many occasions, violent. Peña, on the other hand, considers his action as a mere expression of youth discontent, infantilism or irrationality. Once again, Weber comes to our aid against Peña, when he reminds us that politics is done with the head, but not only with the head. Thus, for example, charisma is based precisely on belief in a person’s extraordinary strengths. 
Placing oneself under the eaves of such rich and complex thinking as Weber’s does not mean repeating literally what he said. But Weber does not allow himself to be reduced to an image as simplified and conservative as the one presented by Peña. On the contrary, it can contribute to a critical reflection of our society and not simply to a purely defensive attitude of the Status quo. It is evident that Peña corresponds to the type of intellectual who not only reflects on reality. political and cultural of the country, but, also as a person committed to education, he makes political pedagogy with the pretension of leading the national debate, but this cannot be done at the expense of the simplification of a thought as complex and innovative as that of Weber or other great intellectuals of the first modernity. 
 
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The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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