CAESARISM, CHARISMA *"° FATE PETER BAEHR HISTORICAL SOURCES AND MODERN - - — RESONANCES IN T . • v r r C THE WORK OF 1 rv MAXWEBER * X ' ■■ > r< v n *•' r • : ^ g h . Oi f R 1C 0 Transaction Publishers New BRUNSWICK (U.S.A.) an d LONDON (U.K.) Copyright © 2008 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo­ copy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042. www.transactionpub.com This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008036038 ISBN: 978-1-4128-0813-2 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baehr, Peter. Caesarism, charisma, and fate : historical sources and modern reso­ nances in the work of Max Weber / Peter Baehr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-0813-2 (alk. paper) 1. Power (Social sciences) 2. Weber, Max, 1864-1920. 3. Au­ thority. 4. Caesarism. 5. Gifts, Spiritual. 6. Charisma (Personality trait) 7. Political sociology. I. Title. JC330.B344 2008 303.3’3—dc22 2008036038 In "homage to Melvin Richter for the gifts of his learning and friendship Contents Preface ix 1. Introduction 1 Part 1: From Caesarism to Charisma 2. Political Republicanism and the Advent of Caesarism 11 3. Caesarism and Charisma: From German Politics to 59 Universal Sociology Part 2: Fate and Fate Communities 4. Fate 117 5. Communities of Fate and the SARS Emergency 139 in Hong Kong 6. Concluding Remarks 185 Appendix: Caesar in America 187 Bibliography 213 Index 241 Preface In 1998, Transaction published a book with an obscure and pretentious title. It was called Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study in Republicanism and Caesarism. I was the author. The title—chosen by me against all sensible advice—was oblique because the book seemed to be about the demise of Republican Rome. In fact, it explored three related themes: the demonic reputation of Caesar in political republican thought; the emergence of the concept of Caesarism in the nineteenth céntury and its decline during the twentieth; and the role played by Max Weber in reshaping the language of Caesarism in his theory of modern politics. Social scientists and students of Max Weber, misled by the title, ignored the book. Part 1 of Caesarism, Charisma and Fate reprises that earlier study, though in a streamlined and updated form. I am grateful to Irving Louis Horowitz, chairman of the board of Transaction, for giving me another chance to present my arguments. They center on Weber’s creative re­ shaping of the social and political vocabulary of his day, in particular the language of leadership. Part 1 of this book—the larger part of it—is mostly historical in character, transporting readers back to the era when, and before, Weber wrote. It seeks to explain Weber’s rhetorical strategies within the contexts of his own age. Part 2 has a different goal. It employs and develops Weber’s ideas in order to understand our own time. My subject is the idea of “fate,” a notion that Weber characteristically em­ ployed in a nuanced and multi-leveled way. Risk and trust are, today, the subjects of major debate in the social sciences. Fate is an unfashionable term. I believe that some of its implications are worth preserving. “Fate” offers a sense of human pathos, predicament and tragedy that most social science concepts are singularly ill-suited to evoke. And, as I will show in my discussion of “community of fate,” it is fully capable of being applied sociologically to certain kinds of social disaster. Parts 1 and 2, it will be plain, are distinct and autonomous studies. As such, they can be read separately according to the reader’s predilec­ tion. Yet while divergent in orientation, both components of the book do IX Caesarism, Charisma and Fate X thematically overlap. Weber’s notion of fate (traced and adapted in part 2) also plays out in his theory of politics (the subject of part 1) when he argues that only two basic shapes are possible in a mass polity. A nation can either institute parliamentary institutions that encourage responsible leadership, or it can dispense with such arrangements and, by design or default, promote reckless authoritarianism. The choice ultimately is ours. But the choice itself is situated in the nature of the society and polity we inhabit, our obdurate present, the fate of the times. Equally, if Weber’s ideas about fate resound throughout this book, so too does the issue of political and social language. To grasp the dynamism of Weber’s social and political thought entails paying close attention to the vocabulary he employed. By the same token, to understand the emotions unleashed by a social disaster - such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) crisis in Hong Kong during 2003—requires taking seriously the tropes and metaphors it generates. One especially significant idiom to describe disease epidemics is battle imagery. Many have criticized it as demean­ ing and callous. A Weberian account offers a very different perspective, furnishing a way of understanding, rather than excoriating, the codes through which social action is articulated in conditions of distress. No attempt is made here to provide a comprehensive survey of Weber’s ideas, even his ideas of charisma and fate. Notably, I desist from providing yet one more account of charisma within Weber’s sociology of religion. My focus is on charisma within Weber’s sociology of Herrschaft (ruler- ship, domination); and, more especially, some of its roots in the political idea of Caesarism. The book’s purview is thus limited to selected themes that have been either overlooked or deserve further elucidation. Weber scholars will notice, and some will be irritated by the fact, that I have relied principally on textual sources that predate the German criti­ cal edition of Weber’s work, the Max Weber- Gesamtausgabe (MWG). These are the sources I had closest to hand, marked-up as a result of three decades of use. I did, as the footnotes attest, consult the MWG on many occasions (Gordon Wells and I worked extensively with it in our edition of Max Weber: The Russian Revolutions). For the discussion of Caesa­ rism and Herrschaft, however, the older sources are perfectly adequate, with some supplementation. The Edith Hanke edition of Economy and Society (Weber [1922] 2005a) that deals with my topic has an informative introduction, examining relevant debates of Weber’s time, and a useful apparatus of notes. But the texts themselves are, in the main, the same ones I found in earlier German editions of Weber’s work.