Max Weber’s thoughts on violence are as relevant today as they were in 1918

We live in an age of political violence. Assassinations circulate through the news cycle like viral clips. Political leaders talk openly about using force against their enemies. Armed agents kill people on the streets.

Rhetoric once confined to the fringes now comes straight from podiums and press conferences. I’ve written about this on the blog before, and each time it feels less like an aberration and more like a pattern.

A change in politics 

It’s tempting to think something unprecedented is happening, but one of the first lessons political theory teaches us is that this, violence entangled with politics, is closer to the historical norm than the exception.

What is ending now is not politics-as-usual, but an unusually long period in which large parts of the world experienced relatively low levels of overt political violence. Recent history trained us to think of politics as something that happened through institutions, procedures, and televised debates. That era is slipping away.

From Ancient Rome to the streets of Minneapolis

From Ancient Rome, where politics and assassination were inseparable, to Renaissance Florence, where political conflicts were settled with murder in church, to the twentieth century assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Mahatma Ghandi, political power has repeatedly been founded, defended, and destroyed through violence.

This is why one of the most important thinkers for understanding our moment is not a contemporary pundit, but a German sociologist writing at the end of the First World War: Max Weber.

Debates, definitions and overthrowing the state

Weber lived through the collapse of the German Empire. He taught and wrote in a moment when revolution felt imminent, when soldiers were mutinying, monarchies were falling, and a communist revolution in Germany seemed not just possible but likely. This was the world of Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartacists, a world where students were not merely debating politics, but actively preparing to overthrow the state.

It was to such students that Weber delivered his famous lecture Politics as a Vocation in 1919. Many of those listening were engaged in revolutionary violence. Weber knew this, and, crucially, he did not speak as a pacifist wagging a finger at history.

Weber believed that politics necessarily involves violence. His most famous definition of the state is that it successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. Politics, in other words, is inseparable from coercion.

Morality and violence

Yet Weber was also deeply uneasy about violence, especially when it was morally sanctified.

At the heart of the lecture is a distinction between what Weber called the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility. The ethic of conviction says: I act according to my beliefs, and I am morally pure because my intentions are pure. If terrible things happen as a result, that is the fault of the world, not of me. The ethic of responsibility says something much harder: you are accountable for the foreseeable consequences of your actions, even, especially, when they arise from noble aims.

No moral refunds

Weber was sharply critical of revolutionary communists not because they were willing to use violence, but because they believed their convictions absolved them of responsibility. They told themselves that the suffering they caused would be redeemed by the utopia to come. History, Weber thought, does not offer that kind of moral refund. To believe that conviction trumps responsibility is to blind yourself to the harm you are doing in the present.

This is why Weber can sound both for and against violence. He accepted that politicians will do things that should trouble their conscience. Anyone who wants clean hands should not go into politics, but he was fiercely opposed to those who treated violence as morally cost-free because they believed history was on their side.

The political theorist David Runciman has done more than anyone to make this side of Weber accessible to modern audiences, particularly through his lectures and podcast work, which I got most of these details from.

Weber, Blair and The Iraq War

Runciman has also drawn a provocative comparison between Weber’s thinking and the politics of Tony Blair, especially over The Iraq War. As Runciman once wrote, reflecting on Blair’s insistence on the purity of his intentions: good intentions in politics don’t count for much. What matters is whether leaders take responsibility for the damage they cause, or retreat behind moral self-justification.

From a Weberian perspective, the problem with Blair was not simply that he was wrong - there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was the justification for the war, lest we forget - but that he seemed insufficiently haunted by what he had done.

By contrast, Weber admired figures who lived with the weight of their decisions. He wrote movingly about Abraham Lincoln, who was visibly marked by the American Civil War. Lincoln understood that preserving the Union required immense suffering, and he did not pretend otherwise. The burden showed.

Every life matters

It is hard to imagine many contemporary politicians being haunted in this way. Blair and Iraq. Cameron and austerity. Johnson and the pandemic. Farage and the casual stoking of hatred. Trump and, well, everything. Too often, politicians treat people like chess pieces to be sacrificed. Political violence is framed as something unfortunate that happens to other people, far away, justified by clichés about broken eggs and necessary omelettes.

For Weber, this was precisely the moral failure to avoid. Violence always has a cost. Every life matters, even when the person is a monster. That does not mean violence is never justified, but it does mean it can never be morally waved away. To govern responsibly is to grapple with that cost, not to outsource it to history or ideology.

This is why Weber’s lecture remains so unsettling. It took courage to stand in front of radicalised students in 1919 and tell them to slow down, to think, to resist the intoxication of moral certainty. It is much easier to praise courage as action, the courage to smash, seize, overthrow. Weber argued for a different courage: the courage to take responsibility, to endure moral ambiguity, to accept that there are no guarantees of redemption.

Lessons for today

Our political leaders today are not equal to that task. They are not philosopher-emperors like Marcus Aurelius, nor are they figures of tragic conscience like Lincoln. However, Weber’s warning applies not only to those in power.

Activists, too, can fall into the trap of believing that a better future excuses present harm. Posting, cheering, endorsing violence from a safe distance is easier than confronting its moral weight.

Weber does not offer comfort. He offers sobriety. Politics, he insists, is the slow boring of hard boards, not the thrill of righteous destruction. The most serious and committed activists that I know understand this well. In an age of escalating rhetoric and violence, that may be the most radical thing we can hear. Not a call for less thinking and more action, but for the courage to think when action is most tempting.

What would Max Weber make of our politicians?

Max Weber, that stern-browed German sociologist with a moustache worthy of Nietzsche and a mind like a surgical scalpel, once gave a lecture called Politics as a Vocation. It is one of those pieces of political writing, like The Communist Manifesto or Democracy in America, that seems to understand its moment even better than the moment understood itself.

Delivered originally as a lecture in 1919, in the stunned and shell-shocked aftermath of the First World War, then later published, it isn’t about how to fix the world. It’s about what politics is, what it demands, and why it is, when done properly, so crushingly difficult.

Weber was trying to understand how modern politics works: not as a spectacle, not as an ideology, but as a profession. A thing people do, with rules and consequences. His argument (and probably the most famous point in the lecture) was that the state, in its modern form, was defined by its monopoly on legitimate violence, and politics, therefore, was the slow, grubby, bureaucratic, and often soul-destroying work of deciding how that power should be used. That work, he thought, was best done by professionals.

The machinery of politics

Weber saw clearly how politics had become institutionalised. The era of the noble landowner dabbling in Westminster was over. The rise of political parties, what Weber called “machines,” had changed the game. These machines were not sentimental. They produced candidates the way factories produce cars. However, occasionally, out of the grinding metal and belching smoke, one of them spat out a genuine leader.

A democratic dictator, Weber called them. Men like William Gladstone, who came from inside the machine but used its power to project a political vision onto the nation. The charisma of the outsider, wielded by the insider.

Insiders and outsiders

That distinction, between insiders and outsiders, is the key to understanding Weber’s model. He believed great politicians came from inside the system but stood apart from it.

Abraham Lincoln. Otto von Bismarck. Gladstone. They knew how to work the levers of power, but they also had vision, and the psychological strength to live with contradiction. Not just contradictions between ideals and reality, but contradictions within themselves. Lincoln, he wrote, was “haunted” by the burden of leadership, but he did it anyway.

Trump, Truss and the fantasy of the outsider

By these standards, modern politics is a nightmare. Weber would have loathed Donald Trump, not because of his policies but because of his origin story. Trump didn’t emerge from a party machine; he broke in with a crowbar. He wasn’t shaped by the system. He hijacked it. For Weber, that made him dangerous, not just in a moral sense, but in a functional one. Outsiders don’t know how the machine works. So, when they start pushing buttons and pulling levers, things go bang. Usually, in the worst way.

The British conundrum

Britain offers a different conundrum. Here we have insiders, products of the machine, who behave like outsiders. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are not anti-establishment. They are the establishment. Johnson has been a Tory for decades; Truss worked her way up through student politics and the wonk-industrial complex. Yet, when power came, they governed like amateurs.

So, what went wrong? Why, if Weber was right that party machines produce capable leaders, do our party machines keep producing duds?

The professional without substance

The answer may be that the machine itself is broken. Weber thought parties could still generate greatness, but only if they were places where political skill, compromise, and endurance were developed over time. The grind mattered. Parliament mattered. The whole dreary, infuriating business of legislating and coalition-building mattered.

What happens when Parliament becomes a theatre? A place that only boosts politicians standing as media personalities and not the place where the messy compromise of governing is worked out? When MPs are selected for loyalty, not talent? When ambition is rewarded more than ideas?

Well, you get people who’ve clocked the hours, worn the rosettes, climbed the ladder, but don’t know how to govern. They know how to win, but not how to do it. You get Johnson.

A modern paradox

Weber would have recognised this mutation. He wrote that politicians must be able to hold “the strong and slow boring of hard boards” not flashy slogans or viral speeches, but patient compromise.

Here we hit a modern paradox: we demand authenticity from our politicians, but we punish them for honesty. We demand conviction, but not contradiction. We want them to be brave, but also bland. Social media has intensified this tension: every vote, every hesitation, every fudge is recorded, memed, and weaponised. So politicians retreat into performance.

Why we don’t want what Weber wanted

Maybe, deep down, we don’t even want what Weber wanted. He believed in the professionalisation of politics, but modern voters don’t. They want disruption. They want mavericks. They’ve seen what the professionals have delivered: a financial crash, a lost decade of wage growth, creaking public services, housing crises, climate drift. They’ve seen how insulated those professionals are from the consequences.

So we get the politics of rage. Of spectacle. Of nihilistic hope. A rolling carousel of outsider messiahs and insider clowns. Still, the machine keeps churning.

Would Weber like Starmer?

This brings us to Keir Starmer. On paper, he’s Weber’s ideal: an insider with competence, caution, and a very serious haircut. He’s spent his life inside institutions, legal ones, political ones, party ones. He believes in rules, in process, in making things work. However, where’s the vision? Where’s the haunted inner struggle? Where’s the Gladstone?

Starmer won a big majority, he may even hold on to some of it, but where is greatness in government? That seems off the table. Weber wanted politicians to combine the vocation of responsibility with the spirit of vision. Starmer, like so many of today’s leaders, offers only management.

The final puzzle

Here’s one final question: if Weber thought Parliament could produce great leaders, why does it now produce mediocrities?

Well, because Parliament has changed. Once, it was a proving ground. Now it’s a theatre for politicians to elevate their status as a celebrity or media personality, a prelude to them going on Strictly (or starting a podcast if they have intellectual pretensions).

Weber believed politics was the calling of those who could carry the weight of the world, who could live with contradiction, who could endure failure and persist. In our time, politics has become the calling of those who can weaponise Twitter rage, and the House of Commons is just a platform to get their angry message onto TV. A tool for those who want to monopolise our attention.

The machine still runs, but it no longer builds leaders, it builds celebrities, and that, Max Weber would say, is not the same thing at all.