Red Train Blog

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.