Thoughts on Weber's 1895 "The Nation State and Economic Policy"

I recently had occasion to re-read Max Weber’s 1895 inaugural lecture on “The Nation State and Economic Policy” (found in the Cambridge edition of Weber's political writings). The lecture is shockingly relevant, so I thought I might write out its chief themes.

One striking feature of the lecture is that it summarizes—in under thirty pages—the core themes that preoccupy the entirety of Weber’s corpus. The lecture proceeds in three sections: First, a discussion of a particular cultural conflict between Protestant German and Catholic Polish agricultural laborers in Prussia. There we see already an early form of Weber’s famous analysis of the Protestant ethic, which in the concrete historical case contrasts with the Polish workers’ mentality. Weber’s wariness of expanding Polish migration leads to a proposal to shut down the borders and forcibly repopulate the land with German workers. But more importantly, this leads to the second part of the lecture: A broader treatment of the nature and pathology of modern economic rationality. The German state is unable to act in the interest of the great German nation because its intelligentsia have become enamored of English-style economic thinking. Finally, Weber’s third part of the lecture turns to the question of producing a proper ruling class that will be capable of escaping the iron-cage of economistic rationality.

In 28 pages we have Weber’s entire career: The germ of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a diagnosis and critique of anti-political, economic, bureaucratic rationality, and an insistence on responsible rulers who take seriously the task of “politics as a vocation.”

1. Catholic Poles v. Protestant Germans

Let’s start with section one, which spans the first twelve pages of the essay. The key topic of interest for Weber is the divergent mentalities Polish and German laborers bring to their work. He notices that throughout West Prussia German workers appear to be substantially wealthier than the Polish ones. How is that to be explained?

The two nationalities have competed for centuries on the same soil, and with essentially the same chances. What is it, then, that distinguishes them? One is immediately tempted to believe that psychological and physical racial characteristics make the two nationalities differ in their ability to adapt to the varying economic and social conditions of existence. This is indeed the explanation (5).

(To be clear, as Weber makes explicit in a footnote, he does not mean to make an overly biological argument about the distinction between the races. He distinguishes himself, in that regard, from the kind of scientific racism common in his day. That said, the influence of racial Darwinian themes in this analysis is unmistakable).

The key reason, Weber goes on, is a cultural difference between the two groups. The Germans embody a spirit of freedom, they are assertive and strive to be independent. It is for this reason that as soon as they can, they move to the cities where they can live free of quasi-feudal agricultural constraints:

Amongst the estate complexes of his homeland the world of the day-laborer contains only masters and servants, and his descendants will be faced forever after only with the prospect of toiling away on someone else’s land to the tolling of the estate bell. In this inarticulate, half-conscious urge towards far off places there lies hidden an element of primitive idealism. Anyone who cannot decipher this does not know the magic of freedom (8).

The Poles, on the other hand, appear content to live as serfs. They lack the “self-assertiveness” of their German rivals, and as such have accommodated themselves to a life of relatively impoverished servitude. They lack the German striving, the need for independence and freedom.

(Weber’s claim that the Catholic Poles simply have much lower life expectations, and are accordingly happy to “eat grass,” mirrors the kind of reasoning underlying early twentieth century American progressive/eugenic arguments against immigration. As Thomas Leonard points out, these arguments were full of assumptions about the Chinese laborer being content to live on rice alone in a manner no self-respecting American would do).

Weber notes that, in a sense, the Catholic Poles are winning! The Germans are emigrating out of West Prussia, and every year more Poles come in. This, again, is because they are much more willing accommodate themselves to the condition of low-paying, degrading labor than are their German competitors. The Polish serfish laborers and their capitalist landowning employers make a perfect pair.

All this strikes Weber as unacceptable. He demands that Germany close its eastern border with Poland, confiscate agricultural estates from the Pole-employing landowners, and repopulate the lands with German colonists:

From the standpoint of the nation, large-scale enterprises which can only be preserved at the expense of the German race deserve to go down to destruction. To leave them to their own devices means permitting unviable colonies of starving Slavs to come into existence by way of the gradual parceling-off of the estates (12).

All this should strike modern ears as eerily familiar. Weber’s position against (Catholic) Polish immigration is very much like the modern immigration restrictionist’s position against (Catholic) Hispanic immigration. Think how often we hear two lines in the American immigration debate: (1) Immigrants do jobs Americans are simply unwilling to do; and (2) Immigrants lack the ethos or cultural values that Americans possess.  

There’s a puzzle here: Weber and the contemporary restrictionist are PROUD of a national culture that is unwilling to do servile labor. That is what they take to be great about their nation. Yet at the same time, it is precisely this pride that leads their co-nationals to refuse to take up work they deem beneath them. Large capitalist firms step in and to employ the foreigner laborer that is willing to do the work.

There is something tragic, then, about the Weberian celebration of German freedom. It is that freedom that distinguishes the German from the serf. But it is also that love of freedom that leads to economic and cultural defeat. You might say that Weber believes the German state must force the German people to be free.

2. Nationalism Against Economic Rationality

This leads to the second portion of Weber’s lecture—his critique of economic rationality and defense of nationalism:

It is not this practical question of Prussian agrarian policy I want to discuss today. I would prefer to return to the fact that such a question arises at all in all our minds, to the fact that we consider that the German race should be protected in the east of the country, and that the state’s economic policies ought to rise to the challenge of defending it. What makes us feel we have a right to make this demand is the circumstance that our state is a nation state (13).

In the case of West Prussia, Weber thinks it is obvious that the state must step in to enforce a pro-German national agricultural policy. The market and the capitalist employers profit tremendously from the flow of low wage-earning Polish immigrants, who appear to be content to take degrading jobs. The interesting question for Weber is how it can be that this obvious political prescription has become so obscured. His explanation: “the economy way of looking at things” is to blame.

Modern economic rationality has destroyed the traditional recognition that economics must serve politics:

The science of political economy is a political science It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day politics of the persons who happen to be ruling at any given time, but the enduring power-political interests of the nation. For us the nation state is not something vague which, as some believe, is elevated ever higher, the more its nature is shrouded in mystical obscurity. Rather, it is the worldly organization of the nation’s power. In this nation state the ultimate criterion for economic policy, as for all others, is in our view ‘reason of state’ (16-7).

The economistic mode of rationalism has no way of theorizing the importance of the nation state. It has no grounds for making value judgments of partiality for one’s own people. It thinks only in terms of wealth production and distribution, it “consists in devising recipes for universal happiness … adding to the ‘balance of pleasure’ in human existence” (14).

German politics must reject a disenchanted economic science that aims at “breeding a soft, eudaemonistic outlook, in however spiritualized a form, behind the illusion of independent ‘socio-political’ ideals” (27).

Indeed, this mode of thinking hasn’t just corrupted economics, but all the academic disciplines. Weber attacks the rise of social history at the expense of political/military history, the economization of law, and the transformation of philosophy into physiology. I quote at length:

In every sphere we find that the economic way of looking at things is on the advance. Social policy has superseded politics at the forefront of thinking, just as economic power-relations have replaced legal relations, and cultural and economic history have ousted political history. In the outstanding works of our colleagues in history we find that, where once they told us about the warlike deeds of our ancestors, they expatiate today on the monstrous notion of ‘matriarchy’, while relegating to a subordinate clause the victory over the Huns on the Catalaunian Plain. … the economic way of looking at things has penetrated into jurisprudence itself, so that even in its innermost sanctum, the manuals of the Pandect Jurists, the spectre of economic thinking is beginning to stir … we economists have ‘come into fashion.’ When a way of looking at things breaks new ground so confidently, it is in danger of falling prey to certain illusions and of overestimating the significance of its own point of view … The broadening of the subject-matter of philosophical reflection—outwardly evident in the very fact that nowadays we find many of the old Chairs of Philosophy being given to outstanding physiologists (for example)—has led many of us laymen to believe that the old questions about the nature of human understanding are no longer the ultimate and central questions of philosophy (17-18).

Much of that polemic could be reproduced verbatim today in critiques of the disciplinary tyranny of economics within the academy. (Or in more polemical attacks on the transformation of history and legal education).

But this transformation is, once again, most damaging when it comes to politics. The German intelligentsia—gripped by economic rationality—is unable to make the decisions necessary to secure the greatness of the German people. The science of economics purports to be value-free, to speak only of laws and structural tendencies, not to impose normative values. But as everyone knows, that claim to neutrality is nonsensical. The new, subjective economics does bring with it a chain of grotesque moral commitments:

The criteria of value which political economists have naively identified or given prominence to have alternated between the technical economic problem of the production of goods and the problem of their distribution (‘social justice’). Yet, again and again both these criteria have been overshadowed by the recognition, in part unconscious, but nevertheless all-dominating, that a science concerned with human beings—and that is what political economy is—is concerned above all else with the quality of the human beings reared under those economic and social conditions of existence. … Even our highest, our ultimate ideals in this life change and pass away. It cannot be our ambition to impose them on the future. But we can want the future to recognize the character of its own ancestors in us. Through our work and our nature we want to be the forerunners of that future race (15).

There are two parts to this argument, which modern readers need not embrace in full. The first is the attack on economic rationality on grounds that it occludes genuine moral considerations while imposing instead ostensibly-non-moral criteria of efficiency, production, consumption, and equality. The second is that economic policy ought to be guided by considerations of national greatness and cultural excellence. I certainly share the dislike with liberal, economistic rationality, while rejecting Weber's overly-enthusiastic anti-moralism (though I think there is a sensible way of reading Weber that separates him more fully from Nietzschean themes. A proper, moralized political theory should have no trouble building considerations of national partiality into a explicitly normative philosophical position).

Still, what is undeniable here is a resonance with contemporary complaints about the tyranny of economic reasoning at the expense of genuinely political considerations. Weber does not mean to reject the use of market institutions, but he does wish to reject the thought that markets serve autonomous ends that cannot be directed by political control:

We do not mean, as some strange misunderstanding would have it, ‘help from the state’ rather than ‘self-help’, state regulation of economic life rather than the free play of economic forces. In using this slogan of ‘reason of state’ we wish to present the demand that the economic and political power-interests of our nation and their bearer, the German nation-state, should have the final and decisive say in all questions of German economic policy, including the questions of whether, and how far, the state should intervene in economic life, or of whether and when it is better for it to free the economic forces of the nation from their fetters and to tear down the barriers in the way of their autonomous development (17).

3. The Vocation of Political Rule

This leads to the third section of the lecture. How has it has come to pass that economic rationality has taken such hold over the German state, and how that rationality might be combated? His answer centers on the failure of the ruling political class:

We economic nationalists measure the classes who lead the nation or aspire to do so with the one political criterion we regard as sovereign. What concerns us is their political maturity, which is to say their grasp of the nation’s enduring economic and political power interests and their ability, in any given situation, to place these interests above all other considerations (20-21).

A nation needs a political ruling class because the mass of the people cannot be relied on to remember and commit to the existential questions of national sovereignty or political rule. With the exception of momentary war or crisis, the mass of the people are not interested in questions of reason-of-state, but are preoccupied with more mundane questions of economic wealth and inequality.

The trouble is that political leadership and economic dominance traditionally go together. This was fine for Germany throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the economically dominant Junkers (and their embodiment, Bismarck) brought the political instincts necessary for capable, national rule. Yet today, in a world of industrial, globalized, capitalism, it is clear that the time for Junker leadership has passed. The person of Bismarck again typifies that obsolescence. Seeing him today is like seeing a ghost from a past life. It is as if “a ghost had stepped down from a great era of the past and was moving about among a new generation, and through a world that had become alien to it” (23).

So if the Junkers are done, what is the new, leading political class? The first candidate is the middle class. Yet Weber insists that the bourgeoisie lacks “the maturity today to be the leading political class of the nation” (23). This is clear in their failure to establish a German empire, an obvious test of their capacity to govern with an eye toward national greatness. Why is the bourgeoisie so politically incapable?

The reason is to be found in its unpolitical past, in the fact that it was not possible to catch up on a century of missed political education in a single decade, and in the fact that rule by a great man is not always a means of educating the people politically. The vital question for the political future of the German bourgeoisie is whether it is too late for it to make up the lost ground. No economic factor can substitute for such education (25).

The proletariat is even less prepared to take up the work of political leadership. The English and French working class are in better shape, Weber claims, because of their history of organized struggle. But in Germany, the proletariat falls into crude, moralistic philistinism. The working class can only lead once it establishes an “aristocracy of labor” that can responsibly govern the German nation. (Think here, of course, of the contrast between the “ethic of conviction” and the “ethic of responsibility” made famous in “Politics as a Vocation”).

The tragedy of modern Germany is that no class seems capable of political leadership. The key task of political science and economics must therefore be “political education.” It is not enough to address questions of economic growth or wealth distribution. What is needed is a ruling class attuned to the core demand of national greatness. As Weber concludes in his stirring, tragic, German way:

Even in the face of the enormous misery among the masses of the nation which weighs so heavily on the sharpened social conscience of the new generation, we have to confess sincerely that it is our awareness of our responsibility before history that weighs even more heavily on us today. It is not given to our generation to see whether the fight we are engaged in will bear fruit, nor whether posterity will acknowledge us as its forefathers. We shall not succeed in exorcising the curse that hangs over us (that of being the belated offspring of a great, but past political epoch), unless we discover how to become something different: the precursors of an even greater epoch. Will that be our place in history? I do not know, and I will say only this: youth has the right to stand up for itself and for its ideals. Yet it is not years which make a man old. He is young as long as he is able to feel the great passions nature has implanted in us. … it is not the burden of thousands of years of glorious history that causes a great nation to grow old. It will remain young as long as it has the capacity and the courage to keep faith with itself and with the great instincts it has been given, and if its leading strata are able to raise themselves into the hard, clear air in which the sober work of German politics flourishes, an atmosphere which, however, is also filled with the earnest grandeur of national sentiment (27-8).

I have recently been increasingly struck by the degree to which this preoccupation with serious, political leadership dominates late nineteenth and early twentieth century thinking. I've blogged before about its various formulations in Gramsci (and here) (who cites and is clearly influenced by Weber's critique of economism) and Frank Knight (an important Weber translator). There are also important resonances with Friedrich Meinecke's conservative nationalism.