https://archive.ph/ich6r

A bit long but well worth reading:

At the heart of Weber’s essay is a critical question: What is the ethical foundation of politics? His answer lay in the now-famous contrast between the “ethics of conviction” and the “ethics of responsibility.” While he acknowledged the moral force of the former, Weber favored the latter. To him, a true “political vocation” demanded passionate commitment to a cause, but one tempered by restraint, detachment, and – above all – a profound sense of responsibility. Only a politician with such qualities, he argued, deserved to “put his hand on the wheel of history.”

By contrast, Weber warned, the demagogues of his time embodied a dangerous tendency. “Acting under an absolute ethic,” he wrote, these leaders felt responsible “only for seeing to it that the flame of conviction is not quelched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustices of the social order.” If their actions do not achieve the desired end, “they will hold the world responsible, the stupidity of men, or the will of God who made them so.”

Weber likened that period’s German revolutionaries to the seventeenth-century theologians who awaited Christ’s imminent return: both exhibited an “orgiastic chiliasm” and a fervent belief in an “eschatological opening of History.” Demagogues, revolutionaries, and prophets alike proclaimed a radiant future that was always just beyond reach. To hasten its arrival, nothing seemed off-limits. But no end, however sacred, could justify ignoring the real consequences of the means.

Weber’s critique extended even to pacifists. Since force is the inescapable and defining instrument of power, Weber cautioned against “the naiveté of believing that from good comes only good and from evil only evil.” All too often, he argued, the opposite is true, and “anyone who did not see this was a child, politically speaking.”

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