Weber was a democrat, in fact he supported the left leaning liberal party in
Germany, the
German Democratic Party (DDP) and was one of the author's of the Weimar
constitution. His use of language, however, was coloured by the dominant political
discourse of the time which, in our period, could not be viewed as politically
correct.
As far as the use of the term Herrenvolk is concerned,
it does not necessarily have the connotations associated with the Nazis and it
does
not necessarily imply racial superiority. It might simply be rendered the opposite
of "subjugated people".
Brad De Long wrote:
> I'm supposed to give a talk about "threats to American national
> economic power" at the end of March. Having little insightful to say,
> it struck me that I might as well teach my audience a little
> intellectual history and review how others have thought about the
> relationship between economic prosperity and national power and
> security in the past.
>
> One of my cases is going to be Max Weber. I would talk about Weber's
> belief that the ultimate aim of power is to shape the future of
> humanity:
>
> Future generations... would not hold the Danes, the Swiss, the
> Dutch, or the Norwegians responsible if world power--which in
> the last analysis means the power to determine the character of
> world culture in the future--were to be shared out, without a
> struggle, between the regulations of Russian officials on the one
> hand and the conventions of English speaking 'society' on the other,
> with perhaps a dash of Latin raison thrown in. They would hold us
> responsible, and quite rightly so, for we are a mighty state and can
> therefore, in contrast to those 'small' nations, throw our weight
> into the balance on this historical issue
> I would point out that all of us--no matter what our
> nationality--should get down on our knees and thank God daily that
> over the twentieth century the decisive shaper of world culture was
> not one of the... alternative "mighty states": Russian officials,
> Japanese honor-bound authorities, German... ahem.
>
> And I would say that we have to guard against the habits of thought
> into which Weber fell in his "brutal" Freiburg inaugural lecture, in
> which he said that:
>
> We do not have peace and human happiness to hand down to
> our descendants, but rather the eternal struggle to preserve
> and raise the quality of our national species. Nor should we
> indulge in the optimistic expectation that we shall have completed
> our task once we have made our economic culture as advanced as it
> can be, and that the process of selection through free and 'peaceful'
> economic competition will then automatically bring victory to the more
> highly developed type. Our successors will hold us answerable
> to history
> not primarily for the kind of economic organization we hand down to
> them, but for the amount of elbow-room in the world which we conquer
> and bequeath to them
> Because it really is--or ought to be--our task is to hand down peace
> and human happiness that will bring us *all*--in every nation--closer
> to utopia.
>
> But due to a misspent youth taking computer programming courses, I
> have no German. So I am working from Donald Speirs translation of
> _Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik_ in the 1994 CUP
> _Political Writings_.
>
> So here is my question: what, exactly, is the German that Spiers
> translates as *elbow-room*?
>
> And should I be suspicious of this translation as a whole?
>
> I am already somewhat puzzled by some aspects of it. For example,
> Speirs translates "Herrenvolk" as "nation of masters," and does not
> even mention the... alternative... translation. He says that "Weber's
> use of the term Herrenvolk ought not to be confused with the National
> Socialists' later misappropriation of Nietzschean vocabulary. Weber's
> usage does not have imperialist implications..." But this puzzles me
> too, for Weber says that it does have imperialist implications. He
> writes: "A master race--and only such a nation can and may engage in
> world politics--has no choice..."
>
> I think that Weber is arguing for parliamentary democracy by saying
> that only if each individual is a co-ruler--a Herr--can the nation's
> people be a master race--a Herrenvolk. It's a nice piece of
> intellectual judo: he is telling his authoritarian opponents who
> pride national power above all else that a master race must be a race
> of masters, and a nation with an authoritarian government is a nation
> not of masters, but of servile subjects or subjected slaves. But this
> intellectual judo move is hidden--and Weber's "rough edges" are filed
> off--by not giving Herrenvolk its... standard... translation.
>
> Brad DeLong
--
Rod Hay
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