So Weber was speaking up for an ethic of responsibility, which recognized from the start the deficiencies of others and evaluated actions in terms of likely consequences. Yet he also worried about a politics focused purely on immediate effects without an underlying cause to give it meaning. His ideal was one in which the ethic of ultimate ends and responsibility come together in “a genuine man—a man who can have the ‘calling for politics.’ ” Here he was looking for the charismatic figure, a hero as well as a leader, who would not “crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.” He was not optimistic: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.” He urged a politics based on “both passion and perspective,” for “man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.”14
Weber’s distrust of actions based on purity of motive rather than assessment of consequences reflected confidence in the ability to assess consequences and the role of scientific research in facilitating such assessments. Social action might always remain something of a gamble, but the odds could be shortened by formulating a reasonable hypothesis on what might be expected from alternative courses of action. Without this confidence, how was one proposed course of action to be assessed against another?
Tolstoy
If Weber had one figure in mind as representative of the ethic of ultimate ends it was Count Leo Tolstoy. The author was addressing all the issues connected with science, bureaucracy, and modernism that bothered him, but from a completely different perspective. At one point, Weber even thought about writing a book on Tolstoy as the great idealist of his time. Tolstoy, Weber allowed, was at least consistent, if “nothing else,” in opposing both war and revolution, but that left him irreconcilable not only with war but with the world and the benefits of culture.15 The preoccupation with Tolstoy was evident when Weber took aim at Tolstoy’s antirationalist and antiscientific views in “Science as a Vocation.” In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber picked on Tolstoy’s favorite text, the Sermon on the Mount, when mocking the ethic of love which said “Resist not him that is evil with force.”
This was Tolstoy’s creed. Through a series of spiritual crises he had come to reject the pomp and privilege of the Orthodox Church and devise his own unique form of Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount and the principle of turning the other cheek was at its core. This led to a set of rules revolving around living in peace, not hating, not resisting evil, renouncing violence in all circumstances, and avoiding lust and swearing. If only these rules could be embraced universally, there would be no more wars nor armies, nor indeed police and courts. He challenged established ecclesiastical and secular power but was also against violent revolution as immoral and futile. He rejected the urban for the rural, and the generation of wealth for communion with nature.
We have already met Tolstoy in his role as an antistrategist. The well-springs are the same. He was deeply skeptical about the ease with which deliberate causes could be linked with specific effects and therefore disdained those who claimed this as their expertise. He despised most of all, noted Berlin, “experts, professionals, men who claim special authority over other men.” In War and Peace, he had mocked the presumption of those who claimed that a great general’s act of will, expressed through orders delivered down the chain of command, could affect the actions of large numbers of men and so turn history. Generals and revolutionary intellectuals could claim to be following a scientific strategy, but they were deluded because they had become separated from and did not understand the ordinary people upon whom their schemes depended. Change, for better or worse, was the result of countless decisions of individuals caught up in events. Unfortunately, ordinary people were ignorant and uneducated, connected perhaps through their common feelings and values but unable to make sufficient sense of their plight or come together to create a new world.
Tolstoy might be of the Enlightenment when it came to his search for truth and an intense, gnawing belief that with a determined enough search it could be found, but he was also of the counter-Enlightenment in so many key respects, horrified by modernization and an exaggerated confidence in science, by efforts at political reform that lost sight of what he saw to be the fundamentals of the good life. He could not be “fitted into the public movements of his own, or indeed any other, age. The only company to which he belongs is the subversive one of questioners to whom no answer has been, nor is likely to be given.”16 Gallie observed, with understatement, that organized action was not Tolstoy’s “forte” and that he was “distressingly weak on the practical side.”17 Even his own family was far from convinced about his new way of life.18 What he offered, and in his case this was not trivial, was the power of example and many books and articles.
His uncompromising pacifism, challenge to tsarism, and exposés of the sufferings of the poor meant that his core messages were received loud and clear, and his effectiveness as a propagandist for his own views was enhanced by not only the way he lived but his literary gifts. His polemics included vivid descriptions of the struggles for existence in the city slums, the routine cruelties of army life, and the aristocracy’s capacity for self-deception. His analyses of the iniquities of militarism and myopic patriotism were laced with sardonic wit and at times prophetic insight. He described the war fever of the future, as priests “pray on behalf of murder” and newspaper editors “set to work to arouse hatred and murder,” and described how thousands of “simple, kindly folk” will be “torn from peaceful toil” and trudge off to war, until these poor souls “without knowing why, will murder thousands of others whom they had never before seen, and who had done nor could do them any wrong.”19 In this respect, war for Tolstoy was an extreme version of a much more general malaise, of unnatural divisions within humanity, which it both reflected and aggravated. And to explain how men could allow this to happen to them he deployed his own version of false consciousness—men had been “hypnotized” not only by their governments but, most tragically of all, by each other. Only by exposing the myth of patriotism could the spell be broken. At the heart of his antistrategic vision was the belief that divisions within human society were unnatural, and so if they were healed there would be no need for struggle and conflict.
In 1882, Tolstoy participated in the census of Moscow. He wrote an article that year, asking the “What Is to Be Done?” question that Russians often seemed to ask themselves at this time.20 Moscow had experienced a period of fast growth, swelled by immigration from the countryside, with all the associated problems of overcrowding, poverty, crime, disease, and exploitation. The census, he explained, was a “sociological investigation.” He added that, uniquely for a science, sociology’s object was the “happiness of the people.”21 Unfortunately, despite this objective, whatever “laws” might be elucidated by gathering information, and whatever long-term benefits came through following these laws, little would happen of immediate benefit to the poor people whose lives were being reported. A compelling description of a wretched state of affairs could be an essential first step to action: “All the wounds of society, the wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance—all will be laid bare.” But it was not enough. When encountering someone hungry and in rags, insisted Tolstoy, it was “more moment to succor him than to make all possible investigations.” Instead of scientific detachment and a hurried moving on from one sad case to another, he urged forming relations with the poor and needy.
The true aim should be to break down “the barriers which men have erected between themselves.”22 This meant rejecting charity, which did no more than assuage the guilty consciences of the elite while reinforcing divisions. All should work together to heal the wounds of society. His call was to community and fraternity, which required like-minded people to reach out to the poor and oppressed. The benefits would be both material and spiritual. The alternative he warned was class warfare: �
�It need not be thus, and it should not, for this is contrary to our reason and our heart, and it cannot be if we are living people.”
Unfortunately, as he soon discovered, where he led few followed. Furthermore, as he explored the under-life of the city, the more he concluded that have-nots were as corrupted by city life as the haves. The issue was not just the scale of the problem but the sort of society Moscow had become. He still could find some nobility among the poor, but when it came to drinkers and prostitutes he could make as much sense of them as they could of him. This was an alien culture, resistant to his overtures, surviving in ways that he found disagreeable. The more he explored city life the more his previous hopes appeared naïve. Eventually one night he stopped researching. He felt foolish and impracticable, like a physician who has uncovered the sore of a sick man but must recognize that “his remedy is good for nothing.” He stopped taking notes. “I asked no questions, knowing that nothing would come of this.”23 The answer to “What Is to Be Done?” appeared to be “Nothing.”
While he still blamed the excesses of his class for social divisions, he now saw urban life as the problem. Cities were venal and corrupt places, beyond reform. The cause went even deeper—the fault lay in the whole path humankind had taken in pursuit of economic development. Money had been allowed to get in the way of proper human relations. They could only be restored on the land where money could be irrelevant and people need not be alienated from each other and the beauty of nature. He set an example, returning to his estate in Yasnaya Polyana where he sought to create his own rural utopia, with but one garment, no money, and fulfillment through manual labor. With this complete retreat from modernity, Tolstoy insisted that he was living the only life that could be true to his faith. His stance was passive and uncooperative, but there was no direct action, for that would have involved both a degree of organization and a presumption of human agency.
“The Anarchists are right in everything,” he wrote in 1890, “in the negation of the existing order, and in the assertion that, without Authority, there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions.” Their one mistake, he continued, was to think that this could come about through a revolution. It would only come about by there being “more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power … There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.”24
Jane Addams
In May 1896, Tolstoy received a visitor at Yasnaya Polyana: Miss Jane Addams of Chicago. The daughter of a wealthy Illinois farmer, Addams was then in her mid-30s, and on her way to becoming one of the most admired and influential women in America. Her fame rested on the Hull House Settlement, founded in Chicago in 1889. This was modeled on the Toynbee Settlement in the East End of London, which she had visited a few years earlier. The underlying concept was that the educated and privileged should settle among the poor and deprived to the benefit of both. At Hull House, which at its peak was composed of thirteen buildings, could be found shelter, facilities for bathing, and a playground. In addition to opportunities to learn about and enjoy the so-called high culture of art, literature, and music, there were guest speakers and opportunities for debate, research, and campaigning.
Addams had read many of Tolstoy’s books. She described What to Do?, published in the United States in 1887, as the source of her view that “only he who literally shares his own shelter and food with the poor, can claim to have served them.”25 The influence was evident, to the point of the great man being depicted in a mural in the Hull House dining room. As a strong pacifist and Christian with doubts about organized religion, she also explicitly embraced Tolstoy’s commitment not to resist evil. She declared herself “philosophically convinced of the futility of opposition, who believe that evil can only be overcome with good and cannot be opposed.” Poverty, disease, and exploitation were a challenge for society as a whole and must be resolved through forms of reconciliation before they led to conflicts that could tear society apart. She described the Gospel as “an outward symbol of fellowship, some bond of peace, some blessed spot where the unity of the spirit might claim right of way over all differences.”26
Nonetheless, her encounter with Tolstoy was disappointing. He paid little attention to her description of Hull House while “glancing distrustfully at the sleeves of my travelling gown.” The amount of cloth this involved, he declared, was sufficient to clothe many young girls. Was this not a “barrier to the people”? And, when discovering that she had a farm in Illinois, was she not an “absentee landlord”? He suggested she would do more use “tilling her own soil” than by adding to the crowded city. The charges were unjust, but bothered her sufficiently to determine to spend two hours each day at the bakery on her return to Chicago. She tried but failed. This was not the best use of her time.27 This small incident revealed why she could not be a true follower of Tolstoy.
Tolstoy found the division of labor a crime against nature; Addams accepted that it was unavoidable. Her whole project was about getting people to accept the logic of inter-dependence. Whereas Tolstoy gave up on the city because it forced divisions among humanity, Addams believed that the city could and must be made to work for all its inhabitants. The fundamental point of principle Addams, and other progressives, shared with Tolstoy was a belief that social divisions were unnatural and could and must be transcended. But whereas Tolstoy believed in a world in which men, the land, and the spirit joined in unity, Addams sought to create a world without struggle in one of the least likely cities of the world, Chicago.
Chicago was then the world’s fifth largest—after London, New York, Paris, and Berlin. It had taken shape far more recently than the others. The combined effects of the railroads, the city’s position as the commercial and business center of the Midwest, and massive immigration had resulted in the population doubling from five hundred thousand in 1880 to over a million in 1890, and to double again to well over two million by 1910. Some 60 percent of the population had been born abroad, and all but 20 percent were of recent immigrant stock. Germans, Poles, Russians, Italians, and Irish all formed distinctive and self-conscious communities, often in uneasy relationships with each other. After a great fire in 1871 destroyed the old wooden buildings, the city was largely rebuilt in stone and steel.28 Chicago invented the skyscraper. Money went into the arts, parks, and a brand new university, paid for by John D. Rockefeller. Life in the city was tough and conditions were dire. The “first in violence,” wrote radical journalist Lincoln Steffens in 1904, “deepest in dirt; loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, new; an overgrown gawk of a village, the teeming tough among cities. Criminally it was wide open; commercially it was brazen; and socially it was thoughtless and raw.”29 For his novel The Jungle, Upton Sinclair went undercover in the stockyards to expose the awful circumstances of immigrant workers in the meatpacking industry.
Max Weber visited Chicago in the fall of 1904 en route to a major scientific congress in St. Louis. He described it, in a striking metaphor, as being “like a human being with its skin peeled off and whose intestines are seen at work.”30 He toured the stockyards, watching the automated process whereby an “unsuspecting bovine” entered the slaughtering area, was hit by a hammer and collapsed, gripped by an iron clamp, hoisted up and started on a journey which saw workers “eviscerate and skin it.” It was possible, he observed, to “follow a pig from the sty to the sausage and the can.” At the time of his visit the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workman’s Union were smarting after a defeat in a strike aimed at getting the stockyards unionized. Weber, apparently with a degree of exaggeration, described the aftermath: “Masses of Italians and Negroes as strike-breakers; daily shootings with dozens of dead on both sides; a streetcar was overturned and a dozen women were squashed because a non-union man had sat in it; dynamite threats against the Elevated Railway, and one of its cars was actually derailed and plunged into the river.”31 He also visited the Hull House Settlement, about which his wife
Marianne wrote in glowing terms: “It includes a day nursery, accommodations for 30 women workers, a sports facility for young people, a large concert hall with a stage, an instructional kitchen, a kindergarten, rooms for all kinds of instruction in needlework and manual tasks, etc. During the winter 15,000 people of both sexes come here to receive instruction, inspiration, counsel, and enjoy themselves.”32
Addams had inserted herself and Hull House into a maelstrom of urban divisions, a result of the persistent issue of race and the treatment of blacks, agrarian decline and urban rise, inter-ethnic tensions, and constant clashes between capital and labor. She attached herself to Progressivism, the major liberal project in the United States at the time. The Progressives saw the social problems of the time as the core challenge for government and feared that without urgent action they would lead to fractures that would be impossible to heal. Government must be a unifying force, above sectional interests, on behalf of society as a whole. In this Addams was a democratic optimist, convinced of the capacity of ordinary people to play constructive roles in civic affairs, with their own ideas on how to bring order and decency into their lives. She contrasted this to what she considered the naïve view, attributed to the English Fabians, “that somewhere in Church or State are a body of authoritative people who will put things to rights as soon as they really know what is wrong.”33 By making great art and big ideas available to ordinary people, she believed that they would be better able to develop themselves and make informed choices in their lives.
Strategy Page 43