Table Of ContentCAESARISM,
CHARISMA
*"° FATE
PETER BAEHR
HISTORICAL SOURCES
AND MODERN
- - — RESONANCES IN
T . • v r r C THE WORK OF
1 rv MAXWEBER
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Transaction Publishers
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Copyright © 2008 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008036038
ISBN: 978-1-4128-0813-2
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baehr, Peter.
Caesarism, charisma, and fate : historical sources and modern reso
nances in the work of Max Weber / Peter Baehr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-0813-2 (alk. paper)
1. Power (Social sciences) 2. Weber, Max, 1864-1920. 3. Au
thority. 4. Caesarism. 5. Gifts, Spiritual. 6. Charisma (Personality
trait) 7. Political sociology. I. Title.
JC330.B344 2008
303.3’3—dc22
2008036038
In "homage to Melvin Richter
for the gifts of his learning and friendship
Contents
Preface ix
1. Introduction 1
Part 1: From Caesarism to Charisma
2. Political Republicanism and the Advent of Caesarism 11
3. Caesarism and Charisma: From German Politics to 59
Universal Sociology
Part 2: Fate and Fate Communities
4. Fate 117
5. Communities of Fate and the SARS Emergency 139
in Hong Kong
6. Concluding Remarks 185
Appendix: Caesar in America 187
Bibliography 213
Index 241
Preface
In 1998, Transaction published a book with an obscure and pretentious
title. It was called Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study
in Republicanism and Caesarism. I was the author. The title—chosen by
me against all sensible advice—was oblique because the book seemed
to be about the demise of Republican Rome. In fact, it explored three
related themes: the demonic reputation of Caesar in political republican
thought; the emergence of the concept of Caesarism in the nineteenth
céntury and its decline during the twentieth; and the role played by Max
Weber in reshaping the language of Caesarism in his theory of modern
politics. Social scientists and students of Max Weber, misled by the title,
ignored the book.
Part 1 of Caesarism, Charisma and Fate reprises that earlier study,
though in a streamlined and updated form. I am grateful to Irving Louis
Horowitz, chairman of the board of Transaction, for giving me another
chance to present my arguments. They center on Weber’s creative re
shaping of the social and political vocabulary of his day, in particular
the language of leadership. Part 1 of this book—the larger part of it—is
mostly historical in character, transporting readers back to the era when,
and before, Weber wrote. It seeks to explain Weber’s rhetorical strategies
within the contexts of his own age. Part 2 has a different goal. It employs
and develops Weber’s ideas in order to understand our own time. My
subject is the idea of “fate,” a notion that Weber characteristically em
ployed in a nuanced and multi-leveled way. Risk and trust are, today, the
subjects of major debate in the social sciences. Fate is an unfashionable
term. I believe that some of its implications are worth preserving. “Fate”
offers a sense of human pathos, predicament and tragedy that most social
science concepts are singularly ill-suited to evoke. And, as I will show in
my discussion of “community of fate,” it is fully capable of being applied
sociologically to certain kinds of social disaster.
Parts 1 and 2, it will be plain, are distinct and autonomous studies.
As such, they can be read separately according to the reader’s predilec
tion. Yet while divergent in orientation, both components of the book do
IX
Caesarism, Charisma and Fate
X
thematically overlap. Weber’s notion of fate (traced and adapted in part
2) also plays out in his theory of politics (the subject of part 1) when he
argues that only two basic shapes are possible in a mass polity. A nation
can either institute parliamentary institutions that encourage responsible
leadership, or it can dispense with such arrangements and, by design or
default, promote reckless authoritarianism. The choice ultimately is ours.
But the choice itself is situated in the nature of the society and polity we
inhabit, our obdurate present, the fate of the times. Equally, if Weber’s
ideas about fate resound throughout this book, so too does the issue of
political and social language. To grasp the dynamism of Weber’s social
and political thought entails paying close attention to the vocabulary he
employed. By the same token, to understand the emotions unleashed by a
social disaster - such as the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)
crisis in Hong Kong during 2003—requires taking seriously the tropes
and metaphors it generates. One especially significant idiom to describe
disease epidemics is battle imagery. Many have criticized it as demean
ing and callous. A Weberian account offers a very different perspective,
furnishing a way of understanding, rather than excoriating, the codes
through which social action is articulated in conditions of distress.
No attempt is made here to provide a comprehensive survey of Weber’s
ideas, even his ideas of charisma and fate. Notably, I desist from providing
yet one more account of charisma within Weber’s sociology of religion.
My focus is on charisma within Weber’s sociology of Herrschaft (ruler-
ship, domination); and, more especially, some of its roots in the political
idea of Caesarism. The book’s purview is thus limited to selected themes
that have been either overlooked or deserve further elucidation.
Weber scholars will notice, and some will be irritated by the fact, that
I have relied principally on textual sources that predate the German criti
cal edition of Weber’s work, the Max Weber- Gesamtausgabe (MWG).
These are the sources I had closest to hand, marked-up as a result of three
decades of use. I did, as the footnotes attest, consult the MWG on many
occasions (Gordon Wells and I worked extensively with it in our edition
of Max Weber: The Russian Revolutions). For the discussion of Caesa
rism and Herrschaft, however, the older sources are perfectly adequate,
with some supplementation. The Edith Hanke edition of Economy and
Society (Weber [1922] 2005a) that deals with my topic has an informative
introduction, examining relevant debates of Weber’s time, and a useful
apparatus of notes. But the texts themselves are, in the main, the same
ones I found in earlier German editions of Weber’s work.
