DANIEL BELL
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"decorated" with the name of "revolution."
It
is a "romanticism of the
intellectually interesting," an "emptiness devoid of all feeling of ob–
jective responsibility." And he detested the
"Weltanschauungs-politi–
cians ... windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon
themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations."
In my early book,
Marxian Socialism in the United States
(1952), I
adopted Weber's framework in an effort to understand radical poli–
tics . The Bolshevik, as chiliast or eschatologist, I wrote, is neither
in
nor
of
this world, and therefore takes no moral responsibility for the
actions of bourgeois society; he follows an ethic of ultimate ends.
The trade-union movement, having to deal with the day-to-day,
slow boring of the hard boards, necessarily
is
in and of the world,
and follows an ethic of responsibility. The Socialist (and for me Nor–
man Thomas was the exemplar) was
in, but not
tifthe world, and was
trapped by his commitment to moral purity and political
compromise.
Like Weber- as much for reasons of my own temperament as
for the "early sorrows" of politics - I opted for the ethic of responsibil–
ity. In his youth, Weber had struggled with the ideas of the early
nineteenth-century American Unitarian minister and pacifist, Wil–
liam Ellery Channing, who had influenced Weber's mother's think–
ing. As he came to reject any ethical absolutisms, he wrote, in a
youthful letter: "The matter does not appear to me to be so desperate
if one does not ask too exclusively: 'Who is morally right and who is
morally wrong?' But if one asks rather: 'Given the existing conflict,
how can I solve it with the least internal and external damage for all
concerned?' " And this is the view I espoused.
Such a standpoint risks opportunism, yet the principle of com–
promise in politics is primary because, as Weber insisted, "the decis–
ive means for politics is violence," and those who resort to violence in
the belief that such actions are justified have to be prepared as well to
accept the consequences, "the diabolic forces lurking in all violence."
Those thoughts, those turbulences, are compressed into the last
ten pages of Weber's essay. What stirred me was the way in which,
after almost forty pages of didactic and even dry distinctions about
party systems and types of political roles, a personal passion had
burst through the lecture to end in those tormented, troubled con–
cerns and the final stoical words.
I had long felt that some hidden springs of tension lay behind
those last remarks, and the passage that long stayed in my mind,
