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How can one reconcile politics and ethics, or, more realistically, manage the tension between them? This the question the German sociologist Max Weber grappled with in “Politics as a Vocation,” a lecture he delivered before the Free Students’ Association on January 28, 1919, during the short-lived Munich Revolution. More than a century later, his essay still serves as a stark reminder of the overlapping dangers of demagoguery, charismatic leadership, and ideological fanaticism.

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.” From that paradox, he drew a broader lesson: nowhere was the “tragic warp” of the human condition more obvious than in politics. For that reason, he viewed politics as the “slow drilling of hard boards.”

But while Weber did not offer prescriptions for salvation or happiness, nor did he advocate passivity, conservatism, or reactionary politics. Instead, he proposed a passionate yet realistic way to defend humanity’s highest values. This, for him, was the essence of the “ethics of responsibility.”

The unnamed demagogues, revolutionaries, and pacifists Weber criticized in his lecture – the standard-bearers of the “ethics of conviction” – were Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Kurt Eisner, leader of the Munich Revolution and then head of Bavaria’s revolutionary government. Attendees recalled Weber citing them by name, yet he omitted them from the printed version, which was published months after the revolution collapsed.

Weber also left another character unnamed in his lecture: the “pure type” of politician who embodied the “ethics of responsibility.” That character was none other than Weber himself.

Weber’s Secret Passion

Weber was 54 when he delivered his Munich lecture. By then, he was widely respected as a sociologist and social philosopher, with a monumental – though still largely unpublished – body of work. He had come to Munich to resume academic life after years of forced withdrawal due to a long and painful depression.

His political stance at the time defied easy classification. Like many of his contemporaries, Weber was an enthusiastic supporter of World War I. “No matter what the outcome, this war is great and wonderful,” he wrote in August 1914. Notably, his support was driven not by pan-German romanticism but by realism.

According to Weber, Germany had an unavoidable geopolitical destiny: while Switzerland could be the guardian of “freedom and democracy” and of “much more intimate and eternal cultural values,” Germany had no choice but to assert its power against Tsarist Russia and Anglo-American hegemony.

As the philosopher Ernst Bloch later recalled, Weber dressed in uniform every Sunday. He longed to serve at the front, but his contribution took another form: he devoted himself, with the same disciplined intensity that he put into his scholarship, to running the military hospitals in Heidelberg.

Before long, however, Weber’s enthusiasm gave way to disillusionment. The Kaiser’s political, diplomatic, and military strategies struck him as not only wrong but spectacularly stupid. What he had defended as a necessary, defensive war against Russian imperialism had transformed into a reckless expansionist enterprise spearheaded by military “madmen” and their industrial allies.

Weber denounced Germany’s annexationist policies in Belgium and correctly predicted that submarine attacks on civilian ships would draw the United States into the war. In his view, no political leader was equal to the moment: not Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom he despised, nor the succession of chancellors who capitulated to the military’s arrogance. “There is not a single statesman, just one, to manage the situation! And to think that this man who does not exist is indispensable,” he wrote in 1915 to his old friend, the pastor and liberal politician Friedrich Naumann.

For a time, Weber even believed that he could be such a statesman. In 1916, he went to Berlin to try to put his “hand on the wheel of history,” but his efforts came to nothing. Neither his forecasts of the war’s economic consequences nor his plans to act as Germany’s informal representative in Poland – granting that occupied country a measure of autonomy – received any notice. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything in it for me,” he complained. Even his most devoted friends, such as the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, worried that his political pursuits were a distraction from his academic work.

Most of all, Weber regretted the futility of being a vicarious politician. Although he confessed to being “fed up with bursting into people’s offices to ‘do something’,” he still held onto hope: “Everyone knows that, if they need me, I will always be at hand.”

Politics at that time, Weber believed, had a single overriding purpose: to secure Germany’s future by pursuing peace. But he did not support peace at any price – least of all the humiliating settlement that, in his view, the pacifists were proposing. The republic, he believed, could survive only if peace preserved its dignity.

What Weber envisioned instead was a constitutional, republican alternative that rejected both pan-German militarism and social revolution. Since the Russian Revolution of 1905, and especially after the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, Weber had written extensively about socialism, dismissing it as politically and practically unworkable. He saw no plausible path by which the utopian vision of The Communist Manifesto could be realized.

Although politics was Weber’s secret passion, and remained so for the rest of his life, a political role continued to elude him. Unable to advise, influence, command, or directly shape events, he continued to teach while devoting himself to his monumental 1920 book Sociology of Religion.

A Prophet Without Followers

Young people gave Weber hope, but could he provide them with clarity amid the turmoil they were living through? Two years before delivering “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber presided over seminars at Lauenstein Castle in Lower Saxony that were attended by prominent writers of various political persuasions and a circle of students with liberal, socialist, and pacifist tendencies. As his wife Marianne later recounted in her comprehensive biography, those gatherings became a rehearsal for the generational conflict that would soon spill out of the lecture hall and into the streets of Munich.

Among the young men who attended Weber’s seminars was the intense, tormented poet and playwright Ernst Toller. A severely wounded veteran of the Great War, Toller had moved between psychiatric hospitals and prison cells on account of his pacifist militancy. His concern, as he later wrote in his memoir, went “beyond the sins of the Kaiser or electoral reform,” the topics Weber addressed. He and his comrades wanted nothing less than to “create a new world, to change the existing order, to change the hearts of men.”

The students, Marianne Weber recalled, respected her husband’s “controlled ethos” and his “sober incorruptibility,” yet they bristled at “that scientific mind which was incapable of offering a simple way to solve problems and which asked itself about every ‘social ideal’ by what means and at what price it could be achieved.”

But Weber did not despair, urging his students to “crack the hard nuts” of scientific work and pursue knowledge of themselves and the world through objective data rather than through “revelations.” He did not believe in social prophecy. Yet, as Marianne observed, he felt a deep kinship not with the misunderstood fathers of science but with the biblical prophet Jeremiah – a “titan of invective” who denounced his king and people alike. With no apostles at his side and no hope of success, Weber pressed on, driven only by the righteousness of his criticism. “He was enveloped,” Marianne recalled, “by the pathos of inner solitude.”

Where did this tragic realism come from? From an early age, Weber knew he was immune to the spell and comfort of religion or its ideological substitutes. He understood that spell well enough to make it the subject of some of his greatest works, but his interests drove him in the opposite direction, toward the scientific work of demystifying the world.

In Weber’s universe, there was no room for illusions or simplifications. His concept of “ideal types” offered a framework for understanding economic systems, legal institutions, religious ethics, and the sources of political domination. But if anything defined the human condition, it was the inevitability of conflict. Faced with this harsh and irreducible reality, Weber regarded politics as the most noble vocation, for no other pursuit touched the tragic core of life so deeply. At its highest level, political action could elevate existence itself, shaping its moral quality.

But the man who arrived in Munich in November 1918 discovered that the very students to whom he had once preached the “ethics of responsibility” at Lauenstein Castle were now following Eisner – a charismatic leader animated by the “ethics of conviction,” a demagogue drawn straight from Weber’s own pages.

From Hope to Despair

The Munich Revolution unfolded from November 1918 to May 1919 in three escalating stages – social-democratic, anarchist, and communist – before being crushed by a nationalist and antisemitic backlash that ultimately gave rise to the Nazi Party.

It began after Germany’s defeat in the Great War. The exaltation of 1914, the patriotic fervor, and the intoxication of promised glory had by then given way to rationing, hunger, disease, and death. Nearly two million German soldiers had been killed, with more than four million wounded and another million taken prisoner. Bolshevik Russia was already out of the war under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Germany’s fate now rested with France, Britain, and the US.

In Weimar, a republic was proclaimed on November 9 under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). But parliamentary democracy was an intolerable outcome for the revolutionaries who aspired to emulate – and ultimately surpass – Lenin’s achievement. Uprisings soon broke out in several ports and cities.

In Berlin, Liebknecht and Luxemburg founded the Spartacus League with the goal of creating a free socialist republic. On January 15, both were murdered by soldiers loyal to Gustav Noske, whose disciplined and ferocious forces included thousands of paramilitary volunteers (Freikorps), many of them hardened veterans of Germany’s elite stormtrooper units.

By then, however, a different kind of revolution had already prevailed in Munich. In November 1918, the Bavarian monarchy collapsed in just five days, brought down by a largely peaceful mobilization of tens of thousands of workers and soldiers. The movement was led, improbably, by Eisner – a 51-year-old Jewish intellectual and editor.

Imprisoned in early 1918 for his militant pacifism and released that October, Eisner emerged as the hero of the moment. His speeches in Munich’s squares, auditoriums, assemblies, and beer halls electrified “the masses” – a central term in both the vocabulary and vision of the revolution, though in reality those mobilized masses amounted to no more than 10% of the population. On November 8, pending parliamentary elections, the Provisional National Council declared Eisner the first minister-president of the People’s State of Bavaria.

Gustav Landauer, Eisner’s friend and collaborator, described him as a “modest, pure, honorable man, who has earned his living as a precarious writer” and who suddenly became “the spiritual leader of Germany by the mere fact that this courageous Jew is a man of spirit.” One militant worker echoed the sentiment: “He is the sword of the revolution, he has overthrown the twenty-two kingdoms of Germany, he is our brilliant leader; I will defend him to the death.” Despite his self-deprecating sense of humor, Eisner himself adopted a messianic tone:

“The world seems torn to pieces, lost in the abyss. Suddenly, in the midst of darkness and despair, trumpets sound announcing a new world, a new humanity, a new freedom.”

The sudden emergence of a revolutionary government caught nearly everyone by surprise. Its impact was immediate: Eisner championed women’s suffrage and an eight-hour workday, while workers’ councils led by intellectuals rallied to his side, along with soldiers recently returned from the front.

But Eisner’s government was met with fierce resistance. The centrist and conservative parties, the bureaucracy, the middle classes, the mainstream press, Catholic clergy and other religious groups (including the Jewish community), the ultra-nationalist brotherhoods, many university teachers and students, the diplomatic missions of Germany’s allies, and most Bavarian farmers all regarded the new regime as an intolerable aberration.

Almost overnight, the peaceful and cultivated Munich became a stage on which the twentieth century was rehearsing its future. Prominent intellectuals, writers, and bohemians joined the government, alongside economists such as Edgar Jaffé, Lujo Brentano, and Otto Neurath, and pedagogues like F.W. Foerster, all of whom were convinced that the revolution would mark the dawn of a new era.

The city became a crucible. Spartacist revolutionaries mingled with Lenin’s agents, while future Nazis like Rudolf Hess and Ernst Röhm cut their political teeth. Nuncio Eugenio Pacelli – the future Pope Pius XII – sent reports back to the Vatican. Writers and thinkers like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victor Klemperer, Martin Buber, and Lion Feuchtwanger witnessed the turmoil firsthand. And on the margins, a 29-year-old failed painter and embittered veteran named Adolf Hitler drifted through rallies and barracks, searching for an outlet for his rage.

Violence, however, was slow to erupt. When Weber delivered his lecture on “Politics as a Vocation” on January 28, barely 11 weeks had passed since Eisner’s rise to power. The revolution was still searching for direction, and the republican order was hanging by a thread.

In Weber’s view, Eisner’s government was a disaster. Before beginning his lecture, Weber declared, “This does not deserve the honorable name of revolution: it is a bloody carnival.” Among those listening were students who would go on to leave their own mark on history: the philosopher Karl Löwith; Max Horkheimer, a co-founder of the Frankfurt School; and Carl Schmitt, who would become one of Nazism’s chief theoreticians.

The Bloody Carnival

In Munich, Weber confronted the “Aleph of the century”: a country in turmoil, a polarized and feverish city, a charismatic demagogue in decline, a weakened parliament, a revolution rushing toward its apotheosis, and a military-led nationalist backlash that was rapidly gaining momentum. He was horrified.

The convergence of historical upheaval and personal crisis gave his words the gravity of prophetic revelation. His rejection of the present mirrored his anxiety about the future, as he became convinced that the fate of Germany and Europe would be decided there and then. Distilling this moment, “Politics as a Vocation,” though intended to address immediate political circumstances, transcended its time and became a defining text of modern liberalism.

Admonishing his young revolutionary listeners, Weber spoke as a prophet-scholar crying out in the wilderness: “Whoever seeks the salvation of his soul and that of others should not do so by the path of politics, whose tasks are very different and can only be accomplished by force.” His critique of the “ethics of conviction” was rooted in the recent outbursts of political violence:

“Are we not seeing that the Bolshevik ideologues and the Spartacists produce the same results as those of any military dictator precisely because they use this means of politics? How does the government of the councils of workers and soldiers differ from that of any ruler of the old regime if not in the person of the one who holds power and in his amateurism? How do the attacks of most representatives of (supposedly new) ethics on their adversaries differ from the attacks made by any other demagogue?”

While the Russian Bolsheviks had won, the Spartacists in Berlin had failed in their bid for power. In Munich, however, the “amateur” Eisner stood at the helm. The “attacks” Weber mentioned were ones he had endured. On November 4, 1918, he was shouted down at a rally by two furious representatives of “the new ethics” (the literati, as he mockingly called them): the anarchist Erich Mühsam and the German-Russian Leninist Max Levien. He exclaimed,

“Will it be said that they are distinguished by their noble intention! Well, but what we are talking about here is the means used, and the adversaries being fought also claim for themselves, with total subjective honesty, the nobility of their ultimate intentions.”

Although he planned to write a “Sociology of Revolution” – a project he never completed – Weber used his lecture to trace what he saw as a downward spiral occurring before his eyes. Once leaders like Eisner unleash popular passions, they quickly lose control. However noble their ideals, their actions rest on the apparatus they create, and that apparatus is composed not of pure souls but of “the red guards, the rogues, and the agitators,” who inevitably demand their rewards:

“In the conditions of the modern class struggle, the leader has to offer as an internal reward the satisfaction of hatred and the desire for revenge … the need to defame the adversary and accuse him of heresy.”

To the apparatchiki, external rewards meant “power, spoils, and perks.” Weber warned the Marxists in his audience, “Let us not deceive ourselves … the materialist interpretation of history is not a chariot that is taken and left at whim, and does not stop at the authors of the revolution.”

Aware that his young listeners would prioritize conviction over responsibility, Weber closed his lecture with a line from Goethe’s Faust: “The devil is old; grow old to understand him.” His repeated references to the “demonic forces” that pervade politics were prophetic, as he foresaw “an Age of Reaction” settling over Europe in less than a decade. If that were to happen, his listeners’ moral aspirations – which Weber admitted he shared – would become unattainable. Germany faced not “the dawn of summer,” he predicted, but a “polar night of icy harshness and darkness.”

His audience was shaken, much as Toller had been at Lauenstein. “Weber tore away all the veils of illusory thinking, and yet no one could fail to feel that at the heart of that clear mind beat a deep human earnestness,” said Löwith. But many were unwilling to abandon their illusions. Horkheimer recalled: “Everything was so precise, so scientifically austere, so free of values, that we returned home completely desolate.”

The illusion lingered, but it was Weber who proved prescient, as the “carnival” had become bloody. Just three weeks after Weber’s lecture, Eisner set out for parliament to tender his resignation and was assassinated by a young aristocrat, Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley, who sought to prove his “true” German identity to the far-right nationalist Thule Society, which had rejected him because his mother was Jewish. Although Weber did not settle permanently in Munich until June 1919, he witnessed this tragedy’s opening act.

After Eisner’s assassination, a weak Social Democratic government that included Weber’s close friends Neurath and Jaffé attempted to push through bold and original reforms. But it was soon swept aside by the workers’ councils, which on April 6 announced the First Bavarian Soviet Republic – a senseless anarchist experiment that sought to remake the world in seven days. Unlike God, it lasted less than a week before it was supplanted by the openly authoritarian Second Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was crushed on May 1 by Bavarian and Prussian troops. It was in those ranks that the swastika first appeared, a dark omen of what was to come.

The Great Philo-Semite

The main protagonists of this drama did not survive its aftermath. Landauer, the intellectual leader of romantic anarchism, was savagely beaten with rifle butts and clubs, then murdered on May 2.

Weber also died young. After brief and unsuccessful forays into politics, he returned to Munich in June, just as the university and the city were being overtaken by xenophobic, nationalist, militaristic, and antisemitic authorities. Casting himself as a living example of the Protestant ethic he was then studying, Weber threw himself back into writing and lecturing, voicing unpopular liberal opinions that earned him the unfair label of “godfather of the Soviet Republic.”

This public struggle unfolded alongside private anguish almost unbearable even for a man of Weber’s stoic temperament: the suicide of his widowed sister, who left behind four children, and his tortured love affair with Jaffé’s wife, Else – a former disciple with whom he edited the legendary Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (“Archives for Social Science and Social Policy”).

Weber was particularly incensed by the “mad anti-Semitism” that poisoned even his colleagues. Demonstrating his moral independence, he defended his former Jewish adversaries to such an extent that Leo Löwenthal, with Horkheimer a future founder of the Frankfurt School, called him “the great philo-Semite.”

True to that description, Weber successfully defended Neurath in court and did the same for Toller, arguing that “in an act of rage, God made him a politician.” He even publicly acknowledged Eisner’s good faith and spoke in defense of several other imprisoned leaders, explaining to the judges the meaning of the “ethics of conviction.” It was for this reason that he omitted Eisner’s name from the published version of “Politics as a Vocation.”

For all its idealism, the Munich Revolution confirmed Weber’s observation that “good does not follow good, but often the opposite.” The demagogues, socialists, pacifists, anarchists, and communists leading it had committed the greatest political sin of all: ignoring reality.

As it turned out, politics was not about drafting lofty plans that overlooked practical obstacles. The working classes were nowhere near a majority in Bavaria or Germany. Factories, now controlled by bureaucratic and military bosses, did not embrace socialism but remained within capitalist structures. And not all of Eisner and Landauer’s followers were idealists like them; many quickly changed sides, seeking their “internal and external rewards” among the triumphant far-right forces.

Perhaps most importantly, the revolutionaries were mistaken about their true adversary. It was not the SPD, which they dismissed as timid and reformist, but the pan-German militarism that Weber foresaw and which they failed to confront.

Convinced that the West had entered terminal decline, the Frankfurt School’s founders escaped to the US, where they freely built an intellectual tradition at odds with their host country’s economic order. The revolutionaries, meanwhile, clung to the belief that the constitutional and parliamentary order Weber defended had been buried forever. But by denouncing and banning the “arch-reactionary” Weber, they cleared the way for the real reactionary: Schmitt.

While Weber was right to condemn those romantic revolutionaries, he overlooked some important nuances. Eisner, for example, resembled the moderate Russian socialist Alexander Kerensky far more than Leon Trotsky. Landauer, the anarchist, was a utopian mystic who detested the Marxists’ will to power. Politically, was Eisner’s pacifist stance truly so irresponsible? Had it endured, it might have softened the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles. And were Landauer’s communal experiments wholly unrealizable, at least on a modest scale? Not necessarily.

In his 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation,” Weber had assumed that “enchantment” could never be restored to the disenchanted, post-Enlightenment world. Eisner and Landauer, sustained by utopian hope, nonetheless clung to it. Both embodied the “ethics of conviction” to the very end and paid the ultimate price.

Unlike Weber, these radical leaders failed to grasp the depth of Germany’s centuries-old Jew-hatred, which would ultimately doom their political project. From the revolution’s outset, he warned Else Jaffé: “Separatism is raising its head, and it is going to embellish itself with anti-Semitism.”

The most disastrous consequence of the Bavarian revolution was that it set the stage for the rise of Hitler, beginning with his arrival in Munich in November 1918. While some biographers trace his antisemitism to his Vienna years, others, like Ian Kershaw, see its origins in Munich, where he electrified the very same crowds that Eisner had stirred months before. With the fascist demagogue seemingly emulating the socialist one, Weber’s theory of charisma had been grimly vindicated.

Weber died of pneumonia in June 1920. His fury against the Treaty of Versailles and the strain of unrelenting, solitary political struggles undoubtedly deepened his exhaustion, though he never lost his resolve. Having defended Germany’s fragile constitutional and parliamentary order against the frenzy of revolutionary passion and the lure of nationalist dictatorship, he did not live to see the diabolical extremes to which these forces went as the “polar night” he foresaw finally arrived.

The Specter of Munich

Just as Eisner’s assassination foreshadowed that of foreign minister Walther Rathenau in 1922, the upheavals of 1919 presaged the collapse of the Weimar Republic, itself undermined by left-wing factions whose contempt for parliamentary politics blinded them to the dangers of militarism and ultra-nationalism.

This pattern repeated itself in Spain, where ideological hatreds and left-wing disdain for liberal democracy fractured the republic and empowered the nationalist right, culminating in Francisco Franco’s four-decade dictatorship. Similar dynamics played out across Latin America, most notably in Chile in the 1970s.

Weber’s warnings about charismatic revolutionaries and their rigid “ethics of conviction” were further vindicated by the tragic course of the Cuban Revolution. Generations of Latin American students followed the path of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and the outcome of this millenarian worldview remains all too evident in Cuba and Nicaragua today.

And the cycle has yet to run its course. Just a few years ago, it seemed unimaginable that our democracies would once again confront the forces that fractured interwar Germany. Yet here we are, drowning in what passes for populism. Despite their differences, figures like US President Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador resemble Schmitt’s model of a dictator who understands that all politics boils down to is the friend-enemy distinction.

Some countries like France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany have not entirely forgotten the lessons of World War II, narrowly resisting the pull of authoritarianism. But the US – on the eve of its 250th birthday – is now in real danger of succumbing to it.

To be sure, populist leaders are not the only ones who see politics through Schmitt’s flattening, polarizing lens. Many university students in the US and Europe, animated by a vaguer, less articulate version of the “ethics of conviction,” have embraced it as well. But unlike the revolutionaries of 1919, who impatiently dismissed Weber’s warnings in pursuit of social and economic justice, young people today often conflate altruism with narcissism.

The youth of 1919 joined the revolution and, like Eisner and Landauer, many of them died for it. What are campus insurrectionists willing to risk? Their predecessors turned away from active politics not to shirk responsibility but to build a framework for social change. By contrast, today’s student movements seem to lack any coherent utopian vision.

That said, one cause preoccupies today’s young idealists above all: Palestine. But too often, support for Palestinian rights gets entangled with support for Hamas and antisemitism. Just as antisemitism does not justify the carnage in Gaza, neither does the carnage in Gaza justify turning a blind eye to antisemitism or the atrocities committed by Hamas.

Here lies another grim echo of 1919. Much like the Munich idealists, who believed their revolution would usher in an era of universal harmony and dissolve ancient hatreds, postwar Jewish generations naively hoped that the horrors of the Holocaust would overcome centuries of prejudice. That hope was ultimately dashed by the hostile and violent response to Israel’s creation.

Since its founding, Israel has signed peace treaties with several Arab countries and is now pursuing a grand bargain with Saudi Arabia. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains ensnared in communal animosities and Schmitt’s friend-enemy dichotomy.

All this makes clear that “Politics as a Vocation” will never lose its relevance. But a lot of time has passed, and liberal democracy once again finds itself under siege. I wonder: Where are today’s Weberian heroes? Is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky really the only one up to the task?

Walking the streets of Munich, I find reason for hope in the way the city acknowledges both its dreams and its nightmares, with memorials to Eisner and Landauer, as well as the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, which stands near the Nazi Party’s former headquarters. In the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack, I saw people gather in Munich’s main square to listen to a troupe of Jewish singers performing in Yiddish. The moment was fleeting but powerful, a reminder that the struggle against the icy darkness of fanaticism is far from lost.

Publicado en Project Syndicate el 5 de septiembre de 2025.