Max

Abstract

Even though Max Weber left no systematic reflection on the question of revolutions, he still showed a strong interest in the revolutionary events he witnessed and the actors involved in them. This article retraces Weber’s perspective on the ethical-revolutionary attitudes and actions of four of his contemporaries, with some of whom he was in personal contact: Robert Michels, Ernst Frick, Ernst Toller, and Karl Liebknecht. Particularly in his letters, but also in a number of public statements about these individuals, Weber reflects on the different combinations of ethical radicalism and violence as well as their (in)consistencies. While striving to create a better world, for Weber, the revolutionary actors inevitably become trapped in the aporias and dilemmas of the extreme positions they represent, with an ethics of conviction on the one hand and an ethics of success on the other. It is not least these consideration that finally lead Weber to formulate his own mediating position of an ethics of responsibility in his famous lecture Politics as a Vocation , in which he redefines the relationship between ethics, politics and violence.