Max Weber as Forerunner of Post-Foundational Political Thought?

Some Remarkings about the Link between Politics and Values in Politik als Beruf

Abstract

The polytheism of values, as it was formulated by Max Weber in his work, has deserved increasing interest in political thought, especially in post-foundational theory. A bird’s eyes view let us confirm that some of its basal principles seems to be anticipated in that Weberian formulation, i.e., the assumption of an ontological weakness that can be experimented immediately by us and that political action leads us to an undecidable situation, which bind us to take a decision between “gods” and “demons”. In this paper we aim to compare Weber’s understanding of the polytheism of values as it follows from “Politics as a Vocation” [Politik als Beruf] with that of the post-foundational theory. Since Weber was not interested in a metaphysical diagnosis, but in the practical question of the link between subject and ultimate values, we state that, despite its similarities, there are some important differences that distances him from post-foundational political thought.