Politics as a Vocation

“One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.
This means passion in the sense of matter-of-factness, of passionate devotion to a 'cause,' to the god or demon who is its overlord. It is not passion in the sense of that inner bearing which my late friend, Georg Simmel, used to designate as 'sterile excitation,' and which was peculiar especially to a certain type of Russian intellectual (by no means all of them!). It is an excitation that plays so great a part with our intellectuals in this carnival we decorate with the proud name of 'revolution.' It is a 'romanticism of the intellectually interesting,' running into emptiness devoid of all feeling of objective responsibility.
To be sure, mere passion, however genuinely felt, is not enough. It does not make a politician, unless passion as devotion to a 'cause' also makes responsibility to this cause the guiding star of action. And for this, a sense of proportion is needed. This is the decisive psychological quality of the politician: his ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness. Hence his distance to things and men. 'Lack of distance' per se is one of the deadly sins of every politician. It is one of those qualities the breeding of which will condemn the progeny of our intellectuals to political incapacity. For the problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Politics is made with the head, not with other parts of the body or soul. And yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone. However, that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the 'sterilely excited' and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word. The 'strength' of a political 'personality' means, in the first place, the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility, and proportion.“


What Weber I saying here is that there is 3 things that make a perfect politician: passion, a sense of responsibility and a sense of proportion. He’s saying that not only do they have to have passion but that passion has to be connected with a sense of responsibility towards the cause but all this has to come together with a sense of proportion. He feels that if politics us to be true and honest it has to come from someone who passionate about it.


I chose this passage because it is one of the reasons why I don’t follow or believe in politics. I agree with Weber that in order for politics to be true it has to come from someone who is passionate about what he’s doing and who really is here to help the cause and do what’s in the best interest of the people and that’s not what happens most of the time. I believe that many of today’s politicians main goal is money, they have their motives that they keep behind closed doors and cover it up with making promises to the people that they know they will not come through with.