studies in

social & political thought

Volume 22 Winter 2013
Volume 17 . June 2010

Interview
Howard Caygill
Author of On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance

Articles
Revisting ‘La Question’: A Political-Phenomenological Critique
of Merleau-Ponty’s Assessment of Algerian Decolonization
Dan Wood

Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

Zeynep Talay

The Impossibility of Post-Metaphysical Politics:

Ontology and Thought in Rorty, Heidegger, and Marcuse
Clayton Chin

Between Libertarianism and Authoritarianism: Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Conception of Democracy in ‘Human All Too Human’
Pepijn Corduwener

Books Reviewed
Untimely Affects by Nadine Boljkovac
Marx and Alienation by Sean Sayers
Francois Laruelle’s Philosophies of Difference by Rocco Gangle
Diary of an Escape by Antonio Negri
Reading Negri by Pierre Lamarche,
Max Rosenkrantz and David Sherman
Antonio Negri by Timothy S. Murphy
Difficult Atheism by Christopher Watkin
Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy by Justin Clemens
Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and
Democracy

by Zeynep Talay

Abstract

Nietzsche and Weber investigate modernity from the point of

view of the fate of the individual. While Nietzsche asks whether
it is possible to breed a human being capable of self-overcoming
and self-mastery, Weber generalizes this theme and turns it into
a research question: what type of human being will be forged
in the future? Both thinkers doubted whether democratic
political cultures could produce autonomous individuals,
though Weber did suggest that a measure of autonomy – and
personality - might be possible through devotion to one’s
vocation and to ‘the demands of the day’. Weber wrote against
the background of Nietzsche’s thoughts about personality, but
here I suggest that he did not develop them. They remain an
important challenge, and later thinkers – including political
scientists and political sociologists - have been reluctant to take
it up.

Introduction

In 1992, Tracy Strong wrote that ‘the Weber of Parsons and Shils is no longer
with us… instead, we have a more Nietzschean Weber’ (Strong, 1992: 9). That
more Nietzschean Weber is one who investigates modernity not from the
point of view of social order, but from that of the fate of the individual. At
the center of Nietzsche’s work is a conception of self, grounded in a critical
account of Cartesianism, in particular of the relationship between selfhood,
rationality, and morality. The central issue for Nietzsche is whether it is
possible, within a modern society, to breed a type of human being with a
capacity for what he calls self-overcoming and self-mastery. Weber’s notion
of personality, and of a character forged through some sort of struggle, is
similar to Nietzsche’s notion of self-mastery, and he too asks about what
type of human being will be forged in the future. Both thinkers were at least
Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy 31

ambivalent about the capacity of democratic political cultures to produce

individuals who were autonomous in this sense, who were not merely able
to reason for themselves or understand categorical imperatives but also able
to shape themselves. However, one difference between them is that Weber
often states that autonomy can only be expressed and fostered through
devotion to one’s work, a position we may extend to the claim that some sort
of determinate, and possibly quite limited, activity is central to the
development of the personality.
In the first section of this article I address the centrality of Nietzsche
for Weber’s notion of personality, but in the second I will suggest that
Weber’s thoughts about personality and democracy remained undeveloped
(in some ways less developed than Tocqueville’s), and that this represented
a challenge for later thinkers. I conclude that this challenge was taken up
only fitfully by political scientists and political sociologists, and that the
questions that Nietzsche and Weber posed remain with us.

Personality and Autonomy: Kant, Nietzsche, Weber

In Human, All too Human, Nietzsche writes:

The fable of intelligible freedom. . . . Now one finally discovers that

this nature [of man] cannot be responsible, since it is completely
a necessary consequence and is assembled from the elements
and influences of past and present things; consequently one is
not responsible for anything, not for his nature, nor his motives,
nor his actions, nor his actions nor for his effects. Thereby one
achieves the knowledge that the history of moral sensations is
the history of an error, the error of responsibility which rests
on the error of freedom of the will (Nietzsche, 1996: 39).

The target of this passage is Kant. In Critique of Practical Reason, Kant argues
that the moral law is something that all rational creatures accept as an
ultimate fact of experience. He also suggests that moral obligation has a
twofold character: on the one hand, it is the most familiar experience of the
common man; on the other, it is the uncanniest of all experiences. Obligation
is both insistent and inescapable, a task that we are called to that
distinguishes it from every determination of desire that issues from self-love.
Obligation calls us to the ‘intelligible’ or ‘noumenal’ order. The moral law
must be expressed as a categorical imperative; it commands us
unconditionally.
At the same time, in the decision to obey or disobey we discover the
32 Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

possibility of our freedom. ‘What else, then, can the freedom of the will be
but autonomy, i.e. the property of the will to be a law to itself?’ (Kant, 1959:
65; 446) Autonomous individuals act as both ‘sovereigns’ and ‘subjects’ if
they obey the very law that they promulgate to themselves. The autonomous
will does not submit to anything beyond itself, such as desire or appetite,
which is dependent for its fulfillment on external objects. The heteronomous
will, on the other hand, is a will that allows itself to be governed by some
pre-established principle. Briefly, in the second critique, Kant argues that
heteronomous principle cannot serve as the proper basis for morality;
morality presupposes autonomy.
Nietzsche comments on Kant’s concept of autonomy in The Gay
Science:

What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? The

‘firmness’ of your so-called moral judgment? This
‘unconditional’ feeling that ‘here everyone must judge as I do?’
Rather admire your selfishness at this point. And the blindness,
pettiness, and frugality of your selfishness. For it is selfish to
experience one’s own judgment as a universal law; and this
selfishness is blind, petty and frugal because it betrays that you
have not discovered yourself nor created for yourself an ideal
of your own, your very own - for that could never be somebody
else’s and much less that of all, all! (Nietzsche, 1974: 265)

As a philosopher of autonomy himself, Nietzsche had an intermittent

dialogue with Kant, and in some ways attempted to finish or even correct
the project that Kant began. Nietzsche argues that on the one hand, Kant
appreciates sovereignty and makes it the focus of his philosophical project,
but on the other, betrays sovereignty by conflating it with the simple
fulfillment of our rational nature. Kant destroys sovereignty by subsuming
it under the ‘universal’ principles of reason – in other words, by
conceptualizing it – and imprisoning the individual through the rule of an
impersonal law. For Nietzsche, reason can never be used to determine the
nature of individual sovereignty, about which there can be no systematic
doctrine; on the contrary, sovereignty is simply the commandment one has
over oneself.
One consequence of this view is that Nietzsche attempts to rescue the
individual from the institutions and values that constrain him. He tries to
do so by writing the history of culture in such a way as to imply that,
although he is the product of culture – which might be thought to be as
constraining as any impersonal law – the sovereign individual is not
Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy 33

responsible to any tribunal, only to himself. This means that, in contrast to

Kant, Nietzsche concerns himself with the problem that we know as ‘art of
living’. His sovereign individual will be one who affirms life, who creates
new meaning in place of the old, who says: ‘we are responsible to ourselves
for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this
existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of
chance’ (Nietzsche, 1986: 128).
Max Weber’s encounter with Kant has a similar flavor to Nietzsche’s,
although here one should add that his notion of personality belongs within
an entire German tradition of thinking about personality. Weber draws on
the Kantian distinction between the realm of freedom and the realm of
nature. Now, this distinction is crucial since, for Weber, freedom resides in
a situation where the decision for an action is based on the actor’s own
choices not being disturbed by ‘external constraints or irresistible affect’. In
that sense, the essence of personality resides in a consistent relationship with
ultimate values, and in the ability to translate these into purposive-rational
action. As Goldman put it, ‘ultimate values, an inner relation to these values,
constant will, and rational action are thus hallmarks of personality’
(Goldman, 1988: 142). Weber lays out a Kantian version of the personality
that is opposed to nature or natural determination. What is beyond nature
is not the moral law but values. Values are neither inside nor outside us.
They are independent of individuals, and yet, we have some kind of relation
to them. The question is, what?
Like Nietzsche, Weber thinks that reason can provide a guide neither
to morality nor to personality. A person may devote themselves entirely to
the pursuit of goodness without being able to justify doing so. This makes it
difficult for people to maintain a distance between their inner life and the
routine demands of modern social life; there do not seem to be any standards
against which to judge that life, and so the individual must make
considerable efforts to create his or her own meanings. He says that
personality entails a constant and intrinsic relation to certain ultimate values
and meanings of life but does not specify what the content of these values of
meanings might be.
This emphasis on ultimate meanings places Weber closer to Kant than
to Nietzsche (it is just one respect in which he is a neo-Kantian; in fact he
refers to Kant in The Protestant Ethic, where he notes that Kant was strongly
influenced by Pietism and that ‘many of his ideas are strongly connected to
ideas of ascetic Protestantism’ (Goldman, 1988: 121)). Although Weber
agrees with Nietzsche that the self must look beyond reason for its centre of
gravity, he does so in a way that implies that the experience of finding it will
have affinities with faith. In the Protestant Ethic Weber gives an historical
34 Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

account of the relationship between the idea of shaping of the self and the
Calvinist ethos realized in calling, and in so doing somewhat steps out of
the shadow of Nietzsche and moves closer to Kantian concerns.
One indicator of this is the central role played by duty in Weber’s
work, albeit that here he quotes an exemplary saying not of Kant but of
Goethe:

How can one get to know oneself? Through contemplation

never, but certainly through action. Try to do your duty, and
you know immediately what is in you. But what is your duty?
The demand of the day (Quoted in Goldman, 1988: 129).

Why does Weber insist on the importance of duty? What is the demand of
the day?
Strangely enough, in order to answer these questions we can turn to
Nietzsche again. At the beginning of the second essay of On the Genealogy of
Morals Nietzsche introduces his striking figure the ‘sovereign individual’,
claiming that finally ‘the tree actually bears fruit, where society and its
morality of custom finally reveal what they were simply the means to: we then
find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree, like only to itself,
having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-
ethical individual.’ Towards the end of Genealogy he writes:

This man of the future will redeem us, not just from the ideal
held up till now, but also from those things which had to arise
from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from
nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision that makes
the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his
hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of
God and of nothingness – he must come one day (Nietzsche, 1967:
71).

Nietzsche is fascinated by the idea that after a long and painful process
humanity, at last, will have the fruits, and that we – the moderns – are in a
transitional period.1 Even though it is true that Nietzsche regards culture as
a ‘tyranny against nature’, he also believes that there is a selective object of
culture whose function is to form a man capable of promising and thus of
making use of the future, a free and powerful man who is active. Modern
culture has produced Napoleon, Goethe… and even Nietzsche himself. And
Weber’s own analysis of the self achieved through Protestant discipline
concludes that ‘the personality thus constructed transformed and fortified
Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy 35

the self of the believer and made the new self capable of initiative,
innovation, and strength of an unusual kind’ (Goldman, 1988: 4).
However, unlike Nietzsche, Weber does not refer to a future that will
come one day, nor does he think that we are in a transitional period. While
Weber agrees with Nietzsche in ignoring the ‘fact that science – that is, the
techniques of mastering life based on science – has been celebrated with
naïve optimism as the way to happiness’ (Weber, 1989:17), he is even more
critical of the modern anti-scientific prophets in the Germany of his time.
Modern rationality – of science, of organization and so on – is here to stay.
This, and perhaps only this, is the meaning of his asides about the iron cage.
Similarly in ‘Science as a Vocation’ he states that ‘there are in principle no
mysterious, incalculable powers at work, but rather that one can in principle
master everything through calculation. But that means the disenchantment
of the world’ (Weber, 1989: 17). Although this seems to imply a kind of
pessimism on Weber’s part, I will claim that Weber is no less optimistic than
Nietzsche about the future, despite the fact that he suggests no final message
about how we should conduct our lives. For just like Nietzsche, Weber is
occupied with the question of ‘What sort of man will inhabit the future?’
In ‘Science as a Vocation’, after a long account of the external
conditions of an academic occupation in the context of the increasing
bureaucratization of the university, Weber finally turns to the expectations
of the audience: ‘But I believe that you really wish to hear about something
else – the inner vocation for science’ (Weber, 1989: 8). As Wilhelm Hennis
states, the lecture is basically to do with the question of ‘who has personality
within science?’ (Hennis, 1987: 71) And Weber gives the answer: ‘Personality
is only possessed in the realm of science by the man who serves only the
needs of his subject’, adding immediately that ‘this is true not only in science’
(Weber, 1989: 11). The lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’ has the same pattern.
Weber devotes a considerable space to the definition of the state, of politics,
the distinction between living off and for politics and a comparative study of
political parties or groups at different times. Finally he comes to the point:
‘Now then, what inner enjoyments can this career offer and what personal
conditions are presupposed for one who enters this avenue?’ (Weber, 2001:
114). Of the three conditions – passion, a sense of proportion and a sense of
responsibility – passion is the most peculiar, because by it Weber means
‘matter-of-factness’, or devotion to a cause: ‘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’ (Weber, 2001: 114). This quite sober
definition of passion is a clue to the difference between Weber and Nietzsche.
For instance, although the passion of the scientist devoted to truth has
played a major role in the ongoing disenchantment of the world, although
36 Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

science is no longer regarded as a way to true being or to true nature or to

the true God, and although science cannot address the question of value, it
can still play an important ethical role in human life, namely, to provide
clarity concerning ‘ultimate’ problems (Weber, 1989: 25). By the same token,
although the bureaucratization of political life and the disenchantment of
cultural life constrain individual freedom, unlike Nietzsche, who sees the
end product of culture – the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on its tree
- as a new beginning, Weber insists on the idea that we have to embrace our
condition of being thrown into the world as it is, that the requirements of
modern society – the ultimate rationalization and bureaucratization – are
unavoidable; he says, furthermore, that in thus meeting ‘the demands of the
day’ we can still preserve a sense of individuality or ‘personality’.
In both lectures Weber insists on the idea that to be a personality you
have to devote yourself to something higher – it might be scientific truth, it
might be a cause, or it might be a profession defined in terms of a certain
value. But there is more to this idea of personality – and this idea of ethics –
than devotion to a profession. Weber is not defining professional ethics, but
saying something about human relations in general. This is expressed in the
famous and, as we will see later, puzzling final sentence of ‘Science as a
Vocation’: ‘We should go to our work and do justice to the demands of the
day both in human and professional terms. But that is plain and simple, if
everybody finds and obeys the demon which holds the threads of his life’
(Weber, 1989: 31).
This phrase is an indication that, following Kant, Weber is concerned
with the individual’s capacity for consistency of conduct. According to
Weber one can achieve this consistency by simply doing one’s duty blindly
- obeying the rules of a profession - or one can do something with passion
and commitment. In the former case there is no personality, for one
interprets ‘the demands of the day’ to mean that one should merely adapt
oneself to reality, whereas for Weber, personality implies ‘an unfettered self
which tries to assert its individuality by affirming certain constant values in
the face of the impersonal forces which increasingly dominate the modern
world’ (Schroeder, 1991: 62).
However, it is not clear how much space Weber thinks that the
modern world provides for such a personality. The phrase ‘unfettered self’
is in fact a little misleading, because as Hennis insisted, a key dimension of
Weber’s empirical work is the relationship between personality and life
orders. That is why even in the vocation lectures Weber devotes considerable
space to the external conditions of science and politics. The main question
for Weber is what kind of ‘personality’ can inhabit different life spheres or
the future:
Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy 37

What becomes of the person who enters such an order, or is

caught up in the ‘power’ of one - whether this is a matter of free
choice, or whether the person in born into it, as in family, status,
linguistic community, state and religion? What ‘fate’ do these
orders dictate, reveal or refuse to the persons placed in their by
conditions of time and place? (Hennis, 1987: 72)

It is true that, as Nietzsche also claimed, different life-spheres involve ‘a

demand, type, form, a variety of impositions.’ However, rather than oppose
this through the appeal to a creative or imaginative or assertive individuality,
Weber asks whether these life-spheres may ‘open-up possibilities for future
conduct, a formative tendency for ‘personality’ (Hennis, 1987: 72). Hennis
thinks that this is related to ‘Tocqueville’s analysis of the moral consequences
of the transition from ancient regime of personal servitude to the
individualistic epoch of unfettered equality’ (Hennis, 1987: 75). Indeed, this
may explain Weber’s own interest in agrarian social structure and rural
labour organization. The question he puts to them is: do the new modes of
organization, the new life orders being formed in the present, make the
formation of ‘personalities’ more or less likely? For instance, Weber states
that in the West, wage labour:

… is considered to some extent to be a neighbourly act of

helping out… these people distinguish the concept of labour
from that of duty or obligation. Here individualism in labour
organization finds its most extreme form… He labours perhaps
because he actually has to, but in his mind it is because he likes
to. He is not familiar with the kind of labour that we know from
the east, this rigid, obligatory form of labour that yokes the
whole life together (Quoted in Hennis, 1987: 75).

In the end, Weber does not give a systematic analysis of different social
orders and their relation to ‘personality’ or of what type of man can inhabit
the future. Instead he left a series of challenges that later social and political
science was invited to take up. The question that I would like to ask now is,
to what extent have these challenges been addressed?

‘Making Democracy Work’

Weber’s friend Robert Michels said that all forms of political organization
will eventually develop into oligarchies. The iron law of oligarchy is just the
38 Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

sort of statement that threatens to close off discussion of the Weberian

question: what is the relationship between personality and life order in
different spheres, in particular, the political sphere? This latter question was
not answered systematically by Weber himself, and has remained an implicit
challenge to political science. Seymour Martin Lipset and Robert Putnam,
for instance, are concerned with these issues in their accounts of sustainable
democracy. It should be said though that whereas for Weber the question
was: ‘do current institutional structures – democratic or not - encourage the
development of personalities?’, for them the question was: ‘do the
personality structures of modern democratic citizens support the
maintenance of a particular political system, democracy?’ As Sven Eliaeson
puts it, Weber’s ‘completely secularized views of politics left no room for a
metaphysics of “democratic spirit”, and thus he saw no necessary connection
between democracy and freedom and/or equality’ (Eliaeson, 1998: 48). As
has been said, if Weber believed this he was echoing, albeit weakly, a
Nietzschean idea:

The democratic movement is not merely a form assumed by

political organization in decay, but also a form assumed by man
in decay, that is to say in diminishment, in the process of
becoming mediocre and losing his value (Nietzsche, 1966: 117).

With a similar approach Weber focuses on ‘the growth of rational discipline

which is manifest in the bureaucratization which accompanies the rise of
mass democracy’ (Owen, 1991: 80). This thought hovered over his writings
on parliament and government in Germany, where parliament is to be
judged not in terms of the quality of its legislation but as an arena for testing
the personalities of political leaders.
For both thinkers their doubts about democracy are reflected in their
remarks on socialism. While Nietzsche suggests that socialism ‘expressly
aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an
unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved in a useful organ of
the community’ (Quoted in Owen, 1991: 81), Weber claims that ‘socialism
would abolish the possibility of individual autonomy and self-expression
through the construction of a totally bureaucratic order in which the
individual is reduced to an instrument of the state’ (Owen, 1991: 81). Neither
Nietzsche nor Weber lived to witness the rise of not one but two totalitarian
systems, or the war between them and its consequences; had they done so
the themes of freedom, strong personalities would surely have been just as
prominent in their work if not more so.
Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy 39

Postwar Political Science

Can the same be said of political scientists and political sociologists who did
witness it? After World War II both disciplines established a fairly close link
between democracy and freedom on the one hand, and between
totalitarianism and a lack of freedom on the other. The types of freedom that
democracy was thought consistent with were the liberal freedoms of a
deontological or utilitarian sort. The effect of this was that Nietzschean and
Weberian doubts about democracy’s capacity to breed autonomous
personalities were marginalized; if they were entertained at all it was in
philosophy, critical theory, some versions of sociology (notably in theories
of mass society), and literature. The empirical study of political parties, trade
unions or professional organizations rather steered clear of them.
Take, for instance, Seymour Martin Lipset. Lipset did witness World
War II and its consequences, and as a result a central theme of his work was
the sustainability of political democracy. In one study he focused on the ITU
(International Typographical Union) and the emergence of a large socialist
party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in Canada, but he
did so partly in order to see whether Michels was right about the iron law of
oligarchy. Contrary to Michels, Lipset came to the optimistic conclusion that
ITU was ‘a large trade union which governed itself through an elaborate
democratic political system’ (Buxton, 1985: 212-13).
This looks like a dry statement of a value-neutral scholar; but as a
graduate student, Lipset had already agonized over Weberian questions
about the ethics of a scientist, and the dilemma of reconciling his political
commitment with the objective scientific research. As a young political
scientist, he wanted to give ‘personality’ to what he was doing. He came to
the conclusion that if one can manage to keep conclusions separate from
political biases, one can still be loyal to Weberian strictures, starting the study
with questions that are based on one’s own values, but keeping it objective
and value-free, allowing one to come to objective conclusions. Having faced
these ethical questions, later Lipset claims that the task of political sociologist
is to be concerned with cleavages as well as consensus, and to provide
political leaders with empirical knowledge and thereby contribute to the
effectiveness of the democratic system. He thought that too many political
sociologists focused either on cleavage or on consensus and thus contributed
to the perpetuation of ideology. A stable democratic system requires both
consensus and cleavage (Buxton, 1985: 228). It also presupposes a situation
where ‘all major political parties include supporters from many segments of
the population’. The question for Lipset then is not ‘what makes personality
possible?’ but ‘what makes democracy work?’, with the question of
40 Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

personality being thought to take care of itself or be irrelevant. Lipset makes the
Tocquevillian argument that participation in any form of organized activity
has the effect of stimulating political participation (Lipset, 1956: 43-56).

Such activity increases the possibility that individuals will

become acquainted with other politically active individuals or
with information which will make the political process more
meaningful to them (Lipset, 1956: 47).

This was written thirty years before the theme of ‘civil society’ became so
popular among intellectuals.
One piece of empirical research that helped in its popularization was
Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work, an endorsement-with-evidence of
Lipset’s statement. By focusing on the efficiency of the regional governments
that were elected in the early 1970s in Italy, Putnam explores ‘why norms
and networks of civic engagements powerfully affect the prospects for
effective, responsive government and why civic traditions are so stable over
long periods’ (Putnam 1992: 16). He claims that membership in voluntary
organizations such as labour unions, guilds, and even bird-watching clubs
and the like promote a sense of community, and in a nation with a strong
sense of civic community, a tolerance toward diversity and high level of
mutual trust are more possible. A strong civil society promotes social
connectedness and integration, and a corresponding set of attitudes and
habits; there is a strong link between voluntary cooperation and social capital
in the form of norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement. Social
capital refers to ‘features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and
networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating
coordinated actions’ (Putnam 1992: 167). At the other end of the spectrum,
‘where norms and networks of civic engagement are lacking, the outlook for
collective action appears bleak’ (Putnam 1992: 183). ‘The harmonies of a
choral society illustrate how voluntary collaboration can create value that
no individual, no matter how wealthy, no matter how wily, could produce
alone. In the civic community associations proliferate, memberships overlap,
and participation spills into multiple arenas of community life. The social
contract that sustains such collaboration in the civic community is not legal
but moral’ (Putnam 1992: 183).
Since Putnam’s work a whole wave of studies have appeared,
conducted in a similar spirit and formulating questions in the same sort of
language. Tusalem’s study of NGOs in ‘transitional societies’ is just one:

Associations may contribute to institutional conditions and

Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy 41

venues that support, express, actualize individual and political

autonomy as well as transform autonomous judgments into
collective decisions (Tusalem, 2007: 361).

Tusalem states that states with a strong civil society promote the pluralism
of their societal groups and this approach leads NGOs to experience both
vertical and horizontal growth. These states support the idea that there
should be NGOs in the regions, provinces, and municipalities, since their
expansion is good for democracy. It is compatible with the sustainability of
democracy because, by bringing citizens together, NGOs create a space
where people can discuss the strengths and shortcomings of local and
national governments. ‘In the end, states with very dense and diffused NGOs
are better geared to make effective demands on the polity as a whole’
(Tusalem, 2007: 379).
Trust, norms, networks, social capital, social contract, efficiency, this
is the (increasingly popular) language of a political science that has left
Nietzschean and Weberian questions, and the deep brooding that gave rise
to them, a long way behind. Its questions are different: how can civic
engagement be fostered? How do civil society organizations contribute to
better policy-making? How can individuals’ demands on the polity be met?
On the question of how individual people can face up to the demands of the
day, this work is largely silent.

Conclusion

Both Weber and Nietzsche investigate modernity from the perspective of

individual freedom and one of the central issues for both thinkers is whether
it is possible to breed a type of human capable of self-mastery. Even though
Weber’s notion of giving personality to one’s character is similar to
Nietzsche’s notion of self-mastery, Weber insists on the idea that autonomy
expresses itself in devotion to the demands of one’s work. That is what the
vocation lectures are about. Postwar political scientists such as Lipset and
Putnam have interpreted this, if they have interpreted it at all, to mean that
there is no contradiction between personal autonomy and political
participation, and that democracy allows people to be ‘devoted to a cause’
in many different ways, some of them apparently quite minor or local. In
some ways their work is a critique of Weber, whose own situation left him
free to ask profound existential dilemmas and to be ambivalent or even
hostile towards democracy. But in other respects the work of Putnam et al is
another example of the neglect of Weber, and for that matter Nietzsche, by
political scientists. The sharp questions they posed about modernity,
42 Talay: Nietzsche and Weber on Personality and Democracy

autonomy and personality continue to cast their shadows, or ought to. And
it probably should remain an open question whether belonging to a bird-
watching club or a choir is quite what Weber had in mind when he said that
we should meet the demands of the day and devote ourselves to something
with passion.

Zeynep Talay ([email protected]) did her doctoral studies in Philosophy

at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Before her PhD she gained
an MA in Philosophy at the University of Warwick in England.

Endnotes

1
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche presents the following historical
sequence: 1) a pre-moral (vormoralische) period in which the value or disvalue
of an action was derived from its consequences; 2) a moral period which
shifts from assessing consequences to assessing ‘intentions’ and which
involves the first attempts at self-knowledge; 3) an ‘extra-moral’
(aussermoralische) period which is a threshold upon which we ‘immoralists’
stand and in which we believe that morality in the traditional sense, the
morality of intentions, was a prejudice. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil (New York: Vintage, 1966), p.32.

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