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The Kingdom of Influence
Weber’s critique of the Wilhelmine system did not start with the Great War. Coming from a
bourgeois liberal milieu (Roth 1987) he has always been very skeptical of the person of the
Kaiser, Wilhelm II. During the Great War, his skepticism transformed itself into ferocious
critiques of the Emperor, certainly, but most substantially of the whole Wilhelmine Regime.
The publication of several articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung, later to be compiled in Parlament
und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland, and an important series of public speeches allowed
Weber to “conquer public opinion in no time at all” (Schröder 2013:16). By the end of 1917,
he had become a public figure of the first order. In 1919, his academic appointment in postrevolutionary Munich was contested by both the conservative leadership of the University,
who judged him politically too close to the Social Democrats1, and by the Action committee
of the Soviet of Munich Workers and Soldiers, who judge him an enemy of socialism
because of his attachment to bourgeois capitalist ideas (Ibid: 19). His voice, if contested, was
well known and his opinions, if opposed, were respected2. His remorseless critique of the
Wilhelmine regime assuredly had a lot of room for substantive attacks against the personality
of the Emperor. Yet, to limit our understanding of Weber’s views on the monarchy to a
opprobrium against the Kaiser’s poor judgment would be to mist the larger picture. More
than anything else, Weber’s critique of the Wilhelmine system was based on theoretical
considerations about the role left for a monarch to play in a modern mass state.
A decade before the First World War, Weber’s analysis of the post-revolutionary
Russia in 1905-06 was already displaying many of the structuring elements of his critique of
monarchy. In short, Weber held monarchy to be a regime inadequate with the modern
political existence, except in his parliamentary form, and then again only if a monarch was
willing to relinquish any public participation in the conduct of state’s affairs. This
constitutional conception of modern mass democracy was, of Weber’s own admission,
inspired by the Victorian experience. As we know, however, by the end of 1919, Weber
would take account of the Kaiser’s abdication and propose his vision of a Republican
Germany; his ill-fated “democracy of leaders” [Führerdemokratie]. But in 1917, writing
Parliament und Regierung, Weber was still a monarchist. Not out of conviction or love of the
institution, but simply because he assumed that the German dynasties, the Hohenzollerns as
the ancillary regional ones, would emerge unscathed from the war, and that in those
conditions constitutional monarchy was “an sich” the form of government for Germany
(MWG I/15: 469). The purpose of this paper is to shed light on Weber’s critique of
Even so, that when Lujo Brentano (1844-1931), who’s research chair Weber was inheriting in Munich,
recommended Weber to the Bavarian academy of science in June 1919, many conservative member opposed it.
If many saw in him a ‘demagogic trouble-maker’, some even perceived him to be the intellectual “godfather of
the soviet republic’. (See Schröder 2013: 30, the letter from Weber to his colleague Karl von Amira on the 29th
August 1919 in MWG II/10: 750, and the letter to Hans Delbrück on October 8th 1919, Ibid: 804-5.)
2
See MWG I/15 (Zur Politik im Weltkrieg. Schriften und Reden 1914-1918) and I/16 (Zur
Neuordnung Deutschlands. Schriften und Reden 1918-1920)
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absolutist monarchy, or, as he called them “personal regimes”, and to show how his views
matched those held by High Victorians3 like John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot half a
century before his own writings. In time, the objective of this comparison is to present their
comprehensive conception of parliamentary monarchy.
To state, as I just have, that Weber shared political views and fundamental ideas with
the Victorians of his father’s generation is somewhat of an adventuresome affirmation.
Without a doubt, Weber looked across the Channel for his constitutional ideas and
Westminster as always appeared to him as the pre-eminent example of a efficient
parliamentary government. Weber often asked, if it was not that very system that had
allowed England to constitute its powerful empire. Yet, it is a shared assumption among
Weberian scholars to believe that Weber had a “selective understanding” of the British
political institutions. So selective indeed, that it denatured them entirely. In his influential
Max Weber und die deutsche Politik Theodor Mommsen claimed that “Weber idealized the
English Constitutional settlement” by “severely overestimating the amount of political
influence really wielded by monarchs like Eduard VII, the one example he so often
adduced” (1959: 156-7). Even among scholars who have not founded their carriers jousting
against a straw-man version of Weber, this perception is tenacious. In this way, Turner and
Factor assumed that Weber’s ‘cæsarist assumption’ and his insistence in describing the
British parliamentary system as a dictatorship shows how little he really understood about
the kind of “conventions” and “liberal traditions” that ruled over a “government by
discussion” (1984: 53). Finally, J.P. Mayer, who did an enormous amount of work for the
On February 2, 1901, from the innumerable crowd that assembled in the streets of London to watch
Queen’s Victoria funeral procession only a few could remember a time before her reign. The great majority of
them had knew but a single monarch; the Queen and the Crown were almost synonymous to them. They were
purely and simply “Victorians”. But the “Victorian era”, precisely because it stretches over such a long period
of time, makes somewhat of an imprecise historical delimitation. Following Richard D. Altick example (1973.
See Chapter I: The Longest Reign 1837-1901), I delimitate the Victorians era into three distinct epochs. The
First one, Early Victorianism, should formally start in 1837, the year when the eighteen-year old Victoria
ascended the British throne. Historians, however, often prefer 1832, the year of the adoption of the First
Reform Act, for its profound and lasting political impact on British society. In the 1850s, the early Victorian
age gave way to High Victorianism. The World Great Exhibition, held in 1851 in the Crystal palace in
London’s Hyde Park, reassured Britain about her dominant position both as the world’s richest nation and as
the first supplier of manufactured goods. This “age of equipoise”, as W.L. Burn has called it (1964), or Britain's
“Golden Years” were a period where England could congratulated itself on having achieved a industrial
revolution surpassing that of all other countries, without anything resembling the kind of political convulsions
that the Continent was still suffering from in the aftermaths of the 1848 revolutions. It is during this period, as
early as 1851 in fact, that the British first started to self-consciously label themselves as “Victorians” (Altick
1973: 73). Finally, Late Victorianism started around 1870. In 1867, the Second Reform Act doubled the
electorate by enfranchising the working class. Three years later the Education Act expended elementary
education for the children of those who had just been admitted into the political sphere. The agricultural
depression of 1873 incited to the a general economic recession –now known as the “Long Depression”, but
back then called the “Great Depression”. All three events are good examples of what generated the fin-de-siècle
spirit that appeared in the 1880s and that heralded the end of the Victorian age. In 1901, with the ascension to
the English throne of the Queen’s first son, Eduard VII, the Edwardian era succeeded the Victorian one. For a
thorough discussions about the historical delimitations of the Victorian Age, also see Theodor Hoppen’s 184686 The Mid-Victorians Generation (1998) and Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Spirit Of The Age: Victorian Essays (2007).
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reception of Weber in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially with his 1944 Max Weber and
German Politics: a study in political sociology, also doubts Weber views on Westminster. If Mayer
recognized that “the British structure” was Weber’s “norm-giving ideal” (1944: 33), he
doubted that the British traditions on which England’s institutions were founded ever
became familiar to him. “He had to rely on books,” Mayer writes, “but even if there are
some which permeated with this [British] spirit, are their letters not dead if you do not have
experiences of the living example of English institutions?” (Ibid: 34). By analyzing the
continuity and the discontinuity present in the writings of Weber and of certain Victorian
authors, I hope to expose the fundamental tenacity of a particular conception of
parliamentary monarchy, and by the same token, a common critique of absolutist
monarchism. It is to this endeavor that we will now apply ourselves, starting with tsarist
Russia.
The Russian Revolution of 1905
In December 1904 the Russian population learned the loss of their Pacific fleet at the hands
of the Japanese army. Shortly afterwards, on January 5th 19054, the Japanese accepted the
surrender of the troops defending the strategic Russian naval base of Port Arthur. The
Russo-Japanese War would linger on for almost another year, finally ending up in the first
defeat of a “Great power” to a non-European nation. The disarray enkindled by the military
defeats, the social tensions in the urban areas as in the countryside, and the inability of the
tsarist regime to answer the resulting civil agitation were brought into focus on Sunday
January 9th 1905. Bloody Sunday gained its name when soldiers of the Imperial Guard fired
upon peaceful demonstrators carrying orthodox icons and portraits of the Tsar Nicholas II,
as they were marching towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the monarch asking
him to convene a constituent assembly. Hundreds were killed and many more wounded.
Social strife spread like a wild fire all across the land. Over the coming months the Tsar’s
power was systematically contested: massive strikes, farmers revolts, and soldiers’ mutinies,
the most famous one being in Odessa on the Battleship Potemkin in June 1905. These erupted
all over the land. A Soviet was created in Saint Petersburg and in October a ten-day general
strike paralyzed the whole country. Political and social upheaval all over Russia put Nicolas
II under great pressure. To save his crown from the impending revolution the Tsar
consented to constitutional reforms. In his October Manifesto, Nicolas II granted the Russians
population the basic liberal freedoms based on the inviolability of the individual, such as
freedom of conscience, of speech, of assembly, and of political association. He also pledged
to introduce universal male suffrage and to consent real legislative powers to the Duma.
Many were led into believing that Russia could become a parliamentary democracy.
4
The dates concerning the events taking place in Russia are recounted in the Old Style Julian Calendar.
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Weber did not share this optimistic analysis. Having “learned Russian rapidly” after
the outbreak of the Revolution, so that he could “follow the daily events in different Russian
newspapers”, he monitored “for months on end in breathless excitement” the situation in
Russia (Weber 1989[1926]: 342). The first essays he wrote on the Russian revolution,
intended as a commentary on S. J. Jivago’s presentation of Loi fondamentale de l’Empire Russe
published in March 1905 (Weber 2002[1906]: 29, ff.2.), ended up “forming the most
substantial of his political writings, at least in extent” (Beetham 1985: 183). Regarding The
Situation Of The Bourgeois Democracy In Russia was published, first as an extra booklet for the
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik (No. 1, Vol. 22) in February 1906, and was
rapidly followed, in August 1906, by a second essay of two hundred and thirty-six pages (No.
1, Vol. 23). Its title alone, Russia’s Transition To Pseudo-Constitutionalism, sets the tone. Despite
being “profoundly moved and affected” by the “Russian struggle for liberation” (2002[1906]:
72), 5 Weber was not hopeful about the future of liberal ideas in Russia6. On the contrary, in
his mind, Russia’s 1905 post-revolutionary constitutional arrangement came to embody the
worst that the modern state could become.
Even if the new order was using some of the trappings of a parliamentary monarchy,
what it really induced was “the fading away of the still existing old autocracy and the
definitive establishment of a centralized domination of the modernized bureaucracy” (MWG
I/10: 405). If Weber always described the bureaucratization of modern life as a disquieting
and discomforting process, his portrayal of the Russian bureaucracy was by far the bleakest.
There, the ‘dead machine’ of bureaucracy was not merely busy fabricating “the cage of
bondage which men may one day be forced to inhabit” (MWG I/15: 464), as it was
everywhere else in the Western world, in tsarist Russia the officialdom had already become a
murderous machine. Pyotr Stolypin (1862-1911) acted both as Prime Minister and Minister
of Internal Affairs from 1906 to 1911. This was an unusual concentration of power in tsarist
Russia. He used the full might of the state bureaucracy to launch a brutal crackdown on the
revolutionary opposition. Ambulant martial courts staffed by military officers without any
legal training and that could arrest, judge, and execute “terrorists and traitors” in a matter of
hours started to roam the country. Deprived of counsel and without a right of appeal, the
accused offenders faced an expeditious travesty of justice. Thousands were condemned to
the gallows, or as they were known back then, to the “Stolypin’s necktie”. The lucky ones
were sent off to forced labour (Kauffmann 2004: 73-4). By the time of Stolypin’s
assassination at gunpoint in September 1911, Siberia had gained more than three million
inhabitants, only a small portion of which resulting from a normal demographic growth…
In Weber’s mind, Russia came to play the role of a magnifying glass: a literal army of
“public servants” composed of policemen, soldiers, censors, moles, informants and agents,
In his 1917 Rußlands Übergang zur Scheindemokratie, Weber will once more reiterate his “really strong
sympathies for the Russian liberation movement” (MWG I/15: 238).
6
C.f. Beetham1985 : 44-9.
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some answering the Okhrana, the imperial secret police, other directly to Stolypin, was
making every effort to suppress the liberal and democratic elements in the Russian society.
As formidable as this bureaucratic force might have been, it could never completely stem the
revolutionary movement, as evidenced by Stolypin’s own assassination. The forces of ‘order’
could only try to hit harder and at the opposition, and this over and over again. The reaction
of the government entangled Russia in a vicious circle of violence:
While the suppression of the murders –especially of the bomb attacks– was utterly
impossible, they exercised no discernable intimidating effect on the practice of the
administration: instead the civil war raged on, taking the terrible form of guerrilla
warfare. Neither side would grant pardon and the collateral death of innocents was not
given any consideration. (MWG 1/10: 318-9).
In the gravest of manners, the situation in Russia was almost a caricature of the German
one. In fact, many of the hindrances to the establishment parliamentary government within
an authoritarian monarchy that Weber was to describe in his 1917 Parliament And Government
In A Reconstructed Germany were already present in his Russian writing from 1906. As
Mommsen summarized it, in Weber’s eyes “Russia appeared to represent the coarsened
model [vergröbertes Muster] of what needed to be monitored in Germany” (1989[1959]: 155).
The most important impediment to a parliamentary government, in Russia as in Germany,
was the monarch’s vanity and his perpetual pursuance of prestige.
Of Dilettantes and Bureaucrats
Weber’s second article on the 1905 Revolution, Russia’s transition to pseudo-constitutionalism, was
particularly interested in the inner workings of the tsarist system and in its global
repercussions on the Russian society. If the Tsar had been compelled to make many
concessions to the liberal opposition in order to save his crown, those were more theoretical
than practical. The new constitution wasn’t that innovative. The executive power, which
entails both control over the army and foreign policy, was still the prerogative of the crown.
The ministers were accountable to the monarch. The latter also had complete authority in
administering court, the imperial domains7, and his succession. The Tsar was still head of the
Orthodox Church, described by Weber as the “religious foundation of absolutism” (Archiv:
279). Concerning budgetary matters, one of parliament’s most important task and political
weapon, the newly formed Duma had no say regarding military spending, the Navy, and the
Imperial court. Combined, those three expense fields represented about 40% of the state’s
budget. As for the remaining 60%, it got automatically renewed in case of dissension
between the Crown and the Duma. The legislative powers of this pseudo-parliament were
also desperately effete. The Tsar convened and dismissed the parliament, had a veto on all
his legislative decisions and could, when the Duma was not sitting, pass legally binding
7
In 1914, 40% of the Russian land was still a property of the state (Kauffmann 2004: 74).
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declaration that would be applied with force of law until the Duma’s next session, then to be
voted upon. To make things worst to the proponents of a constitutional monarchy, the Tsar
also transform the old State Council of 1810 into the upper chamber of parliament to be
played against the Duma. The Tsar directly names half of its members, the other one being
elected by a complicated system based on the Prussian three-class franchise. As stated in the
Article IV of the new Russian Constitution, if the powers of the crown were not “limitless”
anymore, they nevertheless still were “supreme”. Nicolas II was still an autocrat.
Furthermore, if he ever had the intention of respecting them in the first place8, the
new liberties proclaimed by the Tsar would prove to be hollow ones. Freedom of conscience
meant that some sects, the Jewish one in particular, were now tolerated, but as David
Beetham puts it, “unbelief itself was not admitted” (1985: 193). With regards to the freedom
of the press, it suffices to say that censorship forced about two hundred newspapers to stop
their publications and that legal actions were brought against as many journalists. Freedom
of assembly was never abided by, especially for the Russians workers. Stolypin’s repression
apparatus, from 1906 onwards, made a profuse use martial law and emergency regulations,
effectively suppressing all civil liberties. The state “had used every conceivable juridical
manipulation to subordinate the conceded new liberties to administrative arbitrariness. The
machinery worked on, as if nothing ever happened.” (MWG 1/10: 399).The new constitution
did nothing to protect the Russian people from the authoritarian features of tsarist Russia.
However, it would be mistaken to believe that it had no impact on the Russian state. On the
contrary said Weber, the new constitution changed everything.
Government in Russia, under the pre-1905 state of affairs, was characterized by the
everlasting rivalries between the different satrapies of the Russian state. Each bureau, each
military branch, each ministry was answering directly to the Tsar and competing with all
others for the imperial assent. The new constitution centralized the whole bureaucratic
activities of the state by making it answerable to the Council of ministers, himself advising
the Tsar. Weber was quick to point out that this new arrangement simply meant that the
imperial bureaucracy had consolidated its position at the expense of the crown’s own
influence. The Tsar was now utterly dependent on his ministers as they were the ones
presenting the Tsar with the information as they saw fit. What we saw taking place in Russia,
postulated Weber, was the:
bureaucratic rationalization of the autocracy […] which today requires, whether we
like it or not, the specialist, which in turn, due to an inadequate self-administration,
means exclusively the bureaucrat. The autocrat –even if he has a less insignificant
“Daß es von Seiten des Zaren persönlich mit einer Umwandlung Rußlands in einen »Rechtsstaat« mit –wie es im
Oktobermanifest etwas naiv heiß –»wirklicher« Garantie der Persönlichkeitsrechte zu keiner Zeit aufrichtig gemeint war, versteht
sich von selbst und trat bei jeder Gelegenheit hervor, die dazu irgend Anlaß grab; für ihn grab es nur Polizeiinteressen.” (MWG
1/10: 305)
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personality than the ruling Tsar– receives all of the information about domestic
politics spoon-feed [vorgekaut] to him by his prime minister and the Counsel. (Ibid: 406)
The interests of the bureaucracy would be the effective but inconspicuous filter through
which all choices and options would be presented to the Tsar for him to adjudge.
Weber saw two major problems with this constitutional arrangement. The first one
being that the Council of ministers, because its members were selected by the crown rather
than responsible to the Duma, was not qualified to advise the monarch. We will come back
this it later. The second problem was that the whole state apparatus was divided into two
adversarial camps. The relations between the people, on the one hand, the Tsar on the other,
were “organized by following the axiomatic assumption that the representatives of the
people were the natural enemies of state authority and that it would always remain so” (Ibid:
420). On the one side one could find his imperial bureaucrats, draped in the Tsar’s authority,
unfettered by the will of the people, “cut off from any organic links” with the rest of society,
“hovering above it in a kind of ‘liberty’ going against the grain of history” (Ibid: 110). On the
other side was the Duma, a “sham parliament” elected by the people, but created in such a
way as to be utterly powerless if it ever attempted to oppose the executive branch of
government. The constitution of 1905 meant “the permanent war of the “society” against
the bureaucracy” (Ibid: 411). The apparent strength of the crown, when it was in effect
weaker than even before, could not but lead to false expectation9, deception, and civil unrest.
The new constitution could not but be temporary states of affairs.
The situation could have been completely different if the Tsar had but decided to stay
the master of the bureaucratic apparatus of his empire, instead of renouncing his power to
“the machine”. Without surprise, Weber’s favourite solution would have been the thorough
parliamentarization of Russia. In such an eventuality, the bureaucracy would have been
“facing the parliament alongside the monarch, thus standing with him in a community of
interests” (Ibid: 408). The mistake, according to Weber, was entirely on the Tsar’s shoulders.
He had, as the German Kaiser would continue to do until his abdication in 1918,
confounded the appearance of power and the capacity for genuine political results:
The pure “kingdom of influence” can accomplish, especially in its conscious application,
a great deal of positive tasks for its country, tasks which a “kingdom of prerogative”
cannot achieve. The dynastic vanity and the swelling of the monarch’s self-assurance,
both so easily excited by the legal recognition of the existing prerogatives of the Crown,
mislead him toward personal ambitions that are simply incompatible the contemporary
realities of the modern state; the dilettantism of the ruler, if still possible during the
Renaissance, can nowadays only lead to detrimental consequences (Ibid: 408-9).
Throughout this whole period, one of the demands of the Russian’s peasantry was the election of
representatives to negotiate directly with the Tsar (Archiv: 332).
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That Webber articulated this dual concept of monarchy, as either a “kingdom of influence”
or as one of “prerogative”, is in itself a giveaway. Weber thought about monarchy with the
category of the English constitutional tradition, as he had discovered them in Maitland’s
Constitutional History of England or Gneist’s lectures on British State Law for the Nineteenth-Century
Germany, while doing his military service in Strasburg in 1884 (Mayer 1944: 21-22).
Equally interesting for our endeavour in evaluating Weber’s understanding of the High
Victorian critique of monarchy is the fact that he presented this dual conception of
monarchy as representative of its general development in a modern state. What the situation
in Russia displayed was in no way exceptional or particular to its specific historical condition.
In fact, argued Weber, Wilhelmine Germany was displaying the same symptoms, simply in a
still benign form. Both Germany and Russia were examples of monarchies that had decided
to stay “kingdoms of prerogative”. Naturally, some features of tsarism were specific to the
Russian national history, to the influence of the Orthodox Church, to pan-Slavic
nationalism, and to the agrarian structure of the country’s economy, but the transfer of the
autocratic qualities of the tsarist absolutism of old from the monarch to the state
bureaucracy was no accident:
Altogether, the situation in Russia offers us the opportunity to study the consequences
of a specifically modern “monarchism”, in which, as things stand today, one must
inevitably expect a monarch who is, in the worst case scenario a dangerous political
dilettante, or in the best case, a one-sided military expert. (MWG I/10: 677, ff. 359)
“Dangerous political dilettante”, if written in 1906 in a text about Nicolas II, these words
were equivalently aimed at the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had just suffered a
humiliating political defeat at the Algeciras Conference, and reminded the world how
catastrophic his management of the Moroccan crisis had been.
Weber’s argument was precisely that the disappointing –to say the least– capacity of
the two cousins for governing their respective empire was not such much to be blamed on
their respective personality, although it was indisputably the source of many unnecessary
quarrels, but rather on their shared obstinacy to protract a “personal regime” that was not
suitable with the requirements of a mass state. The time of the despot, enlightened or not,
was definitely over. Weber analysis of the events in Russia showed how such a “patriarchal
autocracy was technically achievable only at the price of being a system ruled by rut and
inefficacies” (MWG I/10: 405), and how, in his fight for the trapping of power against a
representative body, the monarch was in fact yielding up the administration of the country to
his officials. For a modern state, the personal regime of a king could not but become the
uncontrolled domination of its officialdom.
In April 1917, Die Hilfe (Vol.23. No17: 272-279) published Weber’s third and final text
on the situation in Russia. Weber, as everyone else, had been quite surprised by the February
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Revolution 10 , but was prompt in suggesting a straightforward explanation: The Tsar’s
“disastrous vanity” was to be blamed; “his most decisive central defect was given to a
respective ruinous error: to want himself to rule (MWG I/15: 243). According Weber, the
Romanov Dynasty would have been lost in the 1905 Revolution if, “against all
expectations”, a statesman like Stolypin had not emerged. As draconic and dastardly as his
politics had been, his efforts alone had managed to break the revolutionary opposition and
preserve the Tsar formal position at the head of the state. The Tsar himself, despite
appetences, was a “dilettante, whose inevitably restless and unpredictable interventions […]
made any purposeful politics impossible and imperiled the existence of both the country and
his crown” (Ibid: 244). This dilettantish character, as stated earlier, was not conditioned by
the personality of the Tsar, inasmuch as by the intrinsic incompatibility between the idea of a
personal regime and the technical knowledge required by a modern administration. It was
what Beetham called the pathology of absolutism” (1985: 192-8). The education of a
monarch could in no way supply him with the kind of highly technical grasp of the inner
workings of a modern mass state. On the contrary, the trappings of the Crown stir in
monarchs the “Romantik und Pathetik” chase for “the external appearances of power, not only
making his conspicuous and noisily interference pernicious to any sober and consistent
conduct of politics, but also potentially endangering the crown itself” (Ibid: 246). The Tsar,
writes Weber, while most certainly thinking about the Kaiser, could have chosen another
path. As Eduard VII had doe, he could have walked away from the “romantische Phantasie”
that represent a ‘personal regime’ and conceded to let his ministers administer the country in
his name. His would still have been the kingdom of influence as a “monarch with political
aptitudes and a sense of restraint consistently exercises a great influence on the direction of
the state” (Ibid). In parliamentarization Weber came to see both the best way for a monarch
to preserve his crown and the most effective system of public administration.
Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland, whose publication in the pages of the
Frankfurter Zeitung also started in April 1917, is Weber’s most mature expression of his
political thought. As one should expect, Weber mobilized the Russian example as a
precautionary warning for those in Germany who oppose parliamentary institutions:
One need only look for a moment at Russia in order to understand that the transition to
parliamentary monarchy, as the liberal politicians desired it, would have preserved the
dynasty, destroyed the naked rule of the bureaucracy, and in the final result would have
‘Red October’, or the Bolshevik revolution, was to build on the February Revolution. The two events
are however distinct. The February Revolution, often called the Bourgeois Revolution of 1917, lead up to the
establishment of the Russian Provisional Government of Prince Georgy Lvov (1861-1925), supported by the
liberals and the socialists. Latter that year, it is this new government that Bolcheviks overthrown. However,
their seizure of power not being recognize by wide segments of the country, especially outside SaintPetersburg, it plunged the country into the chaos of the Russian Civil War (1917-22). In 1922, the victory of the
Red Army against White Guards led to the creation of the Soviet-Union (1922-1991).
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strengthened the country as much as it is now weekend by the present republic of
literati. (MGW 1/15: 469)11
Weber expected parliamentarisation to have two distinct effects. First a strong parliament
would allow for the politically able monarchs like Eduard VII and Leopold II to preserve a
great among of influence over the course of the affairs of state while simultaneously – “zum
heil der Macht des Landes!” – removing the incompetent ones from the equation (Ibid: 472).
Second, a parliament with real legislative and political powers was held to be a far better
“selection site of leaders [Auslesestätte von Führern]” than the nomination of ministers by the
person of the monarch could ever be. Ministers trained by years of work in parliamentary
commissions and party politics would be able to do one essential thing that no aristocratic
system could ever hope to achieve, acquire the specialist knowledge that would enable them
to oversee the daily administration of the country by its civil servants (Ibid: 486-507)12.
However, the overall logic according to which a modern monarchy could either try to
preserve the appearance of active political power, thus in reality relinquishing the true
political power to an unbound officialdom, or that it could accept the tenets of parliamentary
monarchism and entrust the daily administration of the state to a cabinet compose of
seasoned professional party politicians, was in no way a new idea. Five decades earlier, this
conception of parliamentary monarchy was already at the foundation of Bagehot and Mill’s
respective positions in the debate concerning the Second Reform Act of 1867.
We Must Not Let in Daylight Upon Magic
Having spent thirty-five years of his life working for the East India Company, John Stuart
Mill was well aware of the remarkable efficiency that a bureaucratic organization could have
in administering large social groups. And he did not hold this view only when it concerned
foreign rules. In England as abroad, Mill held that “freedom cannot produce its best effects,
and often breaks down altogether, unless means can be found of combining it with trained
and skilled administration” (CW XIX: 440). As a member of parliament, Mill supported the
1854 Northcote–Trevelyan Report that established a permanent civil service based on merit
Under Weber’s pen, the term of “Scheinkonstitutionalismus” is mainly associated to his treatment of the
1905-06 events in Revolutionary Russia. However, Weber already used it to describe Germany as early as 1892.
Cf. Letter Baumgarten on April 18th 1892. See also Letter to Naumann on December 14th 1906.
12
For another formulation, see Suffrage And Democracy In Germany: “But the full power of parliament is
indispensable wherever hereditary organs of state - monarchs - arc the (formal) heads of officialdom.
Inevitably, the mode monarch is always just as much of an amateur as any member of parliament, and therefore
quite incapable of controlling an administration. But there is this difference: a member of parliament can learn
to weigh the power of words in party conflict, whereas the monarch is required to remain outside this struggle;
furthermore, provided it has the right to hold enquiries, parliament is in a position to acquire the relevant facts
on a subject (by cross-examining experts and witnesses under oath) and thus to control the actions of officials.
How is this to be effected by the monarch or by a democracy without a parliament?” (Weber 2004[1917]: 127)
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and independent of the will of the elected official13. Like Weber after them, a great many
Victorians, like Mill, but also Walter Bagehot, and even Gladstone, recognized that
bureaucracy was an essential part of modern politics14. The work of government, writes Mill,
must be let in “the hands of governors by profession; which is the essence and meaning of
bureaucracy” (Ibid: 103). They wanted to put an end to the corrupted and inefficient system
upheld by the old plutocratic mode of selection for public charges. However, Victorians also
knew that a state bureaucracy if left to its own devices, was prone to “diseases”.
For Mill, the first of those ailments was “routine”, where “the bureaucratic
governments […] perish by the immutability of their maxims”. The second was
“pedantocracy” the transformation of a state bureaucracy into an “aristocracy of public
functionaries” (Ibid: 439). Like “Despotism”, pedantocracy designated a comprehensive
system of government that could potentially sustain itself indefinitely. Mill listed as
pedantocracies all those countries that Montesquieu had previously defined as despotic,
nations like Russia and China, because they were administered by mandarins and imperial
bureaucrats (Urbani 2007: 84, ff.1). In Consideration on Representative Government (1861) Mill’s
definition of despotism has no affinity with violence and becomes synonymous with
“stagnation” and “routinization”. As a despotism by officials, a pedantocracy, much like the
despots and the viziers of Montesquieu’s work, simply take away the people’s intellectual and
moral attributes, letting them not accepting their political submission, but rather not realizing
that they are indeed unfree.
Weber’s closing statement at the end The Protestant Ethic of the impending “Chinese
petrification” in modern life is not so different. Weber’s apprehension about the
development of modern large-scale bureaucratic apparatus, “ housing of that future
serfdom”, is the overriding concern structuring all of his political thought. If “‘history’ is
unremitting in spawning ever new ‘aristocracies’ and ‘authorities’ (MWG I/10: 270), to
Weber it seemed that the ever-increasing scope and power of bureaucracy had to be kept in
check. We see how both Weber and Mill not only understood the challenge that bureaucracy
represented to liberal societies, but also how both feared bureaucracy precisely because of
the dehumanizing effect it could have on the mind set of those cornered in this “iron cage”.
Weber’s Ordnungsmensch and Mill’s pendantocrates are one and the same.
Naturally, the question then becomes how to secure the positive effect of a
bureaucratic administration in modern mass states, whilst also resisting is worst possible
effects? For the Victorians, the question had the same starting point as it had for Weber.
Was the current political organization, namely a monarchy, an appropriate institutional
framework to this end? Weber certainly did not think of that “personal regime” of the Tsar
C.f. Reform of the Civil Service (CW XVIII: 205-212).
In his seminal On Liberty, Mill states that “to secure as much of the advantages of centralized power
and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the
general activity—is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government” (XVIII: 309).
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14
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or of the Kaiser as capable of controlling the excesses of the officialdom. On the contrary, in
their obstinacy to preserve the appearance of political power, a “kingdom of prerogative”,
they were in fact sacrificing the real political power to their functionaries, thus accelerating
the edification of a social environment characterized by a growing “unfreedom[Unfreeheit]”.
Parliamentarization, on the other hand, could allow for a politically gifted monarch to exert
his influence while leaving the dilettantish one powerless to do harm their crown of their
country. Additionally, a parliament would supply a steady number of experienced statesmen
to serve as the King’s ministers, administering both the daily administration of the state and
supervising its bureaucrat’s activities.
Obviously, the Victorians could happily draw other conclusions from their own
circumstance. The reign of Queen Victoria had very few common aspects with Nicolas’s II
and Wilhelm’s II cases. By the time she ascended to the throne in 1837, the first reform Act
had for five years already secured the kind of parliamentary politics that Weber would later
be inspired by. More surprising, however, is despite those massive differences in their
respective political contexts, both Victorians and Weber shared a common evaluation of the
monarchy. “Since European life assumed a settled aspect”, writes Mill 1861, “anything above
mediocrity in a hereditary king has become extremely rare, while the general average has
been even below mediocrity, both in talent and in vigour of character. A monarchy
constitutionally absolute now only maintains itself in existence […] through the mental
qualifications of a permanent bureaucracy” (CW XIX: 437). The reliance of modern
monarch on bureaucracy had not escaped Mill. None being all-seeing, it meant that no
monarch could rule alone, thus his need for a bureaucracy superintend his domains. The less
power a monarch is willing to consent to his subjects, be it through diverse intermediary
bodies, local and regional governing bodies or representative assemblies, the greater his need
for a bureaucracy (Holmes 2007: 339). The more absolute he wants his control to be, the
more powerful his servants must become, the less control he has over them:
A professional bureaucracy can be established and trained. Training however does not
insure loyalty. The despot may treat ordinary citizens arbitrarily and abusively. But to
instil the necessary loyalty into his administration, his principal information-gathering
organ and the main instrument of his rule, he must treat it with some degree of respect,
decency, fairness, and predictability. This is another reason why the behaviour of a
power-maximizing despot, although unlimited in principle, will often be restricted in
practice. (CW XIX: 399)
Here, Mill presents us with the same “inversely related dynamic” between an autocrat display
of power, and his true control over the officialdom exercising his rulership that Weber came
up with in his analysis of the 1906 post-revolutionary Russia. The higher the centralization of
power, the less freedom of movement for himself the monarch can effectively preserve.
Ultimately, this culminates in a situation where “nothing to which the bureaucracy is really
adverse can be done at all” (CW XVIII: 308). So instead of suffering from a constitutional
limitation of its power by accepting the establishment of a parliamentary monarchy, the
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crown, in time, come to be belittled as nothing more than a mantle which the state officials
can wrap themselves in to justify their own authority. In 1859 already, Mill wrote about how
the “melancholy condition of the Russian empire” was due to its first step on that path:
“The Czar himself is powerless against the bureaucratic body; he can send any one of them
to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them, or against their will. On every decree of his
they have a tacit veto, by merely refraining from carrying it into effect” (Ibid :307). As in the
case of Weber, we see that Mill’s evaluation of monarchy is not based on specific
personalities, inasmuch as on the systematic consequences of the developments at work in
the mass state.
Walter Bagehot also shared this view. In writing The English Constitution, first published
in The Fortnightly Review between May 15th 1865 and January 1st 1867, he aimed at preserving
what he thought of as the essential parts of the country’s institutions from any unnecessary
modification in the Second Reform Act. One of the misconceptions he addressed was the
idea that the Crown in England was still the executive. “It is a fiction of the past to [the
Queen] legislative power”. On the contrary, the Crown was the “dignify part” of the
constitution par excellence, not the “effective one”, that was actually in charge of political
business (LWWB V: 96, 114): “The occupations of a constitutional monarch are grave,
formal, important, but never exciting” (Ibid: 133).
It was a good thing Bagehot thought that monarch was no longer in charge of the
business of government, since nothing in their education could prepare them for the highly
technical and specialize nature of modern legislation. “Princes had no impulse for real
work,” not because all kings’ character and sanity had to be bad as George’s III had been,
but simply because nothing in the education of a prince could be “calculated to foster it”
(Ibid): “his education will be that of one who has never had to struggle; who had always felt
that he has noting to gain; who has had the first dignity given him” (Ibid: 146). The new
bourgeois class, “trained to thought, full of money, and yet trained to business” (Ibid: 161)
was seen by Bagehot, as by Weber, as the best possible legislator in this new age. Young
Lord, born into old-money wealth could not be expected to care much for the law of
patents, for the law of ‘passing tolls’, or the ‘law of prisons’ as “it is as great a difficulty to
learn business in a palace as it is to learn agriculture in a park” (Ibid). For the same reasons,
mill too thought that “great ministers, in the aristocratic governments of modern Europe,
[were] almost as rare a phenomenon as a great king (CW XIX: 104). Certainly political genius
could occasionally emerge from the aristocratic family. Throughout history many had, largerthan-life personalities to whom everything they touch seem to succeed, at least for a time.
But “what right do have we”, asked Bagehot, “to expect the perpetual entail on any family of
an exquisite […] sort of genius? (Ibid: 140, see also p.206)”. None.
This is why Bagehot advises constitutional monarchs to respect their duty to a “wellconsidered inaction. What he means by that is exactly in line with Weber’s conception of a
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“kingdom of influence”. Officially, states Bagehot, a “sovereign has, under a constitutional
monarchy [but] three rights – the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to
warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others” (Ibid: 142). Nothing is to
stop a wise and politically sagacious monarch to leave his own mark on the affairs of his
kingdom, but through the actions of his ministers, generals and ambassadors. King Leopold
of Belgium, an example also often used by Weber, was Bagehot favourite “consciously
modest king” (Ibid: 143).
Even such limited monarch, when one thinks about what it entails, is bound to be an
exception. A monarch is useful when he gives an effectual and beneficial guidance to his
ministers. But these ministers, believe Bagehot, “are sure to be among the ablest men of
their time” since the business of parliament they submit themselves to, and for some since
years, is a “magnificent training” that separate the wheat from the chaff:
They will have had to conduct the business of Parliament so as to satisfy it; they will
have to speak so as to satisfy it. The two together cannot be done save by a man of very
great and varied abilities. The exercise of the two gifts is sure to teach a man much of
the world; and if it did not, a Parliamentary leader has to pass through a magnificent
training before he becomes a leader. He has to gain a seat in Parliament; to gain the ear
of Parliament; to gain the confidence of Parliament; to gain the confidence of his
colleagues. No one can achieve these—no one, still more, can both achieve them and
retain them—without a singular ability, nicely trained in the varied detail of life. What
chance has an hereditary monarch such as nature forces him to be, such as history
shows he is, against men so educated and so born? He can but be an average man to
begin with; sometimes he will be clever, but sometimes he will be stupid; in the long run
he will be neither clever nor stupid; he will be the simple, common man who plods the
plain routine of life from the cradle to the grave. His education will be that of one who
has never had to struggle; who has always felt that he has nothing to gain; who has had
the first dignity given him; who has never seen common life as in truth it is. It is idle to
expect an ordinary man born in the purple to have greater genius than an extraordinary
man born out of the purple; to expect a man whose place has always been fixed to have
a better judgment than one who has lived by his judgment; to expect a man whose
career will be the same whether he is discreet or whether he is indiscreet to have the
nice discretion of one who has risen by his wisdom, who will fall if he ceases to be wise
(Ibid: 145-6).
Weber could not have exposed his conception of parliament as an “Auslesestätte von Führern”
in any better way. And since parliamentary ministers were ofttimes not only better equipped
to understand the practical aspects of governmental activity, but also more accustomed to
conflict, though decisions and political responsibilities, they were, in Bagehot’s and Mill’s
view, the “real sovereign of the state” (CW XIX: 91), those in charge of the effective parts of
the constitution, in charge of the public servants and those responsible before the electorate.
Their position was symbolically as servants of the Crown, but was in truth, they were the
masters of the executive branch of government, the master of the state apparatus. This is the
parliamentary system that Weber hoped one day to take root in Germany.
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