A threefold problematic emerges from Max Weber’s work: the dynamics of bureaucracy in the modern state; the ethic of responsibility in politics as a vocation and the counter-forces that put stress on that ethic; and, third, the ethical tensions between scholarly inquiry and political advocacy in academic life. Last year I began to work through Weber’s ideas on these fronts with an eye to their bearing on contemporary events.

And then came the 100 days!

Two caveats are required in approaching Weber’s relevance to the turmoil Trump’s second term has unleashed.

The first regards theory. Weber’s mode of thinking, his style of theorizing, is to develop problematics, that is, fields of inquiry, in which concepts are minted and deployed to account for the contrary forces at play in society and politics. Theory neither predicts nor envisions a historical outcome of the present. Weber does not postulate a set of social relations and conflicts with an intrinsic tendency toward a particular transformation of society as a whole, as did Marx.

Nor does he seek a unified conception of justice or postulate an ideal form of polity in the manner of political philosophy. The difference and strife among the value spheres in modern society does not admit of an inevitable outcome or a universal ideal: “the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other.”

The second caveat involves historical contexts. It is important to resist making too direct an analogy between the United States today and the Weimar Republic. The question of democratic fragility is different in the two situations. Germany was reeling in the wake of its defeat in World War I, the collapse of its monarchy, and the reparations it faced after the Versailles Treaty. In these inauspicious circumstances, it was trying to establish a democracy for the first time in its history; meanwhile, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was inspiring leftist revolutionaries, and an incipient nationalistic revolutionary conservatism was attracting disillusioned veterans. Weber’s essays “Science as a Vocation” and Politics as a Vocation,” published in 1919, were based on lectures given, respectively, in November 1917 and January 1919. Weber died in 1920, thirteen years before the ultimate breakdown of the Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler’s rise to power. In the U.S. today, Trump’s cascade of executive orders and DOGE’s takeover of government agencies and commandeering of official records and data have opened a decidedly uncertain, surely dangerous period for liberal democracy. American democracy’s vaunted durable continuity is often overstated in light of the 1850s and the Civil War, post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Gilded Age, and conflict over racial segregation in the 1950s and 60s; nonetheless, it has been characterized by a Constitution at once difficult to amend and amenable to flexible interpretation, the separation of powers, judicial independence, and the system of checks-and-balances—all of which are today under stress and often openly contested. The fragility of democracy in the process of inauguration and its fragility under duress may well illuminate one another but they are not identical….