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Ours are nihilistic times, says philosopher Dr Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Never before has society been more atomized, demoralized, and configured to fit the mandates of the capitalist system. What is to be done?

In her latest book, Dr Brown turns to German sociologist Max Weber to answer this question. Weber despised nihilism as a source of social polarization and bureaucratic disenchantment. To revive the collective spirit, Weber celebrated the political virtue of charisma.

100 years later, however, charisma is seen with tremendous suspicion — not least for its consequences in Weber’s native Germany. For issue #64, Dr Brown challenges progressive forces to reconsider their approach to charismatic political leadership, offering a vision of "Weber for the Left" from her new book out from the Harvard University Press, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber.

Charismatic leadership tends to worry, if not repel, left and liberal thinkers. There is radical democratic anxiety about leadership as an inevitably hierarchical formation. There is liberal democratic anxiety about its potential usurpation of representation. There is Habermasian anxiety about surrendering reason as the source of political agency and mobilization. There is widely shared anxiety about the dangers of despotism that charismatic leadership portends, fear that flirtation with such leadership breeds or legitimates unchecked power. Consequently, many progressives denounce left populism today, and not only Leninism of old. Others defend leaderless social movements, uprisings without clear or consolidated demands, or horizontalism and sociocracy. 

These anxieties about charismatic leaders may be taken seriously without allowing them to govern. Charisma, with its capacity to incite and excite, inspire and mobilize, and above all lead beyond business as usual, is an indisputably potent element of political life. For the Left to do without it while the Right milks it for advantage is to ensure defeat while hewing to the kind of virtuous political ethos that Weber warns against. Liberal centrists, in particular, at times seem prepared for the world to go up in flames while clutching institutions, proceduralism, reason, and civility. The mistake here is more than pragmatic or strategic, however. Rejection of charismatic leadership misunderstands both politics and reason in the effort to preserve modernity’s peculiar promise of freedom based on their conjoining. It imagines political arguments free of rhetorical power, prevailing only on the basis of their evidentiary and logical soundness. It imagines reason in an abstract and autonomous register, independent of cultural location, forms of rationality, and their particular terms of discourse. Above all, it imagines reason as independent of desire, if not opposed to it. 

These are consequential misunderstandings. Among other things, they anoint the Left with rationality and tar the Right exclusively with false consciousness or bad faith—greed, supremacisms, or ambition for power parading as justice and right. In this, they reproduce the intellectual disdain that many drawn to the Right chafe against and that right-­wing politicians exploit. They also align a left value constellation with truth, disavowing the ardor, rancor, will to power, and historical contingency in this constellation. Moreover, in mistaking the political theater for an academic debating hall, the Left shrinks from crafting its own passionate attachments as a compelling future and grasping in order to wound, exploit, or co-­opt the passions of its enemy. Instead, the left rationalists are limited to calling out hypocrisies and fictions in right-­wing projects or exposing their nefarious funding streams or networks. Always on its back foot in this regard, the Left is perplexed by its own failures and shrinking ground as its enemies today flirt ever more openly with authoritarianism and fascism. 

The point is not that the Left should learn to play dirty. Or substitute emotion for thoughtful and informed argument, lies for truth, convenient fictions for science. Or hew to Sorelian irrationalism and blind belief in myth. All of this would deepen nihilism and hasten the end of democracy, and miss the opportunity to challenge the binaries contributing to predicaments of the present. Rather, the point is that we need to surrender the opposition between reason and desire in the political sphere, along with conceits that reason could ever defeat desire in politics, or that conceptual philosophical refinements or science solve political problems. Above all we need to surrender every variation on the notion that only false consciousness keeps the masses from knowing and acting on their true interests in equality and emancipation. Often the masses want neither; their desires run another way, and the challenge is to harness and reroute these desires. Desire is not infinitely malleable, but if it is understood and gratified with recognition, it can be crafted and redirected. 

Our task is to incorporate concern with desire into political thinking, action, and persuasion at every turn, whether we are analyzing climate denialism and opposition to abortion or fashioning a campaign designed to traverse hardened political polarities. How might we mobilize the desire to live comfortably for building an order that supports rather than imperils life, both human and non-­human? How might we mobilize care for innocent life for protecting vulnerable life of every kind? How might we mobilize the longing for respect and belonging for resistance to ubiquitous powers of subordination, humiliation, and abjection? 

Attention to political desire draws us near an orbit of thinkers on the Left—Sorel, Gramsci, Marcuse, Stuart Hall, among others—who looked to culture and feeling to replace and supplement economism, spontaneity, and reason as sources of revolutionary enthusiasm among the masses. This kind of thinking, of course, is far from Weber’s own heart, especially but not only the Sorelian strain that fetishized violence and valorized mythos over logos. Yet Weber’s particular formulation of charismatic leadership may be precisely what is needed to make this tradition more responsible, compelling, and relevant to the present. Only charismatic political leadership, Weber insisted, could productively re-­enchant the political realm, disrupting its machineries of domination with visions and forms of action redemptive of the human power to shape the world. Grounded in inner discipline and restraint, charismatic leadership tethered to relentless responsibility for event-­chains in the singular theater of politics both leads to and models a way of linking revolutionary ardor for another world with concern for life in this one. Far from acting from impulse or instinct, let alone vanity or belief in the superior ethical worth of a cause, Weber’s hero disrupts the status quo through close respect for its powers and coordinates while doggedly pursuing paths to new ones. This figure holds out revolutionary hope that comports with neither myth nor utopia while breaking the open closures of the present. 

For Weber, sober, responsible, purposive leadership in the contemporary political realm includes appreciating the extraordinary difficulty of resisting, let alone overcoming, forms of rationality and rationalization that govern to bring about alternatives; recognizing violence as the ultimate means, and power as the only currency of the realm; consciousness of the contingent nature of one’s cause along with the distance between intentions and effects; and commitment to awakening human longing for something to believe in and hope for. These are also indispensable elements of a left politics, and their combination is especially important in turning aside fatalism and resisting nihilism. While we have been focused on their embodiment in leadership, this very embodiment can also be a form of political education. Leaders who are passionate and responsible, visionary and careful, inspirational and sober, hold lessons for social movements and citizenries alike. 

This said, political education, and its complex entwinement with desire, cannot be left to the political realm alone. If Weber is right that political worldviews, “values,” emerge from complex attachments and desires, and if nihilism represents a crisis of desire, an impasse in loving this life and this world, then education of feeling or attachment becomes fundamental to building a post-­nihilist future. This education becomes all-important as we abandon the conceit that our values are true and those of our opponents false, that political values are a matter of discovery rather than legislation, and that either reason or interests will naturally counter seduction by authoritarianism or chicanery, by unsustainable supremacies of species, race, or gender, or by nihilistic versions of freedom (nihilistic because they do not serve life in any sense). Weber’s position, a retort to liberals and Marxists alike, reminds us that rational argument and compelling evidence by itself does not counter popular fears and frustrations, attachments and yearnings. Rather, the task of those invested in a more just and sustainable order is to kindle and educate desire for such an order and to build that desire into a worldview and viable political project.

Excerpted from NIHILISTIC TIMES: THINKING WITH MAX WEBER BY WENDY BROWN, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2023 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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