RESEARCH ARTICLE

politics or the political? anhistorical perspective on acontemporary non-debatekari palonenDepartment of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University Jyvaskyla,P.O.B. 35, Jyvaskyla FIN-40014, FinlandE-mail: kpalonen@cc.jyu.fi

doi:10.1057/palgrave.eps.2210113

AbstractConceptualisations of ‘the political’ and ‘politics’ tend to diverge quitesignificantly from one another in contemporary literature. The origins of thissplit can be traced back to the works of Carl Schmitt and Max Weber. Byaccentuating the opposition between these conceptions, we are able to detecttwo different attitudes toward politics. The Schmittian ideal of the political longsfor stability that extends beyond the daily quarrels of politics, whereas theWeberian thinkers understand politics as a contingent activity par excellence.

Keywords politics; the political; Max Weber; Carl Schmitt

In 1981, Regis Debray, the formerrevolutionary and later advisor toPresident Francois Mitterrand, pub-

lished a book with the classical title,Critique de la raison politique. He opposespolitics (la politique) to the political(le politique): ‘Bref, la politique m’a long-temps masque le politique’ (Debray,1981: 13). For Debray, the decline ofpolitical activism was indeed combinedwith the reflection of ‘the political’ assuperior to ‘mere’ politics. A number ofother French authors shared this view,(see Marchart, 2003) whereas others, asthe title of Alan Badiou Peut-on penser lapolitique (1985) indicates, have contin-ued to reflect on the practical activity ofpolitics. No real debate between the two

modes of conceptualisation exists inFrance or elsewhere.

Should we understand politics by goingbehind the term itself to examine ‘thepolitical’ or by rendering the activity itselfmore intelligible? In this essay I shalltrack the conceptual origins of the twoperspectives to the opposition betweenCarl Schmitt and Max Weber. The pre-sence of the Schmittian and Weberianproblematic already played a role in theinter-war literature and is even moredistinct in the post-war conceptualisa-tions of the political and politics. Finally,I shall conclude with the thesis thatthe Schmittian search for the politicaldevalues the practical activity ofpolitics, whereas the Weberian style of

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conceptualising politics as contingentactivity re-values the politicians.

SCHMITT AND THE CONCEPTOF THE POLITICAL

Both the expression ‘the political’ inEnglish and le politique in French referhistorically to translations of the Germandas Politische. The catalyst for the rise ofthe political in recent academic literatureis, of course, Carl Schmitt’s Der Begriffdes Politischen. It was first published asan article in 1927, and the book versionappeared in 1932 and was subsequentlyrevised during the Nazi regime, althoughSchmitt himself canonised the 1932 ver-sion in 1963. Today, the literature on thepolitical tacitly refers to Schmitt, despitethe notoriety of the author.The use of the adjective as a noun in the

expression das Politische was certainlynot Schmitt’s innovation. Friedrich Schillerand Friedrich Schlegel had already usedthe term in the 1790s (see the referencesin Palonen, 2006: 45–46) as referring to adistinct sphere or sector. The demarcationof the political refers to a new level ofabstraction that illustrates the increasingthematisation of the phenomenon overthe course of the second half of thenineteenth century. In his AllgemeineStaatslehre, the leading constitutionallawyer Georg Jellinek used a more ab-stract expression of the concept of thepolitical, namely der Begriff des Poli-tischen, although subordinating it to thatof the state (Jellinek, 1900: 158).The question of the criterion for politics

or the political was a controversial topic inthe Wilhelminian and Weimar debates. Inaddition to Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, anumber of other authors from variousbackgrounds, including, for example,Hans Morgenthau, Karl Mannheim andWalter Benjamin, should be recognisedas relevant to the present-day debates onthe concept (see Palonen, 1985, 2006).

Schmitt’s famous opening sentence onthe political as a precondition of the state,‘[d]er Begriff des Staates setzt den desPolitischen voraus’, (Schmitt, 1932: 20) isa direct inversion of Jellinek’s view. It isno longer the concept of the state but thatof the political that is the key problem forconstitutional lawyers. Schmitt’s call forradical novelty to become the norm inlegal discourse is marked by this empha-tic turn against Jellinek’s authority. Formany practical purposes of legislation andjurisprudence, such as the ‘political’ char-acter of a crime or an association, thepolitical can no longer be determined interms of the state (Schmitt, 1932: 22–26).

An intense thematisation of politics andthe rise of controversial calls for politici-sation took place in the German academicand cultural context during the yearsbetween the publication of AllgemeineStaatslehre and Der Begriff des Poli-tischen (see Palonen, 1985, 1989). Thecriteria of the political were broadly dis-cussed particularly among constitutionaland international lawyers, both in relationto the disputes surrounding the Weimarrepublican constitution and the contro-versy between the legal positivists andtheir fierce opponents (see esp. Veroffent-lichugen der Vereinigung der DeutschenStaatsrechtslehrer vol. 5, 1929, and vol.7, 1931). Schmitt’s construction of anew ‘criterion’ for the political tookplace within the range of legal discourse;he no longer regarded the political as aresidual concept that can neither be de-fined in legal terms nor considered amoral,economic, or other type of phenomenon.He aimed at identifying the political by itscategorically distinctive criteria (‘in eigen-en letzten Unterscheidungen’, Schmitt,1932: 26). It is to this end that heproposes his famous friend–enemy distinc-tion, ‘Unterscheidung von Freund undFeind’ (Schmitt, 1932: 26).

Schmitt’s understanding of the politicalwas opposed to that of his legal collea-gues, such as Heinrich Triepel (1927),

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who still thought in terms of spheres.Although Schmitt offers distinctive criter-ia for the moral, aesthetic and economicspheres and compares the political withthem, his point is that the political doesnot form a separate sphere of its own,‘kein eigenes Sachgebiet’ (Schmitt, 1932:38). Although this distinction to Sachge-biete is not clearly formulated in the firstversion (see Schmitt, 1927: 4, 10–11), itappears to be the result of the introduc-tion of the degree of intensity as asupplementary component of the criter-ion, which is indebted to HansMorgenthau’s dissertation from 1929(Schmitt, 1932: 27–28, 38–39).From the perspective of conceptual

history, the distinction of the politicalalludes to a higher degree of abstraction.The Schmittian concept of the politicalconstructs a metaphorical space of inclu-sion and exclusion. The distinction be-tween friend and enemy by the decision(distinction) of a quasi-sovereign agent(in terms of Schmitt’s 1922 thesis) alsoeliminates all the ambiguous intermedi-ate Spielraum for action. It is, however,the degree of intensity that gives thedistinction between friend and enemy itstemporal variability. With the additionalcriterion of the necessity of political unityamong friends and enemies (politischeEinheit, Schmitt, 1932, esp. 43–45),Schmitt reaffirms the exclusive characterof friendship and enmity and delimits therole of the purely formal criterion ofintensity. Schmitt later specified that thefigure of the partisan is one that attemptsto deny the exclusivity of the distinctionbetween friend and enemy and, corre-spondingly, dissolve the definite politicalunits (Schmitt, 1963, esp. 93).Schmitt never explicates the relation-

ship between das Politische and Politik,although he presupposes the ‘real possi-bility of the struggle’ as a precondition ofspeaking of Politik (Schmitt, 1932: 32).The point is that the political does not liein the struggle itself (Schmitt, 1932: 35).

Politics, which is the activity of struggling,is conceptually secondary to the criterionof the political, which also marks thepriority of structure over passing tempor-al events. Accordingly, for Schmitt, thepolitical decision regarding the identifica-tion of the enemy has already been madeand, as such, is not left to the ‘strugglingsoldier’ (Schmitt, 1932: 34). However,the very act of distinguishing or decidingbetween friend and enemy marks anexceptional situation that refers to timeand action within his thinking.

Der Begriff des Politischen evoked in-tense debates among Schmitt’s contem-poraries, who frequently transcended hislimited juridical problematic as well as theterms of his conceptualisation. As anexample of this among historians, wecanmention themedievalist Otto Brunner,who uses Schmitt in his polemic againstthe anachronistic projection of the stateonto the Middle Ages and refers to thenon-territorial concept of Fehde (feud) asthe mark of enmity between political units(see Brunner, 1942).

Helmuth Plessner’s Macht und mens-chliche Natur (1931) offers the mostoriginal application of the Schmittiancategories. Plessner was a philosophicalanthropologist who was indebted to We-ber, and he already defended politicsagainst the popular claims of the commu-nity in his Grenzen der Gemeinschaft(Plessner, 1924). Plessner incorporatesthe friend–enemy distinction within Politikas existing in the situation of taking

‘Schmitt’s understandingof the political was

opposed to that of hislegal colleagues, such asHeinrich Triepel (1927),

who still thought in termsof spheres.’

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a stand for and against (‘in einer Situationdes Fur und Wider zu leben’, Plessner,1931: 195). The distinction creates azone of one’s own affirmation against thatof the stranger (Plessner, 1931). Friend-ship and enmity are thus relativised andtemporalised into zones within the rangeof the situation at hand and the activityoriented toward it. Plessner’s book is astrange combination of Weberian andSchmittian inspired views, althoughWeber clearly takes priority.Schmitt’s joining the Nazi Party in May

1933 changed both his own formulationsand the reception of his work both in andoutside Germany. In some French works,the very expression le politique wasregarded as belonging to the Nazi voca-bulary (see Palonen, 1990: 44–45). Mostof the British authors who were concep-tualising politics in the thirties made noreference at all either to the abstraction of‘the political’ or to Schmitt. One exceptionto this general rule is Ernest Barker, whoin his Reflections on Government dis-cusses the alternatives to democracyafter World War I and analyses thosewriters who idealised the memory ofwar. ‘The consequent conception of poli-tics and of the nature of ‘‘the political’’may be seen in a pamphlet published inGermany by Dr Carl Schmitt in 1932.’(Barker, 1942: 270) Schmitt’s strictlyjuridical justifications for re-determiningthe criterion of the political were clearlylost in such interpretations.

WEBER AND POLITICS ASAN ACTIVITY

In a footnote, Carl Schmitt (already inSchmitt, 1927: 2) quotes Max Weber’sformula from Politik als Beruf of politics asstriving for power shares and influencingtheir distribution, ‘Streben nach Machtanteiloder nach Beeinflussung der Machtvertei-lung’ (Weber, 1919: 8). Characteristically,Schmitt only sees the point in Weber’suse of power as the decisive criterion

(entscheidendes Merkmal, Schmitt,1927: 2). The activity of striving receivesno attention.

Similarly, most of the textbook refer-ences to the ‘Weberian concept of politics’do not refer to striving. Even specialists inthe field frequently disregard the pointthat, for Weber, even ‘social orders’ (seeWeber, 1922) are constituted in terms ofhuman activities, the relationships be-tween them and their contingent constel-lations. The canonisation of Weber as asociologist and the almost total neglect ofhis ‘merely political’ writings also contrib-uted to the dismissal of the action per-spective on politics.

The notion of the striving for power as acharacterisation of politics is, as such,nothing new. The legal philosopher FritzBerolzheimer, for example, considered itto be essential to politics, ‘der Wesenszugaller Politik’ (Berolzheimer, 1907/1908:243). He did not, however, further ex-plicate either striving or power.

Weber marks the contrast by present-ing politics in terms of verbs referring toactivities. In addition to Streben andErstreben, he uses the expression Politiktreiben (all in Weber, 1919: 9) as well asthe artisan metaphor of drilling or boringplanks: ‘Politik bedeutet ein starkes lang-sames Bohren von harten Brettern’(Weber, 1919: 67). In other words, forWeber, the conceptual reflection on poli-tics takes place in the explication of whatthe actors are doing and who is actingpolitically. One major difference betweenthe politician and its counter-concept,namely the official, can be described interms that refer to the differences inperformance. Officials do not need tostrive for power, but instead use existingpower shares. They are not engaged inpoliticking, but execute or accomplish agiven policy. Above all, they have no needslowly and patiently to remove the ob-stacles in their way in order to open up anew Spielraum for action, but insteadremain within the existing one.

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The broad range of verbs applied byWeber to describe the activity of politicsindicates that there can be no guaranteethat politicians will be successful. ForWeber, this is not a sign of the power-lessness of politics, but refers instead tothe openness of politics as a struggle. Thecontingency of politics as an activity isconstituted by his concept of Chance,which links Weber’s political and metho-dological writings to one another (seePalonen, 1998). When interpreting Machtand Herrschaft in terms of chances,Weber (1922: 28–29) insists that theybe expressed and actualised only in andthrough action. Power is neither propertynor a given structure, but a contingentconstellation between struggling or com-peting political agents. In a consistentlynominalistic fashion, for Weber, power isnot a whole that is ‘distributed’ intoshares, but, rather, is something whichexists only in the form of singular sharesand their contingent constellations. Nordoes there exist any readily availablerepertoire of power shares, but, rather,anything can be turned into a crucialpower share in the situation at hand. Assuch, the redistribution of power sharescontains the use of existing shares as wellas the creation of new shares and thedissolution or devaluation of some of theold ones.Now we are able to understand better

how Weber and Schmitt differ in theirproblematics of conceptualisation. ForSchmitt, the political marks an elementin politics that extends beyond its obviouscontingency, an ontological foundationanchoring politics in something that ismore than politics. Weber, by contrast,attempts to conceptualise the passing,fluid, fragile and contingent activity ofpolitics itself, without reducing its con-tingency. In this sense, for him, contin-gency is neither merely residual nor thefortuna, but the concept of Chance offershim a principle of the intelligibility of thecontingent activity. In this sense, we can

speak of the ‘Weberian moment’ as hav-ing taken place in his twentieth centurypolitical thought (Palonen, 1998).

In its contemporary context, Weber’sPolitik als Beruf was much less contro-versial than Schmitt’s Begriff des Poli-tischen, and his radically nominalisticaction perspective was seldom recog-nised. Nonetheless, the Weberian con-ception inspired a number of Weimarauthors, including Helmuth Plessner andHans Morgenthau. Weber’s views soongained international recognition – inFrance, especially through the work ofRaymond Aron (1938a, b). In the Britishcontext, a Weberian inspiration can alsobe detected in the early work of GeorgeCatlin, who referred, for example, topolitics as ‘an Activity, not a Thing’(Catlin, 1929: 68). Independently ofWeber, there also exist other attempts toreflect upon politics from the perspectiveof the politician, such as Louis Barthou’sportrait of the French politician (1923) orF. S. Oliver’s (1930) introduction to hisstudy on Walpole.

THE POLITICAL INPOST-WAR LITERATURE

The academic study of politics becameinstitutionalised in the western worldduring the post-war years, which wasquite a discouraging development forthe conceptual reflection on politics andthe political. The leading metaphor of theacademic discipline of political science,the political system, as it was canonisedby David Easton (1953) and others,

‘When interpreting Machtand Herrschaft in terms

of chances, Weber(1922: 28–29) insists

that they be expressedand actualised only inand through action.’

kari palonen european political science: 6 2007 73

signified the return to a division of sec-tors, one of them being the political. Thepolitical thus refers to a metaphoricalspace within the holistic order of thesystem. In the functionalist version ofsystems thinking, political science wasreduced more or less to a sub-discipline ofsociology, the imperialistic discipline ofthe post-war decades. The result was thepriority of order over action and struggle,a kind of Hegelianism without history.Two German sociologists have more

recently attributed an autonomous roleto the political. Niklas Luhmann hasrelated systems to environment (Umwelt)and attributed a constitutive role to con-tingency. In his posthumous Die Politikder Gesellschaft (Luhmann, 2000),Luhmann polemicises against voluntar-ism, but allows room for opportunisticpoliticking as a part of the vitalisation ofthe relationship between system andenvironment. Ulrich Beck’s ‘reinventionof politics’ (1993) has its roots in theradicalisation of risks, the individualisa-tion of life-styles and biographies, andactivist movements. He opposes the sub-politics of everyday agency to the sys-temic view of ordinary politics, not toreplace or revolutionise it, but to expandpolitics into a Doppeltheater containingboth the systemic ordinary polity and theactivities of sub-politics. Beck thus at-tempts to combine action and systemsthinking, although, perhaps unwittingly,still attributing a certain priority to thespatial metaphors.In Germany, the reception of Schmitt’s

work among historians led to the modi-fication of his ideas. In his study of theGreek origins of the political, the classicistChristian Meier revises the political into afield of action (Handlungsfeld) betweenpolitical units (Meier, 1980: 34–39). Meierwants to incorporate action and time, thatis, he wants to incorporate politics into aconstitutive element of the political ‘field’.He retains the priority of the political, butin the sense of its being an ‘element’ of

movement between political units (1980:36). Meier’s historical interpretation ac-centuates the opening of the horizon ofdecidability and controversiality as themain political novelty of the dethroningof the Areopagos and its conceptualisa-tion by Aischylos a few years later (Meier,1980: 144–246). He thus plays with theambiguity of the German concept ofEntscheidung and takes from it much ofthe Schmittian emphasis on the closureof the situation.

In France, for example, Charles deVisscher (1953) relies on the criterion ofthe political presented in Morgenthau’searly work (1929, 1933) on internationallaw. For the phenomenologist PaulRicœur, ‘[l]e politique est organisationraisonnable, la politique est decision’(Ricœur, 1957: 729). For him, as forSchmitt, politics as action is secondaryto the deeper level of the political, but thedifference between the juridical criterionand philosophical reason is obvious.

Julian Freund, who as a former resistantwas initially suspicious of Schmitt,mediated Schmitt’s concept of the politi-cal to the French audience. The title itself,L’essence du politique (1965), alreadyindicates a clear distinction between histhought and that of Schmitt. Instead of acriterion, Freund presents the political asan essence, an invariable condition of lapolitique (Freund, 1965: 1–2). The poli-tical refers to the weight, pesanteur, ofthe political (1965: 15). For Freund, theSchmittian friend–enemy distinctionserves as one of the presupposes of thepolitical, the other pairs being those ofcommand and obedience and the publicand the private. In the conflict betweenthese presuppositions dialectical relation-ships prevail, and the dialectic of friend-ship and enmity lies in the struggle, and itis here that we can detect Freund’s debtto Weber.

Similarly to Schmitt, Ricœur andFreund, the former revolutionary RegisDebray also regards the political as the

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unchanging element beyond the contin-gency of politics, although his views aremore inspired by the structuralist thin-kers. He defines the critique of politicalreason as the study of ‘stable’ humangroups, their conditions of organisationand functioning (Debray, 1981: 45). Sucha study aims at the understanding of thelimits of the entire political project (en-terprise) (1981: 60). Debray’s work isclearly tinged with the tone of a disap-pointed activist. Since then, the level ofreflection on the political has significantlyincreased among French philosophers.Much of this reflection remains strictlyphilosophical and far removed from thedirty world of everyday politics (seeMarchart, 2003).Chantal Mouffe, a Francophone author

writing mainly for an Anglophoneaudience, incarnates the leftist receptionof Schmitt’s work. In her Return of thePolitical, Mouffe wants ‘to think withSchmitt against Schmitt’ (Mouffe, 1993:2), particularly to replace the concept ofthe enemy with that of the adversary(Mouffe, 1993: 4; 2005: 20–21). Shethus accepts, contra Schmitt, the plura-listic character of democracy and defendsagonism as opposed to antagonism. Boththe use of Schmitt and the softening of hisviews is a tool used by Mouffe against thetendency to reduce the role of the politicalin, for example, Rawlsian, Habermasianor even Marxist thinking. Unlike theFrench philosophers, Mouffe is certainlynot uninterested in daily politics. Still, likethe other post-Schmittian thinkers, shelooks beyond politics to the ‘ontological’level of the political (Mouffe, 2005: 8). Forher, the political refers to the constitutive‘dimension of antagonism’, whereas ‘by‘‘politics’’ I mean the set of practices andinstitutions through which an order iscreated’ (2005: 9). For Mouffe, politicsalso remains subordinated to order as amoving historical element, whereas she isnot interested in the closer explication ofthe activity of politicians.

To sum up, the post-war literature onthe political decontextualises the conceptfrom Schmitt’s strictly juridical aims andfrees it from its ideological implications.Still, it shares the Schmittian problematicof the priority of the political over politics,including a certain disregard for the dailyactivities of politicians and the corres-ponding search for an ‘ontology’ behindpolitics.

THE TEMATISATION OF THEACTIVITY OF POLITICS

Although the student, feminist, environ-mental and other movements of thesixties and seventies accentuated theactivity of politics beyond the conven-tional polity-sphere, active reflection onthe question of what this means for theactivity of politics itself has remainedstrikingly scarce. Is all of this merely theextension of the old criteria for theactivity of politics, as presented by MaxWeber or, for example, by Hannah Arendt(1958, 1968, 1993) or Michael Oakeshott(1962, 1975) to the politics of ‘move-ments’? Or, do the movements requiredifferent types of politicians, perhaps lessformalistic and less institutional ones? Somuch the agents in those or later contextsspoke of the need for a ‘new politics’, solittle they themselves have specified howthis new politics is manifested in theexpression and interpretation of theactivity of politics itself.

This does not, however, mean that nonew ideas were presented concerning theactivity-concept of politics. Arendt,Oakeshott and Jean-Paul Sartre arethree authors who in their post-war workpromoted, each of them in their owndirection, the instrumentalisation of

‘Debray’s work is clearlytinged with the tone of a

disappointed activist.’

kari palonen european political science: 6 2007 75

contingency as a medium of the intellig-ibility of politics (in the sense of Palonen,1998). The Arendtian view accentuatesthe distinction of politics as action fromfabrication by the criterion of novelty, andshe uses the metaphor of the performingarts to refer to politics (esp. Arendt,1968: 177). Oakeshott’s famous meta-phor of politics as ‘sailing on a boundlessand bottomless sea’ (1962: 60) is anindication of his strong anti-foundational-ism. Sartre was among the first to regardpolitics as a ‘dimension of person’ (Sartre,1964), and he defends the oblique andpersuasive activity of the situated politi-cian against the paradigm of the socialengineer (Sartre, 1972: 261–262).The action perspective is also close to

the thought of those authors who haveclosely followed the acts of politicians, forexample J. D. B. Miller (1958, 1962) andBertrand de Jouvenel (1963). For both,the Weberian inspiration is clearly visible.A new legitimation of the study of politicsthrough the activity of politicians hasbeen presented in the new rhetoric andthe speech act theory. For example, JohnPocock once published an article entitled‘Verbalizing the political act’ (Pocock,1973), and Quentin Skinner recentlyaffirmed that ‘perhaps agency after alldeserves to be privileged over structure’(Skinner, 2002: 7).From this perspective, it would be

senseless to go ‘behind’ politics in orderto understand it. On the contrary, it is thevery activity of contingent politicking thatis the main objective of its understanding.Here, we can already detect a link to therhetorical tradition.

THE POINT OF THENON-DEBATE

The political in the Schmittian and poli-tics-as-activity in the Weberian sensetranscend much of the harmless daily oracademic uses of the polit-vocabulary.They indicate different problematics, both

of them legitimate, and the attempts suchas Plessner’s and Freund’s to combinethem hardly sound convincing. No realdebate between the problematics of thepolitical and politics appears in sight, butclarifying the opposition helps us tounderstand the lack of debate.

The problematic also has different valueorientations. The search for the political,whether as a philosophical foundation oran ‘ontological’ instance of stability, maybe understood as an attempt to create alegitimate place for the political in theorder of things. From this point of view,the contingent – temporal, passing andrhetorical – aspect of the activity ofpolitics necessarily remains unintelligible.The reverse side of this attitude lies in thelack of interest in the dirty world of ‘mere’politics. Here, the highly academic searchfor the political comes close to joining thechorus of the widespread popular opi-nions expressed in politician-bashing.

The scholars of politics should ratherattempt to understand better the activityof politicking; politicians seldom haveeither the time or the desire to explicatewhat they are doing at the very momentat which they are acting as politicians.Journalists often do a better job of thatthan politicians themselves, and scholarsshould take politicians’ own words as thefirst step in the assessment of theiractivity, which can then be explicatedand interpreted in greater detail. Histor-ians tend to be better at this than politicalscientists. Part of the problem may lie inthe very self-conception of those who

‘Politik als Beruf remainsthe best study to date on

the activity of politics,and this is largely due toWeber’s high regard forpoliticians (see Palonen,

2002).’

european political science: 6 2007 politics or the political?76

study politics academically as ‘socialscientists’. Faced with escalating contin-gency and a wide variety of politicalaction, the urge to retreat into a searchfor ontological narratives on the essenceof politics, democracy, legislation, etc isquite understandable.For Weber, the contingent aspect of the

activity itself serves as a source of itsintelligibility. The reason why I considerMax Weber and not Carl Schmitt asmarking the turning point in the under-standing of politics is precisely because ofhis attempt not only to understand butalso to re-value the activity of politicians.Max Weber was a life-long homo politi-

cus. He keenly commented on dailyevents and occasionally served as acritical advisor to politicians such asFriedrich Naumann, and his personal ob-servations and experiences also played a

crucial role in his writings. Politik als Berufremains the best study to date on theactivity of politics, and this is largely dueto Weber’s high regard for politicians (seePalonen, 2002). He recognised that pro-fessional politicians are an indispensablecomponent of a parliamentary democ-racy, particularly as persons with boththe will and the competence to questionthe powers of bureaucracy (see Weber,1918).

The interest in the political also pro-vides the scholar with an excuse to retaina pro-political attitude while remainingdisinterested in the actions of politicians.However, politicians exist within a highlycompetitive and contested environment,and from time to time they are obliged torevise both their stands and the legitima-tion of them. How they accomplish this isa fascinating topic.

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About the Author

Kari Palonen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, co-founderof the History of Political and Social Concepts Group, and editor of Redescriptions: Yearbookof Political Thought and Conceptual History. Recent publications include Quentin Skinner(2003), Die Entzauberung der Begriffe (2004) and The Struggle with Time (2006).

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