Weber: between conviction and responsibility

Abstract

This work aims to focus on Max Weber’s work “Politics as a vocation”, analysing the final part of the work where the author deals with the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. In our analysis we will try to demonstrate how Weber’s thought is influenced both by the Florentine Nicolas Machiavelli and the German Immanuel Kant. If we understand the ethics of conviction as an ethics aimed at the morally correct choice regardless of the consequences, we will be able to verify a strong relationship with the Kantian categorical imperative developed in the work “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”. On the other hand, the ethics of responsibility approaches the categorization of politics as separate from the morals made by Machiavelli in the “Prince”. The traces of these two works are present in the subtlety of Weberian writing when conceptualizing the characteristics of politics and its action through the main figure of the one who exercises it, that is, the politician.