In “Politics as a Vocation (Beruf),” Max Weber explicitly takes up the question of an “ethos” appropriate to politics. He does so, I argue, in the context of an implicit but powerful critique of calculable responsibility. I am, in many respects, cautioning against the usual understanding of “Politics as a Vocation.” We all already know that in “Politics as a Vocation” Weber argues for a hard-headed political ethos. A Weberian political leader, while deeply committed to a cause, spurns moral absolutism, anguishedly accepts the necessity of violent means and “dirty hands” in politics, and is willing to make consequentialist calculations to help determine the appropriateness of particular political means. I argue for a more nuanced view of the Weberian political ethos. Weber's preferred political leader is more accurately described as someone who keeps calculation in its place – both in terms of assessing the consequences of pursuing certain means and, more fundamentally, in terms of a basic framework for viewing responsibility and the world. Given Weber's emphasis on the importance of passionate commitment to a “cause” (Sache) for meaningful political action (PB 76–79), careful readers of Weber have long understood that his preferred political ethic, an “ethic of responsibility” (Verantwortungsethik), cannot be reduced to a consequentialist ethic. But even careful readers have not recognized the extent to which the Weberian ethos quite specifically reflects Weber's concern about the place of calculation in politics. Identifying Weber's effort to corral calculative thinking reveals a deep conceptual unity within “Politics as a Vocation” and, more importantly, within his treatment of political responsibility.

I begin by arguing that the underlying, implicit target of Weber's critique of politicians who rule in the uncommitted manner of bureaucrats or who cleave to “an ethic of conviction” (Gesinnungsethik) is their shared, diminished view of responsibility as calculable. Both of these exemplars of political irresponsibility understand responsibility as a series of calculable – stable, discrete, reckonable, negotiable, dischargeable – duties or debts. Calculable responsibility also explains why Weber treats revolutionaries, who are willing to use violence and seem to disavow the standards of Christian morality, and Christian pacifists within the single category of conviction politicians. They both subscribe to the “ethical rationality” (and hence the ethical calculability) of the world, which renders their responsibility calculable.