Abstract: THE MEN WHO CREATED CLASSICAL POLITICS WERE NOT PROFESSORS, observed R.G. Collingwood in 1942. They were men of the world and they lived among men of the world. Their interest in political life was not formed by reading I Today Collingwood's observation may have to be turned on its head. Now it is professors who try to establish the historical existence of classical political ideas by explicating academic treatises. However valid this methodology may be for the eighteenth century, in twentieth-century America the of classical republicanism seemed to have disappeared from political life. The burden of this essay is to explain why. One key to that explanation may be found in the reflections of the German social philosopher Max Weber. In 1904, Weber came to the United States to attend the St. Louis Exposition on the Congress of Arts and Science. What he observed in his travels, which took him from St. Louis to Chicago and New Orleans, and from quiet Oklahoma to bustling New York City, convinced him that he now had a picture of the future of modern industrial society. The picture that emerged was hardly inspiring. One conviction that troubled Weber was that politics could no longer regenerate republican government and restore the classical of the past. For Weber perceived, as did Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville a half century earlier, that the modern political state would not be able to withstand the economic and social forces that would absorb it. In Germany this realization made Weber insist all the more on the independence of the political. Yet the vision of things to come in America rendered him doubtful that classical doctrines could survive modern developments. For one thing, in America political parties made patronage and the spoils system a common feature of everyday politics. Parties themselves, moreover, while occasionally representing ideals rather than material concerns, always structures struggling for domination, and as such they are often led by professionals and specialists who have no other aim than that of promoting and perpetuating their
Publication Year: 1985
Publication Date: 1985-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 17
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