Politics as Personal Freedom: An Analysis of Max Weber’s Speech “Politics as a Vocation”

Abstract

This article covers a research devoted to the concept of politics articulated in Max Weber’s speech “Politics as a Vocation”. The article is divided into three parts. The first part highlights the historical and occasional contexts of the speech. In the second part, the three definitions of politics given by Weber are sequentially studied and linked with each other; then the picture of the politics of the immediate future is partially reconstructed in which politics as freedom is associated with domination or with the fight for domination. In the third part an assumption is made on whom Weber sees as a politician of not the immediate but of the distant future, a politician in the highest sense of this word, whom Weber calls a “hero”.