The separation between ethics and politics: Max Weber on ancient Judaism and modernity

Abstract

For Max Weber, modernity is characterized by a tragic conflict among value spheres, each claiming to possess the ‘true meaning’ of human life. In particular, Weber argues that while the political sphere is dominated by the unifying, exclusionary, power-driven, and war-prone nation state, the ethical sphere is characterized by the universalization of individually based, deontological norms. For Weber, I argue, the modern separation between the ethical and political spheres originates in ancient Judaism. His work on Judaism, mostly neglected by political theorists, describes the emergence of politics as an autonomous, naturalistic sphere with the establishment of kingship. Biblical prophets, simultaneously, were the inventors of an idealistic, mulish, universal ethics Weber termed the ‘ethics of ultimate ends’. Thus, against the Greek model harmonizing ethics and politics, Judaism invented an antagonistic model of the two. This Jewish imagination lay dormant for almost two millennia but returned to the stage in secularized modernity.