Das Verschwinden der fortuna?

Zusammenfassung

Sheldon S. Wolins originelle Übersicht über die Geschichte des politischen Denkens, Politics and vision (1960), enthält einen Passus, der auf die Verbindung zwischen der Bürokratisierung und der fortuna-Kontingenz bei Weber eingeht. Im Lenin-Abschnitt spricht Wolin über den ‘romantischen’ Protest gegen die Bürokratisierung bei “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard und Sorel”, denen auch Weber zugeordnet wird:

Nowhere was the anguishing tension between the world of organization and the creative individual more clearly revealed than in the thought of Max Weber, perhaps the greatest of sociologists. No one saw more clearly than he that bureaucracy and large-scale organization were the fundamental phenomena of modern political, social and economic life. ...Yet in his famous essay, Politics as a Vocation, along with its clear-eyed recognition of the way bureaucracy has invaded all political realms... Weber plaintively pleaded for a conception of political leadership, rising to heights of moral passion and grandeur, harried by a deep sense of responsibility. But, at bottom, he is a figure as futile and pathetic as his classical counterpart. The fate of the classical hero was that he could never overcome contingency or fortuna: the special irony of the modem hero is that he struggles in a world where contingency has been routed by bureaucratized procedures and nothing remains for the hero to counted against. Weber’s political leader is rendered superfluous by the very bureaucratic world that Weber discovered: even charisma has been bureaucraticized (Wolin 1960, 423).