I'm supposed to give a talk about "threats to American national
economic power" at the end of March. Having little insightful to say,
it struck me that I might as well teach my audience a little
intellectual history and review how others have thought about the
relationship between economic prosperity and national power and
security in the past.
One of my cases is going to be Max Weber. I would talk about Weber's
belief that the ultimate aim of power is to shape the future of
humanity:
Future generations... would not hold the Danes, the Swiss, the
Dutch, or the Norwegians responsible if world power--which in
the last analysis means the power to determine the character of
world culture in the future--were to be shared out, without a
struggle, between the regulations of Russian officials on the one
hand and the conventions of English speaking 'society' on the other,
with perhaps a dash of Latin raison thrown in. They would hold us
responsible, and quite rightly so, for we are a mighty state and can
therefore, in contrast to those 'small' nations, throw our weight
into the balance on this historical issue
I would point out that all of us--no matter what our
nationality--should get down on our knees and thank God daily that
over the twentieth century the decisive shaper of world culture was
not one of the... alternative "mighty states": Russian officials,
Japanese honor-bound authorities, German... ahem.
And I would say that we have to guard against the habits of thought
into which Weber fell in his "brutal" Freiburg inaugural lecture, in
which he said that:
We do not have peace and human happiness to hand down to
our descendants, but rather the eternal struggle to preserve
and raise the quality of our national species. Nor should we
indulge in the optimistic expectation that we shall have completed
our task once we have made our economic culture as advanced as it
can be, and that the process of selection through free and 'peaceful'
economic competition will then automatically bring victory to the more
highly developed type. Our successors will hold us answerable
to history
not primarily for the kind of economic organization we hand down to
them, but for the amount of elbow-room in the world which we conquer
and bequeath to them
Because it really is--or ought to be--our task is to hand down peace
and human happiness that will bring us *all*--in every nation--closer
to utopia.
But due to a misspent youth taking computer programming courses, I
have no German. So I am working from Donald Speirs translation of
_Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik_ in the 1994 CUP
_Political Writings_.
So here is my question: what, exactly, is the German that Spiers
translates as *elbow-room*?
And should I be suspicious of this translation as a whole?
I am already somewhat puzzled by some aspects of it. For example,
Speirs translates "Herrenvolk" as "nation of masters," and does not
even mention the... alternative... translation. He says that "Weber's
use of the term Herrenvolk ought not to be confused with the National
Socialists' later misappropriation of Nietzschean vocabulary. Weber's
usage does not have imperialist implications..." But this puzzles me
too, for Weber says that it does have imperialist implications. He
writes: "A master race--and only such a nation can and may engage in
world politics--has no choice..."
I think that Weber is arguing for parliamentary democracy by saying
that only if each individual is a co-ruler--a Herr--can the nation's
people be a master race--a Herrenvolk. It's a nice piece of
intellectual judo: he is telling his authoritarian opponents who
pride national power above all else that a master race must be a race
of masters, and a nation with an authoritarian government is a nation
not of masters, but of servile subjects or subjected slaves. But this
intellectual judo move is hidden--and Weber's "rough edges" are filed
off--by not giving Herrenvolk its... standard... translation.
Brad DeLong
