Philippe-Louis Vien: The magnificent training: Walter Bagehot and Max Weber on Parliamentary politics

Between the hagiographies following the wake of Marianne Weber’s Lebensbild, Mommsen’s Wegbereiter thesis, and the works of those, indirectly writing against the first two receptions, who see in him an insightful political scientist, Max Weber’s political thought is the object of three massively different interpretations. With the help of Pocock’s theory of political language I intend to shed lights on the English influences of Weber’s conception of modern politics. In this I follow the intuitions of Günther Roth in his Work on “Weber The Would-beEnglishman”. But where his writings are based on the economic history of Weber’s extended family, I want to investigate the structure of his political thoughts as to reveal how Weber’s political ideas, if often described as unique and extraordinary in the German context of his time, are based on interrogations and themes that would appear as common for late-Victorians. In order to identify the common tensions upon which a shared political language is articulated, I compare Weber’s writing on politics with those of two iconic Victorian political authors, namely Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill. From their (I) historiography, to their conception of the parliamentary institutions, be it their roles as tools of State administration (II) or in their influence on the political education of the nation (III), or in their relation to (IV) Statesmanship, what reveals itself is a common conception of modern politics, a common view on the necessity of strong parliamentary institutions in modern states, and a common adherence to the short lived brand of agonistic liberalism.
Vien's paper given at the Max-Weber-Kolleg on 2nd November 2015 is the first real attempt at outlining some of the intuitions I have about the influence of Victorian political thoughts on Weber’ own one. Build upon the specific conception of Statesmanship that derives from Victorian parlamentarianism, the content of this text will most probably find its place in what is projected as the 7th chapter of Vien's PhD thesis. In its present form, this text is no chapter yet. In the hope of publishing it as a scholarly paper, he decided to concentrate his argumentation exclusively on Bagehot and Weber, and completely leave aside John Stuart Mill from the discussion. Aside from the validity of its demonstration, the main element concerned with in this paper is the sequencing of its arguments, or, if one may say, its stratégie d’exposition. One can see two ways of writing down such a piece. The first one is a theme-by-theme approach, proposing both authors’ views on a specific theme in a joint section and presenting my different themes in succession. The second option is to brush two distinct and separate overall pictures of my authors’ thoughts and comparing these two portraits. One can see how a theme-by-theme approach allows for a more detailed analysis of the subjects at hand, but one fears it detaches the reader from the overall picture, making it hard for him to recognize the comprehensive thought system he is being presented with. Vien opted for the second option, first presenting an author’s thought and then the other’s, but he would be really interested in the reader's views on all of that.