Conceptualizing Politics

2.   Which ethics for politicians?
The mapping of the positions regarding politics and ethics ends with a bipolar 
formula that, though a hundred years old, still preserves its grasp on the matter we 
are discussing and has not lost popularity in political and media debate. This is Max 
Weber’s idea that, in order to prove one person’s vocation to politics, s/he has to think 
and act according to two ethical principles that are in principle opposed to each 
other and must nonetheless both be practised in a balance.
7
 One is called by Weber 
‘ethics of conviction’ (Weber 1919a), that is the attitude to act on principles and 
ideologies, anchored in one’s own deep beliefs, and regardless of the practical con-
sequences; this was a much practised orientation in 1919, after the Great War, the 
Russian Revolution and the attempted revolutions and coups in the rest of Europe, 
but has never ceased to move masses and individuals up to our time and will prob-
ably not cease to do so in the future. The ‘ethics of responsibility’, on the contrary, 
directs us towards actions whose consequences we can stand up to, aware as we are 
that we cannot assume other humans are by nature as good as to do the best of 
our own intentions and acts. The underlying problem for both ethical orientations 
is that their own terrain, politics, is where even the best intentions are confronted 
with the inevitable, basic component of any politics: violence. This essential pres-
ence of violence lets Weber, himself a realist, acknowledge that politics is an ethi-
cally sensible business, which causes suffering and death – as we saw in Excursus 2.  
Against this background the danger for those following the ethics of conviction 
is thoughtless agitation and fanaticism, that is the proclamation of splendid, but 
unattainable ends, followed by the inability to stand up to one’s own responsibility, 
because the failure with its costs is entirely burdened on others’ shoulders (by evok-
ing the evil allegedly essential to humankind, or the unreasonableness of fellow citi-
zens). On the other hand, an orientation led exclusively by a sense of responsibility 
can lead to a political behaviour devoid of ideas and ideals, ending up in cynicism, 
barring any change and innovation.
The bipolarity found in Weber’s two forms of ethics is to be understood as an 
alternative to the sheer and unbridgeable dualism of other configurations given by 
philosophers and theologians to the relationship of politics and morality – though 
Weber’s two poles do not overlap with their traditional counterposition, as in 
Machiavelli’s or Kant’s design. Weber’s image denotes a tension between the two 
terms that can and should give way – he maintains – to a balance; this is never 
easy to find and can never be expected to last, because the vagaries of politics (as 

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Ethics, philosophy and politics  191
summary to those of society, economy, technology and culture), continuously upset 
and redefine the balance we believe to have found.
It is left to the readers to assess whether today’s politicians, worldwide or in a 
specific country, meet Weber’s criteria for being found endowed with a vocation 
to politics and enough professionalism as to decently practise it – this is the twin 
meaning (vocation and profession) of the German word Beruf. They should also 
find out if those criteria still express the requirements set by political reality in 
a globalised world, constrained by those nuclear weapons that make resorting to 
violence so absurdly suicidal, and in which international governance matters more 
than national parliaments and executives, the addressees of Weber’s argument. In 
the period between the World Wars, and still during the Cold War, the world risked 
to drown in a stormy sea of ‘convictions’, including, as a follow-up episode after 
its end, the ideological neocons rule during the presidency of George W. Bush in 
the USA; its political blunders (the Iraq war, the dissolution of the Iraqi army, the 
treatment of Iraqi Sunnis) contributed to the ignition of the horrors perpetrated by 
jihadism and lately an Islamist ‘state’ based on an illusionary ‘ethics of conviction’. 
On the other hand, the ‘responsibility’ (in the sense of business-as-usual policies) 
practised by politicians over the last three decades, particularly in Western coun-
tries, has shown little understanding of the under-the-surface processes going on 
in the middle-long run, such as: rising inequality, youth unemployment and youth 
disaffection, problems of the ageing population, environmental downsides of ‘pro-
gress’. In other words, to be ‘responsible’ without analysing the long-term trends or 
having a strategy, flexible though it may be, can also erode the basis of democratic 
governance. Even a political realist can agree on this. The fear of resuscitating big 
ideological convictions, such as the grand récits/great narratives on progress and/or 
classless society put to rest by postmodernists,
8
 has unfortunately led to the bloating 
of so-called pragmatism, as if being smart and flexible in the political business were 
only possible in the absence of deeper ideas and designs.
Let us now draw a more general conclusion. In its absolute version, the opposi-
tion of realism and idealism which we have some times alluded to shows ample 
signs of obsolescence and, furthermore, was never fully real. Plenty of thinkers, 
religious or secular, upheld idealism, but hardly any real political entity ever acted 
according to it. Look at the revolutionary regimes, such as the French one after 
1789 and the Soviet-Russian after October 1917: the more they proclaimed to act 
on idealistic principles of liberty and equality, the more they used the bloodiest 
tools justified by realists in order to impose themselves, survive civil wars, eradicate 
the opposition. Politics is neither a gala dinner nor a religious service and mostly 
consists of a difficult entanglement of principled and selfish behaviours. The best we can 
hope to achieve as people of good will is to move weights inside this mix in favour 
of the former, also by manoeuvring the latter to the former’s advantage.
9
 In order 
to do so, a theoretical framework for ‘reading’ political events that is less rough than 
realism vs. idealism is helpful.
There is another reason why that opposition was never fully real or properly 
designed. Idealism or normativism, which is in my view the more adequate term, 

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192  Ethics and politics
used to be, and still is, a purely normative doctrine, telling people and countries 
how they should ideally behave in order to uphold certain values. A realist approach 
to politics is, first of all, a privileged way to understand it and to make predictions, 
at least conditional (‘if A acts like that, B will be likely to react in this other way’); as 
such, it made the birth of political science possible, which would have never mate-
rialised if politics had always been looked at with normativist lenses. On the other 
hand, realism was and is not just an academic discipline or school, but also a practi-
cal intention of directing politics on its own terms. This was essential in Il Principe, 
much less in the (implicitly realist) political science of the twentieth century. Here 
methodological realism is paired with different political orientations, and not always 
on the right wing of the spectrum.
10
 The association of realism with figures, such 
as Carl Schmitt or Henry Kissinger has been misread as a necessary link between it 
and conservative or imperialist positions, as if progressive politics were only possible 
on the fragile and erratic shoulders of idealistic prescriptions.
There is more to say on the evolution of realism. Kenneth Waltz (1959) tried 
to disengage it from its questionable anthropological roots (the moral good is not 
possible in politics because, in humankind, evil and aggressive tendencies prevail) 
and to re-found it on systemic grounds (international anarchy between sovereign 
states makes war always a possibility, or Waltz’s third image, cf. above Chapter 6). It 
was wise to detach the realist pattern of explanation from philosophical views on 
human nature; on the other hand, this last issue cannot be excluded from debates 
on ethics and politics. It is unavoidable to question the hidden anthropological 
assumptions of normativism (the openness of human beings and – what is more 
doubtful – political communities to behave according to an universalistic legislation 
deriving from a reasonable top principle). Yet let us look at the realism of the sys-
temic type: its substantive basis, international anarchy, has been significantly eroded 
in the sixty years after Man, the State and War was published. Nuclear weapons have 
made the world less immediately anarchical and the resort to war much less likely 
than it used to be; climate change has moved the entire international society to 
at least try to find a solution in favour of future generations; and human rights 
have become talked about more frequently and fought for more energically than 
it used to be before 1948, the year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 
(UDHR).
11
 In the second and third case, normativity based on worldwide shared 
concern, fear and solidarity, is directly playing a role in politics, even in its darkest 
corner: international politics, in which, unfortunately, many actors keep behaving 
like Machiavelli’s beasts, the fox and the lion, or worse. In the case of climate change 
and nuclear weapons, we have seen in Chapter 7 how these man-made challenges 
raise in the very heart of politics issues of universalistic normativity that include 
future generations. This shows that, along with problems regarding the regulation 
of biotechnology, moral questions now arise in the middle of politics, and their 
separation is a tale from other eras. While moral pluralism (implying different moral 
approaches to different spheres of action or types of relationships) seems to take 
the stage in moral philosophy, also on the side of realism things are no longer so 
clear-cut, as if the world still consisted of only the likes of either St. Francis or of 

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Ethics, philosophy and politics  193
Cesare Borgia, the cruel prince much praised in Il Principe (clones of the latter do 
however abound).