The claim of this section, about the history of an idea, is that Weber's lecture of 1919 makes the official's honour a transfer: the official keeps the duty to execute and hands the responsibility for the order's content to the one who gives it. The transfer is built, in the text, as the condition that keeps the apparatus from falling apart. The section adds to the debate between du Gay and Lipsky by showing that the transfer, as Weber writes it, carries answerability and nothing else, so that the defence of the ethos and the study of its front line are talking about different things that travel in different directions.
4.1Legal rule and the modern servant of the state
Before he reaches the official's honour, Weber has already placed the official in his typology of rule. The lecture defines the state by its means:
Der Staat ist, ebenso wie die ihm geschichtlich vorausgehenden politischen Verbände, ein auf das Mittel der legitimen (das heißt: als legitim angesehenen) Gewaltsamkeit gestütztes Herrschaftsverhältnis von Menschen über Menschen.
In this article's translation: the state, like the political associations that preceded it historically, is a relation of rule of human beings over human beings, resting on the means of legitimate (that is, regarded as legitimate) force. The parenthesis matters for what follows. Legitimacy here is a matter of how rule is regarded by those who obey. Weber then asks the question from below: "Wann und warum tun sie das?" When and why do they submit? He answers with three inner justifications. The third is the one that concerns the official:
Endlich: Herrschaft kraft „Legalität“, kraft des Glaubens an die Geltung legaler Satzung und der durch rational geschaffene Regeln begründeten sachlichen „Kompetenz“, also: der Einstellung auf Gehorsam in der Erfüllung satzungsmäßiger Pflichten:
The sentence runs across a page break and continues: "Herrschaft, wie sie der moderne „Staatsdiener“ und alle jene Träger von Macht ausüben, die ihm in dieser Hinsicht ähneln." In the article's English: finally, rule by virtue of legality, by virtue of belief in the validity of legal statute and of a functional competence grounded in rationally made rules, that is, an orientation towards obedience in the fulfilment of duties laid down by statute: rule as the modern servant of the state exercises it, and all those bearers of power who resemble him in this respect.
Legal rule is defined by an orientation, an Einstellung, towards obedience in fulfilling duties. Obedience is not a burden laid on the official from outside; it is what he is disposed towards. Weber adds at once that the pure types are rarely found, and that fear, hope and interests of every kind condition compliance in reality.
The lecture then turns to rule by charisma, which interests it most; the official enters as the contrast to the figure the lecture is about.
4.2The honour passage
The passage on the official comes in a discussion of political figures, and Weber marks it as decisive for judging what he calls "unseres früheren Regimes" (in the article's gloss, our former regime). It begins with what the official is for:
Der echte Beamte – das ist für die Beurteilung unseres früheren Regimes entscheidend – soll seinem eigentlichen Beruf nach nicht Politik treiben, sondern: „verwalten“, unparteiisch vor allem, – auch für die sogenannten „politischen“ Verwaltungsbeamten gilt das, offiziell wenigstens, soweit nicht die „Staatsräson“, d. h. die Lebensinteressen der herrschenden Ordnung, in Frage stehen.
The genuine official, in the article's English, this being decisive for judging our former regime, should by his proper vocation not engage in politics but administer, impartially above all; this holds also for the so-called political administrative officials, officially at least, so far as reason of state, that is, the vital interests of the ruling order, is not in question. The exception at the end is easy to pass over. Impartiality holds so far as the vital interests of the ruling order are not at stake. Where they are, the sentence leaves the official's position open.
Weber then gives the official's manner and its opposite:
Sine ira et studio, „ohne Zorn und Eingenommenheit“ soll er seines Amtes walten. Er soll also gerade das nicht tun, was der Politiker, der Führer sowohl wie seine Gefolgschaft, immer und notwendig tun muß: kämpfen. Denn Parteinahme, Kampf, Leidenschaft – ira et studium – sind das Element des Politikers. Und vor allem: des politischen Führers.
Without anger and without partiality he should conduct his office. He should therefore not do precisely what the politician, the leader as well as his following, must always and necessarily do: fight. For taking sides, struggle and passion are the element of the politician, and above all of the political leader (the article's translation). The official is defined by what he refrains from. His conduct is a restraint, and the lecture is explicit that it is a restraint of the passions that are the politician's element.
Then the two principles of responsibility:
Dessen Handeln steht unter einem ganz anderen, gerade entgegengesetzten Prinzip der Verantwortung, als die des Beamten ist. Ehre des Beamten ist die Fähigkeit, wenn – trotz seiner Vorstellungen – die ihm vorgesetzte Behörde auf einem ihm falsch erscheinenden Befehl beharrt, ihn auf Verantwortung des Befehlenden gewissenhaft und genau so auszuführen, als ob er seiner eigenen Überzeugung entspräche: ohne diese im höchsten Sinn sittliche Disziplin und Selbstverleugnung zerfiele der ganze Apparat. Ehre des politischen Führers, also: des leitenden Staatsmannes, ist dagegen gerade die ausschließliche Eigenverantwortung für das, was er tut, die er nicht ablehnen oder abwälzen kann und darf.
In the article's English: the leader's action stands under a quite different principle of responsibility, the very opposite of the official's. The honour of the official is the ability, when the authority above him insists, despite his objections, on an order that seems to him wrong, to carry it out on the responsibility of the one who gives it, conscientiously and exactly as if it matched his own conviction: without this discipline and self-denial, ethical in the highest sense, the whole apparatus would fall apart. The honour of the political leader, that is, of the leading statesman, is by contrast precisely the exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, which he cannot and may not refuse or shift onto others.
4.3What the transfer carries
The official's honour has four parts. There is an objection: the official has Vorstellungen, representations, and makes them. There is an insistence: the superior authority beharrt, persists. There is a transfer: the order is carried out "auf Verantwortung des Befehlenden", on the responsibility of the commander. And there is a manner of execution: conscientiously, exactly, as if by conviction.
The transfer is the hinge. It is what makes the official's obedience honourable rather than servile. The official who has objected and been overruled no longer bears responsibility for the order's content. That responsibility has gone upward, to the one who insisted. In return the official owes not grudging compliance but full and exact execution. Nothing in the sentence says that the commander must do anything with the responsibility he receives. The leader's own honour, in the next sentence, is that he may not refuse it or shift it; the two sentences together form a closed circuit in which responsibility moves up and stops.
What the circuit carries is answerability: who is to be held to account for the order. It does not carry the work. The official executes. If the execution produces a failure, the official's honour, as Weber writes it, does not say who repairs it, who explains it to those affected, or who repeats the task. One could read the transfer as implying that the commander bears those costs too, since they are consequences of his order. But the text does not say so, and the lecture's later account of consequences, read in Section 5, treats them as something the responsible actor must aufkommen für (in the article's English, answer for), not something he performs.
4.4The restraint that keeps the apparatus whole
The clause after the colon gives the transfer its justification: without this discipline and self-denial the whole apparatus would fall apart, "zerfiele der ganze Apparat". The official's restraint is what holds the apparatus together. In the terms of the study from which this article is drawn, this is a restraint in the sense of the letter: a holding that keeps something from coming. The letter says that "the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way". Weber's official holds back not lawlessness but disintegration. His self-denial is what withholds.
The reading of a restraint as a power that delays every coming, good or bad, is Cacciari's and this study's extension of the letter, not the letter's own: Cacciari reads the restraining power as ambiguous, holding back the lawless one and with it the end that the faithful await, and able to contain lawlessness only by taking some of it into itself (Cacciari 2013). Applied to Weber's official, the extension has a definite meaning. The discipline that keeps the apparatus whole also keeps a wrong order in force. The official who executes a mistaken order exactly and conscientiously holds back the collapse of the apparatus and, by the same act, holds back the correction that his objection might have brought. Something of the error is taken into the restraint. Weber's text knows this, since it makes the execution of a wrong order the very test of the official's honour.
4.5The cost of the type in the wrong place
Weber does not praise the official without reserve. In the same passage he turns the honour into a charge against the former regime:
Gerade sittlich hochstehende Beamtennaturen sind schlechte, vor allem im politischen Begriff des Wortes verantwortungslose und in diesem Sinn: sittlich tiefstehende Politiker: – solche, wie wir sie leider in leitenden Stellungen immer wieder gehabt haben: das ist es, was wir „Beamtenherrschaft“ nennen; und es fällt wahrlich kein Flecken auf die Ehre unseres Beamtentums, wenn wir das politisch, vom Standpunkt des Erfolges aus gewertet, Falsche dieses Systems bloßlegen.
Precisely officials of high ethical standing are bad politicians, irresponsible above all in the political sense of the word and in that sense ethically low: such as we have unfortunately had again and again in leading positions; that is what we call rule by officials; and truly no stain falls on the honour of our officialdom if we expose what was wrong, politically and judged by success, in this system (this article's translation).
The charge is that the official's virtue is a vice in the leader's place. A person trained to execute on another's responsibility, placed where there is no one above to receive it, becomes verantwortungslos, irresponsible, in the political sense. The transfer has nowhere to go. Weber's word for the resulting order, Beamtenherrschaft, rule by officials, names a system in which every position executes and no position answers.
This is the point at which the passage comes closest to the article's question. A system of executors, each honourably handing responsibility upward, can arrive at a top where no one takes it. Weber reads the result politically and does not follow it downward. If no one at the top answers, the consequences still occur, and someone still does the work they create. The lecture, at this point, returns to "den Typen der politischen Figuren", the types of political figure, and the question of the work below is not taken up.
4.6What the reading adds
The section adds two things to the debate between du Gay and Lipsky. First, it shows that the honour du Gay defends, as Weber writes it, is a transfer of answerability conditioned on an objection: the official speaks, is overruled, and then executes on another's responsibility. The protection of citizens from arbitrary power that du Gay finds in procedure (du Gay 2000) depends, in Weber's text, on the commander receiving what the official hands up. Second, it shows that Weber's own account contains a case where that condition fails, the rule of officials, and that his complaint against it is political, about success and failure at the top. The costs that Lipsky finds landing on those served (Lipsky 1980) and the work that falls to the front line are outside the passage's field of view. Weber neither denies them nor assigns them.