Abstract

Max Weber's lecture Politik als Beruf, published in 1919, gives the official and the political leader two opposite kinds of honour. The official's honour is to carry out an order he thinks wrong "auf Verantwortung des Befehlenden", on the responsibility of the one who commands; the leader's honour is a responsibility for what he does that he may not refuse or shift onto others. Scholarship has drawn opposite lessons from this ethos of office: one line defends it as a protection of citizens from arbitrary power, another finds that front-line discretion makes policy and that those served bear its cost. A related debate sets accountability as a relationship of actor and forum against accountability shaped by the avoidance of blame. This article asks whether Weber's transfer of responsibility places the work that follows a stop on those nearest to it. It reads the three passages of the lecture in the German, with the article's own English, and follows one verb, abwälzen, to shift a burden onto another, through them. It finds that Weber moves answerability upward and says nothing about who does the work of consequences, and that the lecture's own image of the leader's apparatus treats those below as conditions of success, not as bearers of cost. It then reads a synthetic scene from ARCHON, a modern summary written for a platform, in which an automated intake shows success while dispatch has stopped and an agent is left to explain the delay. The scene adds a figure Weber's pair lacks: the person who answers to the forum without having decided or executed. The article does not judge the ethos of office. It shows what each reading gains and costs, and who pays.