Max Weber’s Parliamentary Democracy

Max Weber’s political thought is rightly associated with such notions as ‘domination’, ‘charismatic leadership’ and ‘bureaucracy’. But in a strange twist of fate, brought about by authors like Mommsen, Habermas, and Aron, his unique concern for parliamentary democracy has been sorely neglected. Studies about parliamentary government in Germany, especially under the Weimar Republic, have been greatly influenced by the thesis of the ‘decline of parliament’ as put forth by Schmitt’s critique of parliamentarism and, to a lesser extent, by Schumpeter’s theory of elitist democracy. The problem with this is that a large part of our understanding of Weber’s conceptualization of the role of a parliament in a modern mass democracy is informed by the portrait given to us by such intermediary works. This rendering of Weber’s ideas on democracy by third parties cannot but make them, at best, knotty; most of the time befuddling; and, on a number of occasions, sadly misleading. My aim with this presentation is to help reconstruct Weber’s own understanding of parliamentary institutions and, by doing so, to demonstrate two things. First, that contrary to how it often gets portrayed, Weber’s constitutional reform proposal was neither unprecedented nor that innovative. Weber’s constitutional design had some potentially revolutionary outturns for the Wilhelmine Germany from which it arose. However, this does not mean that the ideas were necessarily new. In fact, almost all of its key aspects were an adaptation of an authoritative English view on Parliamentary government. Following Roth’s suggestion to read Weber as a ‘would-be Englishmen’, we discover that he endorses a Victorian conception of parliamentary institutions that took shape half a century earlier during the debates about the Second Reform Act of 1867. Not being the trailblazer of Schmitt’s critique of parliamentary government, Weber’s analyses are rather in line with Walter Bagehot’s own understanding of the English constitution. Far from betokening a decline of parliamentarism, all of Weber’s political texts conclude that this is the only political institution capable of producing the kind of government required by a thriving modern mass state. This brings us to my second point, namely, the consistency of Weber’s commitment to a parliamentary democracy. What the evolution of Weber’s constitutional thought reveals, from advocating a Westminster-inspired constitutional monarchy in 1917, to advocating a ‘plebiscitary leader democracy’ [Führerdemokratie] in 1919, is not, as Mommsen would have us believe, a critical authoritarian turn, but rather an adamant commitment to parliamentary democracy and the pragmatism of his political views. Confronted with the sudden and unexpected abdication of the Kaiser in 1918, Weber adapted his constitutional design to a new political landscape, in which an elected president would have to make parliamentary government possible. In the changeover from one system to the next, Weber preserved what he understood to be the essential features of efficient parliament. Thus, if the form and the arguments in favour of those two proposals differ, both are founded upon the same Victorian conception of a parliamentary government and are animated following the same institutional mechanism.