Max Weber

r@raphaelbauer.com (Raphael Bauer) — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0200

On 13 June 1918 a German professor stood up in Vienna before some three hundred officers of the Austro-Hungarian army and talked for an hour and a half about socialism¹². He had not taught a course for more than eighteen years and had returned to the lecture hall only that spring, for the summer semester at the University of Vienna³. The army’s office for defence against enemy propaganda had invited him, the officers were being trained to give their men patriotic instruction, and the Bolsheviks had held Russia for seven months¹. Max Weber did not tell them that socialism was wicked, and he did not tell them it was impossible. He told them to look at who was gaining as firms passed from their owners to salaried managers, to cities and to the state: “Die Diktatur des Beamten, nicht die des Arbeiters, ist es, die – vorläufig jedenfalls – im Vormarsch begriffen ist”⁴. What was on the march, for the time being at any rate, was the dictatorship of the official and not that of the worker.

Capitalism on The Prosperitist

Max Weber