Revolution and Revolutionary Subjectivity: Links Between Politics, Ethics, and Violence

The concept of revolution – one of the most important in modern political thought – was not addressed in depth by Weber: his work lacks a systematic theory of political revolution. However, it is possible to find in Weber’s work various and scattered references to the concept and traces of his interest in the subject. The hypothesis of my investigation is that a successful perspective to address this issue is Weber's reflection on revolutionary subjectivity. In fact, the specificity of the Weberian approach consists in investigating social processes starting from the subjective perspective of the actors: indeed Weber has less concerned himself with the question of what a political revolution is and where it comes from than with the question of the subjective reasons and expectations of the people who make the revolution. This paper outlines the figures of revolutionaries that emerge from the Weberian text – from the Anabaptist of Münster during the Protestant Reformation to the Spartacist Group in Weber’s contemporaneity –, focusing on their main features: the structure of their actions, their ethical justification and the form of their violence. In doing so, I will deal with the connections between ethics and violence, as well as with the definition of political sphere and its borders.