What does it mean to be a musician in our time and in our place? What is to be the fate of music—serious, great music, timeless music—in our civilization? For reasons which I trust will become apparent, I want to take as my model in exploring these questions one of the most important humanistic statements of our century: the German sociologist Max Weber’s lecture at the University of Munich more than seventy years ago, a lecture simply titled “Politics as a Vocation.”¹On that occasion in the winter of 1918-19, Weber spoke to Germany just after its defeat in World War i and at the beginning of a revolutionary movement modeled on the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia a year earlier. In a world torn apart by slaughter and the collapse of every social structure, in a world fated to bring forth new barbarisms in some ways more terrible than the old, Weber raised the question of politics as a possibly humane way of organizing society. Not the least of Weber’s genius was that he understood that politics presupposes politicians, and that politicians differ importantly from one another in their function, behavior, motivation, and moral value.

My concern here in reflecting on “Music as a Vocation” is what Weber identified as the distinguishing features of the political vocation. I realize that it is impossible to do justice to Weber’s profound and many-sided analysis of his subject on this occasion. But several points he made about politicians are relevant