according to Weber, because they took no account either of the "average deficiencies of people" or the consequences to which a given course of action was likely to lead. Obedience to the absolute injunction against the use of violence—"resist not him that is evil with force"—would have had the political consequence that good people became "responsible for the evil winning out." Politics required an "ethic of responsibility," Weber argued. Since the "decisive means for politics is violence," those who accepted the burden of political action had to weigh the gains promised by any course of action against the "diabolic forces lurking in all violence." They had to weigh the possibility that coercive means, while unavoidable, might nevertheless corrupt even the most unimpeachable ends.

A critique of political irresponsibility began, then, with the salutary reminder that a failure to oppose evil, even if opposition had to avail itself of morally ambiguous means, might lead to a greater evil; but it became irresponsible in its own right, according to Weber—and not only irresponsible but intolerant and fanatical—if it claimed that absolute ethical ends could redeem ambiguous means. Writing immediately after the First World War, Weber was troubled by the ease with which former pacifists and conscientious objectors had suddenly turned into "chiliastic prophets," calling for the forcible abolition of injustice, for wars to end war, or for revolutionary violence that would put an end once and for all to the need for revolutionary violence. He thought the pacifist's refusal to resist evil with force, though it led logically to the triumph of evil, did less practical harm (since common sense usually prevailed over pacifism) than the ex-pacifist's claim that force became ethical in the service of a righteous cause. Weber reserved his greatest scorn for those who preached revolution in the name of love. "He who wishes to follow the ethic of the gospel... should not talk of 'revolution.'"

Weber's strictures against "academic prophecy" were directed principally against Christian socialists, many of whom renounced nonviolence in the twenties (in the United States as well as in Germany) and began to advocate a forcible overthrow of capitalism. But the general import of this indictment applied to all those who refused to acknowledge the contingent, provisional, and morally ambiguous nature of political action. It applied equally to Christian socialists and to Marxists, except that the latter justified revolution not in the name of love but in the name of

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