For some reason, I’ve managed to miss the very-good Bad Conscience blog up until now. It’s worth a visit, if only to read this post on Max Weber’s notion of plebiscitary Caesars. They are, it seems, the kind of political leaders that we yearn for:

Max Weber

“Weber believed that mass democracy held out the promise of ensuring new kinds leaders emerged; not privileged notables or landed gentry, but men with charisma who could carry the trust of the masses and be propelled forward to exercise genuine leadership in the face of state and party bureaucratic nihilism.”

And, while I know that avoiding the global love-in with Obama is both the hip thing to do, and therefore the right thing, I can’t help thinking that he fits this template more than anyone. Not only was Obama charismatic enough to overcome enormous odds over the last few years, he also practically reinvented the notion of the party machine.

He redefined it – attracting large numbers if low-ticket donations rather than the narrow patronage that political parties have come to rely upon.

There’s another thing to pick up here as well. Google the term ‘post-bureaucratic age’ and you will find that it’s something of a common feature in the speeches of senior modernising Conservatives in recent years. Spookily, it has all of the convenient political utility that the notion of ‘The Third Way’ had back in the 1990s.

I suspect that some Conservatives would argue that Obamas ability to almost reinvent a political party in an organic way made him the first post-bureaucratic President? If so, how come Weber  found an Obama-shaped space in his understanding of bureaucratic government?

If you’re able to brace yourself for a long read, this is really worth a look. It picks up a lot of threads found in Bobbio’s Liberalism and Democracy though it is written from the libertarian end of the argument. It is, however, deeply critical of the way that libertarians engage with their opponents and it focusses a great deal upon the shortcomings of libertarian arguments.

“…if libertarian-style politics seems especially unnatractive to members of formerly oppressed and disenfranchised groups, maybe that’s because it is reasonable to suspect that a politics that focuses relentlessly on the inviolability of property rights in a system that once treated people as property, and for centuries denied much of the population the chance to accumulate any property, is a politics meant to protect those who reap the gains of a still-rigged and unjust system.”

And if you’re not in the mood for reading a good long post, just skip down to the comments – comment number five from ‘anonymous coward.’

(Via Stumbling & Mumbling)