What do you think?
Rate this book
Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber
One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading―and confounding―political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.
How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.
To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.
Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.
How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.
To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.
Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.
144 pages, Hardcover
Published April 11, 2023
32 people are currently reading
548 people want to read
About the author
Wendy Brown
58 books332 followersWendy L. Brown is an American political theorist. She is Class of 1963 First Professor of Political Science and a core faculty member in The Program for Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 15, 2024
I was drawn to this book after being very impressed by Brown's deeply-affecting account of nihilism in her earlier work In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, where she used it to diagnose the apparent wholesale abandonment of basic values such as truth and democracy in the United States.
But the concept of nihilism is a sword with two edges. Brown's neat explanation of how she uses the term in the introduction is plausible on its face:
"Nihilism is manifest today as ubiquitous moral chaos or disingenuousness but also as assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for accountability to truth, justice, consequences, or futurity, not only ethics. Nihilism is revealed in the careless, even festive, breaking of a social compact with others and with succeeding generations that is manifest in quotidian speech and conduct today, especially but not only on the right."
The problem comes when one more carefully subjects the term to scrutiny. Certainly, the word nihilism has meant a great many things to a great many people. In the concept's earliest days in Russia, it carried a positive connotation, for Turgenev and Trotsky, signaling a clearing fire that would burn away the old deadwood of State and Religion, and their baseless insistence on a self-evident legitimacy. We should take this as a warning that its range of meanings is huge, and, as with any term of comparable scope, it can obscure as easily as illuminate.
So we need to get into nihilism and recognize first and foremost that the term is necessarily normative. It refers only to the felt crisis at the loss of values that are important for us. As Nietzsche put it, nihilism is when "our highest values devalue themselves." "Our." "Highest." This leads us directly into a conflict regarding which values matter, which need to be preserved or resuscitated. One can easily imagine the conservative Christian agreeing that we have a nihilistic crisis in the United States, one in which the value of an unborn life is no longer recognized, and in which the sanctity of marriage, the very foundation of society, has been sold for a song in the marketplace of political correctness.
The crisis of nihilism, then, comes down to a point of view, and here things get even more complicated. Do MAGA Republicans spurn the very notion of truth, as Brown claims? Has the concept of shared reality truly broken down to the degree where factual claims are fungible and purely strategic? Or is it simply that the political left and the political right are riven by profound disagreements about what constitutes truth, and about which facts are true? My sense is very much that right-wing voters absolutely believe it "matters" whether or not climate change is a real phenomenon, or whether or not the 2020 election was truly stolen - they simply have a different set of answers.
One can (and should) disagree with these answers and analyze the various forms of misinformation and disinformation that give rise to destructive false beliefs, of course. But what matters here is whether or not we are truly in a kind of post-truth polity in which truth no longer matters to voters, or if politicians are simply doing what politicians have always done: lying. The former entails a nihilistic crisis, the latter does not.
This goes to the heart of the whole argument, because the question at stake is whether or not we are living in a post-truth society that has spun out of a social crisis rooted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century displacement of absolute truth by philosophy and science. But these people we are engaging, these putatively post-truth casualties of postmodernism, are precisely those who reject the authority of philosophy and science to displace the eternal truths promised by religion and tradition. If anyone is having a nihilistic crisis, it should be liberals. Conservative Christians can simply continue to believe that climate change is not possible because God promised Noah that he would never destroy the world again. And if one argues, like Heidegger, that such unshakable faith is itself a symptom of nihilism, and a response to it, then the application of the term has lost any criterion for falsifiability, and that should give us pause.
I don't think Brown has quite got a hold of all these problems in her diagnosis of the political crisis of the present. In this book, she focuses her attention primarily on two short essays by Max Weber, one analyzing the task of politics, and one analyzing the proper orientation of science and the academy. In both cases, there is a dichotomy that she wishes to problematize. In the first case, she argues that Weber's efforts to exorcize appeals to emotion and charismatic persuasion from politics have contributed to a left that is distrustful of charismatic leaders, and that this is both theoretically and strategically problematic. Similarly, in the second essay, Weber argues that science and teaching should focus exclusively on "the facts," and ascetically disregard any infiltration of politics, feeling, or preference for a particular outcome. To the modern reader, such an attempt immediately occurs as anachronistic and astonishingly naive, so it is not difficult for Brown to problematize this notion. What is more difficult is to establish that this problem is deeply tied up in the crisis of nihilism that Weber himself diagnosed, and that Brown sees as a crisis of our present age.
This is a useful and often-persuasive critical engagement with Nietzsche and with Weber, but the notion of nihilism has begun to occur to me as something so gigantic and so laden with immense baggage, that I'm starting to ask if it retains any analytical utility.
But the concept of nihilism is a sword with two edges. Brown's neat explanation of how she uses the term in the introduction is plausible on its face:
"Nihilism is manifest today as ubiquitous moral chaos or disingenuousness but also as assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for accountability to truth, justice, consequences, or futurity, not only ethics. Nihilism is revealed in the careless, even festive, breaking of a social compact with others and with succeeding generations that is manifest in quotidian speech and conduct today, especially but not only on the right."
The problem comes when one more carefully subjects the term to scrutiny. Certainly, the word nihilism has meant a great many things to a great many people. In the concept's earliest days in Russia, it carried a positive connotation, for Turgenev and Trotsky, signaling a clearing fire that would burn away the old deadwood of State and Religion, and their baseless insistence on a self-evident legitimacy. We should take this as a warning that its range of meanings is huge, and, as with any term of comparable scope, it can obscure as easily as illuminate.
So we need to get into nihilism and recognize first and foremost that the term is necessarily normative. It refers only to the felt crisis at the loss of values that are important for us. As Nietzsche put it, nihilism is when "our highest values devalue themselves." "Our." "Highest." This leads us directly into a conflict regarding which values matter, which need to be preserved or resuscitated. One can easily imagine the conservative Christian agreeing that we have a nihilistic crisis in the United States, one in which the value of an unborn life is no longer recognized, and in which the sanctity of marriage, the very foundation of society, has been sold for a song in the marketplace of political correctness.
The crisis of nihilism, then, comes down to a point of view, and here things get even more complicated. Do MAGA Republicans spurn the very notion of truth, as Brown claims? Has the concept of shared reality truly broken down to the degree where factual claims are fungible and purely strategic? Or is it simply that the political left and the political right are riven by profound disagreements about what constitutes truth, and about which facts are true? My sense is very much that right-wing voters absolutely believe it "matters" whether or not climate change is a real phenomenon, or whether or not the 2020 election was truly stolen - they simply have a different set of answers.
One can (and should) disagree with these answers and analyze the various forms of misinformation and disinformation that give rise to destructive false beliefs, of course. But what matters here is whether or not we are truly in a kind of post-truth polity in which truth no longer matters to voters, or if politicians are simply doing what politicians have always done: lying. The former entails a nihilistic crisis, the latter does not.
This goes to the heart of the whole argument, because the question at stake is whether or not we are living in a post-truth society that has spun out of a social crisis rooted in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century displacement of absolute truth by philosophy and science. But these people we are engaging, these putatively post-truth casualties of postmodernism, are precisely those who reject the authority of philosophy and science to displace the eternal truths promised by religion and tradition. If anyone is having a nihilistic crisis, it should be liberals. Conservative Christians can simply continue to believe that climate change is not possible because God promised Noah that he would never destroy the world again. And if one argues, like Heidegger, that such unshakable faith is itself a symptom of nihilism, and a response to it, then the application of the term has lost any criterion for falsifiability, and that should give us pause.
I don't think Brown has quite got a hold of all these problems in her diagnosis of the political crisis of the present. In this book, she focuses her attention primarily on two short essays by Max Weber, one analyzing the task of politics, and one analyzing the proper orientation of science and the academy. In both cases, there is a dichotomy that she wishes to problematize. In the first case, she argues that Weber's efforts to exorcize appeals to emotion and charismatic persuasion from politics have contributed to a left that is distrustful of charismatic leaders, and that this is both theoretically and strategically problematic. Similarly, in the second essay, Weber argues that science and teaching should focus exclusively on "the facts," and ascetically disregard any infiltration of politics, feeling, or preference for a particular outcome. To the modern reader, such an attempt immediately occurs as anachronistic and astonishingly naive, so it is not difficult for Brown to problematize this notion. What is more difficult is to establish that this problem is deeply tied up in the crisis of nihilism that Weber himself diagnosed, and that Brown sees as a crisis of our present age.
This is a useful and often-persuasive critical engagement with Nietzsche and with Weber, but the notion of nihilism has begun to occur to me as something so gigantic and so laden with immense baggage, that I'm starting to ask if it retains any analytical utility.
Read
October 1, 2025Me ha gustado mucho, hacia tiempo que no leía un ensayo de este tipo, tan directo y tan claro.
Lo he leído en el mejor momento creo, en un Alsa en Granada por el Máster de profesorado, los textos de Weber son increíbles y me han dejado con ganas de releerlos aunque este libro creo que hace de resumen, mientras trae a Weber al debate actual.
Una de las preguntas que hace Weber respecto a la ciencia es sobre el papel del profesor ¿qué tienen que hacer los profesores ante la crisis de los valores? y sé que no daré clase en la universidad, pero leer este libro me ha hecho poner en valor la educación y darme más motivación para continuar con el MAES.
Lo he leído en el mejor momento creo, en un Alsa en Granada por el Máster de profesorado, los textos de Weber son increíbles y me han dejado con ganas de releerlos aunque este libro creo que hace de resumen, mientras trae a Weber al debate actual.
Una de las preguntas que hace Weber respecto a la ciencia es sobre el papel del profesor ¿qué tienen que hacer los profesores ante la crisis de los valores? y sé que no daré clase en la universidad, pero leer este libro me ha hecho poner en valor la educación y darme más motivación para continuar con el MAES.
December 30, 2025
Wendy Brown is the deliverance of enlightenment in a pre-dark age. This book delves into some of the roots of that thinking through her own investigation of a crucial polarity that shaped modernity in the 20th c.: Webers rationalism and Nietszche's nihilism. Though there is nothing path breaking about this work (it is afterall a lecture series), and though its conclusions can be drawn through direct confrontation with the texts themselves, the affinity between the two thinkers of seeming radical dissimilarity comes to bear very well. Like Weber himself Brown reaches in the grab-bag of history to seek out warnings from the past.
Must read for anyone seeking a grounded interrogation of current crises.
Must read for anyone seeking a grounded interrogation of current crises.
June 2, 2024
Wendy brown pls scare the shit out of everyone
February 18, 2024
Nihilism is upon us. That’s the thesis of the book and the issue to be addressed. Nihilists believe that no value system has any objective basis. Traditional value systems that most people agreed on in the past have been lost, replaced by scientific facts and economic imperatives. The result is either that you believe in nothing, or that each person or small group believes in an exclusive set of values, leaving no ground for cooperation or even conversation across groups.
I think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’re in “nihilistic times.” There ARE widely shared values among large groups of people such as religious communities and political parties. It is true that once widely-shared values have evaporated recently, values such as faith in government, commitment to national well-being, dedication to social justice and the desirability of mutual respect.
Yet I wonder if such an age of universal values ever existed. Maybe it seemed so when only the educated elite discussed such matters, before access to information was universal, travel and communication were easy and cheap, and education was democratized. Brown yearns for that golden age, but it may be a nostalgic delusion. Ask a Black person about universal values in the 1950s. Ask a Jewish person about faith in government in the 1940s. Ask a rural laborer about shared scientific values. I don’t think there have been near-universally-shared values in the West since the Middle Ages.
Brown revisits sociologist Max Weber’s lectures after World War I about the same topic. He too despaired of creeping nihilism, and who wouldn’t after the world-changing intellectual devastation of that war? Interestingly, after WW II, in America, economic boom times overcame questions of value. Everyone was too busy pursuing prosperity to worry much about anything else. Now, it’s different. The rich have won, biological survival is on the brink, and everybody wonders what’s next.
Brown’s review of Weber is mildly interesting but not very enlightening unless you’ve never heard of him. He famously believed that fact and value should be separated and therefore that science had nothing to do with politics or religion. Fortunately, his authoritarian conservatism didn’t catch on.
What does Brown propose to address today's apparent nihilism? America has become almost ungovernable because of lack of shared values. Social discourse lacks civility, and classroom education has become nothing more than economically-driven vocational training. These are all bad things, in her opinion, although she doesn’t say so explicitly.
Nihilism is bad and must be corrected, she implies, though she does not say why. That’s just her unfounded and unjustified value system. The corrective she recommends is NOT to suggest a system of shared values, for any set of values is arbitrary, she insists. Rather, what “we” (mainly educators) should do is emphasize the value of having values, whatever they might be.
But why? People already share common values. Most people want money, sex, health, religion, family, safety, prosperity, and social dignity. They value these things and will say so. We do NOT live in nihilistic times.
Brown’s problem is that she wants a set of near-universal political and intellectual values such as social justice, self-governance, intellectual freedom, political compromise, and who knows what-all—she never states exactly what the burr is under her saddle. Rather, she insists only that we should “redeem” some set of (unspecified) values; “renew,” “rebuild,” “re-enchant” and “develop” them.
But what values, exactly? Surely she cannot mean that any values are better than no values. What about Naziism, fascism, colonialism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and the divine right of kings?
Brown says, “…I do not mean promulgating values. Rather classrooms where values may be studied as more than opinions, ideologies, party or religious loyalties, but also as more than distractions from the empirical, technical, instrumental, or practical (p. 102).”
It remains a mystery however, what values are “more” than all other values? She seems, like Weber, to want a return to absolutes.
Brown says the classroom should be a place where we “deepen” our values; “consider,” “examine,” “analyze,” “discover,” “frame,” and “approach” them. Despite such displays of thesauric virtuosity (a prominent feature of this highly repetitive book), I’m not sure how all that activity would address nihilism in a practical way.
Except for a summary of a hundred-year-old lecture by Max Weber, this short book has very little content. I come away not knowing what Brown believes, what she wants, or even what the problem is that she intended to address.
Brown, Wendy (2023). Nihilistic Times. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 132 p.
I think it’s an exaggeration to say that we’re in “nihilistic times.” There ARE widely shared values among large groups of people such as religious communities and political parties. It is true that once widely-shared values have evaporated recently, values such as faith in government, commitment to national well-being, dedication to social justice and the desirability of mutual respect.
Yet I wonder if such an age of universal values ever existed. Maybe it seemed so when only the educated elite discussed such matters, before access to information was universal, travel and communication were easy and cheap, and education was democratized. Brown yearns for that golden age, but it may be a nostalgic delusion. Ask a Black person about universal values in the 1950s. Ask a Jewish person about faith in government in the 1940s. Ask a rural laborer about shared scientific values. I don’t think there have been near-universally-shared values in the West since the Middle Ages.
Brown revisits sociologist Max Weber’s lectures after World War I about the same topic. He too despaired of creeping nihilism, and who wouldn’t after the world-changing intellectual devastation of that war? Interestingly, after WW II, in America, economic boom times overcame questions of value. Everyone was too busy pursuing prosperity to worry much about anything else. Now, it’s different. The rich have won, biological survival is on the brink, and everybody wonders what’s next.
Brown’s review of Weber is mildly interesting but not very enlightening unless you’ve never heard of him. He famously believed that fact and value should be separated and therefore that science had nothing to do with politics or religion. Fortunately, his authoritarian conservatism didn’t catch on.
What does Brown propose to address today's apparent nihilism? America has become almost ungovernable because of lack of shared values. Social discourse lacks civility, and classroom education has become nothing more than economically-driven vocational training. These are all bad things, in her opinion, although she doesn’t say so explicitly.
Nihilism is bad and must be corrected, she implies, though she does not say why. That’s just her unfounded and unjustified value system. The corrective she recommends is NOT to suggest a system of shared values, for any set of values is arbitrary, she insists. Rather, what “we” (mainly educators) should do is emphasize the value of having values, whatever they might be.
But why? People already share common values. Most people want money, sex, health, religion, family, safety, prosperity, and social dignity. They value these things and will say so. We do NOT live in nihilistic times.
Brown’s problem is that she wants a set of near-universal political and intellectual values such as social justice, self-governance, intellectual freedom, political compromise, and who knows what-all—she never states exactly what the burr is under her saddle. Rather, she insists only that we should “redeem” some set of (unspecified) values; “renew,” “rebuild,” “re-enchant” and “develop” them.
But what values, exactly? Surely she cannot mean that any values are better than no values. What about Naziism, fascism, colonialism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, and the divine right of kings?
Brown says, “…I do not mean promulgating values. Rather classrooms where values may be studied as more than opinions, ideologies, party or religious loyalties, but also as more than distractions from the empirical, technical, instrumental, or practical (p. 102).”
It remains a mystery however, what values are “more” than all other values? She seems, like Weber, to want a return to absolutes.
Brown says the classroom should be a place where we “deepen” our values; “consider,” “examine,” “analyze,” “discover,” “frame,” and “approach” them. Despite such displays of thesauric virtuosity (a prominent feature of this highly repetitive book), I’m not sure how all that activity would address nihilism in a practical way.
Except for a summary of a hundred-year-old lecture by Max Weber, this short book has very little content. I come away not knowing what Brown believes, what she wants, or even what the problem is that she intended to address.
Brown, Wendy (2023). Nihilistic Times. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 132 p.
March 18, 2024
A though-provoking scramble to achieve some clarity of the current nihilism using Weber's Charybdis of secularization and Scylla of instrumental rationalism. It is about finding a way to prevent means from devouring ends. It is about ends.
"The point is not that the Left should learn to play dirty. Or substitute emotion for thoughtful and informed argument, lies for truth, convenient fictions for science. Or hew to Sorelian irrationalism and blind belief in myth. All of this would deepen nihilism and hasten the end of democracy, and miss the opportunity to challenge the binaries contributing to predicaments of the present. Rather, the point is that we need to surrender the opposition between reason and desire in the political sphere, along with conceits that reason could ever defeat desire in politics, or that conceptual philosophical refinements or science solve political problems. Above all we need to surrender every variation on the notion that only false consciousness keeps the masses from knowing and acting on their true interests in equality and emancipation. Often the masses want neither; their desires run another way, and the challenge is to harness and reroute these desires. Desire is not infinitely malleable, but if it is understood and gratified with recognition, it can be crafted and redirected" [p.55]
"The point is not that the Left should learn to play dirty. Or substitute emotion for thoughtful and informed argument, lies for truth, convenient fictions for science. Or hew to Sorelian irrationalism and blind belief in myth. All of this would deepen nihilism and hasten the end of democracy, and miss the opportunity to challenge the binaries contributing to predicaments of the present. Rather, the point is that we need to surrender the opposition between reason and desire in the political sphere, along with conceits that reason could ever defeat desire in politics, or that conceptual philosophical refinements or science solve political problems. Above all we need to surrender every variation on the notion that only false consciousness keeps the masses from knowing and acting on their true interests in equality and emancipation. Often the masses want neither; their desires run another way, and the challenge is to harness and reroute these desires. Desire is not infinitely malleable, but if it is understood and gratified with recognition, it can be crafted and redirected" [p.55]
February 1, 2025
Nevertheless! Despite everything
January 17, 2024
First impressions:
1. If only all philosophers wrote with such clarity. For contrast, see Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In several places, Prof Brown summarizes our times and its difficulties better than any account I can remember.
2. Although pitched to the nihilistic times of the 2020s, Prof Brown is in conversation with Weber's lectures from more than a century ago. Her approach reminds me of Jonathan O. Chimakonam (Ph D)'s "conversational philosophy", albeit reconfigured for a different setting, perhaps in the way that Kant had a Copernican turn.
3. Prof Brown's references to Nietzsche are a stark reminder that "modernity" and/or post-modernity has been our milieu for hundreds of years. Nihilism is a slow moving train wreck.
4. While I appreciate her gestures towards suggesting a way out of the downward spiral of nihilism, I can't help but wonder if we've gone too far already. Her recommendations require a critical mass of leaders acting in good faith, which (as she explains) goes against the forces shaping such behavior. I am left holding out for a hero - not a position that inspires confidence, hope or optimism. But, see above, for a reminder that Galileo kicked out the legs of the religious table spilling value and meaning on the floor, and we are still around.
1. If only all philosophers wrote with such clarity. For contrast, see Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In several places, Prof Brown summarizes our times and its difficulties better than any account I can remember.
2. Although pitched to the nihilistic times of the 2020s, Prof Brown is in conversation with Weber's lectures from more than a century ago. Her approach reminds me of Jonathan O. Chimakonam (Ph D)'s "conversational philosophy", albeit reconfigured for a different setting, perhaps in the way that Kant had a Copernican turn.
3. Prof Brown's references to Nietzsche are a stark reminder that "modernity" and/or post-modernity has been our milieu for hundreds of years. Nihilism is a slow moving train wreck.
4. While I appreciate her gestures towards suggesting a way out of the downward spiral of nihilism, I can't help but wonder if we've gone too far already. Her recommendations require a critical mass of leaders acting in good faith, which (as she explains) goes against the forces shaping such behavior. I am left holding out for a hero - not a position that inspires confidence, hope or optimism. But, see above, for a reminder that Galileo kicked out the legs of the religious table spilling value and meaning on the floor, and we are still around.
August 5, 2024
Beautifully written and argued, yet utopian in its demand that pedagogy accounts for genealogies of knowledge and value formation and subjects them to scrutiny and debate in the classroom to counter ongoing trends of nihilistic dissolution. It would mean that every humanist, social scientist, and natural scientist be trained in history, linguistics, economy, ecology, psychology, political science, etc etc etc, and be able to articulate how these domains hang together and implicate one another. How do we create system thinkers among the populace when the most highly educated people humanity has ever produced—today’s professoriate—remain strictly siloed into their respective knowledge domains and are hampered by political forces inimical to these domains’ thriving, expansion, and interconnection? I’m more pessimistic than Brown that our current malaise can be repaired or even tackled from within the academy.
December 4, 2025
Weber quotes Tolstoy: “Science is meaningless because it has no answer to the only questions that matter to us: ‘What should we do? How shall we live?’ ”
The paradox of the political sphere as ravaged by nihilism and as a venue for overcoming nihilism arises because, for Weber, the domain of the political is quintessentially partisan. It is by nature a sphere of contestation (over meanings and not only aims) rather than of objectivity, though it is not therefore purely subjective or reducible to interest. Thus, while Weber understood politics in his time to be saturated with nihilistic effects, he also saw its unique potential as a domain for articulating, mobilizing, and struggling over the question of how we should live together after answers rooted in tradition or moral-¬religious foundations have been undone by the related yet distinct forces of disenchantment and rationalization. At the same time, since the currency of politics is power, its ultimate instrument is violence, and its essence is partisanship, there can be no political neutrality, objectivity, or peace ever. The value struggles unfolding in its domain are eternal—cold comfort for those still invested in narratives of progress, not to mention harmony or epistemic universality.
Elsewhere, however, Weber insists that freedom’s wellspring is “the soul,” that it involves enacting a life we have chosen and living by the lights of our beliefs, in short, governing and, through that, realizing the self. It is this second meaning that leads Weber to align Beruf with freedom, even to place it at freedom’s heart. When we live according to what we consciously value or feel called by, we are in a certain way living freely, even amid difficult or constraining conditions.
More than merely proscribing a regime of spiritual-intellectual starvation, Weber builds a torture chamber for the man with the vocation for knowledge. In many ways, the lecture on science is one long, depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions. In this, too, he kept education largely irrelevant to political transformation, preventing its synergies with mass movements and hindering its capacities to develop the desires and demands of such movements.
In an age of so much confusion and duplicity about facts, science, and truth, what could be more important than exploring with students how these things are constituted, secured, destabilized, or superseded? Far from being dangerous, understanding the human creations and conventions here is a vital part of educating citizens and future scholars alike.
No generation has ever stared so directly into its own lack of collective future while managing such intense, complex requirements for building its personal and immediate one. More than “cruel optimism,” this predicament is too much for many young spirits, essentially demanding that, with their heads down, they put one entrepreneurial foot in front of the other as if they were not walking toward catastrophe. Build your resume, cultivate your networks, find your mate . . . but also, save for an unaffordable home and unlikely retirement, plan for the end of democracy and an uninhabitable planet. Most young people are in a mode of pre-apocalyptic survivalism, as are we all to some extent. One way we might address this predicament is to acknowledge it and break it open with deliberately post-nihilist questions for our students: “What world do you want to live in?”
The paradox of the political sphere as ravaged by nihilism and as a venue for overcoming nihilism arises because, for Weber, the domain of the political is quintessentially partisan. It is by nature a sphere of contestation (over meanings and not only aims) rather than of objectivity, though it is not therefore purely subjective or reducible to interest. Thus, while Weber understood politics in his time to be saturated with nihilistic effects, he also saw its unique potential as a domain for articulating, mobilizing, and struggling over the question of how we should live together after answers rooted in tradition or moral-¬religious foundations have been undone by the related yet distinct forces of disenchantment and rationalization. At the same time, since the currency of politics is power, its ultimate instrument is violence, and its essence is partisanship, there can be no political neutrality, objectivity, or peace ever. The value struggles unfolding in its domain are eternal—cold comfort for those still invested in narratives of progress, not to mention harmony or epistemic universality.
Elsewhere, however, Weber insists that freedom’s wellspring is “the soul,” that it involves enacting a life we have chosen and living by the lights of our beliefs, in short, governing and, through that, realizing the self. It is this second meaning that leads Weber to align Beruf with freedom, even to place it at freedom’s heart. When we live according to what we consciously value or feel called by, we are in a certain way living freely, even amid difficult or constraining conditions.
More than merely proscribing a regime of spiritual-intellectual starvation, Weber builds a torture chamber for the man with the vocation for knowledge. In many ways, the lecture on science is one long, depressive sigh about what scholarship is and requires, even apart from its miserable contemporary conditions. In this, too, he kept education largely irrelevant to political transformation, preventing its synergies with mass movements and hindering its capacities to develop the desires and demands of such movements.
In an age of so much confusion and duplicity about facts, science, and truth, what could be more important than exploring with students how these things are constituted, secured, destabilized, or superseded? Far from being dangerous, understanding the human creations and conventions here is a vital part of educating citizens and future scholars alike.
No generation has ever stared so directly into its own lack of collective future while managing such intense, complex requirements for building its personal and immediate one. More than “cruel optimism,” this predicament is too much for many young spirits, essentially demanding that, with their heads down, they put one entrepreneurial foot in front of the other as if they were not walking toward catastrophe. Build your resume, cultivate your networks, find your mate . . . but also, save for an unaffordable home and unlikely retirement, plan for the end of democracy and an uninhabitable planet. Most young people are in a mode of pre-apocalyptic survivalism, as are we all to some extent. One way we might address this predicament is to acknowledge it and break it open with deliberately post-nihilist questions for our students: “What world do you want to live in?”
January 20, 2024
A mostly readable and engaging conversation with Max Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures. Brown considers what Weber might have to teach us today about the nature of nihilism, the state of our politics, and the possibilities of knowledge (and by extension, education). While I was unconvinced by her affirmation of Weber’s charismatic leader as the solution to political nihilism, I thought her assessment of the problems we face were accurate. The last fifteen pages were especially useful when considering the purpose of higher education — as a place where values can be examined with a critical eye and help us make informed choices. (As Brown acknowledges, her contribution is a departure from Weber, who would have values expunged from the academy except under the sanitized microscope of rationality.)
More troubling was Brown’s detour into postmodern theory, as if the solution to the destabilization of empirical facts in politics is continued destabilization of empirical fact. She wrote that Weber’s project to combat nihilism ultimately furthered it; it’s possible that, insofar as we continue to rely on teaching our students to not trust anything they read, Brown’s project might do the same.
More troubling was Brown’s detour into postmodern theory, as if the solution to the destabilization of empirical facts in politics is continued destabilization of empirical fact. She wrote that Weber’s project to combat nihilism ultimately furthered it; it’s possible that, insofar as we continue to rely on teaching our students to not trust anything they read, Brown’s project might do the same.
January 5, 2024
On the one hand, most have internalized the neoliberal mandate to calculate and titrate their every educational, social, civic, and personal investment, relentlessly tending their human capital value to build their individual prospects. On the other hand, most are alert to the looming global ecological, political, and economic catastrophes that make the world in which they are tending this value likely to soon crash out of the universe.No generation has ever stared so directly into its own lack of collective future while managing such intense, complex requirements for building its personal and immediate one. More than “cruel optimism,” this predicament is too much for many young spirits, essentially demanding that, with their heads down, they put one entrepreneurial foot in front of the other as if they were not walking toward catastrophe. Build your resume, cultivate your networks, find your mate . . . but also, save for an unaffordable home and unlikely retirement, plan for the end of democracy and an uninhabitable planet. Most young people are in a mode of pre apocalyptic survivalism, as are we all to some extent.
February 20, 2024
I think this is the best book on the current condition / conundrum of Western culture I've read since Charles Taylor. Brown explains why we are living in "nihilistic times," and then explores Max Weber's arguments about the best resources and disciplines to defend against and even push back on nihilism. Finally, she makes a case that Weber's strategies are insufficient and the liberalism he represents isn't good enough to save us from nihilism.
I thought the diagnosis was incredibly insightful and it has already helped me think about the world around me and my relationship to shifting institutional norms, political arguments, and discussions about human flourishing. I find Weber very helpful and Brown does an excellent job unpacking some of his ideas. I'm less convinced by her critique, but found it provocative and well worth engaging.
I thought the diagnosis was incredibly insightful and it has already helped me think about the world around me and my relationship to shifting institutional norms, political arguments, and discussions about human flourishing. I find Weber very helpful and Brown does an excellent job unpacking some of his ideas. I'm less convinced by her critique, but found it provocative and well worth engaging.
December 13, 2023
Wendy brown is a no-good hack who made it hard to believe academia should be preserved against nihilistic forces, if she has a degree. This book was a masterclass in what happens when people who like to hear themselves talk also like to talk about philosophy. DNR!!!! Unless you have an exam about it in 3 hours
February 21, 2024
Helpful
June 29, 2025
Most definitely, a description of the times we live in
November 14, 2025
En su mayoría es un comentario (o reseña) de un texto de Weber, pero las intuiciones que despliega la autora son bastante actuales y relevantes.
December 18, 2024
What are “nihilistic times”? Our times, today, when for politicians, media hosts and other opinion leaders, nothing is sacred, there is no clear standard of right or wrong, truth or falsity that they are required to observe, and thus no clear aim or purpose to any of our lives. That is, no purpose beyond “freedom”, understood to mean license to do whatever we like. This lack of clarity about principles makes us susceptible to charlatans and demagogues, “influencers” whose only claim to authority is the size of their followings— a full church, a massive throng at a rally, or even millions of voters ready to believe, or act as though they believe, whatever their leader says.
We have been here before. Scientific investigation discredited religious certainties about the creation of mankind, the purpose of life, and the physics of the Earth and the universe, a situation that Nietzsche expressed as “God is dead.�� The belief that nothing is sacred or unquestionably true became sufficiently widespread in the course of the 19th century to be given the name, “nihilism”— from nihil, “nothing” in Latin.
Without God, philosophers and scientists sought, and numerous charlatans offered, some other principle for people to cling to and give meaning to their lives. The proliferation of religious sects, many newly invented, was the subject of William James masterly study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-02). Belief in the greatness and destiny of one’s “nation” became a very popular substitute for God— as suggested by the German nationalist slogan, Gott mit uns.
Political philosopher Wendy Brown sees this condition, nihilism permitting any fantasy or doctrine to be considered as valid as any other, as dangerous not only to an individual’s psychological health, but also to the survival and defense of a humane political community, able to take care of its members and solve collective problems.
We have been here before. Scientific investigation discredited religious certainties about the creation of mankind, the purpose of life, and the physics of the Earth and the universe, a situation that Nietzsche expressed as “God is dead.�� The belief that nothing is sacred or unquestionably true became sufficiently widespread in the course of the 19th century to be given the name, “nihilism”— from nihil, “nothing” in Latin.
Without God, philosophers and scientists sought, and numerous charlatans offered, some other principle for people to cling to and give meaning to their lives. The proliferation of religious sects, many newly invented, was the subject of William James masterly study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-02). Belief in the greatness and destiny of one’s “nation” became a very popular substitute for God— as suggested by the German nationalist slogan, Gott mit uns.
Political philosopher Wendy Brown sees this condition, nihilism permitting any fantasy or doctrine to be considered as valid as any other, as dangerous not only to an individual’s psychological health, but also to the survival and defense of a humane political community, able to take care of its members and solve collective problems.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews