Politics as a vocation

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…tion of thinkers (Machiavelli, Hobbes, E.H. Carr, Morgenthau among many others) associate power and consequentialist thinking. It was stated most clearly by Weber in the Politics as a Vocation lecture, where he contrasts the ethic of responsibility (consequences) to the ethic of conviction (deontological). Weber's Realism favors an ethic of responsibility against the more idealist thinkers of politics. E.H. Carr makes a similar distinction between deontological idealism and consequentialist Realism in his classic The Twenty Years Crisis . This fits in with the tradition of Realism, going back the Machiavelli, who argued against actually following moral rules, but instead maintaining the appearance of following moral rules. He also links power, the use of power, the gaining of power, and the maintenance of power to a willingness to abandon…