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The vocation lectures

Towards the end of his life, Weber gave two lectures, "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation", at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich that were on the subject of the scientific and political vocations. The Free Student Youth, a left-liberal student organisation, had Immanuel Birnbaum invite him to give the lectures. In "Science as a Vocation", he argued that an inner calling was necessary for one to become a scholar. Weber thought that only a particular type of person was able to have a career in academia. He used his own career as an example of that. Recalling his arguments regarding the Protestant work ethic, he stated that the path forward in scholarship required the scholar to understand the potential for a lack of success and be methodical in their research. Specialisation was also an aspect of modern scholarship that a scholar needed to engage in. Disenchantment and intellectual rationalisation were major aspects of his commentary on the scholar's role in modernity. These processes resulted in the value of scholarship being questioned. Weber argued that scholarship could provide certainty through its starting presumptions, despite its inability to give absolute answers. Meanwhile, "Politics as a Vocation" commented on the subject of politics. Weber was responding to the early Weimar Republic 's political instability. He defined politics as having been divided into three aspects: passion, judgement, and responsibility. There was also a division between conviction and responsibility. While these two concepts were sharply divided, it was possible for single individual – particularly the ideal politician – to possess both of them. He also divided legitimate authority into the three categories of traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal authority. Towards the lecture's end, he described politics as having been "a slow, powerful drilling through hard boards". Ultimately, Weber thought that the political issues of his day required consistent effort to resolve, rather than the quick solutions that the students preferred.