Eternal Futures: Gillian Rose at Warwick

My first encounter with Gillian was in 1990 as a first-year student at the University of Warwick. Gillian had just arrived in the department of sociology, and had been allocated teaching on the module ‘Theorizing Modern Society’. The lecture slots on Marx, Weber and Durkheim had already been taken, so she taught the work of Georg Simmel. She began with his 1904 lecture on fashion,¹ citing passages in German to explain the relation between form and content, subject and object, as well as the tragedy of modern culture and the meaning of Lebensphilosophie. From this point on she developed a following at Warwick: students flocked to new courses she taught on Frankfurt School critical theory. They were similar in content to those she had taught previously at Sussex,² centring on the relation of politics and aesthetics, but at Warwick they worked through philosophical, sociological and literary pairings: Hegel with Kleist, Nietzsche with Kafka, Adorno and Benjamin with Ibsen and others.

This style of teaching, which was genuinely interdisciplinary, ranged across sociology, philosophy, art, music, theology and literature. Many students complained that ‘this is too difficult’, but Gillian’s answer was consistent and uncompromising: ‘life is difficult!’ There could be no argument as she was right, and in spite of, or perhaps because of, their difficulty her lectures and classes were always packed. Students were drawn to Gillian as, through brilliant readings of texts that at the outset looked impenetrable, she addressed fundamental questions of life, death, love, power and ethics, which at that time were all but absent from the sociological curriculum. More than once she reminded her students of Weber’s distinction between those who live off the vocation of politics, and those that live for that vocation.³ Gillian was firmly committed to the latter, and for this reason there was and could be no separation between her life and her work, between vocation and calling, or what Weber calls (in The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism) Beruf.

Gillian founded the MA in Social and Political Thought at Warwick, but it did not run in 1993–94 because of her illness, which at the time students knew nothing about. The course ran for the final time in 1994–95 and was structured around a core module entitled ‘The Sociological Tradition’. For those with a background in sociology this tradition was largely unrecognizable, as it started with Plato and Aristotle, and covered writings by Aquinas, Hobbes, Rousseau, Paine, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Kant and Hegel, before concluding where many other sociology courses would begin, with Weber. The classes for this module were taught in Gillian’s office, and each week between 10 and 15 students would cram into the space, which had been designed to hold less than half that number. We would sit in near darkness as Gillian detested the light emitted from the fluorescent tubes mounted on her office ceiling. With the onset of winter she would turn on a single anglepoise lamp placed on the floor; we would struggle to read passages of books, and even to see each other, in the fading light. She joked that her office was like Plato’s cave, but it was only partly a joke, which became clear when we read Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ and she explained his reference to Plato and the confusion between concept and reality/shadow and light.⁴ She was making a serious point: don’t be afraid to think the absolute or that which presents itself as unthinkable,⁵ and also don’t be afraid to question neo-Kantian distinctions between fact and value that render the noumenal realm inaccessible and, more than this, strip sociology of political expression and involvement in the name of ‘value freedom’.

For many, Gillian’s classes were a nerve-racking experience, as she was committed to a Socratic method of teaching and could ask students the most searching and difficult questions without warning. Some would try to hide in her ‘blind spot’ by taking a chair in the corner of her office, just out of her line of sight. But, of course, she anticipated this strategy, and would question those people in particular. There could be no hiding, no wilful ignorance, no compromise, and no resignation of any sort. Gillian’s teaching mirrored Weber’s understanding of Socratic elenchus. Weber observes in his lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ that ‘In Greece, for the first time, appeared a handy means by which one could put the logical screws upon somebody so that he could not come out without admitting either he knew nothing or that this and nothing else was truth, the eternal truth.’⁶ For Gillian, the task was not to follow Plato by using concepts to discover the path to what Weber calls ‘true being’, but instead to follow a second thread from ‘Science as a Vocation’: to ‘open the way for knowing and for teaching how to act [rightly] in life and, above all, act as a citizen of the state, for this question was everything to Hellenic man, whose thinking was political throughout’.⁷ If Gillian put the ‘screws’ upon her students, it was for exactly this reason, and it was to ask: what does it mean to live an ethical life; how can one live both politically and ethically; and how can power be reconciled with responsibility or perhaps even love for an other?

Indeed, Gillian framed this course on the sociological tradition with what she called a ‘provocative’ question: why should I be moral? This question comes from Plato’s Republic, which, in the simile of the cave, reflects on the ‘form of the good’, and asks whether we can ‘be responsible for whatever is right and valuable in everything’. More than this, The Republic questions whether power can be exercised through law-making and legislation, not to promote ‘the special welfare of any particular class in our society but of the society as a whole’.⁸ On this point, Gillian directed students to Plato’s Politics, which identifies a fundamental tension in political life: that, ‘though man is born with weapons which he can use in the service of practical wisdom and virtue, it is all too easy for him to use them for opposite purposes’. Here, she argued, lies the value of the state, which for Plato is ‘both natural and prior to the individual’ and defined by the virtue of justice, for ‘justice is the arrangement of the political association, and a sense of justice decides what is just’. But, if this is the case, then what type of political association is best suited to produce justice? How is justice to be reconciled with the thirst for political power? And what, exactly, is the ‘just’? Moreover, Gillian asked, what has happened to Plato’s ideal of the ‘philosopher ruler’? Is this ideal really ‘not impossible’, as Plato suggests, and if so what ‘sketch in the outline of the social system’ should philosophers start by drawing?⁹

Next, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and more questions: what is virtue? How can we live a virtuous life? What is the importance of practical wisdom (phronesis), and how should we understand and position ourselves in relation to Aristotle’s idea of the ethical ‘mean’? At the heart of Aristotle’s ethics is a table of ‘virtues and vices’ that positions a ‘sphere of action or feeling’ on one axis against its ‘excess, mean and deficiency’ on the other. In the sphere of ‘fear and confidence’, for example, excess is marked by ‘rashness’, deficiency ‘cowardice’ and the mean ‘courage’.¹⁰ Gillian implored her students to consider the value and possibility of realizing the mean, along with the real-life consequences of excess and deficiency, for all ten virtues and vices listed by Aristotle (others include: social conduct, anger, pleasure, shame and dishonour). Each vice and virtue was considered in turn, and again there could be no hiding.

In the following weeks, Machiavelli and Hobbes were read as bridges between the ancient and modern worlds. From Machiavelli, Gillian asked: what is the relation between virtue and virtù, the latter being the capacity to act effectively and decisively in the political arena, even if it means employing unethical or immoral methods? At the core of The Prince are a series of ethical reflections on how power can or should be reconciled with ethical conduct, including: ‘how a prince must govern his conduct towards his subjects and friends’; how to rule virtuously and risk coming ‘to grief among so many who are not virtuous’; how to reconcile generosity and parsimony; and whether those with power should be cruel or compassionate, or, in Machiavelli’s words, ‘whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse’.¹¹ And from the earlier (1571) Discourses, Gillian posed a fundamental question, later addressed by Weber: is it acceptable to use means of violence in pursuit of good ends? Machiavelli’s answer, as is well known, is in principle ‘yes’: ‘It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good … it always justifies the action. For it is the man who uses violence to spoil things, not the man who uses it to mend them that is blameworthy.’ More than this, against Aristotle, Machiavelli declares that, while ‘most men prefer to steer a middle course’ between being ‘wholly good or wholly bad’, in practice this is ‘very harmful’ as rarely do they not know how to be either of these things. For this reason, virtue should not be associated with an aspiration for finding a ‘mean’ position.¹²

Gillian was drawn to Machiavelli’s concept of fortuna, and asked how we can deal with circumstances or events that are both unforeseen and not necessarily of our own making. She insisted on an active mediation of fate; a position she develops in detail in The Broken Middle, where she reconsiders Freud’s two ideas of risk, alongside Kierkegaard’s writings on beginning and anxiety, and argues that ‘life must be risked in order to be gained; that only by discovering the limit of life – death – is “life” itself discovered, and recalcitrant otherness opens its potentialities and possibilities’.¹³ Amid lofty considerations of power, justice, tyranny and violence in The Prince, and six types of government in the Discourses, there was a memorable moment of humour in the class on Machiavelli. Gillian never drove a car, and used to take the bus from Leamington Spa to the university campus; she directed us to a footnote buried deep in The Discourses. It reads: ‘Machiavelli does not say that all men are wicked, but simply that legislators are wise to act as if this were true, i.e. “Always drive your car as if both the man in front of you and the man behind are lunatics”.’¹⁴ Again, it was a joke with serious intent, and we were left wondering, as Freud might ask, what made it funny.

From Machiavelli to Hobbes: rather than pursue an obvious reading of sovereign power, Gillian instead considered Leviathan against the backdrop of Franz Neumann’s 1942 Behemoth, which returns to Hobbes’s conception of human nature to question the limits of statehood under national socialism, and the lawlessness, violence and terror of its dictatorial and ‘racial’ form of capitalism.¹⁵ Gillian reread Leviathan to ask what it means to be a ‘person’, to consider the value of friendship, and to question the ‘value or worth of a man’ in relation to his ‘price’, which, Hobbes says, is always something ‘dependent on the need and judgement of another’ – i.e. it is something social.¹⁶

These were recurrent themes considered in the following weeks on Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Paine, Kant and Hegel. Gillian questioned the elusive notion of the social that underpins Rousseau’s idea of contract, and his ideas of popular sovereignty and nationalism. And she objected to Wollstonecraft’s ideas of rights and community for, while predating those of Marx, they are premissed on a defence of rights on the grounds of reason that then does not subject reason itself to critique. On Paine, Gillian asked whether it is, in fact, the case that ‘all men are born equal, and with natural right’, and whether governments can really be ‘comprehended under three heads: superstition, power, and the common interest of society, and the common rights of man’, or what Paine otherwise calls ‘priestcraft’, ‘conquerors’ and ‘reason’.¹⁷ This, in turn, underpinned a reading of Kant on enlightenment, and of Hegel on natural law and the relation between civil society and the state.

A detailed reading of Hegel was central to a companion MA module taught by Robert Fine, and so Gillian addressed the work of Kant instead. She was particularly interested in Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, which she framed as an introduction to the Critique of Judgement, and which addresses many of the earlier concerns of Hobbes. The Groundwork is best known for its formulation of the categorical imperative and idea of the universal: ‘I ought never to act in such a way that I could not also will that the maxim on which I act should be a universal law.’ Gillian observed that a comparable statement can be found in Hobbes’s Leviathan, which argues that moral philosophy can be distilled into the principle ‘Do not do that to another, which thou wouldest not have done to thy selfe.’¹⁸ What, though, of the practical and political application of this principle? Gillian questioned Kant’s idea of duty and his deontological ethics by taking students to key passages in the Groundwork that ask, among other things: Should we make promises that we intend not to keep? What is the sincerity of friendship? And how can we resist the temptation to turn self-love into a universal law?

For Gillian, a sociological concept of altruism sits at the heart of Kant’s Groundwork: for why ‘see others who have to struggle with great hardships’ when one could easily help, and yet think ‘What does it matter to me?’¹⁹ Moreover, Gillian found in Kant an implicit response to the libertarian and neoliberal politics she vehemently opposes in the introduction to Mourning Becomes the Law. Against a definition of freedom as the ‘right to purchase and consume goods and services’, which presupposes and widens an ‘already unequal distribution of opportunities and resources within a capitalist society’,²⁰ Gillian positioned Kant’s distinction between (market) price and dignity. Kant writes, in an implicit response to Hobbes, that ‘In the kingdom of ends everything has either a price or a dignity. If it has a price, something else can be put in its place as an equivalent; if it is exalted above all price and so admits of no equivalent then it has a dignity.’²¹ This, for Gillian, was a central statement of a moral and political philosophy that runs from Kant to Marx and beyond; one in which human life is not reducible to an exchange value or price, but has dignity and value in and of itself.

The final class from that year, just a few months before Gillian died, was on Max Weber. There was another session scheduled on Hannah Arendt, but at that time Origins of Totalitarianism was out of print. Gillian tried to photocopy sections of the text and distribute them ahead of the class, but students had little time to read them. Weber, though, was the ideal figure to end with, as his later work addresses the relation of politics and ethics in detail. In line with the argument of her Hegel Contra Sociology, Gillian turned to Weber’s lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ to question the historical value of science, assert that there can be no science without values or presuppositions, and to argue that we should be suspicious of any science that makes this claim. In teaching Kant, Gillian had asked two searching questions. First, can ‘reason’ – theoretical, practical, or reflective – ever be pure? And, second, does the categorical imperative haunt pure reason? Through Weber, Gillian answered ‘no’ to the first question, and ‘yes’ to the second. While most students already knew about Weber’s interpretative method and commitment to objectivity in social science, few were prepared for the passages in ‘Science as a Vocation’ that address death, which were central for Gillian, and which she returns to, posthumously, in Mourning Becomes the Law.²² Weber declares:

civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life’. He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings for ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilized life is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness.²³

These passages of ‘Science as a Vocation’, which had barely received mention in Weber scholarship at that time, were crucial for Gillian, as they question the value of modern scientific culture and ideals of ‘progress’, and more fundamentally what gives death and (with this) life meaning. Characteristically, Gillian followed Weber when he went on to ask, in the face of the above, ‘What stand should one take?’

Gillian describes Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ as ‘twin, magnificent, inexhaustible essays from 1919’.²⁴ ‘Science as a Vocation’ in fact dates as a lecture from 1917, and asks, in the midst of World War I: what is the meaning of death? What can be lasting, and what can deliver genuine and lasting human fulfilment? ‘Politics as a Vocation’ was delivered in 1919, just over a year before Weber’s own death, and addresses the demands of political leadership and the ‘ethical paradoxes’ that come with the exercise of power. In a fitting summation to Gillian’s module on the sociological tradition, Weber asks: What relations do ethics and politics actually have? How can we reconcile conviction with responsibility? How can we reconcile that which, seemingly, cannot be reconciled? Weber’s answer to this challenge posed earlier by Machiavelli is that the ‘diabolical’ forces of politics and the passionate devotion to a ‘cause’ must, at all times, be tempered by responsibility as the ‘guiding star of action’. And for this to happen ‘a sense of proportion is needed’.²⁵ This is what Weber calls augenmass.²⁶ Gillian read it through Aristotle as a form of practical wisdom, and through Kant as a form of practical reason or judgement.

Vocation

Unbeknownst to us at the time, these classes were Gillian’s final act; a gift to her students and a gift to a future in which the relation between politics and ethics has become ever more of a concern. Only later, on reading Love’s Work, did her students understand how ill Gillian had been through this final year of teaching at Warwick. But no matter how painful and invasive the treatments must have been for her illness, she never missed or was late for a single class. This was her vocation. In answer to Weber in ‘Science as a Vocation’, it was what gave life meaning and fulfilment, and nothing could have been more important at that moment than those final classes on virtue, value, fate, violence, power, love and death. Through teaching and authorship, Gillian found the possibility of continued life outside the constraints of time in what she termed, in the posthumously published Mourning Becomes the Law, ‘eternity’.

In late 1995, while teaching these final MA classes, Gillian was interviewed by Andy O’Mahony of RTE Radio. This interview contains the following lines:

[Eternity]: It’s the only thing I believe in. If there is eternity, then it’s now, and it’s at all time. So it’s the only thing you can believe in, because, after all, time is devastation. You can’t believe in time. Time is going to destroy you. You can’t believe in time, you have to believe in eternity.

And:

There’s this awful divorce between philosophy, which thinks it’s interested in ethics, and social and political thought, which is more sociological. They’ve got to be brought together somehow… everybody’s looking for an ethics. But in fact they should be looking for a political theology. We need to think about God and the polis and not about this anodyne ‘love ethic’.²⁷

The second of these passages is easier to resolve than the first. In the final conversation I had with Gillian, I told her I was going to do a PhD on Max Weber (her ‘second favourite thinker’), and she asked me why it isn’t possible to have a politics based on love. This was so typical of Gillian: her mind was always working ahead and beyond, and at such a pace that you could barely keep up. Her question followed from our reading of Aristotle in the MA module that year, which asked whether justice can be based upon friendship as a form of moral virtue. But Gillian was also pushing further by reminding me of Weber’s definition of the state as exercising a monopoly over the ‘legitimate’ means of violence within a territory, and that the forces of power, for Weber, are diabolical in nature and are potentially intoxicating. They are, thus, anything but ‘anodyne’. Gillian was also alluding to the passages on love, rationalism and disenchantment, and the relation of love to other ‘life orders’, including the ‘political sphere’, in Weber’s ‘Intermediate Reflection’ to his Sociology of Religion, which Gerth and Mills refer to by its subtitle ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions’; a text she knew well.²⁸ Weber of all thinkers, for her, showed exactly why politics could not be based on a ‘love ethic’, and why it would be a tragic mistake to think otherwise.

Gillian’s references to eternity through her later writings and final interview are more complex. Rather than think about them through a religious or theological lens, which was not something Gillian herself did in her final classes, I will turn to the work and life of Zygmunt Bauman to understand them. This is not a wild jump as Gillian and Zygmunt corresponded at length, and Bauman wrote a review of The Broken Middle for the journal Economy and Society.²⁹

In 2003 I visited Zygmunt at his family home in Leeds, and he gave me a copy of the manuscript of his latest book – Wasted Lives – that he had just posted to his publisher. Zygmunt knew I had studied with Gillian, and he knew too that this book would change my understanding of her later work. In Wasted Lives there is a key excursus on culture and eternity. Bauman writes:

We … know that we are mortal – bound to die. This knowledge is difficult to live with. Living with such knowledge would be downright impossible were it not for culture … an invention making all other inventions possible … a contraption to render the human kind of living, the kind of living that entails knowledge of mortality, bearable … it manages to recast the horror of death into a moving force of life.³⁰

Bauman returns to this idea that ‘eternity is the work of the imagination’ in his posthumously published and very beautiful memoir, My Life in Fragments, in which he writes that he has lived twice: his first life, the experience of living; the second ‘narrating the experience’. For Zygmunt, while ‘the first life passes’, the second, ‘narrated one – lasts; and that’s a ticket to eternity’, as ‘eternity is an extension of existence’. Like Gillian in Mourning Becomes the Law, he argues that death is not nothingness, since ‘In every experience there is something … nothingness would have to be the absence of the subject.’ And more than this, again like Gillian, the eternal for Zygmunt is that which is possible: ‘in eternity, anything can happen. … In eternity, nothing ever ends, and nothing ever ends irrevocably.’³¹

Eternity contains the promise of that which can live on beyond death, but for Bauman this promise can only be realized through an ethic of responsibility for the other. Nowhere is this clearer than in his book Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (for him, his finest work, but today rarely read), in which he declares ‘Unless “I am for”, I am not.’³² This statement is a guiding thread that runs from the concluding sections of Bauman’s 1989 Modernity and the Holocaust, in which he develops an outline for a sociological morality, through to his 1993 Postmodern Ethics, which engages in detail with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. These texts are aligned with Levinas’s position, most clearly articulated in the interviews collected in Ethics and Infinity, where responsibility is defined as ‘responsibility for the other’, and where Levinas declares that responsibility is the essential, primary structure of subjectivity.³³

When I left Zygmunt’s house that day, and looked at his living room with its old green-screen Amstrad computer, a gas fire, and piles of manuscripts stacked on the carpet, I asked him, rather naively: ‘Why do you write and publish so many books?’ His reply was striking: that he didn’t have long left to live and time was running out for him, hence there was more to do. I realized that writing was his gift to the world, his production of culture that, for his own benefit and for the benefit of others, sought, in his words, to ‘recast the horror of death into a moving force of life’. It was his pursuit of eternity by moving beyond being-with to what he called being-for the Other.

Gillian’s final lecture course and writings can be understood in the same way. The idea of eternity is a guiding thread to Gillian’s final writings. It runs from start to finish of Mourning Becomes the Law, from the opening critique of Blanchot on the first page for discrediting and disregarding ‘eternity’, and the argument that in refusing to think death as something more than nothingness, philosophy damages if not destroys itself, through to her reading of Rilke and the declaration on the final page that death is the meeting place of ‘endurance’ and ‘eternity’. In this work, Gillian insists that it is vital to renew ‘virtue in life and death’ and to ‘know the violence at the heart of the human spirit’ so that we can give ‘death back its determination and its eternity’.³⁴ This is Gillian’s final lesson, both to her readers and to her students: that it is vital to seek possibility in the seemingly impossible, and not to be resigned or give up hope. For, as Weber observes at the conclusion to ‘Politics as a Vocation’, ‘man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible’, and ‘[o]nly he who in the face of all this can say “In spite of it all!” has the calling for politics.’³⁵

Through such a vocation or Beruf, through the risk and agon of authorship and through teaching that sought to rediscover and reconsider ‘virtue in life and death’ by expanding and reformulating the sociological tradition to address fundamental questions of friendship, justice, law, love, power, violence and the state, Gillian could find eternity. This continued form of life, unrestrained by the limits of time, is depicted most beautifully by Rilke in his Sonnets to Orpheus, a book that for Gillian was a treasured companion. It is fitting to conclude, or perhaps begin, with the following lines from the Sonnets:

And if all that is earthly knows you no more,

Declare this to the still world: I flow

And say this to the hurrying waters: I am.³⁶

Footnotes

1. 1. Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’ (1904), American Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, 1957, pp. 541–58. ↩

2. 2. Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism, Verso, London, 2024; Nicholas Gane, ‘Review of Gillian Rose, Marxist Modernism’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 41, nos 7–8, 2024, pp. 279–84. ↩

3. 3. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Routledge, London, 1948. ↩

4. 4. Ibid., p. 140. ↩

5. 5. Nicholas Gane, ‘Gillian Rose and the Promise of Speculative Sociology’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 2025, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1468795x241312298. ↩

6. 6. From Max Weber, p. 141. ↩

7. 7. Ibid., p. 141. ↩

8. 8. Plato, The Republic, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987, pp. 316–25, 321, 323–4. ↩

9. 9. Plato, The Politics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, pp. 61, 260–325, 297. ↩

10. 10. Aristotle, Ethics, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 104. ↩

11. 11. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, pp. 90–92, 95. ↩

12. 12. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, pp. 132, 177. ↩

13. 13. Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992, p. 16. ↩

14. 14. Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 529. ↩

15. 15. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, Victor Gollancz, London, 1942, p. 90. ↩

16. 16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 217, 151–2. ↩

17. 17. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 69. ↩

18. 18. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 224. ↩

19. 19. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Routledge, London, 1991, p. 86. ↩

20. 20. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 4–5. ↩

21. 21. Kant, Groundwork, p. 96. ↩

22. 22. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, pp. 129–30. ↩

23. 23. Weber, From Max Weber, p. 140. ↩

24. 24. Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 129. ↩

25. 25. Weber, From Max Weber, pp. 118, 115, 15. ↩

26. 26. See Nicholas Gane, ‘Max Weber on the Ethical Irrationality of Political Leadership’, Sociology, vol. 31, no. 3, 1997, pp. 549–64. ↩

27. 27. Vincent Lloyd, ‘Interview with Gillian Rose’, Theory Culture & Society, vol. 25, nos 7–8, 2008, pp. 201–18; pp. 217, 210. ↩

28. 28. Weber, From Max Weber, pp. 78, 116, 323–59. ↩

29. 29. Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Philosophy for Everyday – Though Not for Everyone’, Economy and Society, vol. 22, no. 1, 1993, pp. 114–22. ↩

30. 30. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity, Cambridge, 2004, p. 97. ↩

31. 31. Zygmunt Bauman, My Life in Fragments, Polity, Cambridge, 2023, p. 10. ↩

32. 32. Zgymunt Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies, Polity, Cambridge, 1992, p. 40. ↩

33. 33. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh PA, 1985, p. 95. ↩

34. 34. Rose, Mourning Becomes Law, pp. 140–41. ↩

35. 35. Weber, From Max Weber, p. 128. ↩

36. 36. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, Enitharmon, London, 2012, p. 125. ↩