This is not only to use democratic politics to serve the cause of the empire, but also to use the order and power of the empire to serve the historical planning of German modernity. Looking at it from

This is not only to use democratic politics to serve the cause of the empire, but also to use the order and power of the empire to serve the historical planning of German modernity. Looking at it from another perspective, this is to use the form of modern individualism to express the collective Dasein of the German nation. Of course, there is another layer of Weber's discussion that appears and disappears, which implies that the political establishment of German collective Dasein will become the decisive basis for German modernity and personal happiness. All this cannot simply be described as a dialectic or sophistry between nationalism and liberalism, but Weber's thought was indeed shaped in such a tension. This is why Weber's ideas gained unprecedented attention after the Cold War. On the surface, it seems that Weber's social theory is helpful in dealing with the contradiction between contemporary nationalism and liberalism. But the more critical motivation comes from an internal demand in the history of thought, which is to overcome the challenge of twentieth-century German thought to the nineteenth-century bourgeois social and political order and cultural tastes, and return to the so-called civil society and public society. The imaginary innocent pure state of space, step by step, reintroduces the concept of permanent peace from Kant and invents for it a teleological and universal genealogy. This family tree of course ends with contemporary neoliberal ideology and with the global capitalist market economy that has no structural rivals. But the trouble is that this seemingly subjectless universalist ideology always reveals the special power group to which it is attached and which it serves. So it all comes back to politics. This new political and cultural political consciousness will inevitably be involved in the debate on the materials, categories, and conceptual frameworks of the history of ideas. How to read these materials is really intertwined with how we think about contemporary issues. All history Crouch says is contemporary history, a straightforward insight. But we cannot make a simplistic and cynical understanding of this slogan. We should see the other side of it: without a critical grasp of history, there is no basis for contemporary consciousness; without history, there is no contemporary history. The contemporary history of China requires us not only to participate in reflection on modern, modern, and ancient China, but also requires us to read world history as our own history. Because how to read world history and how to read the genealogy of Western learning are closely related to the interests of contemporary Chinese culture, and are the basic prerequisite for forming the cultural and political identity of contemporary China. From Existence to Politics Before entering this issue, there is another internal and external issue worth considering. The concept of re-understanding freedom as collective self-affirmation, self-validation, and self-realization seems to be intrinsic and can easily be led astray by nationalism or even ethnocentrism that emphasizes national essence and cultural uniqueness. But when we read Weber, we will find that the context of this discussion is basically developed in the context of international relations, geopolitics, political realism, comparative social theory and comparative cultural theory. The so-called internal discourse often corresponds to the external environment of a nation. It can even be said to be the internalization of the latter. It is a subjective representation or construction of an objective environment. This point is important for understanding Weber's comparative religion. Why did he study Confucianism and Buddhism, and why did he put forward the proposition of Protestant ethics and capitalist spirit? From this perspective, we can find an answer that is different from the mainstream academic circles. In contrast, those institutional building issues that seem to be very external, very formal, procedural, and international, such as parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech, fair discussion, constitutional rights, overseas colonization, etc., seem to only be discussed at the same time. The horizontal competition between Britain, the United States and France is related to the fundamentals of the German nation and the fundamental determination of the cultural and political self of the German nation. Weber's ideological passion and unconcealable cultural impulse when discussing political and legal issues fully illustrate this point. No matter how technical and aesthetic Heidegger's philosophy is, its substantive direction or ambition is the unification of the world of thought and the world of life in a political concept. However, this political immanence was only expressed in a clear language of political philosophy and legal philosophy by Schmitt. Weber's inaugural speech began with a very specific issue: the land issue, whether the eastern border should be closed.There is no way to imagine that such a large population in the world will actually achieve the fantasy of peace and universal happiness advocated by eudaimonists. impossible. It is impossible to imagine that legal happiness awaits us somewhere in the future. It is impossible to believe that in this city life there is any other way than the cruel struggle between man and man to create opportunities for free human action. The speech contained a Latin sentence from Dante's Divine Comedy: lasciate ogni speranza (to give up all hope). This is what Dante said when he was led into the gates of hell by Virgil. What he means is that the current situation of the world cannot accommodate such simple happinessists and the hope of so-called universal happiness. Here we return again to the question of freedom at the beginning. The opportunity for free action that Weber talks about here is a very clear and popular way of saying it. The question of what freedom is immediately leads to the question of whether we still have the pursuit and impulse for freedom; that is to say, what freedom is is reduced to what we want; what is German freedom becomes how we behave as Germans and What it means to be German. The pursuit of freedom is the creation of freedom and the opportunity to act freely. He will say later that the real historical mission of all nations is not how much property or wealth they leave to future generations, but how much space they leave for free movement. Weber writes bluntly: When we think beyond the graveyard of our own generation, the question that excites us is not how people in the future will be well-fed, but what they will become. people. From here, Weber really enters into his own problem, which is exactly the same as Nietzsche's problem. Nietzsche believed that the question of what kind of people we will become is the whole problem of culture, so he believed that there is no history at the core of culture; it is ridiculous to talk about this culture being more advanced than that culture and how to progress culturally. Weber believed that this question was also the cornerstone of all work in political economy. What we desire is not to cultivate well-fed people, but to cultivate those qualities that we believe constitute the nobility and greatness of our humanity. The direction of this sentence in the historical context at the time was unmistakable: in 1895, Germany had made rapid progress in the thirty years since its unification. In Marx's words, on the road to capitalism, it had become the same as Britain and France. Keep pace. After reunification, Germany quickly became the largest country in Europe, second only to the United States in the world, and was in a comprehensive competitive relationship with the Western world. This is a flourishing, unprecedented state of affairs in German history. But Weber felt a deep sense of crisis. He considered a very deep question, that is, what kind of people should we be? This is not to say whether we Germans have reached moderate prosperity. The next goal is to be as rich as the UK, as decadent as France, as free as the Americans, and as self-absorbed as the Swiss. He put it simply, he asked why Germany's rise was so difficult? Why do the political passion and moral courage displayed by the Germans in their struggle for reunification seem outdated today? If Germany falls apart under the pressure of a big country and splits into ten small countries, wouldn't ordinary Germans be better off without the burden of a big country? Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to live like the Danes, Austrians, Luxembourgers, and Swiss? What Weber said about how Germans live is not to ask what is the per capita income in Germany, who lives in a big house, or drives a nice car, but what kind of people the Germans want to become. This is his biggest question. This problem is clearly not something that vulgar political economics can solve. This is a so-called value question: What kind of people do we want to be?