Weber's Politics

Well. Max Weber certainly seemed to know what he was talking about! The problem was, I don't. I had a really hard time following the thread of his argument (statement? extended blathering?) - and whenever I did manage to understand more than a page or two at once, I fell asleep. Between political jargon, extensive reference to historical events or literature I didn't recognize (which were well-footnoted, but the footnotes just distracted me more), and the fact that Weber's intended audience was Germany of nearly a century ago, I only pulled a few points out of this reading.

Those few points, however, are quite interesting. I especially like his disctinction of living "for" politics versus "from" politics and how this necessarily gives an economic/class bias to politicians.
Despite our current system of providing a salary to our public officials in order to open high-ranking positions to individuals without indedpendent income, it's still very difficult to get elected to even the lowest government office without quite a bit of campaign money.

Another point of Weber's I found interesting was his equating politics with power, and power with violence. I'm still not sure how much I agree with this point - I do believe that there is more to power than violence, but I'm not sure that there's more to politics than power. Politicians have access to and influence over all kinds of power - prestige, money, an audience, influence - but isn't there something more to a government position? I'm thinking hard, but I can't come up with any aspect of politics that doesn't deal with power in some way.