§ 12. The term ‘association’ should be understood to mean a social relationship whose rules restrict, or exclude, those outside of it and within which there are particular individuals appointed for the specific purpose of securing the maintenance of its regulations. One or more of these individuals will be the ‘head’ or ‘leader’, and in some cases there will also be an executive staff which will normally have delegated powers in appropriate cases. The leadership, or a share in the functions of the executive (what we may call ‘governmental powers’), may either be (a) appropriated or (b) assigned in accordance with the accepted rules of the association to particular individuals or to persons selected on the basis of particular criteria or in accordance with particular forms. The assignment of powers in this way may be either for a long term or for a period or to deal with specific circumstances. The term ‘associational action’ will be used to refer (a) to actions taken by the executive staff themselves, given legitimacy by their executive or delegated powers and taken in order to preserve the existence of the regulations of the association, or (b) to actions taken by members of the association, operating under instructions given by the executive. (The latter will be called ‘action relative to the association’: see Note 3 below.)

From the third century onwards, the progress of urbanisation encountered constant and manifestly increasing impediments. Before touching on the causes of them, let us examine yet again the special characteristics of the ancient city-state, and ask in particular how it is related to the medieval ‘city’. A number of features are discernible in the beginnings of the medieval city which we have already observed in the early days of the ancient city-state. In both, the basic requirement for citizenship is the combination of landownership and participation in the market; there is a tendency towards the accumulation of landholdings through the investment of trading profits; the landless are treated as ‘resident aliens’ (or ‘metics’); public service to the city is imposed as an obligation on the lords of the city; the citizen body is organised along military lines, especially the members of those trades which are of military importance; and there is a social division between those who fight on horseback and those who fight on foot. However, the differences are also enormous. Admittedly (and this cannot be stressed enough) it is important to bear in mind how widely the medieval cities differ from one another in their social structure.

What can politics as a vocation offer in the way of inner satisfaction, and which personal qualities does it presuppose in anyone who devotes himself to it?

Well, it offers first of all the sense of power. Even in positions which are, formally speaking, modest, the professional politician can feel himself elevated above the everyday level by the sense of exercising influence over men, of having a share in power over their lives, but above all by the sense of having his finger on the pulse of historically important events. But the question which he has to face is this: through which personal qualities can he hope to do justice to this power (however narrow its limits in his particular case) and so to the responsibility it lays on him? At this point we enter the domain of ethical questions; for it is in this domain that the question arises: what kind of man must one be to venture to lay hands on the spokes of the wheel of history?

Three qualities above all, it might be said, are of decisive importance for the politician: passion, a sense of responsibility and judgment. By ‘passion’ I mean realistic passion – a passionate commitment to a realistic cause, to the god or demon in whose domain it lies.

The social and economic preconditions for the modern form of bureaucratic administration are as follows.

(1) There must have developed a money economy to provide for the payment of officials, which nowadays is universally made in money. This is of great importance for the general mode of life of the bureaucracy, although it is not, on the other hand, in any way the decisive factor for its existence. In quantitative terms, the largest historical examples of a bureaucratic system which has achieved some obvious degree of development are: (a) Egypt in the time of the New Kingdom (though there were also marked patrimonial elements present in this case); (b) the later Roman Empire, but especially the Diocletianic monarchy and the Byzantine state which developed from it (though here again there were marked feudal and patrimonial elements present too); (c) the Roman Catholic Church, increasingly from the end of the thirteenth century onwards; (d) China, from the time of Shi Huang Ti to the present day, but with marked patrimonial and prebendal elements; (e) in an increasingly pure form, the modern European state and more and more public corporations, since the evolution of princely absolutism; (f) the modern large capitalist enterprise, which is more bureaucratic the larger and more complex it is.

In the period of the Warring States, the politically determined capitalism which is common in patrimonial states, based on money-lending and contracting for the princes, seems to have been of considerable significance and to have functioned at high rates of profit, as always under such conditions. Mines and trade are also cited as sources of capital accumulation. Under the Han dynasty, there are reputed to have been multi-millionaires, reckoned in terms of copper. But China's political unification into a world-empire, like the unification of the known world by Imperial Rome, had the obvious consequence that this form of capitalism, which was essentially rooted in the state and its competition with other states, went into decline. The development of a purely market capitalism, directed towards free exchange, on the other hand, remained at an embryonic stage. In all sections of industry, of course, even in the cooperative undertakings to be discussed presently, the merchant, here as elsewhere, was conspicuously superior to the technician. This clearly showed itself even in the usual proportions in which profits were distributed within associations. The interlocal industries also, it is plain, often brought in considerable speculative profits. The ancient classical disposition to set a high value on agriculture, as the truly hallowed calling, hence did not prevent a higher valuation being placed, even as early as the first century B.C., on the opportunities for profit from industry than on those from agriculture (just as in the Talmud), nor did it prevent the highest valuation of all being placed on those from trade.

Max Weber has been described as not merely the greatest of sociologists but ‘the sociologist’. Yet for most of his career he would not have described himself as a sociologist at all. His own training was in history, economics and law; he was opposed to the creation of professorships of sociology; and in a letter written at the very end of his life he said that his only reason for being a sociologist was to rid the subject of the influence of the collective – or, as it would now be put, ‘holistic’ – concepts by which it continued to be haunted. It was not until after 1910 that he began to compose the treatise which we now have, still uncompleted, as Economy and Society. It is a work of a markedly different kind from his early writings, whether his historical studies of medieval trading companies and Roman agrarian law or his contemporary investigations of the stock exchange and the condition of agricultural labour in the Junker estates to the East of the Elbe. Yet it would be a mistake to read too much discontinuity into the sequence of his writings. His ideas changed over the course of thirty years, as they were bound to do. But his overriding preoccupations did not.

Weber wrote extensively about politics not only from an academic standpoint but also as a committed participant in the controversies of his own country and period. This is, at first sight, out of keeping with his strictures against those ‘favourably disposed towards the admission of value-judgments into teaching’. But in his own terms, his commitment to nationalist values and his advocacy of the policies which he believed would best serve the interests of Germany as a major power are perfectly consistent with his rigorous separation of academic from political values. He did not claim scientific objectivity for his personal values, and he acknowledged the entitlement of others to support different values provided only that they were consistently held. It is true to say that his insistence on the duty of the scholar to accept the findings of science whether they accord with his preferences or not has an obvious connexion with his insistence on ‘realism’ and ‘facing facts’ in the views which he puts forward about practical politics. His open contempt for those who cherish illusions about peace and progress and his determination to expose hypocrisy and rhetoric among the advocates of Conservatism and Social Democracy alike are both expressions of an underlying commitment to what one of his commentators has called ‘the familiar bourgeois values writ large’.

For all their intrinsic importance, the individual results of the work so far done in experimental psychology on the course of the processes of fatigue and training are not perhaps of much direct assistance to the compilers of this survey for their special purposes for the reasons already mentioned. Nevertheless, it might possibly be of some use to them to acquaint themselves with some of the simpler concepts commonly employed in the more recent studies in this field, even though, unfortunately, the precise meaning of many of them is at present a matter of dispute. However, some of these concepts are sufficiently clear in meaning, represent measurable quantities, are of proven usefulness and can provide the compilers with a convenient summary of certain simple elements in personal qualifications for work, together, if necessary, with a handy terminology: for instance, such concepts as that of ‘fatiguability’ (measured in terms of the rate and degree of onset of fatigue); ‘recuperability’ (measured in terms of the rate of recovery of efficiency after fatigue); ‘capacity for training’ (in terms of the rate of improvement in performance in the course of the work); ‘durability of training’ (in terms of the extent of the residue of training left after breaks and interruptions in the work); ‘stimulability’ (in terms of the extent to which the ‘psychomotor’ influence of working itself improves performance); ‘powers of concentration’ and ‘distractability’ (in terms of the reduction or lack of it in performance caused by an unaccustomed environment or extraneous disturbances, and, in the case of a reduction, in terms of its extent); and, finally, ‘habituation’ (to an unaccustomed environment, extraneous disturbances, and – most important of all in principle – to the combination of different activities).

THIS BOOK is based on lectures given annually in the University of Cambridge and on a parallel course of instruction in Practical Astronomy at the Observatory. The recent changes in the almanacs have, in many respects, affected the position of the older textbooks as channels of information on current practice, and the present work is intended to fill the gap caused by modern developments. In addition to the time-honoured problems of Spherical Astronomy, the book contains the essential discussion of such important subjects as helio-graphic co-ordinates, proper motions, determination of position at sea, the use of photography in precise astronomical measurements and the orbits of binary stars, all or most of which have received little attention in works of this kind. In order to make certain subjects as complete as possible, I have not hesitated to cross the traditional frontiers of Spherical Astronomy. This is specially the case as regards the spectroscopic determination of radial velocity which is considered, the physical principles being assumed, in relation to such problems as solar parallax, the solar motion and the orbits of spectroscopic binary stars.

Throughout, only the simplest mathematical tools have been used and considerable attention has been paid to the diagrams illustrating the text. I have devoted the first chapter to the proofs and numerical applications of the formulae of spherical trigonometry which form the mathematical foundation of the subsequent chapters. Although other formulae have been given for reference, I have limited myself to the use of the basic formulae only.

A writer of a textbook on Spherical Astronomy cannot avoid a certain measure of detailed reference to the principal astronomical instruments and, accordingly, general descriptions of instruments have been given in the appropriate places, usually with a simple discussion of the chief errors which must be taken into account in actual observational work.

In numerical applications, the almanac for 1931 has been used.

Introduction.

When we look at the stars on a clear night we have the familiar impression that they are all sparkling points of light, apparently situated on the surface of a vast sphere of which the individual observer is the centre. The eye, of course, fails to give any indication of the distances of the stars from us; however, it allows us to make some estimate of the angles subtended at the observer by any pairs of stars and, with suitable instruments, these angles can be measured with great precision. Spherical Astronomy is concerned essentially with the directions in which the stars are viewed, and it is convenient to define these directions in terms of the positions on the surface of a sphere— the celestial sphere—in which the straight lines, joining the observer to the stars, intersect this surface. It is in this sense that the usual expression “the position of a star on the celestial sphere” is to be interpreted. The radius of the sphere is entirely arbitrary. The foundation of Spherical Astronomy is the geometry of the sphere.

The spherical triangle.

Any plane passing through the centre of a sphere cuts the surface in a circle which is called a great circle. Any other plane intersecting the sphere but not passing through the centre will also cut the surface in a circle which, in this case, is called a small circle. In Fig. 1, EAB is a great circle, for its plane passes through O, the centre of the sphere. Let QOP be the diameter of the sphere perpendicular to the plane of the great circle EAB. Let R be any point in OP and suppose a plane drawn through R parallel to the plane of EAB; the surface of the sphere is then intersected in the small circle FCD. It follows from the construction that OP is also perpendicular to the plane of FCD. The extremities P and Q of the common perpendicular diameter QOP are called the poles of the great circle and of the parallel small circle.