Abstract: Max Weber's entanglement between power and ethics clearly embodies the duality of Machiavelli's "reason of state" doctrine. Like Machiavelli, Weber saw that with the rise of modern states, politics has become an independent value field, conflicting with other value fields, but not completely separated from them.Therefore, he rejected pure ethics of conviction, advocated effect-oriented ethics of responsibility, and recognized that the inconsistency of means and ends was an irrational reality of political ethics. Weber faced the problem of modern bureaucracy that was not prominent in the Machiavellian era. He degraded the ethics of polity to the legitimacy of administrative management and brought the issue of the relationship between bureaucracy and "ethics" to the center stage. In this sense, Weber is a "new Machiavelli".Weber never attempted an ultimate solution to the conflict between power and ethics. However, the question of relationship between bureaucracy and ethics that he left behind is not just a German problem, but also a common problem in contemporary politics. In the post-Weber time, social sciences stop questioning the meaning and purpose of the state, and instead focus on managerial functions and tasks of the state, resulting in what Carl Schmitt called "neutralization" of social sciences.Neutral concepts like "state autonomy" and "state capacity" have replaced Weberian ideas of tension between power and ethics.Any future study of state and social governance in China should try to explain not only the institutional level but also the conceptional level of how China has evolved from its traditional ethical bureaucracy to today's bureaucracy.

Key words: power, ethics, domination, reason of state, bureaucracy