Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy,
Amsterdam 1994, dissertation University of Amsterdam INTRODUCTION
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3. Bureaucracy and masculine domination in Max Weber's Economy and Society
The first comprehensive sociological analysis of modern Western democratic society and of
the societies preceding it was written in the beginning of the century by the German
sociologist Max Weber. He founded modern universalist sociology, of which both the method
and the central object are based on the opposition of public and private life.
Since Weber opposed the rationality of science - the realm of facts - to the 'irrationality of the
world' - the realm of values -, he chose a comparative method to understand 'irrational'
phenomena in a rational way. He therefore constructs logically consistent 'ideal types' to
compare the social actions of individuals to, in order to understand them rationally. His
method opposes facts and values, reason and emotion, rationality and irrationality, science
and politics; his central object, the bureaucracy which dominates modern society, is based,
according to him, on a separation of public from private property, of reasons of state from the
feelings of the officials, of administration from politics.
The correspondence of Weber's method and his scientific object seems to result in an
analysis of modern reality which is impervious to rational feminist criticism, since it relegates
relations between women and men irrevocably to the 'private' sphere of emotions, values
and irrational notions.
Yet Weber's work, in contrast to many later sociological theories, offers many starting-points
for an analysis in sex-defined terms. This is because his sociology is a historical one. He
does not only aim to explain the workings of modern bureaucratic society in its own terms,
but also to understand its genesis: its development from other social formations. And since
no other society has explained its own foundations in the sex-neutral terms of 'human'
freedom and equality, relations of women and men emerge from his historical analysis.
Weber therefore presents two sets of concepts: those constructed to understand the
bureaucratic aspects of modern society, and those constructed to understand other - in his
terms 'irrational' - social formations. The latter concepts can be shown to be sex-defined,
that is connected to relations between women and men; they can be used to connect
feminist knowledge of modern relations between women and men to historical knowledge
represented in Weber's sociology.
Before I can use the knowledge Weber presents in ES to understand the development of the
relations between women and men in Western society,
his separation between the concepts he constructed to understand respectively 'rational' and
'irrational' social formations has to be explained. For since these sets of concepts are based
on different parts of Weber's consciousness - respectively on that of his scientific thinking
about the public world, and on that of his emotions about problems of private life - they are
different in character and therefore are developed in a different way.
I will show that Weber's 'logical constructions' of 'irrational' social formations - which in my
interpretations are relations in the private sphere, relations between women and men and
first to construct a 'bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life' to investigate the ruling
institutions and the men who embody their power; in Three Guineas (1938) she gives a shattering insight into
their military character.
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