Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 8 Connections between formal rationality and patriarchal-patrimonial domination
over and through men
137
Chapter 8. Connections between formal rationality and patriarchal-patrimonial
domination over and through unfree men
1. The connections between Weber's universalist method and his conceptualization of
bureaucratization as a linear development from patriarchal-patrimonial
administration - 137
2. The Ständestaat as a compromise between patrimonial, feudal and city power - 138
3. The development of capitalism: mercantilism and industrialization - 140
4. Patriarchal patrimonialism as the destruction of the freedom and equality of the
patrimonial landlords in Russia - 142
5. Formal-rational legitimation of patrimonialism: reception of the formal structures of
Roman Law - 144
6. Material-rational legitimation of patrimonialism: the welfare state - 147
7. Rationalization of patrimonial bureaucracy: central official, clerks and collegiate
bodies - 148
8. The victory of patrimonialism in Germany and its influence on
German mentality - 151
9. The mentality of 'the patriarchal-patrimonial official' - 152
10. 'Staatsraison': the fusion of formal and patriarchal-material rationality into
rationalized patriarchal patrimonialism - 154
1. The connections between Weber's universalist method and his conceptualization of
bureaucratization as a linear development from patriarchal-patrimonial administration
Weber, in constructing the bureaucratization process as a linear development out of a
patrimonial type of domination, omits many factors which he conceptualized in the ideal
types of 'free feudalism' and of 'the autonomous western city'. To retrieve these lost
connections, I will first return to the universalist foundations of his methodology.
As I stated in the first chapter, Weber's method to understand a world he considered
irrational is based on the construction of unrelated, 'logically consistent' ideal types.
Therefore he could not conceptualize connections between rational and irrational
phenomena in any other way than either by using the empty concept of 'fluid transitions
between opposites' or by formulating an 'unintended consequence', a 'paradox'.
In my treatment of 'the medieval occidental city' I have shown that Weber's separation of the
public and the private sphere, which I see as the reason for his opposition between
rationality and irrationality, is more than an a priori aspect of his universalist
conceptualization of modern bureaucracy. In his own analysis, it is a historical phenomenon:
the separation of 'office' and 'household' is a result of the growth of the money economy in
the autonomous cities and of the ensuing 'disintegration of the household'. In my
interpretation the sex-defined relations of patriarchal private production and private life were
increasingly repressed from official bourgeois consciousness, because of their growing
contradiction with the fraternal market freedom and equality patriarchal power became
based on.
I interpret Weber's concepts of 'fluid transition' and of 'paradoxical consequences' as means
by which he could represent those developments in the private sphere which had been
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