Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy,
Amsterdam 1994, dissertation University of Amsterdam INTRODUCTION
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The interest of Weber's sociology is that he did not totally deny this kind of knowledge,
although he refused to give it official status. By deviating from his own standards of the
'logical consistency' of concepts, he provided an abundance of - mostly implicitly formulated
- insights into causal relations between social actions of historical individuals, which include
also many cases in which the historical actors according to Weber were not (fully) conscious
of the interests they wanted to serve.
Although any reconstruction of relations between historical actors finds its limits in Weber's
self-admitted lack of a theory on the relation between being and consciousness, I will
connect many of his fragmented analyses of specific European developments to each other.
The central concept of this reconstruction is the historical concept of 'patriarchy', which
Weber included in his analysis of 'irrational domination'. By translating his sex-neutral
concepts in his sex-defined ones, I will present a theory on the origins and the modernization
processes of Western masculine domination for which Weber in spite of himself provided the
material.
Since the historical parts of Weber's sociology are not well known, this will mean that I will
not only present a criticism of its irrational aspects, but also a summary of those parts in
which he, in my view, gives a rational account of historical social relations.
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