Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 9 Connections between formal rationality and charismatic domination over and through free
men: the continuing role of magic in the construction of impersonal patriarchal fraternities; from
Ständestaat to revolution
157
Chapter 9. Connections between formal rationality and charismatic domination over
and through free men: the continuing role of magic in the construction of impersonal
patriarchal fraternities; from Ständestaat to revolution
1. The continuing role of magic in the construction of impersonal patriarchal
fraternities - 157
2. Formalism: from magic to Roman conceptual juridical thought - 159
3. Charisma of church and state offices - 161
4. Rationalization of charismatic education into examinations of 'expertise' - 162
5. Inner-worldly asceticism and its routinization: the protestant ethic and the new
bourgeois - 164
6. Rational discipline as inverted charisma - 168
7. Formal rationality as a belief - 171
1. The continuing role of magic in the construction of impersonal patriarchal fraternities
In this chapter I will discuss some of the connections Weber established between 'charisma'
and 'formal rationality'. Since the ideal types of charisma and formal rationality have no
common elements, Weber presents the connections between them as paradoxical. Charisma,
in Weber's view, is the force that breaks both tradition and formal rationality; therefore war and
religion are the most important causes of change, and therefore, in the end, of rationalization.
Yet, as we have seen, Weber in his concept of legal patriarchy connects 'charisma' to
'tradition', since he presents the domination of the individual 'patriarch' as founded on his
membership of a charismatic military group of conquerors, who appropriated the land and its
inhabitants. If the concept of patriarchy is transformed into one of modern hierarchical status
groups of formally free and equal patriarchs, several of Weber's connections between
charisma and formal rationality can be given their place. These connections can be found in
Weber's conceptual exposition and in the references in it to his chapters on religion and law in
ES.
'Formal-rational domination' means that members of an organization orient their actions to
domination which has been legitimized by a cosmos of rules, instead of by some kind of
personal authority; one of the 'mutually independent ideas' on which legal domination rests, is
'That the person who obeys authority does so, as it is usually stated, only in his capacity as a "member" of the
organization and what he obeys is only "the law"'; the members of the organization, insofar as they obey a person in
authority, do not owe this obedience to him as an individual, but to the impersonal order
.'¹
The question is why free men are willing to do obey rules. In the previous chapter I gave a
beginning of an answer: in my view an obligation to obey rules serves as a solution of the
struggle between the patrimonial ruler, who wants to treat his officials as his private property,
on the one hand, and the officials, who want to emancipate themselves from patriarchal-
patrimonial power, without losing their share in it, on the other. This view is confirmed by
Weber's statement that the 'estate' structure developed only where the patrimonial ruler was
confronted by charismatic groups of a military origin, thus by knights and citizens who did not
want to lose their proven manhood to a patriarchal ruler.
1
ES p. 217/218, WG p. 125.
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