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
161
Formalism and legal conceptual thinking were developed by the fraternities of the university-
educated jurists, the 'aristocracy of legal literati'
14
who effected the transformation of religious
into juridical formalism. These fraternities prove their extraordinariness by their monopolization
of 'specialized knowledge' of formal-rational rules and procedures. In my view they form an
important historical connection between routinized charismatic manhood clubs and formal
rational domination.
3. Charisma of church and state offices
A related form of routinized charisma which creates and consolidates formal rational
institutions is 'office charisma'. Weber defines it as 'the belief in the specific state of grace of a
social institution'
15
and conceptualizes it as based on the 'originally magical' 'concept that
charisma may be transmitted by ritual means from one bearer to another or may be created in
a new person.'
16
If 'charisma' is transformed into 'office charisma', 'the belief in legitimacy is no longer directed
to the individual, but to the acquired qualities and to the effectiveness of the ritual acts.' An
example is the transmission by symbolic acts of priestly charisma and royal authority; this kind
of magic may sanctify both church and state.
17
Like juridical charisma, office charisma depends on formalism: on the correct performance of
the rituals by which it is transferred.
18
The Catholic church shows 'the most radical form of the
depersonalization of charisma and of its transformation into a qualification that is inherent in
everybody who has become a member of the office hierarchy through a magic act, and that
sanctifies official acts.' According to Weber the church has deliberately used the magic
differentiation between person and function of 'pre-bourgeois man' for 'the service of a great
organizational idea: that of bureaucratization.' The distinction 'of the unworthy incumbent from
the holy office' is a 'typically bureaucratic policy', and it led to 'an office hierarchy with delimited
jurisdictions, regular channels, reglementation, fees, benefices, a disciplinary order,
rationalization of doctrine and of office-holding as a "vocation".
19
decision from abstract legal propositions by means of legal logic; third, that the law must actually or virtually
constitute a "gapless" system of legal propositions, or must, at least, be treated as if it were such a gapless
system; fourth, that whatever cannot be "construed" rationally in legal terms is also legally irrelevant; and fifth,
that every social action of human beings must always be visualized as either an "application" or "execution" of
legal propositions, or as an "infringement" thereof, since the "gaplessness" of the legal system must result in a
gapless "legal ordering" of all social conduct.'
14
ES p. 855, WG p. 493, see above Ch. 8,5 and below n. 4.
15
ES p. 1140, WG p. 675.
16
'It involves a dissociation of charisma from a particular individual, making it an objective, transferable entity.'
ES p. 248, WG p. 144, see above Ch. 4,4.
17
ES p. 1140, WG p. 675.
18
'Most of the time the symbol has become something merely formal, and in practice is less important than the
conception often related to it - the linkage of charisma with the holding of an office, which is acquired by the
laying on of hands, anointment, etc. Here we find that peculiar transformation of charisma into an institution: as
permanent structures and traditions replace the belief in the revelation and heroism of charismatic personalities,
charisma becomes part of an established social structure.' ES p. 1139, WG p. 674.
19
ES p. 1166, WG p. 694: '- in fact, these features were first developed, at least in the Occident, by the church as
the heir to ancient traditions, which in some respects probably originated in Egypt'. This it not at all surprising,
since the typically bureaucratic policy of distinguishing the unworthy incumbent from the holy office had to be
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