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
168
conceptualization of the paradoxical results of the transformation of the original charisma, in
the reversal of its meaning, than in the 'Verstehen' of the individual motivations which
constituted it.
6. Rational discipline as inverted charisma
'Discipline' is Weber's most radical reversion of 'charisma'. He presents it as the most mindless
of all action orientations: it involves an almost total repression, from outside or of from within
the individual, of all subjective meaning. Only the conduct which is required by the
disciplinarians, on the base of objective calculations, remains . The result is an empty shell of
formal rationality that withstands empathic understanding.
Weber views the rationalization process as a transformation of living human material into a
dead, inhuman machine.
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'Discipline' is the instrument that perfects this transformation. If and
when discipline is total, the dominated seem to have disappeared as human beings; the only
individuals left for sociology to study are operators working a machine. Discipline is therefore
an important element of bureaucratic domination: it turns bureaucracy into a machine and the
officials into the cogs in that machine.
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of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the
tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic
conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this
mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so
determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should
only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate
decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.' And: 'No one knows who will live in this cage in the future,
or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great
rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-
importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit,
sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."'
TPE p. 181/2, DPE p. 188/9.
50
This formulation resembles Marx' conceptualization of the transformation of human labor power into capital;
Marx, however, emphasized the limits to this process, which are caused by the need of capital to exploit human
labor.
51
ES p. 223, WG p. 128: 'It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline,
and in its reliability.' (The translation grants the bureaucracy also the predicate of 'efficiency' which is not to be
found in Weber's text; see Albrow (1970), p. 62 ff.). See also ES p. 224, WG p. 128: 'The question is always who
controls the existing bureaucratic machinery', ES p. 973, WG p. 561/2: 'The fully developed bureaucratic
apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of
production', ES p. 988, WG p. 570: 'In contrast to the "notable" performing administrative tasks as a honorific duty
or as a subsidiary occupation (avocation), the professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity in his entire
economic and ideological existence. In the great majority of cases he is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving
mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march.' 'Increasingly, all order in public and
private organizations is dependent on the system of files and the discipline of officialdom, that means, its habit of
painstaking obedience within its wonted sphere of action' and ES p. 968, WG p. 558: 'Taut discipline and control
which at the same time have consideration for the official's sense of honor, and the developments of prestige
sentiments of the status group' contribute to 'the success and maintenance of a rigorous mechanism'. See further
Ch. 10,2.
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