Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 10 Hidden Masculinity: impersonal bureaucracy as a result of the unsolvable conflict between
fraternity and patriarchy
178
This is the reason why Weber cannot conceptualize a way for modern men to further their
interests in a rational way; why he presents irrational individual 'charisma' as the only way to
pry loose the bars of the iron cage of public life. His consciousness of the continuing
oppressive existence of patriarchy is expressed only in his denunciations of the German
submissive mentality; the absurdities of patriarchal private life which tries to isolate itself
from the general desire for emancipation caused by the principles of freedom and equality of
the fraternities on which patriarchy itself is based, appear only in his paradoxical connections
between charisma and rationality.
The way I have used Weber's concept 'unconscious rationality' in order to connect Weber's
ideal types of domination can only provide a beginning of a rational understanding of modern
'impersonality': its result is only a sex-defined analysis of the contradictory relations between
masculine rulers and their masculine staff and of the contradictory claims of both to
dominance over their dependents.
Weber, as a full member of the impersonal fraternities which rule the world, denies all
production which has not been organized in a bureaucratic form; household and voluntary
production remain invisible. Only the rational organization of production can be
conceptualized in his terms; production itself remains in the dark realm of private values, and
therefore the dynamic process of exploitation and the reactions of the exploited to this
process are only recognized by a conceptualization of the ambiguous character of their
result, the 'status order'.
In order to analyze history in a more dynamic way the insights Marx and Freud provided into
the 'unconscious rationality' of respectively the public production of 'exchange values' and
the private production of attachment and identification in the private one, should be
connected to the analysis of the status order; to make this connection possible the same
operation of translating the sex-neutral terms of these theories in sex-defined ones should
be performed.
14
4. The return of the repressed consciousness of the sex-defined character of modern
relations in the public sphere: the entrance of women and non-white men in bureaucratic
position as a threat to the identity of bureaucratic authority and proof of manhood
When the rational insights Weber has provided are combined with his 'irrational',
paradoxical, ironic ones, the relation of men in bureaucracies to women and other non-
persons who want to hold positions of office, can be conceptualized in a clear way.
When 'non-men' are appointed as 'tokens' of the observance of the rules of universalist
democracy, 'impersonality' is broken; the repressed consciousness of sex-defined relations
returns; the hidden masculine interests become visible. Membership of a bureaucratic status
group alone is not enough to provide the desired proof of manhood anymore; 'manhood' is
14
An attempt to integrate insights of Marx, Freud and Weber was made by the Frankfurter Schule, a group of
marxists who tried to understand the successes of national socialism in Germany; this attempt, however, only
resulted in a 'critical theory' without praxis. The analysis of the Frankfurter Schule could be brought further,
however, if the universalist concepts they kept using were translated in sex-defined ones, as the leftist radical
feminist movement tried to do. See for an outline of such an undertaking Van Baalen (1991).
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