Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. SUMMARY
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'Bureaucracy', or 'formal-rational domination' is a sexless concept; nowhere in Weber's
typology is it stated that one has to be a 'man' in a biological or social sense to be an official
or a manager. In Weber's view, though, modern bureaucracy has been developed in
Western Europe from an older form, which he calls 'patrimonial bureaucracy'; the
'patrimonial bureaucracy' was the administrative staff of 'patrimonialism', which ruled all
great empires from the beginning of history. Weber he defined 'patrimonialism' as a form of
patriarchy; 'patriarchy', according to him, is a sex-defined and irrational form of domination.
The question how this form of masculine domination developed into a formally sex-neutral
one, which is based on universalist human rights and equality before the law, as well as the
question why this development only took place on the continent of Western Europe, Weber
could not answer, since his concept of 'bureaucracy' is not connected to that of
'patrimonialism'.
Patriarchy implies not only legal differences between women and men, but also important
differences between 'real', social, free men, and other human beings who, together with
cattle and implements, are the property of the patriarch - the 'familia', as the Romans called
the whole of his possessions. Weber, though he does analyze 'patriarchy', neutralizes the
concept by identifying it with the power of 'tradition', in this way obscuring all forms of social
relations in which 'kinship tradition' - the historical importance of which he recognizes, since
he views the breach with it as the most important cause for the difference between the
developments in 'the Occident' and in the rest of the world - granted women freedom and
authority.
Weber conceptualizes the sex-defined character of 'patriarchy', in its turn, in an ambiguous
way: on the one hand he constructs a 'patriarchal domination of the household', which is
supposed to be based on 'masculine superiority', while on the other he postulates a
'patriarchy in a technical sense' which is supposedly based on the appropriation of land and
people by a 'caste of conquerors'. The latter concept refers to Weber's other concept of
irrational domination, that of 'charisma', the power of extra-ordinariness or, historically, the
possession of magic powers. For he characterizes these castes of conquerors are 'ritually
closed status groups'; and 'status groups' are defined to have developed from military
fraternities who have appropriated 'charisma' and, routinizing it, turned into its opposite, into
a proof of 'real manhood' by training, examination and/or wealth. 'Charisma' according to
Weber is inimical to all kind of routine activities, especially economic ones, so the
appropriated people, the not-men, have to do the work.
When patriarchs want to expand their domination they can make (unfree) men from their
'familia' heads of households too; these 'quasi-patriarchs', as they might be called, are in an
ambiguous position: they are 'men' in relation to their dependents, whose work they
supervise, but 'children' in relation to the patrimonial lord.
The extension of this form of patriarchal domination to formally free men is what Weber calls
'political patrimonialism'; the free men affiliate themselves with such a patrimonial lord if their
own military groups are not powerful enough to support and legitimate their own patriarchal
domination.
In this way patriarchal hierarchies developed all over the world. The most wealthy and
successful empires were administrated by patrimonial bureaucracies in which officials were
formally unfree men, dependents of the patrimonial prince.
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