Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994 Dissertation University of Amsterdam. Chapter 1. Max Weber's universalist
sociology of bureaucracy: the contradiction between public rationalism and private masculinism
12
discussed.
10
This cannot have been because Weber had never heard of the feminist
movement; feminists were rather vociferous and he himself was actually married to one of
them; his wife, Marianne Weber-Schnitger, held important functions in the Bund Deutscher
Frauenvereine and wrote an important work on the positions of 'married women and mothers
in the development of law'
11
. Weber's refusal to include the women's issue in his analysis of
modern society can be therefore only be explained by his separation of public and private
spheres: it appears that, consciously or unconsciously, he must have relegated the 'women's
question' to the private sphere, to the 'woman's world' of his wife.
Because of his separation of public and private life, the meaning of Weber's analysis of
bureaucracy is not immediately clear: it can either be understood as being strictly
universalist and sex-neutral - sex not being relevant to public life - or as a description of a
strictly male society with strictly male forms of domination, founded either on sociological or
on biological differences between men and women. It is, however, certain that a formal
exclusion of women is not an element of Weber's concept of 'bureaucracy'.
To be able to give an interpretation in sex-defined terms of Weber's sex-neutral concepts
and thus to answer the question whether Weber conceptualizes bureaucracy as a form of
masculine domination, I will discuss the universalist foundations of Weber's method and the
way in which he deals with sex-defined social formations - with relations which in modern
society constitute 'private life'. For this discussion I will use, as much as is possible, his
Introduction to ES, in which he summarizes an earlier article on his method, entitled 'Some
Categories of Interpretive Sociology'
12
. Since he also refers in this Introduction to his famous
article on 'objectivity' in the social sciences
13
, I will first treat some of his famous postulates
on 'Wertfreiheit' ('freedom from values') and on the logical strategies to achieve this goal.
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10
See below no 9.
11
See Ch. 2,1 and 8. Max Weber promoted the appointment of his student Else von Richthofen as the first
female official in Germany, see Lebensbild p. 263, Biography p. 230: 'It was part of the women's program to
obtain such occupations.' Some ten years later he fell in love with her and later even began an affair with her,
which lasted to his death in 1920. See Mitzman (1970) and Green (1974).
12
Einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie (1913), in GAzW, p. 427 ff.
13
ES p. 22, WG p. 11 refers to 'Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy', of
1904, MSS p. 49 ff., GAzW p. 146 ff. To clear up some other points I will also use 'The Meaning of "Ethical
Neutrality" in Sociology and Economics, of 1917, MSS p. 1 ff., GAzW p. 489 ff. and 'Science as a vocation', FMW
p. 129 ff., GAzW p. 582 ff.; this last text is a lecture addressed to students and therefore to a general scientific
public; one may therefore expect the technical terms of methodology in it to be translated in everyday scientific
language.
Though I will refer to the pages of the translation of Shils and Finch in MSS I will mostly use my own, more literal
translation, when they render neither the exact meaning nor the literary flavor of Weber's words . (In 'On
Universities' Shils published a revised translation of a part of 'Der Sinn der "Wertfreiheid" der soziologischen und
ökonomischen Wissenschaften', published earlier in MSS p. 1-10 (p. 47 ff.), and some pages of Science as a
Vocation (Wissenschaft als Beruf) (p. 54 ff.)).
14
The secondary literature on Weber's methodological views is enormous, but it is almost wholly formulated in
universalist terms; its point of interest is the difference between Weber and other masculinist theorists. My
analysis, however, tries to uncover those elements that are common to masculist universalism as such.
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