Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. SUMMARY
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typical 'Untertan', an honorless, unfree, unmanly victim of patrimonial domination for whom
'rationality' only means rigidity and who lives in 'an iron cage of bondage'. In this way he
constructs a direct line of descent from the patrimonial bureaucracies of early history to the
early modern patrimonial bureaucracies of the absolutist rulers of the 18th century and from
there to modern German bureaucracy, a development in which not only the position of
women, but also the establishment of the 'masculinity' of the members of high status groups
gets lost from view.
If, however, one translates Weber's sex-neutral conceptualization of the legitimation of
domination by 'expertise' and 'competence' into his own sex-defined ones of 'patriarchy' and
'routinized charismatic fraternity', the identity of ancient and modern officials is broken. Then
it becomes clear that the bureaucratic 'experts' can be compared with the knights of yore
only in certain aspects. Although they are educated and tested to take their place in
confraternizations of 'real men' who use their official position to further their own interests,
they lack the knightly autonomy: they have no means to maintain a patriarchal domination
over non-persons on their own; though their manhood is formally proven by their
membership of the brotherhood, materially it is not supported by anything. Therefore they
have to identify theirselves with more powerful patriarchs, who compel them to obedience
and so threaten their manhood. Modern men therefore are subjected to unsolvable
contradictions. The historical consequence of these contradictions is the growth of
'impersonality', the disappearance of all sex-specific elements from the consciousness of
their social relations in general and from the legitimation of dominance in particular. This
'impersonality' saves the honor of the bureaucrats: they obey rules, not persons. The same
formal-rational impersonality, however, erodes the foundations of patriarchal domination,
since the freedom and equality the official brotherhoods are based on has also to be granted
to women, children and other non-persons.
In other words: the modern separation of the public from the private sphere is the
consequence of legal-rational dominance. Equality and inequality can exist next to each
other because the development of relations from which all sex-specific aspects have been
repressed. As soon as women and other non-persons, however, claim access to positions of
dominance, the separation between public and private is threatened: the repressed sex-
specific aspects reenter consciousness; the manhood of the experts is threatened. Only
when they succeed in denying women and other non-men their citizen rights and to reserve
the positions of command in bureaucracies for men, they can maintain that the fact that one
holds such a position serves as a 'proof of manhood'.
Thus Weber's 'value-free social science', his 'heroic pessimism', his passionate pleas for
political 'leaders' and against the 'castrating' effects of bureaucratic party systems, can be
interpreted as a fight for manhood which he proposes to perform by combining aristocratic
superiority with a puritan 'asceticism in the world'. From such a standpoint the striving of
women for honor, wealth and prestige can only be understood in a negative way; to
transcend Weber's separation of the public from the private sphere his ironical use of the
paradox, which serves as a counterpoint to his rational constructions of 'adequate causality',
has to be translated into rational social theory. Then Weber's 'iron cage' can be shown to be
a fortress built by middle class fraternities to defend their patriarchal interests. If the
universalist identity between 'man' and 'human being' is broken, it can be deduced from
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