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
16
3. Adequate causation and chance
The way in which Weber conceptualizes causality, which for him is central to science, is
intimately bound up with that of the 'individual', since he wants to trace the consequences of
individual social actions. Although he considers reality to be chaotic, he states that the
historian is nevertheless able to impute certain phenomena to certain causes, as long as he
uses the same concept which a criminal judge uses when imputing a certain effect to the
actions of the accused, namely that of 'adequate causation'
33
; the judge holds the accused
responsible for the results of his actions, as far as he was able to foresee them according to
rules of experience.
34
According to Weber however, the historian is not a judge: historians should not sit in ethical
judgement over historical actors, defining their measure of guilt.
35
In Weber's view scientific causality has to be judged on the basis of rules of experience, guilt
(moral responsibility) on the basis of ethical rules. Rules of experience are objective - ethical
rules are subjective; the former are rational, based on the technical relations between given
means and given ends - the latter are irrational; the former are public, accessible to every
rational being - the latter private, ruled by the belief in gods and demons which the actor
cherishes in the privacy of his conscience.
36
The concept which serves to introduce rules of experience into rational social science is that
of 'Chance', 'probability'
37
. Weber formulates this concept in order to be able to formulate
empirical social 'laws'. Social life is possible because we can to a certain degree predict the
acts of others; we do this by calculating the chances that specific acts will occur and by
orienting our acts to these predictions. It is the task of the social scientist to reconstruct the
predictions individuals make in order to understand their motivations for social actions in
their 'context of meaning', 'Sinnzusammenhang'
38
. For Weber's sociology, defined as 'the
interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its
course and consequences'
39
, not all human action is therefore relevant; it is relevant only
'*when and insofar the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his *conduct
33
GAzW p. 67-69; MSS p. 79/80, GAzW p. 179; GAzW p. 266 ff. (286); ES p. 11, WG p. 5: The interpretation of
a sequence of events' will on the other hand be called c a u s a l l y adequate insofar as, according to established
generalizations from experience, there is a probability that it will always occur in the same way.'
34
The classical example of such a judgement is that on a person who has given a blow on the head of a person
with an egg-shell skull, resulting in death or grievous bodily harm. According to Dutch jurisprudence, this action
has not c a u s e d death, because 'it could not reasonably be expected'. See Rb Rotterdam 11.7.1946 NJ 1947,
213 (egg-shell skulls occur only in one of the 2000 cases); cf. also Hoge Raad 24.1.1950, NJ 1950, 293 and
Hazewinkel-Suringa (1991), p. 163 ff. (175).
35
GAzW p. 271 nt 1. See further below, no 6.
36
FMW p. 147 ff., GAzW p. 603 ff.
37
ES p. 11/12, WG p. 5/6: 'On the other hand, even the most perfect adequacy on the level of meaning has
causal significance from a sociological point of view only insofar there is some kind of proof for the existence of a
probability that action in fact normally takes the course that is held to be meaningful.' To avoid confusion with the
mathematical concept 'probability', the translators have often used the term 'likelihood' (nt 13, p. 59). See on the
connection between 'chance' and 'causality' also Rb. Rotterdam cited in n. 34 above.
38
See about this translation ES p. 8 nt 8.
39
ES p. 4, WG p. 1
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