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
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5. From the understanding of 'action orientations' to the construction of ideal types of
legitimate domination
Since rational reconstruction is a means to understand 'irrational' actions, Weber derives the
construction of his three concepts of 'legitimate domination' from his opposition of 'rational'
'action orientations' to 'irrational' ones. Rational action orientations, however, may also be of
two different types. Only those that are oriented to the use of means to reach ends
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('instrumental rationality', 'Zweckrationalität') are really rational; those actions which are
rationally oriented to values ('value rationality') are ultimately based on irrational choices.
63
The purely irrational action orientations themselves are actually conceptualized in a clear
way: they are differentiated in 'affectual (especially emotional)', and 'traditional' ones, the
latter being determined by 'ingrained habituation'
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.
Weber is mainly interested in action orientations as long as they lead to definable 'social
relations', that is to say: to social relations insofar as they develop certain empirical
uniformities.
65
Such uniformities are greatest when social action is 'guided by the belief in a
legitimate order'
66
. The link between the subjective 'giving of meaning' ('Sinngebung') of
individual actions and the objective existence of fixed socials forms therefore is 'legitimacy':
the belief in the validity of a claim to 'domination' or 'authority'.
The different types of legitimate orders correspond to the types of action orientation, since
they are founded on 'tradition' ('valid is that which has always been'), on 'affectual (especially
emotional) faith' ('valid is that which is newly revealed or exemplary'), on 'value-rational faith'
('valid is that which has been deduced as an absolute') or 'positive enactment which is
believed to be legal'.
67
According to Weber the most common form of legitimation of a social
order is 'tradition', when 'what always has been' is considered to be valid.
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62
In which also secondary consequences, alternative means to the end and the relative importance of different
possible end are taken into account, ES p. 26, WG p. 13.
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This orientation 'is distinguished from the affectual type by its clearly self-conscious formulation of the ultimate
values governing the action and the consistently planned orientation of its detailed course to these values. At the
same time the two types have a common element, namely that the meaning of the action does not lie in the
achievement of a result ulterior to it, but in carrying out the specific type of action for its own sake.' ES p. 25, WG
p. 12. Van Vucht Tijssen (1985), p. 104 and 185, points out that the separation Weber constructs here between
purposive rationality, which is defined in terms of interest, on the one hand, and value-rationality, which 'he
connects to an irrational option for last and inexorable values', at the other one, is too final: no mediating
concepts are formulated.
64
ES p. 25, WG p. 12.
65
ES p. 29, WG p. 14. He constructs a logical series of ideal types to trace the different components of social
action; in this construction of the establishment of social contacts, connections and institutions he proceeds from
open social relations to closed ones, from vague and limited relations to clear and inclusive ones, from voluntary
relations to compulsory ones, finally conceptualizing the territorial state as a 'compulsive association ('Anstalt')
with 'the m o n o p o l y of the l e g i t i m a t e use of physical force in the enforcement of its order'; see ES p. 52
ff., WG p. 28 ff.
66
ES p. 31, WG p. 31. 'The probability that action will actually be so governed will be called the "validity"
(Geltung) of the order in question.'
67
ES p. 36, WG p. 19.
68
ES p. 36, WG p. 19.
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