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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The opposite of traditional domination is 'charismatic domination'. 'Charisma' is defined as 'a
certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary
and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional
powers or qualities'.
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Weber views charisma as the only cause of change; since it is based
on 'extra-ordinariness', however, in the long run it is transformed into traditional domination
or into formal rationality.
According to Weber 'value rationality' has never had a strong influence on actual conduct
and therefore has not led to legitimate domination; the example he gives is that of natural
law
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, which remained in the realm of ideas and values since the influence of its 'logically
deduced propositions' on actual conduct 'lagged far behind its ideal claims'
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.
For this reason 'value-rational legitimation' is not mentioned by Weber as one of the
definitions of the 'pure types of legitimate domination' in the conceptual exposition of the
'types of legitimate domination', the part of ES he worked on during the last years of his life.
In this part Weber presents the 'pure types' only as a 'heuristic model'; they can only prove
their use by their 'results in promoting analysis';
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he does not maintain the pretense of
logical connections between the ideal types, which was suggested by his logical treatment of
contradictory action orientations - ratio versus emotion, habit versus extraordinariness - in
the Introduction. Weber's treatment of the types domination is therefore characterized by a
pragmatist identification of the understandable with the real. This identification conceals a
shift in his work from the action orientations of the ruled to those of the rulers; from the
empathic understanding of the action motivations of human beings to the rational
construction of models of domination.
Weber's concept of 'legitimacy' differs from that of modern sociologists who regard it as
arising from a constitutive consensus of the dominated
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. In his view, however, domination
has to be classified according to the character of the claims of the masters to legitimacy ; as
long as the dominated are powerless only the claims to legitimacy on which the relation of
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ES p. 241, WG p. 140.
70
ES p. 37, WG p. 19.
71
ES p. 37, WG p. 19.
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The Introduction, however, suggests a systematic, logical treatment of possible action orientations and their
possible ways of uniformization. That Weber leaves one of the four types of 'legitimate domination' out of his
conceptual exposition is ostensibly a departure from this consistency; the effects of the ambiguous character of
the concept of 'value-bound rationality' become apparent.
The concept of 'value-rationality' bridges the split between values and rationality. Since Weber has no
methodological instruments to conceptualize such ambiguous phenomena, he has to choose whether 'value-
rationality' is to be understood as 'factual' or as 'normative'; he chooses the latter option and in this way
reinforces the opposition between facts and values, producing a paradox: though some people believe in 'value-
rationality' and, as we will see later, even orient their actions to it, it does not really exist.
Though Weber views rational and irrational action orientations both as belonging to social life, some action
orientations - those who lead to domination - are more real than others; the only way to judge the status of a
certain kind of action orientation is empirical reality. If a type of action orientation leads to domination, it belongs
to the realm of facts; if not, it belongs to the realm of values.
In this way Weber changed a logically consistent ideal-type of 'legitimate domination' into three separate
constructions, based on a pragmatist identification of what is 'rational' with what is 'real'.
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We will see in Ch. 10,1 that Weber views this kind of legitimation as the specific 'democratic' one.
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