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 masters to their staff are based are decisive.
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Legitimacy is no longer defined as a belief
of the ruled, but only as a probability that those over whom domination is exerted will submit
to it. The concept of chance enables Weber to transform conforming individuals into a kind of
statistical category, in which the motivations of individuals to conform - which can be of all
kinds - are of no account.
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This concept of 'legitimacy' therefore denies all those action
orientations and motivations of the ruled which are irrelevant to the legitimacy claims of the
ruler and therefore remain private.
By founding his sociology of domination on this concept of legitimacy, that is by focusing his
sociology on those at the top - on those who are able to have their actions and their
motivations reported - Weber sidestepped the practical difficulties of having to collect
information on motivations and action orientations from 'individuals' who 'have nothing to
say'. The interpretation of the 'giving of subjective meaning' ('Sinngebung') as a starting point
for causal analyses of the actions of historical actors is transformed into a pragmatist
analysis of the motivations of those actors who have won the struggle and so laid the
foundation for modern domination.
The difficulties Weber had in integrating concepts and experiences of the public sphere -
official domination - and the private one are apparent in the dual character of his ideal types
of 'irrational domination': the ideal types of 'tradition' and 'charisma' both can be
differentiated in a sex-neutral and a sex-defined one. By formulating both forms of
domination - which according to his own analysis concerned relations between women and
men and those between men as such - also in a sex-neutral way, he could construct sex-
neutral 'rationalization' as an unintended result of the interaction between the two
emotionally based forms of domination and legitimation, 'tradition' and 'charisma'.
To connect the sex-neutral conceptualizations of 'irrational domination' to the sex-defined
ones, however, Weber takes recourse to conceptual manipulations he has omitted to explain
in his conceptual exposition; I will discuss them in the next section.
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ES p. 213, WG p. 122. 'Furthermore, a system of domination may - as often occurs in practice - be so
completely protected, on the one hand by the obvious community of interests between the chief and his
administrative staff (bodyguards, Pretorians, "red" of "white" guards) as opposed to the subjects, on the other
hand by the helplessness of the latter, that it can afford to drop even the pretense of a claim to legitimacy. But
even then the mode of legitimation of the relation between the chief and his staff may vary widely according to
the type of basis of the relation of the authority between them, and, as will be shown, this variation is highly
significant for the structure of domination', ES p. 214, WG p. 123.
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'Loyalty may be hypocritically simulated by individuals or by whole groups on purely opportunistic grounds, or
carried out in practice for reasons of material self-interest. Or people may submit from individual weakness and
helplessness because there is no acceptable alternative.' ES p. 214, WG p. 123. See also ES p. 37/38, WG p.
20: 'Submission to an order is almost always determined by a variety of interests and by a mixture of adherence
to tradition and belief in legality, unless it is a case of entirely new regulations. In a very large proportion of cases,
the actors subject to the order are of course not even aware how far it is a matter of custom, of convention, or of
law. In such cases the sociologist must attempt to formulate the typical basis of validity'.
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