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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6. Ideal types of developments; the problem of causality in an irrational world; Weber's law of
unintended consequences; 'paradoxical causation'
As we saw before, Weber understands concrete social processes and phenomena by
comparing them to rationally constructed ideal types so as to understand and explain them
causally.
76
Because of 'the irrationality of the world', causal explanations according to him
can only be partial and subjective; he cannot conceptualize any other causal relations than
those of individual, concrete constellations.
77
Weber constructs such concrete causal connections by means of the juridical concept of
'adequate causation' I mentioned before; he redefines this concept in sociological terms by
forbidding social scientists to pass a verdict on historical actors.
Weber's differentiation between a moral and a scientific concept of 'adequate causation' is a
typical instance of his procedure to attain 'value-freedom'. First he defines scientific causality
in a moral way, borrowing the concept from criminal jurisprudence; then he differentiates
scientific from moral judgment by invoking the ethical postulate of value-neutrality. Yet
'adequate causation' retains its aspects of moral judgment. It can be seen as a scientific
transformation of Weber's political ethic, which he calls the 'ethic of responsibility', a term in
which he expresses his standpoint that he holds a politician responsible for the
consequences of his actions insofar as he could have foreseen them, even though they may
be entirely unintended.
78
In Weber's scientific ethic, however, he has to decide which
consequences the acting individual has foreseen; since in most cases he lacks the means to
know this, however, he invokes the 'rules of experience' and imputes those consequences to
the action which, in the terms of Dutch jurisprudence, the actor 'might reasonably have
expected'.
79
Thus the moral judgment is smuggled in in the guise of 'rules of experience'.
By using a concept of causation which separates objective consequences from subjective
intentions, Weber is able to transform the simple insight that individual actions often have
other consequences than those which, in the eyes of the scientist, had been intended, into a
proof of 'the irrationality of the world': into an ironical 'law of unintended consequences'. He
formulates this 'law' as follows:
'the final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even
paradoxical relation to its original meaning
'
80
.
The most famous example of an unintended consequence is the capitalist work ethos, which
according to Weber was created by Calvinism, although Calvin himself intended to proclaim
a religious belief.
81
Weber cannot say that Calvin's religious activities have 'adequately
76
MSS p. 43, GAzW p. 536.
77
MSS 78/9, GAzW p. 177/8.
78
See Ch. 2,6.
79
See above no 3, n. 34.
80
FMW p. 117, GPS, p. 535. In Einige Kategorien der Verstehenden Soziologie GAzW p. 435 Weber already
presented his 'law of unintended consequences' in a generalized form, in the statement that 'conditions of life'
sometimes transform irrationally motivated phenomena into rational effects', see Ch. 10,3.
81
See on Weber's view on the connection between economics and religion in particular TPE p. 183, DpE p. 190:
'But it would also further be necessary to investigate how Protestant Asceticism was in turn influenced in its
development and its character by the totality of social conditions, especially economic. The modern man is in
general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character
which they deserve. But it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-
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