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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caused' the development of the work ethos, since it cannot be said that he has foreseen
such an economic development or that, according to rules of experience, he could have
foreseen it. Therefore Weber presents the economic consequences of a religious action as a
'paradox'
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; having first separated 'religion' and 'economy', each with their own laws
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, he
can conceptualize the connection between action in one area and result in the other only as
a kind of 'interaction' for which no rational 'cause' can be found.
In ES Weber evolved the use of the concept of the 'paradox' much further than he did in the
Protestant Ethic. There he formulates important insights into causal relations not by
searching for a direct, 'adequate' causation, but by constructing paradoxical connections
based on his 'law of unintended consequences'.
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sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not
serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of
historical truth.' See also ES p. 341, WG p. 201: 'for the forms of social action follow "laws of their own"..".
82
He explicitly formulated this in ES p. 586, WG p. 353/4.
83
See for a later definition of 'economic motives' MSS p. 65, GAzW p. 163.
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Weiß (1985), p. 104, compares Weber's 'law of unintended consequences' to Engels' famous passage on how
actions of individuals 'acting with deliberation or passion' may converge into situations which are analogous to
unconscious nature, because the goals of actions might be intended, but the consequences are not (MEW 21, p.
296/7). The comparison Weiß makes neglects Engels' point that the historical materialist activist-theorist can, by
trying to change class relations, understand the process as a rational one, or at least understand it in the
categories of Hegelian dialectics. Though Weber's formulations on the inversion of concepts - especially of the
several meanings of 'charisma' - have a dialectical flavor, he denies the rationality of the process represented by
the inversions. I would want to argue that the mystical character of marxist dialectics is caused by its
universalism; before Engels wrote his 'Origins' neither he nor Marx considered women and children as historical
actors. Feminism changes the perception of what 'history' is, by including women as its subjects - thence the term
'herstory'. In marxist theory 'patriarchy' ended with the abolition of slavery, property of persons under capitalist
relations being hidden in the quasi-natural, a-historical concept 'reproduction'. 'Scientific socialism' is universalist,
since it proclaims a community of revolutionary interests between 'proletarian' women and men, denying the fact
that the 'proletarian' man is actually a property owner: that is, he has a right to the fruits of the labor of his wife
and children. Marx and Engels used the 'generic he' to indicate both capitalists and workers, though in Die Lage
der arbeitenden Klasse in England Engels conceded that actually there were more female laborers than male
ones - one of the most important problems of male workers being that capitalists preferred women and children;
until the edition of 1887 he even used the term 'castration' to picture the awful fate of the husband who had to
mend the stockings of this breadwinner; see MEW 2, p. 370/1. See also Das Kapital I, p. 674: '..., schleudern sein
Frau und Kind unter das Juggernaut-Rad des Kapitals' and p. 665, 666. Marx diagnosed 'the end of the family'
(Das Kapital I p. 513), but in the socialist movement it was only discussed in a superficial way: since Marx
bundled the physical and psychic labor of women together in the concept 'reproduction', socialists claimed that
child care centers, restaurants and laundries would make household work superfluous. Furthermore, since
'reproduction' was located in the private sphere, the possibility that under particular historical circumstances men
as such constitute a ruling class was not analyzed at all.
In this universalist way chains of historical causes and effects then cannot be understood in a rational way: the
actions of women have disappeared from the consciousness of the historical materialist; only herstorical
materialism could find the vanished chains. The ironic character of Weber's paradoxes and even, according to
Brecht, of Hegel's dialectical idealism - Brecht made one of his personages deplore Hegel's choice for the
Prussian civil service, since 'he had the stuff in him to be one of the greatest humorists among philosophers'
(Brecht, Flüchtlingsgespräche, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 1961, p. 108, cited by Martin Nicolaus in his Foreword of the
Pelican edition of Marx' Grundrisse, 1977, p. 26) - perhaps could be explained in a Freudian way by the comical
effects of the repression of the existence of women from consciousness.
Interestingly enough Erickson (1993), p. 92, characterizes Weber's use of the phrase 'lack of a clear borderline'
(e.g., in the case of the 'individual' versus the 'social', ES p. 24, WG p. 12) as 'humoristic' and compares it to
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