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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Weber constructs his paradoxical connections in two ways. Sometimes he conceptualizes a
developments by changing the meaning of a concept in a paradoxical way, claiming that the
concept 'is transformed' or even 'is inverted'; the transformation or inversion of the concept
then represents a change in social relations. At other times he constructs a 'fluent transition'
between ideal types constructed as opposites, thus suddenly postulating their identity; the
development is represented by the 'fluent transition'.
Through his use of his concept of 'the paradox' Weber is able to conceptualize the
development of non-rational domination relations, insofar as he considers them to develop at
all. Change is for instance conceptualized by paradoxical transformations of charisma
working on the unchangeable phenomenon of traditional domination; paradoxical
transformations of charisma in their turn make way for the unchangeable process of formal
rationalization.
I will now examine Weber's methodological problems in connecting the two ideal-types of
irrational domination and their developments with those of 'formal rationality' and 'formal
rationalization'. First I will discuss Weber's only bridge between ratio and values, 'material
rationality', which serves him to demonstrate the paradoxical character of 'formal rationality'.
7. The contrast between formal and material rationality
To compare rational and irrational types of social formations had never been an aim in itself
for Weber: it served only to answer his questions on the characteristics and origins of
Western society. His questions, in their turn, are based on personal - private, sex-defined -
interests or 'value-orientations' which will become clearer when I deal with his political views.
In order to be able to translate Weber's universalist terms in his sex-defined ones and thus
to answer his questions from a perspective which includes the question of what the origins of
Western domination of men over women are, his comparative method has to be taken
seriously; his ideal-type of 'modern bureaucracy' has to be interpreted merely as an
instrument of comparison, as a means to detect those characteristics of modern domination
which are not formal-rational. Yet it is often interpreted in a different way. In the reception of
Weber's works, especially in those scientific communities which were dependent on English
translations
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, his treatment of modern social relations has been divorced from his treatment
of their history which he described by conceptualizing irrational actions orientations and
types of irrational legitimate domination. Therefore the tenuous connections with the
relations of 'private life' which are present in Weber's historical comparisons were severed
and the sex-defined relations of private life further obscured.
American sociologists neglected Weber's scientific analysis of contradictory, irrational
elements of bureaucracy, an analysis which he also presented in his texts on bureaucracy,
but which acquire a clearer meaning when interpreted in connection with his
'Marx's self-acknowledged cover to Engels - whenever I get in trouble, I call it a dialectic'. The translators of ES
point out that 'the work is full of irony, sarcasm and the love of paradox', which according to them is hard to
render in translation (p. XXXIV and n. 1); nevertheless they declare they have deleted many of the quotation
marks which according to them Weber uses 'as an alienating device to indicate that he employs familiar terms
with reservations, with a new meaning, or in an ironic sense' (p. CVII).
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Roth, Introduction to ES p. XXXIII/IV, speaks of the 'fragmented and erratic fashion' in which Weber's works
became available to the English reader' and of 'the uneven influence exerted by the various parts'.
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