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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9. Resistances to rationalization: the modern family
In his treatment of formal-rational domination Weber explains neither why an increasing
number of people - or men and women - orient an increasing number of their actions to an
increasing number of rules, nor does he say whether there is, in his view, any limit to this
process. In quite another part of ES, however, where he deals with the connections between
economy and law, he treats a social formation which, although he does not say so in so
many words, appears to resist the rationalization process: the family. Modern marriage and
fatherhood are shown as restrictions of the freedom of contract; they are institutions where
one of the elements of legal rationality is missing.
Weber did not describe modern sex-defined relations in the family - the only modern
relations between adult women and men he mentions at all - in the context of domination
and legitimation.
100
.
Nevertheless, when one views public and private life as belonging to the same society, one
also has to take into account the existence of a contradiction between legal-rational
domination at the one hand and patriarchal domination of the family on the other. Weber
discusses the resistance of patriarchal marriage to modernization in his chapter on economy
and law; he conceptualizes it as a restriction of the freedom of sexual contract, one of the
legal restrictions of the modern freedom of contract.
According to Weber freedom of sexual contract developed together with the contract of
patriarchal marriage, by means of which families of high status wanted to protect their
daughters against the exploitation concomitant to the 'de facto lifelong polygamy' in the
primitive patriarchal household.
101
'Status contracts'
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created a special position for the
'legal principal wife'; they could also establish other sexual relationships.
103
In the autonomous cities of classical Antiquity freedom of sexual contract had been restricted
in order to protect 'the monopoly of citizenship', 'the politico-economic privileges of
citizenship being reserved to the sons of male and female citizens.'
104
Prophetic religions
instituted other restrictions;
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concubinage 'was finally proscribed in the Occident by the
Lateran Council and the Reformation.'
Weber seems to view patriarchal power over children as a manifestation of the freedom of
sexual contract; he suggests that several institutions and processes worked together to
restrain it:
'The father's right of disposition over the children was seriously limited first by sacred law, then subjected to
additional limitations, and finally abolished for military, political, and ethical reasons.'
100
There is no repetition in ES of a passage such as the one on 'rationalization as encapsulation' in Einige
Kategorien der Verstehenden Soziologie, where he construct an at least partial connection between 'rational
institutions' and 'the household': 'fast alles Verbandshandeln ist mindestens partiell durch rationale Ordnungen -
die "Hausgemeinschaft" z.B. heteronom durch das von der Staatsgewalt gesatzte "Familienrecht" - irgendwie
geordnet,' GAzW p. 467.
101
ES p. 688/9, WG p. 413/4
102
See below, Ch. 3,4.
103
'Simultaneously, however, the freedom of the sexual contract unfolded in many different forms and degrees',
ES p. 689, WG p. 413.
104
ES p. 690, WG p. 413.
105
See ES p. 602 ff., WG p. 362 ff.: according to Weber they did this because they objected to the orgy, and
'sexual intoxication is a typical component of the orgy, the religious behavior of the laity at a primitive level.'
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