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
34
10. Conclusion: the irrationality of formal rationality
The unintended consequence of the formal-rational choice interpretive sociology makes for
the public sphere as its object of investigation is not only that private life cannot be
conceptualized in a rational way, but also that formal-rational processes and phenomena
lose their subjective content, which is displaced in an 'irrational' private sphere and therefore
becomes inaccessible to interpretive explanation. Weber, however, formulates the limits of
interpretive sociology in another way: according to him an investigation of the subjective
meanings 'the individuals' give to their actions often is often made difficult because the true
meaning of an action is often not accessible to the actor:
'Every interpretation attempts to attain clarity and certainty, but no matter how clear an interpretation as such
appears to be from the point of view of meaning, it cannot on this account claim to be the causally valid
interpretation. On this level it must remain only a peculiarly plausible hypothesis. In the first place the "conscious
motives" may well, even to the actor himself, conceal the various "motives" and "repressions" which constitute
the real driving force of his action. Thus in such cases even subjectively honest self-analysis has only a relative
value. Then it is the task of the sociologist to be aware of this motivational situation and to describe and analyze
it, e v e n t h o u g h it has not, *or mostly: not fully, been brought, as concretely 'meant', into the
c o n s c i o u s n e s s of the actor.'
110
In Ueber Einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie Weber had stated that an important
part of the task of interpretive sociology is to be found around its boundary: it is to discover
motivations - exactly like Marx, Freud and Nietzsche did - which can be understood as
objectively 'rational' serving of the actors' interests, although the actors themselves were
unconscious of their rational intentions.
111
For him such 'unconsciously rationally motivated'
actions, however, have to be differentiated from 'irrationally motivated' actions followed by
unintended rational consequences; therefore he cannot cross the borderline except by
making 'plausible hypotheses'. As I have shown, these hypotheses are often formulated in a
paradoxical form, thus as inversion of the meaning of concepts or as a fluent transition
between opposite ones; in these cases Weber jumps the gap between rationality and
irrationality, between his public thoughts and his private feelings, with the help of irony.
I will show, however, that if one conceptualizes the separation of public and private life, of
'the individual' on the one hand and 'the household' on the other, as a social process in a
particular economic context, many of the unconsciously rational motivations - which in my
view are always sex-defined in character, - can be discovered and explained in a rational
way.
110
ES p. 9/10, WG p. 4.
111
See further Ch. 10,3.
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