Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 2 The Weber's private, sex defined values.
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Chapter 2. The Webers' private, sex-defined values
1. Weber's separation of science and politics versus Weber-Schnitger's value-bound
science - 34
2. Introduction to Weber's political texts Parliament and Government and Politics as a
Vocation - 36
3. Nationalism and militarism; politics as independent leadership: as a fight for power in
the state, which is defined by its monopoly of physical violence - 37
4. Leadership and entrepreneurship; Beamtenherrschaft as anti-political force - 39
5. Parliamentary democracy; the superiority of the leadership in England and
America - 40
6. Masculinism and the manly virtues - 42
7. The discussion on the 'matriarchy' - 44
8. Weber-Schnitger's Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung - 47
1. Weber's separation of science and politics versus Weber-Schnitger's value-bound science
To explain the paradoxes of Weber's sociological analysis of the history of bureaucracy, I will
first analyze his masculinist value orientations further. Many of these already have been
deduced from his method and from his central concepts. Weber, however, calls some of his
own private, personal values and opinions 'political'; therefore he deals with them in non-
scientific, 'political' texts. I will show that Weber's 'political' views represent his deepest
personal views, his 'gods and demons', and that these views are sex-defined and therefore
'private'. Weber's 'political' values are by definition masculine values: for a 'real man' life
means fighting. Others may choose to be led by other gods or demons: the amount of
possible values one may believe in is endless and inaccessible to rational discussion; the
number of choices open to a real man, however, is restricted. The scientific analysis of
relations between women and men is not one of these choices; in Weber's opinion it
belonged to the realm of his wife, Marianne Weber-Schnitger. Because of their sex-defined
division of activities and also because of the personal, value-bound way in which Weber-
Schnitger performed her scientific work, I will discuss 'Ehefrau und Mutter in der
Rechtsentwicklung' as well.
In Ch. 1 I discussed the separation of facts and values - of 'objective' science and
'subjective', value-bound politics - which is the basis of Weber's sociology. As a
consequence of this separation Weber only allowed himself to proclaim his 'values' in texts
he termed 'political'.
In his 'political' texts, written mostly in or after the first world war in the form of newspaper
articles or speeches, Weber felt free to judge, to give advice, to admonish, to preach and to
prophesy on the situation of Germany at large, on its government, its politics and its
educational system. These texts, though they are concerned with German politics, are thus
'private' in the sense defined above.
It is not possible to interpret these texts in such a way that the 'politicians' or 'officials'
mentioned in them would also include women, who in that case would also have been
admonished by Weber to be 'manly'. Even when he proposes an extension of suffrage, he
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