Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 2 The Weber's private, sex defined values.
36
investigates the connections between 'economy' and 'society' in universalist terms that
almost wholly excluded women; he nowhere refers to his wife's work.
Moreover there is an important difference in their respective scientific methods. Rejecting
Weber's objective, value-free science, Weber-Schnitger chooses a subjectivist standpoint.
She works from her own experiences as a woman, freely proclaiming her own values in her
scientific work; in 1904 she writes that she considers scientific 'objectivity', in the sense of
renouncing all value ideas, a 'phantom', which can only lead to viewing history through
masculine spectacles.
7
As no further methodological discussions between the Webers have
been reported - in her biography of her husband Weber-Schnitger just summarizes his
views, without commenting on them - it is as if the Webers extended the double moral on
feminine and masculine behavior also to social science. Weber-Schnitger's work was
directed primarily to women and therefore could be considered to have no universalist
pretensions; this could be the reason that Weber neither saw reasons to submit a
subjectivist woman scientist to the criticism he directed to subjectivist men, nor objected to
take a hand in such a subjective women's book.
In order to understand Weber's values and interests and his vain striving for 'objectivity', I will
now discuss those parts of Weber's 'political' texts which are relevant to the questions
treated in ES and to those methodological writings I dealt with before. I will complement this
analysis with a discussion of the standpoints Weber-Schnitger formulated in Ehefrau und
Mutter.
2. Introduction to Weber's political texts Parliament and Government and Politics as a
Vocation
'Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland, Zur politischen Kritik des
Beamtentums und Parteiwesens' ('Parliament and Government in a reconstructed Germany,
A Contribution to the Political Critique of Officialdom and Party Politics)'
8
is a enlarged
revision of some articles published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in the summer of 1917; 'Politik
als Beruf' ('Politics as a Vocation') is a written version of a lecture which was given in the
winter of 1918-'19 to students supposed to be supporters of the socialist revolution in
Germany.
9
In his introduction to 'Parliament and Government' Weber emphasizes its non-scientific
character. He will assume a role which is totally different from the role he usually occupies
7
Weber-Schnitger (1919) p. 5.
8
The translation by Roth and Wittich is published as Appendix II to ES, p. 1381 ff.
9
GPS p. 493 ff., FMW p. 77 ff. Parts of both texts are published in Winckelmann's edition of WuG. In order to
compose a chapter on the sociology of the state - which had been planned by Weber - from these texts,
Winckelmann had to transform them in scientific texts and thus to amputate all value judgments. It is obvious,
however, that Weber wrote these texts exactly to promote these values; therefore Winckelmann's transformation
is difficult to defend, the more because, although Winckelmann suggests the opposite, Weber does not give
much new information on his sociology of the state. As Weber says in his introduction to Parliament and
Government: 'The essay does not provide any new information for constitutional experts, and it does not claim
the protective authority of any science.' ES p. 1381, GPS p. 294. See for a criticism of Winckelmann's project
Beetham (1974), p. 25/6: 'Weber's political writings do not meet these [scientific] criteria, even if all the value
judgments could somehow be spirited away'.
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