Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 2 The Weber's private, sex defined values.
37
as a social scientist: he will take on a responsibility - a concept he will elaborate on later in
Politics as a vocation - to give his views on 'what is to be done'. Naturally he uses his own
science to argue these views; as a political writer he uses his own scientific information on
causes and effects, on what is feasible and what is not. But first he has, in his own view, to
make choices; these choices, 'which cannot be made with the tools of science', concern
fundamental values. The choices he makes also restrict the public he wants to influence to
those who share these values.
10
The values emphasized in both texts are the same, but the contexts are different. PG was
written in the heat of the first world war, PV in the midst of the German revolution; they differ
in mood and tone, and partially in content. In PG Weber wanted to formulate a national
political strategy with the help of which the imperialist successes of Great Britain and the
USA could be emulated; in PV he proclaims an individual political responsibility to confront
the dark future of Germany in a realistic way. In the next four sections I will treat both texts
together, in order to show that Weber's political opinions, his 'value orientations' are indeed
masculinistic in character and therefore 'private' in the sense I defined earlier.
11
3. Nationalism and militarism; politics as independent leadership: fight for power in the state,
which is defined by its monopoly of physical violence
In PG Weber states his nationalist concern with 'the historical tasks of the German nation' in
the clearest way possible;
12
in his discussion of the best strategy to perform these tasks, he
does not explain what they are or why 'one could be grateful to fate for being a German'
13
.
These tasks appear to concern the military survival of the German nation as it is, and may
include the extension of its rule to as many people as possible. According Weber the
German soldiers shed their blood fighting 'against an army in which Africans, Ghurkas and
all kinds of other barbarians from the most forsaken corners of the world stand poised at the
frontiers ready to devastate our country'.
14
Only by emulating the oligarchical political
10
In PV, his lecture for the leftist students, he does not make this restriction.
11
It would of course be possible to include the abundant biographical material available on the Webers' in my
investigation, like Mitzman did in 'The Iron Cage' (1969). But as I want to analyze universalist sociology and not
one masculine sociologist (see for an example of the latter approach Bologh (1990), who, after quoting a few of
the relevant Weber texts, proceeds to analyze the personality of the great man, criticizing him for making the
wrong choice between Love - for his father, of all people - and Greatness), I will generally refrain from doing this.
The extensive discussion of Weber's political values started by Wolfgang Mommsen (1959) is focused on
Weber's propagation of those nationalist and elitist ideas that could have furthered the growth of national-
socialism; see for a summary of Mommsen's argument and the reactions of the 'Weber-orthodox' his Zum Begriff
der 'Plebiszitären Führerdemokratie', in Mommsen (1974) and notes 33 and 46 below. As, in the words of Alice
Schwarzer, nazism is both 'masculinity-madness' and 'femininity-madness', the democratic critique of Weber's
political values and ideas shares many elements with the feminist one; the difference between the latter and the
former one is that the former one does not criticize the real existing democracy with regard to its sexist and racist
foundations.
12
'The arguments presented here cannot influence those for whom the historical tasks of the German nation do
not rank above all issues of constitutional form, or who view these tasks in a radically different manner,' PG p.
1381, GPS p. 294.
13
ES p. 1383, GPS p. 297.
14
Weber would have preferred the repeating of this racist statement to 'the endless repeating of 'war-goals', ES
p. 1382, GPS p. 295.
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