Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 4 Relations between men: from routinization of charisma to patriarchal
domination over men.
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routine and continuous economic activity ('Erwerbsarbeit').
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We shall find remarks on the
dishonoring effects of routine labor at several points in his description of the development of
European social formations; yet he reports the development, especially in the cities of
Western Europe, of status groups based on commercial activities. Weber in his treatment of
status groups does not discuss this contradiction; he only leaves open the possibility that it
may occur.
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The result of the opposition of honor and routine economic activities seems to be a relatively
simple dichotomy in which the not-men, the honorless, the women and 'women', work to
support the 'leisure classes', as Thorstein Veblen in his famous book of 1899 called the
status groups.
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8. Positive and negative status honor; masculine and feminine values
'Class' and 'status' are for Weber complementary factors: social relations at any given
moment are determined by either the one or the other. As the term 'status' indicates, status
groups dominate social relations in stable economic circumstances; in times of economic
upheaval, the class situation prevails.
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Classes, however, can be defined negatively as well as positively - by property and by the
lack of it. To be able to construct a symmetry between the status order and the class
structure, therefore, Weber conceptualized negatively privileged status groups beside the
positively privileged ones (like the warrior status groups and their plutocratized successors).
The problem with the symmetry between positive and negative status groups, however, is
that it can only be partial. Classes according to Weber are 'interest situations', while status
groups are groups, in which members share some positive evaluation of themselves. This
74
Compare ES p. 936, WG p. 537: 'Artistic and literary activity is also considered degrading work as soon as it is
exploited for income, or at least when it is connected with hard physical exertion. An example is the sculptor
working like a mason in his dusty smock as over against the painter in his salon-like studio and those forms of
musical practice that are acceptable to the status group.'
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'The frequent disqualification of the gainfully employed as such is a direct result of the principle of status
stratification, and of course, of this principle's opposition to a distribution of power which is regulated exclusively
through the market'. '...in most instances the notion of honor peculiar to status absolutely abhors that which is
essential to the market: hard bargaining. Honor abhors hard bargaining among peers and occasionally it taboos it
for the members of a status group in general. Therefore, everywhere some status groups, and usually the most
influential, consider almost any kind of overt participation in economic acquisition as absolutely stigmatizing', ES
p. 936 ff., WG p. 537 ff.
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Veblen (1899, 1992). Weber nowhere refers to this book, which bases the opposition of masculine and thus
honorable activities - hunt, war, sports, religion, politics - and feminine, thus dishonorable activities - on a
supposedly original differentiation between two kinds of magic, namely the magic of influencing objects etc.
imagined as animate and those imagined as inanimate. Veblen's theory later brought much joy to Dutch radical
feminists, since it explained why 19th century bourgeois women were not allowed to do any paid work: they had
to be the embodiment of the honorable 'leisure' of their husbands.
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'Every technological repercussion and economic transformation threatens stratification by status and pushes
the class situation into the foreground.''And every slowing down of the change in economic stratification leads, in
due course, to the growth of status structures and makes for a resuscitation of the important role of social honor',
ES p. 938, WG p. 539.
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