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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means that members of a negatively privileged status group have to turn their negative
privileges into a form of honor.
However, in the fragment where he conceptualizes the 'status group' Weber does not deal
with this process: all the characteristics of status groups he mentions refer to positively
privileged groups. The concept 'negative status group' is thus a contradictio in terminis; it
may be used to characterize ambiguous or contradictory social situations.
Weber's chapter on 'Status groups and Classes' in the conceptual exposition, however, has
remained unfinished; it is therefore possible that he planned to include in it the analysis of
'negative status honor' he presented in his older essays on status groups and on religious
groups. There he describes the 'negative status group' as follows:
'However, with the negatively privileged status groups the sense of dignity takes a specific deviation. A sense of
dignity is the precipitation in individuals of social honor and of conventional demands which a positively privileged
status group raises for the deportment of its members. The sense of dignity that characterizes positively
privileged status groups is naturally related to their "being" which does not transcend itself, that is, it is related to
their "beauty and excellence" (kalokagathia, in Greek letters). Their kingdom is "of this world". They live for the
present and by exploiting their great past. The sense of dignity of the negatively privileged strata naturally refers
to a future lying beyond the present, whether it is of this life or of another
.'
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Weber's concept of 'negative status honor' could have led to an understanding of quite a few
'feminine mystiques'. Weber, however, never defined status groups consisting of women. In
his view a negatively privileged status group is a group of men who base their self-esteem in
some degree upon non-military and thus on non-manly values.
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The concept of 'negative status honor' thus serves to explain that in negatively privileged
status groups values which are regarded by the positively privileged men as 'feminine' and
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ES p. 934, WG p. 536. Weber proceeds to explain that 'this simple state of affairs, and not the resentment
which is so strongly emphasized in Nietzsche's much-admired construction in the 'Genealogy of morals', is the
source of the religiosity cultivated by pariah status groups (...)'. In his chapter on religious groups he had
formulated this as follows: The sense of self-esteem which is characteristic of the non-priestly classes that
claimed the highest social privileges, particular the nobility, 'rests on their awareness that the perfection of their
life pattern is an expression of their underived, ultimate, and qualitatively distinctive b e i n g; indeed, it is in the
very nature of the case that this should be the basis of their feeling of worth. On the other hand, the sense of
honor of disprivileged classes rests on some guaranteed promise for the future which implies the assignment of
some function, mission, or vocation to them. What they cannot claim to b e, they replace by the worth of that
which they will one day b e c o m e, to which they will be called in some future life here or hereafter; or replace,
very often concomitantly with the motivation just discussed, by their sense of what they s i g n i f y and achieve in
the world as seen from the point of view of providence.' (ES p. 490/491, WG p. 298).
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'The religion of the disprivileged strata, in contrast to the aristocratic cults of the martial nobles, is characterized
by a tendency to allot equality to women. There is a great diversity in the scope of the religious participation
permitted to women, but the greater or lesser, active or passive participation (or exclusion) of women from the
religious cults is everywhere a function of the degree of the group's relative pacification or militarization (present
or past)', 'Wherever an ascetic training of warriors involving the rebirth of the hero is or has been dominant,
woman is regarded as lacking a higher heroic soul and is consequently assigned a secondary religious status',
ES p. 488/9, WG #; 'It is by no means true that all religions reaching brotherly love and love for one's enemy
achieved power through the influence of women or through the feminist character of the religion (...). The
influence of women only tended to intensify those aspects of the religion that were emotional or hysterical. (...)
But it is certainly not a matter of indifference that salvation religions tended to glorify the non-military and even
anti-military virtues, which must have been quite close to the interests of disprivileged classes and of women.' ES
p. 489/90, WG p. 297/8.
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