Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 10 Hidden Masculinity: impersonal bureaucracy as a result of the unsolvable conflict between
fraternity and patriarchy
177
or material interests - which to the conscious mind appear as irrational or which do not even
appear in it at all.
12
Theorists like Marx, Freud and Nietzsche treat the acting individual not only as an acting
subject, but also as an object of processes or 'forces' it cannot or will not understand. Weber
does say that individual actions are often better understood by analyzing their effects than by
analyzing the motivations for them, but he does not draw any further conclusions from this
insight: he does not want to discuss the difficult connections between subjectively intended,
'purposive' rationality and the unintended rational effects of irrational actions.
13
In my opinion the concept 'unconscious rationality' transcends the contradiction between
'formal rational' and 'irrational' on which Weber bases his conceptualization of domination; it
also transcends the sharp boundaries between the three ideal types. Weber, though, uses it
only in a negative way, in order to draw the boundary of interpretive sociology.
The methods of Marx, of Nietzsche and of Freud - whose term 'repression' Weber uses in
the passage from ES which I cited above - enable the investigator to conceptualize relations
lacking rational representation in the mind of acting individuals; they share the standpoint
that the motivations of individuals, although they may give the investigator much insight into
the situation these individuals find themselves in, do not give a clear view of the interests
they pursue. Methodical individualism, although it can use such theories as 'heuristic models'
and although it might reconstruct the social relations which cause such repression, cannot
establish a connection between the analysis of subjective motivations and objective interest
situations. Since Weber placed private life at the boundaries of science, he has to take
recourse to irony to represent the opposing and conflicting impulses all actors in modern
society are subjected to.
12
'Very essential parts of interpretive psychological work consist now actually of discovering connections which
are not fully noticed or not noticed at all and which are therefore not subjectively rationally oriented in this sense,
although in fact they run in the direction of a connection which for the greatest part can be "rationally"
understood. Apart from certain parts of the so-called psychoanalysis which have this character, for instance also
a construction like Nietzsches theory of resentment contains an interpretation which deduces an objective
rationality of inner or outward conduct from the practical aspects of an interest situation, which is insufficiently
noticed or not noticed at all, since it is "unadmitted" on intelligible grounds. For the rest exactly in the
(methodically) similar sense, in which the theory of economic materialism, which preceded it for some decennia,
did this as well.' GAzW, p. 434.
13
'In such cases the purposive rationality which - though not noticed - is meant subjectively, can easily fall into a
connection to the objectively real rationality (das objektiv Richtigrationale), which not always can be clarified fully;
this connection does not concern us here further. The point was to indicate the always problematic and limited
character of those aspects of "understanding" which are "only psychological" in a sketchy (and necessarily
inexact) way. On the one hand there is an unnoticed ("unadmitted") - relatively far-reaching - rationality of the
apparently wholly purposively-irrational conduct: it is "intelligible" because of its rationality. On the other hand the
fact that can be documented a hundred times (in particular in cultural history): that in truth seemingly direct
purposive-rationally defined phenomena were brought to life historically by wholly irrational motives and later
survived as "adapted" and even spread themselves universally, since changed conditions of life made accrete a
large degree of technical "reality rationality' to them.'
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