In
the positions that Weber took in public, dissatisfaction with the welfare state
is combined with a horror of bureaucracy. This too is not the matter of course
that many of admirers of Weber the great liberal think it to be.
In Weber’s writings there is very little of the
solemn liberal emotionalism with regard to freedom; his later thought, in
particular, revolved far more around political rule or domination. He had no
reason to come away from childhood feeling particularly angry with officialdom,
and in fact the nineteenth century had shown that Prussian-German officials had
a considerable potential for liberal and social reforms. The Prussian reform
era was legendary for its tales of heroism in the upper reaches of state. ‘The
will to renewal’, according to Heinrich Heffter, was alive ‘only in the
educated elite, essentially in liberal officialdom, which virtually alone
embodied political progress and . . . political resolve.’ This innovative spirit
was especially impressive in the university reforms of the of the early
nineteenth century. In Weber’s own day, Otto Hintze gave a still classical
appreciation of the achievements of the Prussian civil service. And today, when
world-wide comparisons are made, the merits of a correct, competent and efficient
administration are recognized more than ever.
In those days many Germans – including Max Weber –took these qualities so much for granted that they were scarcely able to evaluate them. It is true that Weber was prepared to recognize the special efficiency and rationality of German officials, but he did not think such merits were very important for the strength of the nation. Instead, he took over the concept of bureaucracy, which had started life in opposition to late absolutism, more as a rallying cry than a ‘value-free’ designation: it conjured up images of bloodless pen-pushers, the raw material for many a cartoonist.
In Weber’s day it was not only the liberal opposition that railed against bureaucrats; there had long been a conservative anti-bureaucratism as well. Even Treitschke, the herald of the Prussian-German state, denounced the ‘refined stupidity of our mandarinate’, whose ‘examination torture’ seemed designed to ‘suppress any healthy energy in the ‘state youth’. In 1850 none other than 35-year-old Bismarck, who soon afterwards abandoned a civil service career out of frustration, directed one of his first rhetorical fireworks against the Prussian bureaucracy, then still permeated by the liberal spirit of reform. Comparing it to a boa constrictor, he wrote: ‘A state that cannot shake off a bureaucracy like ours by means of a salutary thunderstorm is and will remain doomed. The bureaucracy is cancerous in its skin; only its stomach is healthy, and the laws that it excretes are the simplest muck anywhere in the world.’ Today, when we are used to bureaucratism of quite different dimensions, we are struck by the lack of bureaucracy at the apex of the Bismarckian state. The civil service remained essentially an affair of individual states, the central bureaucracy never employing more than a couple of thousand people before 1914. Bismarck worked with a tiny apparatus which, by today’s standards, seems inconceivable for the head of government of a major power; he fought against any tendency for it to become autonomous, and studiously ensured that the reins were firmly in his hands.
In those days many Germans – including Max Weber –took these qualities so much for granted that they were scarcely able to evaluate them. It is true that Weber was prepared to recognize the special efficiency and rationality of German officials, but he did not think such merits were very important for the strength of the nation. Instead, he took over the concept of bureaucracy, which had started life in opposition to late absolutism, more as a rallying cry than a ‘value-free’ designation: it conjured up images of bloodless pen-pushers, the raw material for many a cartoonist.
In Weber’s day it was not only the liberal opposition that railed against bureaucrats; there had long been a conservative anti-bureaucratism as well. Even Treitschke, the herald of the Prussian-German state, denounced the ‘refined stupidity of our mandarinate’, whose ‘examination torture’ seemed designed to ‘suppress any healthy energy in the ‘state youth’. In 1850 none other than 35-year-old Bismarck, who soon afterwards abandoned a civil service career out of frustration, directed one of his first rhetorical fireworks against the Prussian bureaucracy, then still permeated by the liberal spirit of reform. Comparing it to a boa constrictor, he wrote: ‘A state that cannot shake off a bureaucracy like ours by means of a salutary thunderstorm is and will remain doomed. The bureaucracy is cancerous in its skin; only its stomach is healthy, and the laws that it excretes are the simplest muck anywhere in the world.’ Today, when we are used to bureaucratism of quite different dimensions, we are struck by the lack of bureaucracy at the apex of the Bismarckian state. The civil service remained essentially an affair of individual states, the central bureaucracy never employing more than a couple of thousand people before 1914. Bismarck worked with a tiny apparatus which, by today’s standards, seems inconceivable for the head of government of a major power; he fought against any tendency for it to become autonomous, and studiously ensured that the reins were firmly in his hands.
Neither empirically nor theoretically, then, did
Weber have any reason to feel the horror of bureaucracy, nor does it appear
that his aversion to it was rooted in his own experience. It is not clear if or
when Weber suffered personally from bureaucratic harassment. As we shall see,
he was repeatedly incensed at the way in which Friedrich Althoff, the Prussian official in charge of university
matters, treated scholars. But this highly unconventional, not at all
bureaucratic, man was anything but a pedantic enforcer of the rules; he got his
way more through charisma than through office regulations. And the state enforcement of labor
regulations that Weber had observed in Baden, in the impressive person of Friedrich
Woerishoffer, was by contemporary standards and even present-day standards a
commendable institution, which took many initiatives and was far from seriously
hindering the development of industry.
So, once again, how did the civil service become Max Weber’s scapegoat ‘bureaucracy’? Jurgen Kocka suggests that his main target of attack was civil servants who rose to positions in government and brought with them a ‘bureaucratic incapacity for power politics. HE became a critic of domestic policy for reasons that had mainly to do with foreign policy. This would fit the fact that Weber’s main assault on bureaucracy dates from the period after te first Morocco crisis (1905-6), when the central government – in the view of impatient imperialists and their mouthpiece, Harden’s Zukunft – had lost a unique opportunity (with Russia’s defeat by Japan and ensuing revolution) to achieve a decisive victory over France through the cold-blooded use of war threats. Although the term ‘bureaucracy’ emphasized the element of rule in the civil service apparatus, Weber’s main criticism was that it did not know how to rule effectively, did not really understand the game of power. However, Weber attacked not only the pedantic professionalism of the bureaucracy but also the highly unprofessional ‘dilettantism of the Kaiser, who repeatedly alarmed the world with his verbal saber-rattling.
Another answer to the question of the origins of Weber’s anti-bureaucratic passion is quite simple: Alfred Weber. Alfred h had preceded his elder brother in polemicizing against the bureaucracy; he outlined a terrible vision of it in Prague to none other than the young Franz Kafka, whose friend, Max Brod, was a student of his. Unlike Max, Alfred Weber had suffered a lot from school in his youth, and this must have laid the emotional basis for his hatred of bureaucracy .His vitalist world-view then helped this affect to develop intellectually: the bureaucracy became a cold, soulless apparatus, whose mechanical application of the law threatened to stifle life brimming with laws of its own. This chimed with Max Weber’s painful experience of the ‘iron cage’ which seems to appear out of the blue at the end of The Protestant Ethic.
In 1909, at the Vienna congress of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, Alfred Weber gave a widely notice speech attacking the Historical School of political economy, in which the state and its officials were treated as bearers of the common good. He recognized that the bureaucracy had the virtue of technical efficiency, but its transmission to the whole polity was making ‘our entire society petty-bourgeois and philistine’ and – in an allusion to the recent cartoon by Olaf Gulbrannson in the weekly Simpicissimus – bringing into being a ‘new human type’: ‘German, loyal and entitled to a pension’. ‘There is a terrible danger that these little daddy and mummy existences will trickle down and poison or spoil the only great and viable element for the future, from which we might accede to new and great cultural possibilities.’
Alfred Weber’s outburst has something of the late adolescent about it: he seems to be belatedly giving vent to a grudge that built up in his youth. A Prussian ministry official relied drily and to the point that the state offered greater freedom than a private entrepreneur, since the latter would have shown Weber to the door after such an attack. Max Weber, however, found his brother’s polemical wit infectious and took the same line himself. He ever tried to out-trump Alfred:
My brother is assuredly . . . as convinced as I am that the advance of bureaucratic mechanization is irresistible. Indeed, there is nothing in the world, no machinery in the world, which works with such precision as these human machines do – nor so cheaply either! . . . The technical superiority of the human-operated machinery over handicraft . . .We are happy to acknowledge that there are honorable and talented people at the top of our civil service . . .And even though the idea that some day the world would be filled with nothing but those little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling to a small position and strive for a better one . . . This passion for bureaucratization . . . is enough to make a man despair! It is as though in politics a char-woman, with whose mental horizon a German can get along best anyway, were permitted to run things all by herself, as if we intentionally were to become people who need order and nothing but order, who get nervous and cowardly when this order becomes shaky for a moment, who become helpless when they are torn out of their exclusive adjustment to this order.
Today’s reader, looking back at the experience of totalitarian bureaucracies, is at first amazed by the effectiveness – and even cheapness- that Weber here attributes to bureaucracy. There is no mention of inertia , the squandering of taxpayers’ money or the failure to make cost-benefit calculations; Weber’s civil servants are truly well-oiled cogs in the great machinery of state. In this he fully shared Schmoller’s point of view. And it is true that, in the German Reich at the time, there was a comparatively well-functioning ‘apparatus’ of officials.
While Alfred Weber openly proclaimed a vitalist world-view, his brother’s attacks on bureaucracy also contained subterranean elements of vitalist thinking. In so far as bureaucracy creates a separation between office and people, turns individuals into interchangeable bearers of a function, fixes them to a special area of competence and subjects their activity to firm rules, the resulting self-estrangement is similar to what Marx ascribes to capital. In Economy and Society, Weber says of bureaucracy: ‘It develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is appraised as its special virtue by capitalism’. This ‘dehumanization takes its toll in a lack of vitality, so that, if bureaucracy gets mixed up with big industry, things happen s they did with King Gunter in the Nibelungen epic, who was chained by Brunnhilde to the marriage bed-a story that Weber found piquant enough to repeat more than once.
Precisely in the revolutionary period after 1918, however, when the unbroken continuity of the imperial bureaucracy became a real political danger, Max Weber did an about face. Now the main peril for him was the administrative dilettantism of the political newcomers, which was further weakening Germany vis-à-vis the victorious powers and destroying the reputation of German industry. Even earlier he had talked of the ‘sterile complaints about the Blessed Saint Bureaucracy. Yet his critique of bureaucracy had an impact as great as that of any of his other work, not the least in the United States. Weber later became famous for having anticipated ‘Parkinson’s Law’ of the irresistible growth of bureaucracy, at a time when bureaucratism by today’s standards seemed quite harmless, and for having foreseen that socialism would bitterly disappoint its dream of freedom by stumbling into the bureaucratic trap as soon as it came to power.
So, once again, how did the civil service become Max Weber’s scapegoat ‘bureaucracy’? Jurgen Kocka suggests that his main target of attack was civil servants who rose to positions in government and brought with them a ‘bureaucratic incapacity for power politics. HE became a critic of domestic policy for reasons that had mainly to do with foreign policy. This would fit the fact that Weber’s main assault on bureaucracy dates from the period after te first Morocco crisis (1905-6), when the central government – in the view of impatient imperialists and their mouthpiece, Harden’s Zukunft – had lost a unique opportunity (with Russia’s defeat by Japan and ensuing revolution) to achieve a decisive victory over France through the cold-blooded use of war threats. Although the term ‘bureaucracy’ emphasized the element of rule in the civil service apparatus, Weber’s main criticism was that it did not know how to rule effectively, did not really understand the game of power. However, Weber attacked not only the pedantic professionalism of the bureaucracy but also the highly unprofessional ‘dilettantism of the Kaiser, who repeatedly alarmed the world with his verbal saber-rattling.
Another answer to the question of the origins of Weber’s anti-bureaucratic passion is quite simple: Alfred Weber. Alfred h had preceded his elder brother in polemicizing against the bureaucracy; he outlined a terrible vision of it in Prague to none other than the young Franz Kafka, whose friend, Max Brod, was a student of his. Unlike Max, Alfred Weber had suffered a lot from school in his youth, and this must have laid the emotional basis for his hatred of bureaucracy .His vitalist world-view then helped this affect to develop intellectually: the bureaucracy became a cold, soulless apparatus, whose mechanical application of the law threatened to stifle life brimming with laws of its own. This chimed with Max Weber’s painful experience of the ‘iron cage’ which seems to appear out of the blue at the end of The Protestant Ethic.
In 1909, at the Vienna congress of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, Alfred Weber gave a widely notice speech attacking the Historical School of political economy, in which the state and its officials were treated as bearers of the common good. He recognized that the bureaucracy had the virtue of technical efficiency, but its transmission to the whole polity was making ‘our entire society petty-bourgeois and philistine’ and – in an allusion to the recent cartoon by Olaf Gulbrannson in the weekly Simpicissimus – bringing into being a ‘new human type’: ‘German, loyal and entitled to a pension’. ‘There is a terrible danger that these little daddy and mummy existences will trickle down and poison or spoil the only great and viable element for the future, from which we might accede to new and great cultural possibilities.’
Alfred Weber’s outburst has something of the late adolescent about it: he seems to be belatedly giving vent to a grudge that built up in his youth. A Prussian ministry official relied drily and to the point that the state offered greater freedom than a private entrepreneur, since the latter would have shown Weber to the door after such an attack. Max Weber, however, found his brother’s polemical wit infectious and took the same line himself. He ever tried to out-trump Alfred:
My brother is assuredly . . . as convinced as I am that the advance of bureaucratic mechanization is irresistible. Indeed, there is nothing in the world, no machinery in the world, which works with such precision as these human machines do – nor so cheaply either! . . . The technical superiority of the human-operated machinery over handicraft . . .We are happy to acknowledge that there are honorable and talented people at the top of our civil service . . .And even though the idea that some day the world would be filled with nothing but those little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling to a small position and strive for a better one . . . This passion for bureaucratization . . . is enough to make a man despair! It is as though in politics a char-woman, with whose mental horizon a German can get along best anyway, were permitted to run things all by herself, as if we intentionally were to become people who need order and nothing but order, who get nervous and cowardly when this order becomes shaky for a moment, who become helpless when they are torn out of their exclusive adjustment to this order.
Today’s reader, looking back at the experience of totalitarian bureaucracies, is at first amazed by the effectiveness – and even cheapness- that Weber here attributes to bureaucracy. There is no mention of inertia , the squandering of taxpayers’ money or the failure to make cost-benefit calculations; Weber’s civil servants are truly well-oiled cogs in the great machinery of state. In this he fully shared Schmoller’s point of view. And it is true that, in the German Reich at the time, there was a comparatively well-functioning ‘apparatus’ of officials.
While Alfred Weber openly proclaimed a vitalist world-view, his brother’s attacks on bureaucracy also contained subterranean elements of vitalist thinking. In so far as bureaucracy creates a separation between office and people, turns individuals into interchangeable bearers of a function, fixes them to a special area of competence and subjects their activity to firm rules, the resulting self-estrangement is similar to what Marx ascribes to capital. In Economy and Society, Weber says of bureaucracy: ‘It develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is appraised as its special virtue by capitalism’. This ‘dehumanization takes its toll in a lack of vitality, so that, if bureaucracy gets mixed up with big industry, things happen s they did with King Gunter in the Nibelungen epic, who was chained by Brunnhilde to the marriage bed-a story that Weber found piquant enough to repeat more than once.
Precisely in the revolutionary period after 1918, however, when the unbroken continuity of the imperial bureaucracy became a real political danger, Max Weber did an about face. Now the main peril for him was the administrative dilettantism of the political newcomers, which was further weakening Germany vis-à-vis the victorious powers and destroying the reputation of German industry. Even earlier he had talked of the ‘sterile complaints about the Blessed Saint Bureaucracy. Yet his critique of bureaucracy had an impact as great as that of any of his other work, not the least in the United States. Weber later became famous for having anticipated ‘Parkinson’s Law’ of the irresistible growth of bureaucracy, at a time when bureaucratism by today’s standards seemed quite harmless, and for having foreseen that socialism would bitterly disappoint its dream of freedom by stumbling into the bureaucratic trap as soon as it came to power.
First one must grasp what Weber meant by ‘rationalization’. On the CD-ROM edition of Weber’s works, the term Rationalisierung appears no fewer than 455 times: most frequently (forty-six times) – one will be amazed – in his study of music. Here he developed, earlier and more consistently than elsewhere, the concept that he further deployed in the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: rationalism combined with technology as the kernel of the West’s special path in world history. In Weber ‘rationalization’ means a methodical striving for rule-bound order, it has little to do with ‘rationality’ in the sense of reason; rather, it is ‘highly ambiguous’. Only this made it possible for Weber to arrive at the concept of rationalization through music of all things; it was here, in this unexpected context, rather than much earlier in his study of the stock exchange, for example, that he discovered the ubiquitousness of rationalization. Unlike Kant, Weber did not think that natural reason was inborn in man: he mocked it in a letter to Mina Tobler, as the ‘utterly naïve and childish belief in the power of the rational’. On the other hand, he held the view that man strives by nature to bring order into his affairs, routine into his conduct; Weber found some form of rationalization everywhere, even in magical rites of supposedly ‘primitive peoples’. There is also something instinctual in rationalization. Weber’s concept is related to the idea of rationalization in psychoanalysis, which Ernst Jones introduced in 1908: that is, a procedure which gives a (visually, logically or morally) acceptable form to inherently irrational conduct.
Does the concept of charisma have any logic that can be derived from Weber’s general ideas on the course of history and the process of socialization? At first sight, it sharply conflicts with Weber’s analysis of the ubiquitous processes of rationalization and bureaucratization. But, for Weber, there is also something in human nature that rebels against disenchantment and routinization, against the straight jacket imposed on the individual. And it is this non-everyday element, passionate, ecstatic and bound by no fearful circumspection, which breaks the force of habit in history and creates something new. Here is the link to Weber’s fundamental insights. He does not understand rationalization and bureaucratization as evolutionary processes advancing with a law-like constancy. The individual always remains the basic reality, never a mere function of structures and this is why the power of individuality is able to break through structural constraints. It has something natural about it, and so too does charismatic leadership. Wolfgang Mommsen speaks of ‘charismatic eruptions’.
Nevertheless, one cannot arrive at charisma purely through a conceptual logic; it has always been a stumbling-block for those who would like to construct a logical system out of Weber’s teachings. Not by chance did this concept appear at a time when Weber suddenly had a personal experience of grace and caught a glimpse of salvation. He learned that there are moments in human existence at which the inertia of the everyday breaks down. And now, more clearly than in the past, his whole thought was carried on by the realization that man lives not only on everyday routine but on moments of ecstasy, of ‘standing outside oneself’.
Again and again Weber underlines that charismatic rule breaks from the everyday, though ‘non-every-dayness’ is a term that hardly meets the requirements of of scientific precision. Weber like to use it at a time in his life when he felt capable of non-everyday intellectual fireworks: his own self-esteem was based on this talent for the non-everyday. By ridding oneself of petty egoism, one gains the opportunity for a special kind of strength; then many things become possible which previously seemed impossible. Marianne too seems to have assumed that Max, in a coded manner, was speaking of himself when he talked of charisma.
This background in Weber’s personal experience does not make it easier to operationalize the charisma concept in research; the inflated use of the term, which can now be monitored on the internet in book titles such s Charisma Training in Thirty Minutes, leaves one in doubt whether authors who lack Weber’s experiential background and meticulous approach are capable of applying it in an intellectually productive manner. At one point Weber himself points to the difficultly of empirically demonstrating charisma by any external indicators: ‘It is not directly visible whether the companionage of a war leader with his followers has a patrimonial or a charismatic character: this depends upon the spirit which imbues the community.’ The social scientist needs to have a feel for this spirit in order to identify charisma such; and such a feel is best developed through a charismatic experience of one’s own.
Charisma can be terraced historically only as a connecting link of a community. But is it rooted in the community, or does it arise through, and depend for its effectiveness on, the radiant power of the charismatic? Whether charisma is essentially the gift of a leadership personality or arises only in the heads of his followers: this remains a controversial issue that provides the material for a ping-pong game of quotations from Weber . . . (page 397)
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