HCJ2: Max Weber and Bureaucracy.

Weber was one of the 4 skeptics - Marx, Nietzsche, Weber and Freud (known for ideas on ideology, power, morality and irrationality respectively).

After Karl Marx, there were no revolutions (although the Paris Commune came close) and militarism and imperialism took hold in many countries, mainly because of antisemitism and general xenophobia. In Germany, Bismarck put a lot of the German speaking nations into one state by enforcing rules and laws upon them. This new state needed bureaucracy because of the efficiency needed to run it, this probably explains why Germany has always had a reputation for doing things efficiently. This new bureaucracy created a middle class and in turn, bourgeoisie values spread downwards.

Weber looked at why we obey authority figures and those in power and he found 4 types of social actions:

1: Instrumental-rational (an action carried out  we want to do)
2: Value-rational (an action carried out because it is good practice)
3: Affectual-emotional (an action carried out for an emotional reason)
4: Traditional (an action carried out because society has always done it)

Weber also looked at the types of authority figures we follow:

1: Traditional (people we have always followed and/or respected e.g. parents)
2: Charismatic (people we follow because of their style e.g. religious cult leaders)
3: Legal-rational (people who are supposedly above us e.g. politicians and judges)

The two main problems of legal-rational authority are militarism and cultural exhaustion. Militarism is all about a state seeking enemies just to justify the state's own bureaucratic nature and to create a sense of national danger just to seem important (take America as an example).  Cultural exhaustion is about over-analysing of religion and because bureaucracy advocates total equal rights, therefore stopping artistic geniuses from developing.


According to Weber, bureaucracy has led humanity to lose the skills we used to have e.g. architecture and music. People in bureaucratic societies are are just a very small cog inside an extremely large wheel. We can't get away from bureaucracy, we live and die in a bureaucratic world, this includes hospitals and schools.

TB 2012