Bureaucratic rule valued cultivated sensibility over specialized expertise

Evidence

As Weber so well understood, the “structures of domination” that bureaucracies have embraced, called for, and valued “cultivated men” with “cultural quality” more than specialized expertise. These “qualities of life conduct” that included feelings of sympathy and compassion are more often associated with eighteenth-century “masculine sensibility.” But those “moral sentiments” that so concerned Adam Smith—what Julie Ellison calls the “core curriculum of liberal emotion” that embraced “emoting across the empire”—extended well into the political life of the nineteenth century. Thomas Haskell makes a strong case for just that. He compellingly argues that the market gave rise to “new habits of causal attribution that set the stage for humanitarianism” by making trust and breach of promise central to the character of capitalist social relations. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 403

Categorization

• XREF: Weber’s structures of domination and Smith’s moral sentiments link to the reader’s prior work on class/identity signaling and cultural capital
• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘core curriculum of liberal emotion’ and ‘emoting across the empire’ as frameworks for colonial empathy studies