Weber’s account of rational bureaucracy contains no mechanism excluding Nazi excesses.
Evidence
Rubenstein wished to find out whether the things we know about, but of which Weber was naturally unaware, could have been anticipated (by Weber himself and his readers), at least as a possibility, from what Weber knew, perceived or theorized about. He thought he had found a positive answer to this question, or at least so he suggested: that in Weber’s exposition of modern bureaucracy, rational spirit, principle of efficiency, scientific mentality, relegation of values to the realm of subjectivity etc. no mechanism was recorded that was capable of excluding the possibility of Nazi excesses; that, moreover, there was nothing in Weber’s ideal types that would necessitate the description of the activities of the Nazi state as excesses. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 65
Categorization
- XREF: Directly feeds the reading goal’s bureaucratic-rationality component: Weber’s instrumental rationality as the mechanism enabling mass exclusion.
- DEFINE: Establishes the definitional link between Weber’s value-free instrumental science and the moral neutrality of bureaucratic action.
- QUESTION: How does Foucault’s governmentality reading of Weberian rationality extend or complicate this in the later Islamophobia readings?