the ups and downs of classes, parties, and rulers implement the general drift of secular rationalization. In thinking of the change of human attitudes and mentalities that this process occasions, Weber liked to quote Friedrich Schiller's phrase, the "disenchantment of the world." The extent and direction of "rationalization" is thus measured negatively in terms of the degree to which magical elements of thought are displaced, or positively by the extent to which ideas gain in systematic coherence and naturalistic consistency (Gerth & Mills, 1946, p. 51).
Coherence and consistency in social structure and behavior patterns point in the direction of conventions of social enforcement, hence, to the nature of the state apparatus. In discussing the legitimacy of the state apparatus, Weber focuses on the practical ability to arrive at an ordered sense of such principles as individual rights and a shared sense of "rightness" or legitimacy of the covenants under which human beings associate with one another. Further, Weber argues that a sense of state legitimacy and authority can only be tested under real-world conditions:
All legitimate law rests upon enactment, and all enactment, in turn, rests upon rational agreement. This agreement is either, first, real, i.e., derived from an actual original contract of free individuals, which also regulates the form in which new law is to be enacted in the future; or, second, ideal, in the sense that only that law is legitimate whose content does not contradict the conception of a reasonable order enacted by free agreement (Weber, 1978, p. 99).
The idea of agreement is formulated as "freedom of contract," or "one of the universal formal principles of natural law construction, either as assumed real historical basis of all rational consociations including the state, or, at least, as the regulative standard of evaluation" (Weber, 1978, p. 99). Weber speaks of the "rational structures of law and of ...