Weber's Sociology of Law

No discussion of Weber's theory of the sociology of law would be complete without reference to his social theory in general and his multifaceted treatment of rationality in particular. Indeed, his treatments of society, rationality, and law persistently overlap and converge; Weber's thought is constructed with remarkable consistency. For Weber, the sociology of law is connected to generally shared concepts of the legitimacy of the prevailing social structure, including the legitimacy of state organization. To such concepts he adds another, related idea, that of the charismatic leader, who by various means inspires allegiance and validates authority in the social structure. This is how he explains his premises of legitimacy in theoretical terms:

There are three pure types of legitimate authority. Validity of their claims to legitimacy may be based on:

1. Rational grounds--resting on a belief in the "legality" of patterns of norma

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bjective ideas," including nonrational belief, in the background of social action, and does not necessarily favor bureaucratic standardization as a normative ideal. Thus, says Hilbert, Weberian bureaucracy should not be conceived as an "entity" but rather a consequence of rational processes that have an impact on human society. Hilbert's analysis would seem to imply that Weber's theory can account for social phenomena that amount to an irrational challenge to bureaucratic rationalism. However, Hilbert also refers to the possibility of increased Weberian "insight," which is tacit acknowledgment that Weber himself does not engage in a systematic account of such challenges. Rather, the evidence of Weber's manifest text is overwhelmingly that "the bureaucratic machine" or "bureaucratic apparatus of authority" has a "permanent character" (pp. 228-9). On this view, method and system are all on the side of the bureaucracy. Thus an attempt to harness Weber, proselyte of the rational, in the service of adequate interpretation of irrational processes would seem hazardous. But the community of professional literature appears to live in hope. Sica (1988) sees a difficulty in Weber's equating the concept of rationality with meaning and signi
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