orld explained by superstition and emotion toward social organization. Rationalism is not to be equated with reasonableness and justice as a moral category, but rather "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 and Mills 51). A bureaucratic apparatus administers access to social protections and benefits. But access may be unequal, and Weber's view of Western capitalistic rationality is (Protestant 35) that there is concentration of capital and industry among sectarian Protestants in part because of the break from the "magic" or "spirituality" (and hierarchy) of the Catholic Church, and in part because of Protestantism's own version of authority; Weber cites "devotion to labour in the calling [which] . . . has grown . . . so irrational from the standpoint of purely eudaemoninistic self-interest" (Weber, Protestant 78). Weber also cites (Protestant) Adam Smith's economic theory, which he says amounts to a "moral justification of worldly activity" (81), which famously includes the doctrine of an "invisible hand" of market order and rationality held to be the distinguishing feature of capitalism.
The invisible hand of order is to be distinguished from the hand of social equality. Weber refers to the tension between equality before the law and social differences based on connections between the bureaucratic apparatus of society and relative privileges of various groups, suggesting that the more tenuous the connection, the more likely the status is underprivileged (Weber, "Bureaucracy" 224). Oppressive economic conditions are linked to sociopolitical democratic activity by the oppressed to "level[] . . . the governed" in context of "opposition to the ruling and bureaucratically articulated group" (Weber, "Bureaucracy" 226).
Both Marx and Weber are concerned about the relationsh...