d with religious and cultural tradition" (Weber Theory 54). The roles of the bureaucracy, then, in Weber's view, include the hindering of excess political interference in the economy, and the prevention of the imposition of irrational religious and cultural values on the state.
With respect to the system of privilege and inherited power which marks non-democratic government, Weber argues that the bureaucracy is an obstacle to such aristocratic tendencies, and is therefore helpful to the advancement of democracy:
The development of rational-legal authority, with bureaucratic administration, is both dependent on the breakdown of traditionalized particularistic privileged groups and in turn has a levelling influence, in that it treats social class by birth and other privileged statuses as to a large degree irrelevant to status in the system of authority (Weber Theory 73).
However, Weber is in no way radical in his support of democracy. As MacRae writes, Weber was "a bourgeois, a man of the upper, trading orders of urban life," and, as such, he saw "the daily business of politics" as "inevitably stultifying, arbitrary, likely to run into the sands or be swept by whirlwinds." The political system in general to Weber "was too irrational" and "complex," "a witches' cauldron." Weber did not favor a severely authoritarian govern
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