Weber’s Legal Domination: Rationality, Development, and Western Law
Legal Domination: The Emergence of Legal Rationality
In his analysis of previous domains of authority (charismatic, traditional), Weber identified three steps for study: analysis of documentation, formulation of the general concept deduced, and putting it into practice or testing the media in legitimizing an organization. In the realm of legal rule, these three steps are not easily woven together due to the large scope of information provided in written files.
For Weber, both traditional and charismatic authority are types of derivation that appear and disappear, limiting the observer to watching their descent. In contrast, legal rule does not appear suddenly and, unlike tradition, endures as the result of a human plan and gradual development and evolution. Weber compares the legal derivation of the West with the charm and tradition of India and China to highlight the strengths and advantages of the former.
Influenced by Hegel’s philosophy of history, understood as a sequence of events not solely based on chance, legal rule is presented as the result of progressive development. The proper object of analysis is not what people do, but what they think about what they do. Every person is rational and passionate at once, so we must seek the passions behind a person’s rationing and the reasoning behind their passions.
The actions of people in history are mere events related in time and space when considered only as such. According to Weber, a system of legal domination exists only where the provisions of a legal order are implemented and complied with due to the belief that they are legitimate, that is, under the statutes of a government that exercises a monopoly of its enactment and the legitimate use of physical force.
Emergence of Legal Rationality
From a theoretical point of view, the general trend of law has gone through the following stages:
- Charismatic Legal Revelation through Prophets of the Law
There was a time when legal prophecy was a universal practice founded on the principle that the law could only arise in revelation, meaning legal disputes were arbitrated using an oracle. - Creating and Empirical Discovery of the Law by Legal Notables
- Law Enforcement Powers by Secular or Theocratic Authorities
The discovery of law by revelation gradually gave way to its creation through initiative and consensus. Laws imposed following war and its devastating effects promoted the secularization and systematization of legal thought. A warlord conqueror could increase their authority for war, breaking the existing social order and demonstrating that tradition is not inviolable. Thanks to the separation of church and sacred right, secular authorities found the way open for the imposition of laws and the growth of legal formalism. - Systematic Development of Professionalized Law and Administration of Justice by Technically Trained Persons
The unification and systematization of law is, to some extent, a consequence of administrative stabilization achieved under the rule of powerful hereditary princes. In crushing the claims of the prevalence of subjects and prebendary, monarchs tried to establish their authority by erecting a solid fence around economic officials, controlled centrally. The administrative apparatus unleashed forces for the development of bureaucratic rationality. Sovereign power depended on the efficiency of tax administration, flourishing where primitive methods of tax leases had become a centrally organized domestic performance. The monarch’s interest in unity and order coincided with the personal interests of their staff.
The central organization of a bureaucracy required permanent staff management, and these officials had a vested interest in career opportunities within the bureaucracy. The future was even more auspicious if a prevailing legal unit existed throughout the kingdom, as officials would not be inhibited by ignorance of local laws and could work wherever a vacancy existed.
These circumstances pointed to growing centralization and greater legal uniformity, tending to decrease the potential for arbitrary patriarchal power, but not providing or promising to compensate individual rights. On the contrary, this development was based, to some extent, on the violation of entrenched rights, such as the traditional privileges of feudal vassals and the benefits and monopolies of craft guilds. In the struggle against strong resistance from the estates, the royal heritage often had the support of the burgeoning middle class. The monopoly interests of the first capitalists in companies protected by the government led them to obtain trading privileges at the expense of their precarious legal position before the prince.
However, the predominance of equity in the sovereign power struggle against the privileges of the estates, and the estates against the character of the administrative and legal system (and the consequent lack of a legal order with due process), did not prevail in the long term. While early capitalists depended on the monarch for business opportunities and the power to overcome existing privileges, the king also depended on the financial and political support of economic interest groups. These groups demanded a clear and unambiguous legal system, immune to irrational administrative arbitrariness and disturbance caused by specific privilege, offering firm guarantees of legally binding contracts and operating in a predictable way. The alliance of royalist and bourgeois interests was, therefore, a major factor leading to formal legal rationalization.