Was Weber an anti-federalist?

I was at a conference about a year ago in Washington D.C. on Federalism and constitutions with Professor Georg Vanberg of UNC Chapel Hill, and had the chance to learn more intimately about both the Anti-Federalist papers and the Federalist papers. One of the things that struck me was the similarity between what the Anti-Federalists feared and rightfully predicted, i.e. a more direct relationship between the federal government and the citizens which would diminish the roles of the individual states and lead to a growth in government, and what Max Weber wrote about more than a hundred years later in his works on bureaucracy.

Consolidating power in a concentrated system, Weber argued, was a superior form of organization to the charismatic (religious) system of leadership and the traditional form of domination (feudalism) where social progress for the individual depended on mere nepotism and bribery. In a bureaucracy, the system became goal-oriented rather than value-oriented, and impersonal rule and a precisely outlined hierarchy of authority became dominant features of the state’s rule. Furthermore, the state became legitimized through the monopoly on violence. Weber invented this term to distinguish the modern state from feudal states, where private armies were accepted, and from Catholic courts of law, such as those working under the Inquisition, which held sole jurisdiction over the crime of heresy. The costs of bureaucracy, however, were a loss of individuality and freedom, and a growth in the control the government could exercise over the individual.

This is where Weber’s famous passage on the ‘iron cage’ of rationality comes from. As rationality grows, man becomes trapped in an inescapable iron cage of rules and laws he must adhere to. This was true not only of the capitalist societies at the time, but would also result from socialist rule, which Weber predicted would eventually degrade into serfdom.

So what did the Anti-Federalists actually write? In the Pennsylvania Dissent from the Minority Delegation to the Constitutional Constitution, they worry that

‘the powers vested in Congress by this constitution, must necessarily annihilate and absorb the legislative, executive and judicial powers of the several states, and produce from their ruins one consolidated government, which from the nature of things will be an iron-handed despotism….The Powers of the Congress under the new constitution are complete and unlimited over the purse and the sword…. By virtue of their power of taxation, Congress may command the whole, or any part of the people.’

Coming from Denmark, and not being an American, I had not known prior to the conference that the Anti-Federalists were in fact responsible for the Bill of Rights being added to the United States’ Constitution, to protect individual liberties from consolidated government’s tendency to ignore these. But perhaps the anti-federalist worry over a standing army, which was instrumental in the creation of the second amendment, reflected a wish to keep a modern, bureaucratic state from fully materializing. Effectively this has kept the monopoly of violence somewhat out of the federal government’s hands in the United States in comparison with many countries where such a guarantee to own arms does not exist.

I am curious if we are left invariably to be drawn into a rational calculation that reduces us to a cog in the bureaucratic machine, as Weber very strongly formulated it or if we can keep the development at least partially at bay by carefully formulating the rules that are invariably bound to govern our lives.

Furthermore, I find it fascinating to see Weber’s sentiments revealed more than a hundred years earlier in the Anti-Federalist papers. The Austrian influence on Weber is certainly there, as he was a personal friend of Ludwig von Mises and tangentially involved with the Austrian school, as well as the creation of the Weimar Constitution. The question is – was Weber an anti-federalist?

• David Pontoppidan