3.3.3 Max Weber (1864–1920)

• Base theory: modernity is rationalisation — the disenchantment of the world, the rise of calculation, bureaucracy and the legal-rational authority of the modern state (alongside traditional and charismatic authority — see your Political Theory course).• The sociology of legal thought (his four-fold grid): law-making and law-finding can be —1. formally irrational — decision by oracle, ordeal, prophecy (no rules, no reasoning); 2. substantively irrational — "kadi-justice": case-by-case on ethical/political feeling, no general rules; 3. substantively rational — ruled by ethical, religious or political principles rather than legal logic; 4. logically formal rational — the modern ideal: general, abstract rules applied by reasoning to facts — calculable, predictable law, which Weber linked to capitalism's need for calculability.• Cost of formal rationality: the "iron cage" — procedure can hollow out substance; formally correct law can betray substantive justice (the critique Weber himself anticipated, and later critical legal studies radicalised).• Application to Nepal: Nepali legal history runs Weber's grid uphill — from ordeal and dharmashastra (formally/substantively irrational by his grid), through the Muluki Ain 1854's move to written general rules, to the 2074 Codes' rationalised system — with the standing Nepali problem Weber predicts: formal justice delivered slowly and unevenly (calculability without accessibility).• Critique: the typology reads Eurocentric; "kadi-justice" undersells Islamic and indigenous adjudication's own rationalities — a point postcolonial sociology of…