Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
128
11. The continuity of patriarchal domination and its contradiction with bourgeois freedom and
equality
Weber's analysis of the development of the burgher from 'homo politicus' into 'homo
economicus' is thus one-sided, since it denies the continuity of patriarchy. Yet the defeat of
urban democracy by patrimonialism within and outside the city is far easier to explain if this
continuity is recognized. Free men were not only adverse to fight traditional rulers because
they were to busy doing business, but also because they feared the growing erosion of their
own authority. Affiliation with a 'country father' ('Landesvater') could provide them with a
delegated authority over their dependents.
Weber's analysis therefore has to be reformulated in the following way: patrimonialism is not
only the foundation of feudalism and of the estates of patrimonial officials, it also comes to
support the burgher estates. At the same time bourgeois domination, as domination of an
autonomous patriarchal status group, is opposed to patriarchal patrimonialism, just as the
estate groups of feudal vassals are opposed to every threat to their patriarchal-patrimonial
autonomy.
The bourgeois personality is therefore divided by the split between public and private life,
between the market and the household. In his public life the bourgeois man fights for his
freedom and equality as a fraternity member, while in private life he tries to be a patriarch
and to appropriate women and children, whom he denies the membership rights which are
the basis for his own position as a 'free man'. Since his domination is undermined by the
universalist laws of the market, however, he has to affiliate himself with more powerful
patriarchs, who in their turn threaten to appropriate him, compelling him to obedience and
thereby endangering his manhood. The more pronounced the contradictions in the situation
of the bourgeois become, the more they are repressed from public consciousness.
90
Patrimonialism in Western Europe was transformed once it revived: it no longer dominated
only unfree men, but it also encapsulated many affiliated groups of formally free fraternity
members as well. It did not develop in a linear way from the ancient 'oikos' states to modern
bureaucracy: its development was affected by other, specifically occidental masculine
institutions. Robber bands, traders and armies destroyed kinship traditions; Christianity
created new, inclusive fraternizations in which strangers could become brothers; feudalism
played an important role in creating free and loyal estates of patrimonial officials; and finally
city revolutions created new estates of free patriarchs, who eventually affiliated themselves
with patrimonial rulers, losing their political freedom in the process but receiving quasi-
patriarchal authority instead. From these affiliated patriarchs a new kind of officials could be
recruited.
In Weber's view, however, a status group of bourgeois officials could also be formed in
another way: by being incorporated into a rural gentry of notable local administrators. This
happened in England, where the institution of the office of 'justice of the peace' resulted in
the formation of a status group of 'gentlemen'.
91
This is the more interesting, because the
English cities were demilitarized much earlier than the continental European ones and the
burgher status groups accordingly were characterized by economic activities much sooner;
90
See below Ch. 10,3.
91
See above Ch. 6,6.
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