Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
131
charisma is, in Weber's view, reversed by 'plutocratization'.
98
The concept of
'plutocratization', however, can also be analyzed in a less paradoxical way than by a chain of
reversals of 'charisma'. It may also be analyzed in terms of acquisition of booty.
Acquisition of booty - of which Weber said that it is end as well as means of all forms of
robber charisma - may be considered an independent source of charisma, since financial
success can give the person who achieves it a nimbus of extraordinariness, even of magic
power.
Financial success acquired by systematic economic activities - of the kind which, according
to Weber, the city traders performed - therefore has a contradictory status effect: 'booty' in
itself grants its possessor charismatic powers, but the routine 'work' necessary to acquire it
robs him of it.
Weber emphasizes the importance of the rentier stratum in the constitution of the urban
nobility, especially in the North of Europe, where 'the "patriciate" and the mercantile stratum
were really identical, at least during the early period of those cities
99
'. This kind of mercantile
patrician was no entrepreneur: he did not perform regular business activities in an office.
100
The patrician could participate in the risks and the profits of mercantile enterprises as a
financier; he would always hire others to perform the actual work, 'although at times he might
have taken a share also in the intellectual management of the enterprise'.
101
On the one hand Weber wants to emphasize the sharp boundaries between patricians and
merchants:
'"Capitalist" m o n e y l e n d e r s were both the early Roman patricians vis-à-vis the peasants, and the later
Roman senatorial families vis-à-vis their political subjects - and that (-) in no mean dimensions. It was only the
role of the e n t r e p r e n e u r that the status etiquette, occasionally and with varying flexibility backed up by the
law, forbade to the truly patrician families of both Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The objects in which the typical
patriciate of the different ages invested its wealth of course varied considerably. Nevertheless, the distinction
remained the same: Whoever too noticeably crossed the line between the two forms of economic activity
represented by the investment of wealth on the one hand, and by profits from capital on the other
102
, was
considered a 'banausos' in Antiquity and a man "not of the knightly kind" in the Middle Ages. In the later Middle
Ages the old knightly families of the cities were denied equal rank by the rural nobility because they sat on the
council *benches together with the men of the craft guilds - and thus: with entrepreneurs. It was not "greed for
gain" as a p s y c h o l o g i c a l motive that was tabooed; in practical life the Roman office nobility and the
medieval patriciate of the large coastal cities was just as possessed by the "auri sacra fames" as any other class
98
See Ch. 4,5.
99
ES p. 1293, WG p. 773.
100
ES p. 1293, WG p. 773.
101
'To be sure, he often participated in mercantile enterprise, but then in the capacity of a ship owner, or as a
limited partner, provider of commenda capital or of a "sea loan". The actual work: the voyage and the conduct of
the trading operations, was left to others; the patrician himself participated only in the risks and the profits,
although at times he might have taken a share also in the intellectual management of the enterprise. All important
forms of business of early Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, especially the commenda and the "sea loan', were
tailored to the existence of such financiers who invested their wealth in concrete individual undertakings, with a
separate settling of accounts for each one, and usually in a great number of these to distribute the risk.' ES p.
1294, WG p. 773.
102
Footnote 60 of the translation gives the German terms: 'Vermögensanlage' and 'Kapitalgewinn', and refers to
the distinction between 'Haushalt' und 'Erwerb', treated on p. 10-11 and p. 98 ff.
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