Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
132
in history. Rather, it was any r a t i o n a l, continuously organized, and in this sense specifically "bourgeois" form
of acquisitive operation, any systematic economic activity, that was looked upon with disdain.
'
103
On the other hand he states that the transition between the risk-sharing patrician and the
entrepreneur is fluid and that this fluid transition is a 'very important and characteristic aspect
of urban development'.
104
He further discerns a 'fluid transition' between 'occasional' and 'real' entrepreneur and
between all 'types' in sociology:
'In reality, as we saw, the "types" always become fluid vis-à-vis each other. But this is true of all sociological
phenomena and should not prevent the statement of the typical aspects. The typical patrician, at any rate, was
not a professional entrepreneur in either Antiquity of the Middle Ages, but rather a rentier
105
and "occasional"
entrepreneur.
'
Weber here remains faithful to his comparative method: in order to conceptualize a
transformation of social relations, he constructs two opposite types, a rational and an
irrational one: businessman and aristocrat; he then proceeds to show that 'in reality' these
types do not exist in pure form, since so many transitional types can be discerned.
Nevertheless he retains his opposition of the obligatory leisure of positive status groups and
the demeaning systematic economic activity of businessmen, subsequently merging the
contradictory elements of noble and burgher status and mentality in the type of the English
gentleman. At the end of this operation he claims that the English gentleman is unique and
that on the European continent the aristocratic influences have disappeared entirely.
103
ES p. 1295/96, WG p. 774/5.
104
According to him, however, this fluid transition was caused by other developments: the craft guilds, in
particular in London and in other major British cities, forced nobles and patricians to join them; they were able to
do this because of their increasing power. He adds: 'This is not to deny, of course, that all imaginable transitions
can be found between a patrician way of life and the personal conduct of business. The travelling trader who
obtained money on commenda for individual ventures could transform himself into the owner of a great house
operating with permanently invested limited-liability capital and employing foreign representatives to do the actual
trading work. Money changing and banking operations, but also a shipping or wholesale firm, could easily be
conducted for the account of a patrician who himself lived like a knight, and the transition from a capital owner
who utilized momentarily unused portions of his wealth by letting them out on commenda to one who was
continuously active as an entrepreneur was by nature quite fluid.
This fluidity is certainly a very important and characteristic aspect of urban development. But it itself only the
product of other developments. This blurring of the lines frequently came about only in the period of the craft
guilds' rule, when even the nobility was forced to enroll in the guilds if it wanted to participate in the city
government and when, on the other hand, the burgher remained a guild member even if he was no longer an
active entrepreneur. The name scioperati ["idlers"] for the great merchant guilds in Italy proves this point. This
development was especially typical for the large English cities, in particular for London.' ES p. 1294, WG p. 773.
Here Weber emphasizes the power of the English craft guilds, though elsewhere, as we have seen, he speaks of
the power of the mercantile guilds and the lack of any city democracy in England which could have given power
to the craftsmen. Moreover, the craft guilds according to him were increasingly dominated by rentiers; they in part
'became gentlemen associations for the sole purpose of electing the communal officials'. The membership of
these associations - which 'was theoretically obtainable only through apprenticeship and admission' - 'came in
practice to be acquired through inheritance and purchase.'
In my view Weber's excursion on craft guilds - which according to the translators is not historically exact, see ES
p. 1300, nt 59 - is not very relevant to his argument on entrepreneurship.
105
The translators even italicize the word 'rentier', which Weber himself does not.
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