Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 3 Private versus public sphere: the origins of household and kin group.
character and thus social, but he implicitly leaves the decision who will be cared for to
nature.
The second relationship Weber presents, that between the children themselves, the
siblings
19
, he defines as being not biologic, but wholly economic in character. The siblings
are connected, not by the body of their common mother, but 'by common maintenance'.
20
Weber views this grouping of a woman and her children 'as (in the present sense) the most
primitive sort of family'; nevertheless he does not consider it a cornerstone of society: 'it does
not mean - indeed, it is unimaginable - that there ever were societies with maternal
groupings only'.
21
In Weber's view a 'matriarchy' seems to be a number of women all alone with their babes in
the wood, unable to make contact without the help of men:
'As far as it is known, wherever the maternal grouping prevails as a family type, group relationships, economic
and military, exist among men as well, and so do those of men with women (both sexual and economic).
'
Although he has not explained the origins and character of these economic, military and
sexual relations, he now relegates the maternal grouping to the position of 'a normal, but
obviously secondary, form', which 'is often found precisely where men's everyday life is
confined to the stable community of a "men's house", first for military purposes, later for
other reasons.'
22
Morgan and his followers, however, never maintained that no relations existed between adult
women and adult men, or between adult men; their point was that these relations were not
those of the patriarchal family. Morgan's construction of an original 'generation kinship' is
based on the same phenomena Weber used as the basis of his concept of 'siblinghood': the
social-economic ties developed in growing up together, in the same 'caring-community'.
Weber, however, makes women lose these social-economic ties as soon as they are 'able to
search for means of subsistence of their own'; adult women have no siblings. According to
him social, economic, or military relations between adult women and men can only develop
after men have developed their own, military associations. One would expect that he
therefore would proceed to investigate the origins of such associations, in particular of the
'men's house'; but I will show later that he mentions it only in a later part of this chapter, and
that he conceptualizes its origins not in his treatment of 'traditional domination', but in that of
'charismatic domination'.
23
Instead of this he continues his treatment of family-like formations by restricting the social
relevance of sexual and sibling relations to a stable economic formation he calls 'the
household'. I will follow Weber's exposition and deal first with 'the household', and then with
'the tribe'.
19
'which the Greeks called "milk-partners", "homogalaktes"', ES p. 357, WG p. 212.
20
Ibid. In ES 'der gemeinsame Mutterleib' is translated by 'the common mother'.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid. He adds: 'Men's houses (Männerhäuser) can be found in various countries as a specific concomitant and
a result of militaristic development.' See below Ch. 4,5-6.
23
See below, Ch. 4.
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