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.
5. From 'masculine-dominated household' to 'patriarchy'
After Weber has discussed the tribe, he proceeds to analyze the development of political
associations. This means that he wants to make a connection between his analysis of the
development of 'household' and 'tribe' with official historical developments - the historically
documented changes in the relations between men. This connection involves a conceptual
shift from 'masculine-dominated household' to 'patrilineal descent and exclusively agnatic
attribution of kinship and property'
52
: 'patriarchy' in a technical or legal sense.
Weber constructs his concept of 'patriarchy' in two ways. The first one is presented in his
conceptual exposition and in his later essay The nature and origin of patriarchal domination
in his chapter on patriarchalism and patrimonialism.
53
Here he develops 'patriarchy' or the
'patriarchal household' out of the masculine-dominated 'household'.
As we have seen, his definition of 'household authority' only gives a general statement on
masculine authority, without mentioning any particular 'Herr' or 'patriarch'.
54
In his section on
the nature and origin of patriarchal domination the authority of 'men over women', however,
is attributed to one 'master':
'In the case of domestic authority the belief in authority is based on personal relations that are perceived as
natural ("uralte naturgewachsene Situationen"). This belief is rooted in filial piety, in the close and permanent
living together of all dependents of the household which results in an external and spiritual "community of fate".
The woman is dependent because of the normal superiority of the physical and *mental energies ("Spannkraft")
of the male ("des Mannes"), and the child because of its* objective helplessness, the grown-up because of
habituation, the persistent influence of education and the effect of firmly rooted memories from childhood and
adolescence, and the servant because from childhood on the facts of life have taught him that he lacks protection
outside the master's power sphere and that he must submit to him to gain that protection
.'
55
Here the mystery of the origins of masculine authority over women deepens, since Weber
attributes the 'normal superiority of the physical and mental energies of the male' to one
man, a 'Herr' or 'father', who therefore appears to have appropriated the authority of other
men, who now have become 'servants'.
In his striving to crush the matriarchy theories, Weber has denied every rational historical
explanation of the origins of patriarchal domination. Denying his own statements on the
construct no direct evolution from primates to human beings, some Darwinist elements had slipped into the
argument. Thus the notion of most women - which could be interpreted with Weber's term 'negative status group'
ideology, see below, Ch. 4,8 - that women and men are biologically different, the women being social, the men
aggressive (borrowing from Marx we even called them 'incompletely humanized') still made itself felt. See on
Darwinism, sociology and ethology Marijke Ekelschot in Van Baalen & Ekelschot (1985); on the marxist struggle
with anthropologies and ontologies Alfred Schmidt (1978).
One has to realize that differentiations between social life and production, between relations with people and
relations with the environment - things, plants, animals, geological and meteorological phenomena and
processes - only have developed gradually. It seems that kinship rules could include any person, animal, plant or
thing, if the correct magic formalities which Weber conceptualized in his 'status contract' had been fulfilled. In this
way the rules, based on experience, of gathering and hunting would be formalized as rules of kinship; though
nobody knows if these took the form of the 'totem' relations which survived into recent history. Food 'taboos' and
sex 'taboos' appear to be connected; but the question which were the more 'original' cannot be answered.
52
Ibid.
53
ES p. 1006 ff., WG. p. 580 ff.
54
His treatment of the development of kinship relations from the household, however, explicitly refers to
patriarchal domination.
55
ES p. 1007, WG p. 581.
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