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.
In Weber's view the usual situation after the invention of agriculture was that the women
work on the land, and that the land was therefore theirs. Men performed agricultural labor
only at a later stage.
57
Masculine property of land according to Weber is a new idea; without it patriarchy, as it was
juridically defined in historical times, namely as 'patrilineal descent and exclusively agnatic
attribution of kinship and property'
58
is unthinkable. He does not connect the creation of such
legal patriarchy to masculine agricultural labor, but to military conquest. Legal patriarchy
according to him became predominant 'when the members of a military caste were
landowners living dispersed in the countryside'; it was only developed by 'the empire-building
peoples of the Far East and India, the Near East, the Mediterranean and the European
North'.
59
Weber here resumes the discussion with the 'matriarchy' theorists. He criticizes the term
'Mutterrecht', which suggests a 'legal arrangement'; a legal arrangement of kinship relations
is typical for patriarchy.
60
The question of the character of kinship relations before they were
regulated by law, however, remains unanswered.
In his chapter on the origins of social relations Weber treats the history of this legal
patriarchate and the role of military men's associations in its creation only cursorily. He views
these associations as a result of a breach with tradition; he constructs their development as
a result of a series of transformations of charismatic domination. I will discuss these in the
next chapter.
57
Cultural-anthropological research has established that in such groups there is an opposition between
honorable masculine and dishonorable feminine activities, which is in accordance with Weber's concept of
charisma: the men claim the extra-ordinary activities like burning, plowing and sowing, the women do the routine
work: weeding, weeding and weeding.
58
Ibid. 'Agnate' according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary means: '(One who is) descended esp. by male line
from same male ancestor; descended from same forefather, of same clan or nation; (fig.) akin, of same nature.'
59
Ibid. He adds: 'As far as our historical knowledge goes'.
60
Engels had already rejected Bachofen's term 'Mutterrecht' for the same reason; see Origins, Ch. II, p. 71/2,
MEW 21, p. 48.
65
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