Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 6. Feudalism. Decentralization of patrimonialism into political domination by an hierarchy of
free men
101
conquerors, pirates, traders and craftsmen who had formed charismatic fraternities to seek
wealth and adventures, relativized the holiness of ancient traditions and rituals. According to
Weber this was the reason why in the religions of Western Antiquity totemism and the
casuistic adherence to sib exogamy never developed.
13
One could say that the process of breaking with kinship ties and with patriarchal traditions
was one which reinforced itself, since it created the conditions for the development of those
societies in which confraternizations between strangers are the determining social relation,
and leading to that unique conglomerate of confraternizations, which is to be found nowhere
else in the world: the Western city, the base for economic, juridical and administrative
processes of rationalization, which in the end - at least according to Weber - became
irreversible.
In Weber's view even the 'military status group' and the 'city' of Greek antiquity are identical
entities, since the members of the Hellenic 'caste of military landlords' have their residences
in the city. In the early Western European Middle Ages wandering military groups broke with
kinship traditions in the same way; the Great Migration (Völkerwanderung) lasted for
centuries. In this way Christianity could become the religion 'of these peoples who had been
so profoundly shaken in all their traditions', since it 'finally destroyed what religious
significance these clan ties retained'
14
and replaced the old magic rituals by new ones,
effecting in this way universal fraternization.
In the Western European Middle Ages the members of the military status groups, once they
had subjected the country, did not live in market cities but in castles outside them. During the
disintegration of the Roman empire the money economy had practically disappeared,
15
leaving no economic basis for the maintenance or the rise of great patrimonial empires; only
the Carolingians had the military and administrative talents to create one. The Carolingians
began to bestow offices as fiefs, especially from the 9th century on, 'after the strictly
personal fealty of all office-holders had emerged as the only support of the royal thrones'.
16
In this way the military character of feudalism was transferred to the administration.
Borneman (1975), Ch. III, and Anderson (1978), p. 107 ff.
13
Only traces of these can be found, ES p. 1243, WG p. 745. 'Rudiments' is the translation of 'verkümmerte
Ansätze', the latter giving Weber's meaning more exactly; see Ch. 3,3 on Weber's kinship theory. Here he
continues: 'The reasons for this, insofar as they are not specifically ('intern') religious, can only be vaguely
guessed. The mercenary soldiering and the piratical life of the early period, the military adventures, and the
numerous inland and overseas colony foundations, inevitably leading to intimate permanent associations
between tribal or at least clan strangers, seem with equal inevitability to have broken the strength of the exclusive
clan and magical ties.'
And on the Mycenean culture of the Greek mainland, as expressed in Homerus:
'The other important phenomenon is the completely unrestrained relationship - in site of a certain fearful respect
('deisdaimonia') - to the gods, whose treatment in the epics was later to be so painful to Plato. This lack of
religious respect of the heroic society could arise only in the wake of migrations, especially of overseas
migrations, and thus in areas in which the people did not have to live with old temples and close to the ancestral
graves.' (ES p. 1284, WG p. 767). See further below, Ch. 7,5.
14
ES p. 1244, WG p. 745/6: 'perhaps, indeed, it was precisely the weakness or absence of such magical and
taboo barriers which made the conversion possible.' See also P. Anderson (1978), p. 117/8.
15
The causes of these phenomena and the connections between them are treated by Weber in Die sozialen
Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur, 1896, GAzSW p. 289 ff.
16
ES p. 1078, WG p. 631: 'Teilkönigsthröne'.
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