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
108
practicable; paid justices of the peace were appointed in increasing measure. This did not
lead to any systematization of the administration, because 'rational bureaucracy was
introduced only in piecemeal fashion into the old administrative framework, as concrete
individual needs arose.'
57
The English patrimonial rulers did not succeed in appropriating these honoratiores as a part
of a centralized and continuous administration; it would therefore be more logical to
conceptualize the administration of the justices of the peace as an extension of feudalism.
Formally the justices were 'subjects' ('Untertanen'), whose office was a 'liturgy' for qualified
aspirants', but practically they were 'free members of a political association', 'citizens'.
58
Like
the feudal knights they remained an independent status group, because their authority was
not totally derived from the Crown, but originally had been based on their own position as
'honoratiores', and thus on their membership of a 'gentry' of small landowners, who were
able to negotiate with the ruler and even to monopolize their office. The office indeed
'developed exactly parallel to the disintegration of private dependence'; in this sense it was
not patrimonial at all.
59
Though the honoratiores were not feudal vassals in the technical sense of the word, they
were patrimonial landowners, who offered their loyalty freely in return for social honor.
Weber greatly stresses the importance of the influence of the feudal mentality:
'Substantively the English squirearchy, which had created this system, was of course a stratum of notables of
decidedly manorial character. Without specific feudal and manorial antecedents the peculiar "spirit" of the English
gentry would never have come into being. The particular ideal of manliness of the Anglo-Saxon gentleman shows
indelible traces of this origin. This trait comes to the fore mainly in the formal strictness of the conventions, in the
vigorously developed pride and sense of dignity, and in the social importance of sports which in itself conducive
to the formation of a status group.'
60
Here the difficulties created by Weber's differentiation of male officials in dependent and
independent ones - in 'patriarchs' and 'children' or 'men' and 'not-men' - are apparent. For all
higher officials in Western Europe were patriarchs, who were supported by routinized
charismatic fraternizations with a military past and by their affiliation with powerful
patrimonial lords. Even if a status group of officials originally consisted in part of unfree men,
in the long run these also succeeded in gaining freedom and the corresponding patriarchal
position, because they shared in the power and the prestige of the lord and in the resulting
possibility to exploit his subjects.
Therefore the contrast Weber constructs between 'estate patrimonialism' and 'patriarchal
patrimonialism' in general is not relevant for Western Europe where all patrimonialism was
influenced by feudalism and therefore 'estate patrimonialism'.
57
ES p. 1064, WG p. 620.
58
'but in reality, due to the actual distribution of power, it was the voluntary co-operation not of subjects, but of
free members of a political association - of "citizens", that is - on which the prince depended for the exercise of
his authority.'
59
See also ES p. 1063, WG p. 619: 'At its peak the English administration by the justices of the peace was a
combination of patrimonialism of the estate type with a pure type of autonomous administration by honoratiores,
and it tended much more toward the latter than toward the former'.
60
ES p. 1063, WG p. 620.
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