Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
112
important characteristic. In his view 'the city' should be classified under the sociology of
domination, after the forms of legitimate domination, as a 'revolutionary association'.²
Winckelmann proceeds:
'Because it was Max Weber's often expressed didactic opinion (Lehrmeinung) that rational
administrative organization with its rational administrative principles is copied by the
territorial states from the political associations of the autonomous cities, the expositions on
the sociology of the modern state corresponds systematically with the typology of the cities.'
I will show, though, that Weber's 'didactic opinion' is not clearly expressed in ES. There is
only one passage in his conceptual exposition in which he refers to a connection between
occidental urban developments and the rationalization process which took place within the
patrimonial state; in this passage, however, no direct influence has been conceptualized.³
Neither does Weber give a clear statement on the connection between the two
characteristics Winckelmann named: non-legitimate domination and rational administration.
Winckelmann himself explains the concept 'non-legitimate domination' with a passage from
Politics as a vocation, where he gives the following statement on the freedom of the
autonomous city communes:
'They were free: not in the sense of the freedom from forceful domination, but in the sense that princely power
legitimized by tradition (mostly religiously sanctified) as exclusive source of all authority was absent.'
4
The passage sheds a most interesting light on Weber's theory of legitimate domination.
Everywhere in ES Weber presents three types of legitimate domination; here however, only
one type seems to exist: traditional authority. Since in Weber's view traditional authority is
always patriarchal authority, he seems to hold the same opinion as Kate Millet: to maintain
that all domination is patriarchal. In deciding to present the city as a form of 'non-legitimate
domination', he chooses to conceptualize it as representing a breach with patriarchal
domination and not as a development of new forms of legitimate domination which perhaps
are patriarchal as well. He thus conceptualizes the city burghers as revolutionary patriarchal
subjects, not as any particular kind of rulers.
Earlier in my book I gave what could be an explanation for this choice. The relationship
between the 'traditional', patriarchal or patrimonial, lord and his subjects is a public
domination relationship between men; when a subject of a lord breaks away from the lord's
domination in order to become a free men, the relationship between them changes into one
of real men, of patriarchs. Weber, however, conceptualizes patriarchal domination of the city
burghers only in terms of relations of the 'household', a concept which is private and
therefore not relevant for the investigation of public relationships of domination.
2
WG p. XIX, translated: 'Everywhere in his most different works Max Weber viewed their characteristic in their
specific nature of separate political entity, namely as an autonomous political formation (Verband).' 'The
particularity of the occidental city development appears to him, in comparison to all other forming of cities, from
the special political character of the European city, in this that it was an autonomous "commune" with its own,
separate political rights.' ' The typology of cities, as it is designed, belongs thus indeed - in accordance with the
plan - in the sociology of domination, and in fact at the appointed place: on systematic grounds in its specific
character as a revolutionary Verband after the forms of legitimate domination, from historical considerations as a
precursor of the rational constitution and administration as the state for the shaping of this.'
3
ES p. 240/1, WG p. 139/40, see below no 14.
4
FMW p. 84, GPS p. 501.
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