Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
115
3. The market as an impersonal association
Weber begins his essay with a treatment of concepts and categories of cities in general. The
first general characteristic of the city is that it is a market center.
11
According to Weber this
means that the city population generally buys what it needs on the market - he never makes
any mention of the goods and services produced in the private sector, the households - and
that market goods are being produced mostly by the city population or by that of the
immediate hinterland.
12
The market is a phenomenon easier conceptualized in terms of economy than in those of
interpretive sociology. Since market relations are impersonal and (in Weber's words)
'unbrotherly', they break up existing social relations. The unfinished fragment on the market
13
is one of the earlier essays in ES; Weber there uses the concept 'Einverständnishandeln'
('consensual action') to bring the market within the terms of interpretive sociology.
He presents the market consociation (Vergesellschaftung) as on the one hand 'the
archetype of all rational social action (rationales Gesellschaftshandeln)', yet on the other
hand he states that 'the market community (Gemeinschaft) as such [is] the most impersonal
relationship of practical life into which human beings can enter with one another.'
According to Weber market actions are not oriented to the actions of other persons, but to
commodities
14
; there are 'no obligations of brotherliness or reverence, and none of those
spontaneous human relations that are sustained by personal unions.' The market is 'an
abomination to every system of fraternal ethics. In sharp contrast to all other groups which
always presuppose some measure of personal fraternization or even blood kinship, the
market is fundamentally alien to any type of fraternal relationship.'
Individual market dealings can be conceptualized as 'a coexistence and sequence of rational
consociations'; these are however only 'ephemeral insofar as (...) they cease to exist with the
act of exchanging the goods (...)'.
Because of the orientation of the market partners to things and not to persons, the market
relations as a whole remain marginal to sociological analysis. Weber solves this problem by
conceptualizing the abstract, formal-rational results of them:
'Money creates a group by virtue of material interest relations between actual and potential
participants in the market and its payments. At the fully developed stage, the so called
money economy, the resulting situation looks as if it had been created by a set of norms
established for the very purpose of bringing it into being.'
The unbrotherly, unsocial, un-sociological character of the market causes an erosion of the
legitimacy of the patriarchal domination of both the old rulers and of the city burghers
themselves; in the analysis Weber presents in his essay on the city, however, it is not the
decisive cause of the difference between the autonomous 'occidental' cities and all the other
ones.
11
ES p. 1213, WG p. 728.
12
ES p. 1213, WG p. 728.
13
ES p. 635 ff., WG p. 382 ff.
14
'The reason for the impersonality of the market is its matter-of-factness, its orientation to the commodity and
only to that. Where the market is allowed to follow its own autonomous tendencies, its participants do not look
toward persons of each other but only toward the commodity'.
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