Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
118
These fraternities constituted their own rules of connubium and commensality, mostly under
the protection of new gods, to celebrate and fortify their new brotherhood. In classical
Antiquity they were mostly organized in the form of artificial tribes and clans so that their
gods were clan and city gods; in the Middle Ages however a more universal brotherhood
developed: Christianity. Christianity not only 'destroyed whatever religious significance' the
clan ties retained, but it also laid the foundations for new forms of organization; the magical
aspects of these forms found their expression in the cultic associations of the Lord's Supper
and the administrative ones in the parish community.
28
The fraternities could develop further - into routinized charismatic 'estates' - by using the
wealth the market provided; they were able to monopolize the profit chances of the market
and of the crafts drawn by it, since they formed their own organizations which were closed to
outsiders: 'only the members of the sworn association were to be permitted to share in the
commerce of the city.'
29
When we combine Weber's analysis of the creation of new military trading fraternities with
Weber-Schnitger's report on the prohibition of women to bear weapons
30
, we may conclude
that the link between money and manhood was solidified: since women were not allowed to
bear weapons, they were not allowed to trade.
31
And when 'the purely personal and
temporary coniurationes developed into permanent political associations whose members
were collectively, as urban citizens, subject to a special and autonomous law'
32
, women
were also excluded from this new law. The Germanic law system which centered around the
'Dinggenossenschaften', in which the armed men created their own law
33
, in particular did
not allow participation of women. From its beginning, therefore, the occidental city supported
the patriarchal power of estates of proven men.
According to Weber, however, the wealth citizens acquired in trade was the foundation for a
second dissolution process of 'traditional domination', in this case that of the patriarchal-
patrimonial lord, in whose legal domain the city was founded.
self-surrender to evil magical forces, subsequently assumes the character of a conditional self-curse, calling for
the divine wrath to strike. Thus the oath remains even in later times one of the most universal forms of all
fraternization pacts.'
28
This also means that Jews were from the beginning automatically excluded from the burgher association. ES
p. 1244, 1246/7, WG p. 746, 747.
29
ES p. 1252, WG p. 751
30
EuM p. 210, see above Ch. 2,8.
31
though they had created many of the new crafts; see for instance Sullerot (1968) and Power (1975).
32
ES p. 1254, WG p. 752.
33
ES p. 1249, WG p. 749.
 |
 |
 |