Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
130
After the thirteenth century, however, the landed gentry took over the city leadership from
the mercantile oligarchy. Weber here does not explain why this was; he only states that the
offices, 'which originally had been based on annual elections, came increasingly to be
occupied for life and frequently came to be filled either by cooptation or as patronage of
neighboring manorial lords', and that the royal administration supported this development.
96
In his chapter on patrimonialism Weber states that the city bourgeoisie in the long run fused
with the gentry which performed the local administration.
Weber could not explain this process adequately, since he did not analyze the continuity of
the patriarchal interests of the burgher estates. In this way he obscured the common
characteristics of gentry and bourgeois and the need of support for patriarchal domination
and legitimation, which the burgher felt just as much as the free patrimonial subject or the
feudal vassal. If Weber would have conceptualized these needs - which are even stronger
because the money economy threatens to dissolve patriarchal domination - he could have
included the tendencies of the bourgeoisie to affiliate with patrimonial authorities in his
analysis. Thus he would have avoided obscurities which are the result of an emphasis on the
public aspects of bourgeois activities and a denial of their private aspects.
The fusion of English bourgeois circles with the landed gentry is no miracle, since both strata
were positive status groups; they were both associations of patriarchs; the differences in
their positions and mentalities could be bridged because they had so much in common. The
burgher estate also had its origin in routinized charismatic confraternizations; its
plutocratization could - according to Weber's own theory of the routinization of charismatic
manhood - only emphasize this characteristic.
13. Charismatic legitimacy of burgher status groups: financial success
The first English burgher-officials were rentiers: 'older persons who had retired from
business'; in particular they were 'the growing group of guild members who turned from
entrepreneurs into rentiers after having amassed sufficient wealth', active businessmen
being economically indispensable
97
. Yet elsewhere Weber claimed that businessmen were
barred from entry into the circles of honoratiores, and indeed into all positive status groups,
because of social reasons: routine economic activity, being antithetic to charisma, was held
to be dishonorable, unmanly.
Nevertheless the urban rentiers appear to have become included in the circles of the local
gentry as soon as they shared in the social honor of the office of the justice of the peace; in
Weber's analysis of the formation of the English gentleman, the active business strata were
included in them. Their mentality - 'esprit', as Weber calls it - played an important role in
forming the manhood ideal of the gentleman. Indeed, it influenced this ideal to such a
degree, that it remained ambiguous, and even contradictory, for centuries.
Weber does not give a similarly detailed description of continental developments; he reports
however several instances in which rich business circles fused with the urban nobility, only
to be attacked by new status groups of traders and even of craftsmen.
Burgher estates consist of routinized charismatic groups of 'real' men. If membership of such
groups can be bought with money and manhood is proved by lifestyle, the meaning of
96
ES p. 1280/81, WG p. 765.
97
ES p. 1060, WG p. 617.
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