Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 7 The city: new fraternities of patriarchs
134
The apparent contradictions between 'charisma' and 'rationality' were also bridged; this was
possible because the status claims of the 'business-gentleman' were not founded on his
routine activities - if this had been the case, every clerk could have claimed nobleman status
- but on his financial success and on the lifestyle which was the result of it.
We will see later that financial success could also give another entry into routinized
charismatic groups: the entry by means of a university education. I will discuss the
fragmented treatment Weber gives to the 'rationalization of charismatic education' in when I
discuss the connections of formal rationality and charisma.
110
14. The influence of the city on the rationalization of patrimonialism; the end of city autonomy
on the Western European continent
The autonomous cities of medieval Western Europe cannot be merely a 'historical interlude'
within patrimonialism, as Weber asserted in his essay on The City; they have been an
important link in the rationalization process, since they decisively influenced the forms
patriarchal patrimonialism took in its revival. Military charisma was routinized into a
plutocracy from which patrimonial officials could be recruited; the sons of the members of the
resulting financial and administrative aristocracy could claim entry into it by pursuing a
rationalized charismatic education.
Since the burgher status groups in the medieval Western European cities gradually changed
from armed 'coniurationes' to business confraternizations, the cities lost their military
strength, giving patrimonial rulers from within and without a chance to subject them.
111
Weber states emphatically that patrimonial rulers only subjected autonomous cities if and
when they had built up a bureaucratic apparatus that enabled them to exploit the wealth of
the cities; as long as the patrimonial officials, who originally were courtiers, lacked 'the
specialized knowledge, continuity, and training in rational objectiveness which would have
given them the ability to order and direct the affairs of urban craft and commercial interests',
the rulers were only interested in the financial revenues of the cities.
112
According to Winckelmann Weber often expressed the 'Lehrmeinung' that the patrimonial
rulers copied the rational administrative principles of the cities. Yet in ES he nowhere
formulated such a direct link between city administration and patrimonial bureaucracy. When
in his essay on the city he describes the changes in city administration after the patrimonial
victory of the Italian signorie, he only conceptualizes a tenuous connection between the
victory of patrimonialism in Italy on the one hand and the rationalization of the city
administration on the other. In his view the administrative innovations of the signorie
consisted in the establishing of princely officials and of collegiate bodies for financial and
"declass" the "nouveaux riches". This happened particularly in feudal Japan where eventually the whole foreign
trade was greatly restricted, primarily in the interest of stabilizing the social order.' One could add that in Western
Europe the feudal stratum did not at all succeed in its intentions to restrict the accumulation of wealth. On the
influence of their aims on the development of capitalism see Ch. 8,3.
110
See below Ch. 9.
111
ES p. 1319/20, WG p. 786. In Italy personal and political connections of the city dictators with the great
dynasties finally made uprisings of the burghers illusory, because of the growing use of professional, mercenary
armies by the dynastic powers.
112
ES p. 1351/2, WG p. 804.
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