Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy. 1994
Chapter 8 Connections between formal rationality and patriarchal-patrimonial domination
over and through men
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4. Patriarchal patrimonialism: the destruction of the freedom and equality of the patrimonial
landlords in Russia
To demonstrate the importance of the influence of the Estates on the development and the
character of the revived patrimonialism on the Western European continent, I will now
discuss the case of patriarchal-patrimonial administration in Russia, which Weber compares
to the marginally patrimonial case of the English justices of the peace
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.
In Weber's argument the most important difference between patrimonial administration and
administration by feudally influenced 'honoratiores' is that a patrimonial bureaucracy can be
rationalized and administration by honoratiores cannot. If patrimonialism is too dependent on
honoratiores - as it was in England - it will not become rationalized. This view of Weber
corresponds to his opinion that feudalism is not only no 'indispensable intermediate link in
the development from patrimonialism to bureaucracy', but that it has an inverted relation with
patrimonialism: the stronger the influence of feudalism, the weaker patrimonialism and its
apparatus.
If this were true, one would expect rationalized patrimonialism to develop in empires in which
feudalism did not exist, or in which it was at most very weakly developed. Yet Weber
presents the opposite conclusion. According to him, the absence of feudal estates means
the absence of status groups of officials characterized by their own status honor and by
loyalty to the patrimonial ruler; he strongly suggests that the effect of this lack of a solidarity
of interest among noble officers with regard to the further development of the patrimonial
bureaucracy and eventually on its rationalization is negative.
The outstanding example of patriarchal patrimonialism without a status group of officials is
Tsarist Russia; Weber also cites comparable developments in the late Roman and Byzantine
empires, and among their Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic predecessors and their
Islamic successors, where 'manorial patrimonialism (-) resulted neither in a definite nexus
between landowners and state offices nor in the rise of a homogeneous manorial
and their use of personal servants they did not invest. Since they used compulsory, unpaid labor they wasted
manpower; they 'withhold labor from the free market and use it in a way that largely fails to create capital, and
sometimes simply consumes it', without creating the mass purchasing power needed for industrialization (ES p.
1101, WG p. 647). Furthermore the feudal lords tried to impede capitalist development through political
repression and social exclusiveness. If, however, the nobility succeeded in frustrating the bourgeoisie in its
attempts to enter the noble stratum by buying land, a trend which was strongest in the Middle Ages and in
particular in Germany, it indirectly furthered capitalism, because the bourgeoisie then had to invest its profits in
trade and industry, ES p. 1101, WG p. 648. The rigidity of the feudal system paradoxically 'can benefit the
formation of a rational capitalist system through a more gradual and continuous development and can further its
advance within the interstices of the feudal system', because of the chances for individual acquisition being
limited: 'But exactly because these chances were lacking, capital flowed into the channels of purely bourgeois
acquisition through the putting-out system and the manufactures. And the more successfully the feudal stratum
prevented the intrusion of nouveaux riches, excluded them from offices and political power, socially "declassed"
them and blocked their acquisition of aristocratic landed estates, the more it directed this wealth to purely
bourgeois-capitalist uses.' (ES p. 1102, WG p. 648) This paradoxical process, though, cannot be presented as an
explanation of the causes of British industrial capitalism, since Weber emphasized that the English landed gentry
and commercial classes merged into the stratum of 'gentlemen'.
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which I, because of its important feudal characteristics, treated in Ch. 6,6.
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