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
143
aristocracy.'
22
According to him a 'disconnected juxtaposition of landed nobility and
patrimonial officialdom' existed both in the late Roman empire and in the early Oriental and
Hellenic ones.
In Russia the tsars, in particular Peter the Great, had succeeded in subjecting the nobility by
binding all the higher social rank (chin) to the patrimonial-bureaucratic offices, taking away
the rights of those noble families which for two generations had failed to supply an official
functionary. Therefore the Russian nobles, 'like the Chinese benefice-holders', 'viewed one
another as competitors for the chin and all the opportunities available through the ruler's
favor.'
23
The complete lack of status solidarity among the aristocracy was not only a result of the
specific measures of Peter the Great, but also of the strategies of earlier tsars, who had
transformed the nobility almost completely into a 'court nobility'. According to Weber this
transformation was made possible by the fact that the institute of the 'Gefolgschaft' was
connected with 'sib solidarity, which endeavored to appropriate for the whole sib the service
rank, once it was acquired, and the opportunities connected with it.' Up to the time of Peter
the Great this sib solidarity had made the free selection of officials by the Tsar difficult; Peter
succeeded in breaking it, without at the same time creating a status solidarity directed
against him.
24
Here Weber again emphasizes the importance of the breaking of the clan ties. In his view a
free feudal system could not develop as long as clan ties existed, since these prevented the
creation of new, contractual confraternizations between 'strangers'; the confraternizations
apparently could not develop either when the clan ties were broken only by the strategies of
the patrimonial rulers. These strategies could turn landlords into dependents, with the result
that 'one fundamental feature of medieval Western aristocracy could not develop at all: it
only means that a central guide to social conduct in the form of a distinctive traditional ethic
re-enforced by education.'
25
This does not mean that groups of honoratiores did not develop in Russia and the other
empires Weber discussed; it only means that their conventions 'could not serve as a uniform
ethical guide for "honorable" conduct', based on 'a personal "honorable" relationship to the
lord and a corresponding ethos'. Either there was no connection between 'the individual's
social honor and his relation to the lord', or this 'honor' did not amount to more than mere
ambition or, at best, 'a sense of office and status dignity in the manner of the noblesse de
robe'.
26
22
'no matter how many incipient phenomena existed.' ES p. 1067, WG p. 622/3.
23
'The Tsar's power was rooted in the firm solidarity of interest with him on the part of the individual chin-holders
who ran the administration and the army, which was based on compulsory recruitment. Equally important was the
complete lack of a status-based solidarity of interest among the nobility. ES p. 1065/6, WG p. 621.
24
ES p. 1067, WG p. 622.
25
'this ethic made personal relations central to the style of life and impressed every individual with the obligations
of a status honor that was jointly held and thus a unifying bond for the status group as a whole.'
26
The honoratiores' conventions 'merely provided a framework for the defense of economic interests or the
undisguised striving for social prestige and failed to offer to the notables an elementary internalized standard of
self-assertion and of proving one's own honor. The individual's social honor and his relation to the lord were
either without any inner connection, as in the case of the autonomous honoratiores, or simply amounted to career
opportunities which merely appealed to the desire to count for something, as in the cases of the court aristocracy,
the chin, the mandarins and all kinds of positions depending exclusively upon the ruler's favor. On the other
hand, appropriated benefices of all types were indeed a suitable basis for a sense of office and status dignity in
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