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
153
9. The mentality of 'the patriarchal-patrimonial official'
Weber pictures the mentality of 'the patriarchal-patrimonial official' as that of a subordinate, a
working small-bourgeois non-person. He does not include his own earlier analyses of the
knightly lifestyle of the 'ministeriales' in his picture: he does not mention the strong position
of the French patrimonial officials, who could control the king by threatening to go on strike
and demand the purchase price of their offices back; of the Russian bureaucrats, who
controlled their king by intrigue and obstruction, and of the Prussian Junker-estates of
notable officials
69
. He emphasizes the contrast between the 'Gesinnung', the mentality, of
the patrimonial official and that of the feudal knight, by mentioning the differences in their
manner of education - which for the patrimonial official consisted of administrative training -
and to their different codes of honor:
'Patrimonial education always lacks the features of playfulness and elective affinity to art, of heroic asceticism
and hero worship, of heroic honor and heroic hostility to the utilitarianism of business and office - features which
feudalism inculcates and preserves. Indeed the administrative "organization" (ambtliche Betrieb) is an impersonal
"business' (sachliches Geschäft): The patrimonial official bases his honor not upon his "being", but on his
"functions", he expects advantages and promotion from his "services"; the idleness, the games and the
commercial nonchalance of the knight must appear to him as slothfulness and lack of efficiency. The status ethos
adequate to the patrimonial official enters here into the avenues of the bourgeois business ethos. Already the
philosophy of the ancient Egyptian officials, as we know it from exhortations by scribes and officials to their sons,
has a distinctly utilitarian bourgeois character. In principle, n o t h i n g h a s c h a n g e d s i n c e, apart from
the increasing rationalization and professional specialization in the development from patrimonial officialdom to
modern bureaucracy.'
70
(It. mine)
Since Weber wants to deny, however, any suggestion of an affinity between patriarchal
patrimonialism and capitalism, he constructs a difference between the utilitarian bourgeois
official and the capitalist entrepreneur, and also between him and all patrimonial officials who
considered the whole realm of their discretion a hunting ground for accumulating wealth:
'The main difference between the utilitarianism of the officials and the specifically bourgeois ethos has always
been the former's abhorrence of the acquisitive drive, which is natural for a person who draws a fixed salary or
takes fixed fees, who is ideally incorruptible, and whose performance finds its dignity precisely in the fact that it is
not a source of commercial enrichment. To that extent the spirit of patrimonial administration, interested as it is in
public peace, the preservation of traditional means of livelihood and the satisfaction of the subjects, is alien to
and distrustful of capitalist development, which revolutionizes the given social conditions (-).'
71
Weber here presents a type of official who is totally different from the ones he described
earlier in his historical analysis; this official appears to embody his opinion on the German
officials of his time, an opinion which he also expressed in his political writings. These
officials who 'abhor the acquisitive drive' do not appear to belong to any positive status
group: they pride themselves on their regular, routinized labor.
Weber's construction of this type of patrimonial official can be said to include elements of
'negative status honor'; perhaps, like the bourgeois entrepreneur, such an official could be a
member of a group of 'new men' who still have to turn negative status elements into positive
ones. Weber, however, has found the first example of his kind in ancient Egypt, as a 'scribe
or official', writing edifying letters to his son; therefore he cannot be a product of specific
69
ES p. 1084/5, WG p. 615/6, see above Ch. 6,6.
70
ES p. 1108, WG p. 653.
71
ES p. 1108, WG p. 653.
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