Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. SUMMARY
183
The divergent developments in Europe were caused by the establishment of two kinds of
social formations of free men: that of feudal knighthood on the one hand and of the armed
groups of traders who founded the medieval European cities on the other. Both developed
from wandering charismatic groups which broke with their homesteads, their kin and their
traditions and formed new confraternizations with strange men.
The feudal knights were bound to the patrimonial ruler by a contract which pledged them to
the performance of military and administrative services, in return for a 'fief', patrimonial land
of their own; this confraternization contract implied a code which combined military honor
with personal fealty. Free men had also joined the patrimonial administration, though when
they did so they had to give up their formal freedom; by this influx of free men the services of
officials were restricted to honorable ones and was the position of 'ministeriales' changed
into one of honor, the real work being done by salaried workers. So officials and knights
formed one status group of patriarchs, loyal to the king, but fighting for their own masculine
honor.
The most important activities of the armed confraternizations who founded the medieval
cities were of an economic rather than a military kind; but their arms enabled them to found
an 'illegitimate', revolutionary kind of domination, which threatened all patrimonial princes for
centuries. Market relations, however, caused an individualization process within the large
trading households, in which sons acquired individual rights and the office was separated
from the household. Although Weber does not mention it, this emancipation process also
concerned the wives of the traders; this meant that the patriarchal rights of the citizens were
threatened, causing them to seek support by affiliating themselves with patrimonial lords. So,
eventually, they returned to the patrimonial fold, creating a base for the riches of the rulers,
who in their turn copied the rational law and administration which had been developed in the
cities.
According to me the position of the wealthy citizen was an ambiguous one: he could live like
a free man - a knight - only when he was a rentier; work - 'trade' - threatens his status.
Weber's famous 'puritan ethic' can thus be interpreted as an attempt to add charismatic - in
this case ascetic - elements to the entrepreneurial lifestyle and to make, by routinization of
Calvin's predestination doctrine, economic success a proof of election.
In this way typically western European status groups of men were created. These men were
the ones who began to repress all sex-defined relations, including their own struggle to enter
patriarchy (to become a member of a positive status group and acquire a woman of their
own) from their consciousness, orienting themselves to public life: to fraternities which
promised freedom and equality for all men.
One would expect Weber to connect the transformation from patrimonial to modern
bureaucracy with the entrance of these specifically western European status groups of
feudal knights and autonomous citizens into the administrative apparatus; since he wants to
construct 'logically consistent ideal types, however, he is not able to do this. He presents the
elements of the contradictary relation between 'patriarchy' and 'fraternity', as well as those of
the resulting 'impersonality', the obedience to rules instead of to persons, as separate
phenomena only. A connection between knight and citizen he finds only in England, where
according to him no central bureaucracy developed: therefore he presents the aristocratic-
entrepreneurial-administrative 'gentleman' as the only possible ideal of modern manhood.
He contrast this 'manhood' ideal with the ideal type of 'the German', who is presented as a
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