Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 3 Private versus public sphere: the origins of household and kin group.
of fatherhood, which, in its turn, could only be created 'after the (by no means primitive)
discovery that procreation and birth are connected.'
14
Since marriage could not be an original social relation, Weber had to find another one. We
saw that Weber-Schnitger solved the problem by assuming a Hobbes-like original state of
'the right of the strongest': she presupposed that the men dominated the women in
temporary relationships, which were based on 'the need of the woman of protection for
herself and for her child and the endeavor of the man to better the food supply by her help',
and that women and men together formed a 'horde'
15
. To Weber, however, this 'horde' or
'tribe' presented serious problems. If he considered it to be an original social relation, with a
claim on hunting and fishing grounds - like Weber-Schnitger supposed - they would in his
terms be 'Verbände', social formations, perhaps even the oldest ones. But what would be the
foundation of their social order ? It could not be based on patriarchal domination, since
fatherhood and marriage are relatively young institutions. What kind of social relations could
Weber find except those between women and children and between the children
themselves, in youth and later in adulthood ? The construction of such relations, however,
would mean a conceptualization of a 'matriarchal' or 'siblinghood' association, which would
not differ essentially from the 'classificatory kinship' system which Morgan reconstructed
from its survival in the customs of North America and Polynesia.
Weber indeed does not bring forward Weber-Schnitger's 'horde' or 'tribe' as an original social
relationship; on the contrary he emphatically asserts that the 'tribe or 'clan' is a relatively late
development, which occurred only in specific circumstances, in particular in the absence of
any form of state formation.
16
Instead of the 'horde' he presents the relation between the individual mother and her children
as 'original' ('urwüchsig'):
'Of all the relationships arising from sexual intercourse, only the mother-child relationship is *"original", because it
is a *caring community, of which the naturally given duration lasts until that comprises the time until the child is
able to search for means of subsistence on his own
.'
17
Though Weber tries to avoid a too biologist interpretation of the relation of a woman and her
children by including the economic aspect of 'care' ('Versorgung') as a decisive element of
this relationship, some confusion between social and biologic elements
18
can be discerned.
Not only does he present sexual intercourse between the woman concerned with some man
as the foundation of the relation with her children, giving no attention to the subjective
meaning the woman might have given to this activity, and positing in its place the modern
biological knowledge that the child would not be there if the woman had not, during her fertile
period, had sexual intercourse with a fertile man and become pregnant by this action; but he
also conceptualizes her care for this child as self-evident, giving no attention to the fact that
this care has to be based on a conscious choice - which may be supported by other people -
to keep the child and care for it. Weber therefore appears to present both 'nature' and
'economy' as the foundation of all social relations: he views child-care is economic in
14
ES p. 1007, WG p. 58. Weber here follows the discoveries of the ethnologists of his time, which are often
ignored even now, just like the body of knowledge on kinship relations is ignored; see Evelyn Reed (1978).
15
EuM p.3/4.
16
ES p. 363 ff., see also p. 673 and 688 ff.; WG p. 218 f., see also p. 402 and 412/413.
17
ES p. 357, WG p. 212. In ES 'urwüchsig' is translated by 'natural'; the rest of the sentence by 'because it is a
biologically based household unit that lasts until the child is able to search for means of subsistence on his own.'
This way of translating introduces the kind of biologism Weber tried to avoid.
18
See Ch. 1,4 above on 'given data' or 'processes and phenomena without subjective meaning'
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