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.
autonomous, even dominating position of women in early agricultural societies, he projects
the 'private' patriarchal family of his time backwards into the beginning of history. He does
this by constructing a conceptual sequence which represents historical developments in a
reverse way: from the sex-neutral concept 'traditional social order' to the sex-defined
concept 'traditional domination based on personal loyalty to a man, resulting from common
upbringing'; or, as in his older essays in ES, from 'the inviolability of custom' to 'masculine
household authority over women based on superior strength, practical knowledge and
experience' and from there to 'patriarchal household domination'. These conceptual
sequences hide a speculation on the origins of patriarchy: a hypothesis that patriarchy
appropriated the authority of custom: Weber makes the concept 'patriarchal domination'
appropriate the concept 'masculine household authority', which at its turn, with the help of
the concepts 'common upbringing' and 'superior masculine strength, practical knowledge
and experience' had appropriated the concept 'authority of tradition'.
In this way Weber transforms his methodological separation of facts from values, of public
from private life, into a sociological statement: he projects the modern split between private
institutions, which include women and men, on the one hand, and public institutions, which
include only men, on the other, back into prehistory, constructing a mutual, asymmetric
dependence of separate 'household' and kin groups. The unfreedom and inequality of family
dependents is placed outside of the realm of rational understanding.
In this way, however, the official historical developments - the change in the relations
between men - cannot be understood. Weber, therefore, represents the appropriation of
traditional relations by patriarchy also in another, more materialistic way: by connecting his
concept of patriarchal domination explicitly to the concept of property, in this case the
military appropriation of land. He gives three general statements on property:
'1) Land may be primarily a place to work on. In this case all land and all yield belong to the women's kin groups,
as long as cultivation is primarily women's work. The father does not leave any land to his children, since it is
handed down through the mother's house and kin group; the paternal inheritance comprises only military
equipment, weapons, horses and tools of male crafts. In pure form this case is rare. 2) Conversely, land may be
considered male property won and defended by force; unarmed persons, especially women, cannot have a share
in it. Hence, the father's local political association may be interested in retaining his sons as military manpower;
since the sons join the father's military group, they inherit the land from him, and only movable property from the
mother. 3) The neighborhood composed of a village or a "rural commune" (Markgenossenschaft) always controls
the land gained through joint deforestation, that means, through men's work, and does not permit its inheritance
by children who do not continuously fulfill their obligations toward the association.
'
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ES p. 371, WG p. 223. Presumably this shift from 'loyalty and authority' to 'property', is the reason why Roth
and Wittig made a separate chapter of this section and the following ones on the disintegration of the household
and its opposite developments into enterprise and 'oikos'. As Weber's discussion of 'the neighborhood' is not
connected to his treatment of 'household' and 'tribe', I do not discuss this foundation of masculine property.
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