Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 4 Relations between men: from routinization of charisma to patriarchal
domination over men.
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The proven 'men' are described as 'free men', although the opposite of 'free men' in this
outline is 'women, old people and children', not 'unfree men'; under 'status privileges', Weber
names command (property) of land and slaves - slaves being unfree women and unfree
men. He describes the women as 'dependent economies ('Wirtschaften'), although he does
not explain anywhere why they are dependent. He thus shifts here from a pre-patriarchal
social structure to a patriarchal one where the free warriors possess land and slaves.
In my view Winckelmann was right to include Weber's sketch of the 'warrior status groups' in
WuG. This sketch shows the awkward shift Weber makes from 'warrior consociations'
excluding women to 'status groups' including women, albeit as dependents. In this new
conceptualization the warrior confraternizations, who lived communistically in the men's
house, apart from the women but dependent on them for their food, appear to have
appropriated land, women and slaves.
Weber thus makes his concept of 'status group' appropriate that of 'warrior confraternization',
turning its meaning into its opposite, just as he turned the meaning of 'tradition' and also two
(or three) meanings of 'charisma' into their opposites. Through a conceptual allocation of
land, women and slaves to the 'warrior fraternity', Weber is able to construct a development
of a patriarchy in the legal sense of 'patrilineal descent and exclusively agnatic attribution of
kinship and property', which indeed is his universalist, public concept of patriarchy as a
legitimate domination of proven men over other men, defined as 'non-men' or 'women'.
I understand Weber's shift from 'warrior consociation', through 'warrior status group' to
'status group', as a functionalist conceptualization of
the result of a development in which manhood, honor and property-ownership have come to
be identified. Women and failed men are each excluded from it in a different way: the
'women', the human beings without honor, are separated by the real men in women and
unfree men, the difference between these two groups being that some of the women - the
daughters of the legitimate wives of members of the status group - are candidates for
marriage and thus for incorporation into the status group by way of a 'status contract'. These
women therefore develop different career perspectives and competition strategies; they are
increasingly followed by other women who wish to enter status groups through marriage. In
this way 'femininity' as vicarious participation in masculine wealth and prestige is created.
The concepts 'honor' and 'status' complete the opposition between daily routine work and
routinized not-work, which Weber conceptualized when he constructed the concept of
'charisma'. Human beings without honor or status have to work, to perform all kinds of
physical and mental services that directly or indirectly benefit their betters. For through all his
transformations and reversals of the meaning of charisma Weber leaves one element of it
unchanged: the idea that men who feel themselves to be superior abhor every kind of
the dependent economies (women).
Status privileges: "hunting stable", bearing of weapons, tool labor, participation in hunting and looting expeditions,
food privileges (meat), participation in warrior orgies (cannibalism) and warrior cults, right to tribute, command of
land and slaves, as well as certain kinds of cattle.
Sometimes development to secret clubs with a monopoly of (camorra-like) control of goods and security.
After the end of the youth period: resignation from the men's house, entrance in the family ('military service').
After the end of military ability: expulsion, killing, or on the contrary: to be worshipped as expert in magical
tradition.'
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