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.
85
The importance of a sociological concept of 'caste' lies in its possibility to criticize historical
myths of superior and inferior 'races' and to explain the ambivalent position of racially-
discriminated men and of the women who identify with them. It also serves to provide Weber
with a further element for his sociological interpretation of the origins of legal patriarchy,
without taking recourse to 'the Aryan myth' on 'Indo-Germanic' conquerors who would have
introduced patriarchy into Europe.
85
10. Property of land and people: military caste and patriarchal 'familia'
As we have seen, Weber connected military castes to the invention of masculine property of
land, based on the idea of male property as something 'won and defended by force', in which
'unarmed persons, especially women, cannot have a share'. If the members of a military
caste lived dispersed in the countryside
86
, according to him patriarchy in the legal sense
usually became predominant.
87
Weber does not explain how this situation has come about; neither does he explain how and
why military fraternities acquired the power which enabled them to regard land as something
which is conquered by men. Again he represents a historical development on a conceptual
level by reasoning from the result backwards: military fraternities have conquered land and
the people who live on it and therefore they can be conceptualized as a 'status group', in this
case a ritually closed 'caste'. In his interpretation these 'warrior castes' cannot have been
other than patriarchal; he deduces this from the character of great empires:
'As far as our historical knowledge goes, the empire-building peoples of the Far East and India, the Near East,
the Mediterranean and the European North developed patrilineal descent and exclusive agnatic attribution of
kinship and property; contrary to a frequent assumption, the Egyptians also had patrilineal descent even though
they did not have agnatic attribution. The major reason for this phenomenon is that great empires cannot be
maintained in the long run by small monopolistic, staff-like groups of warriors who live closely together in the
manner of "men's houses'; in a natural economy empire-building requires as a rule the patrimonial and seignorial
control of the land, even is this subjection proceeds from groups of closely settled warriors, as in Antiquity. The
manorial administration develops quite naturally out of the patriarchal household that is turned into an apparatus
of domination; everywhere the manor originates in patriarchal authority. Hence, there is no serious evidence for
the assertion that the predominance of patrilineal descent among those peoples was ever preceded by another
order, ever since kinship regulations among them had been regulated by any law at all.
'
88
qualified individuals (...). But individual selection is far from being the only, or the predominant, way in which
status groups are formed: political membership or class situation has at all times been at least as frequently
decisive,' ES p. 935, WG p. 537, see also ES p. 386, WG p. 234: '"pure" anthropological types are often a
secondary consequence of such closure (...).' and ES p. 388, WG p. 235: 'But if there are sharp boundaries
between areas of observable styles of life, they are due to conscious monopolistic closure, which started from
small differences that were then cultivated and intensified; or they are due to the peaceful or warlike migrations of
groups that previously lived far from each other and had accommodated themselves to their heterogeneous
conditions of existence'. Weber though does not criticize all ideas about race and its effects; he only relativizes
them.
85
See Poliakov (1971). Weber does not provide information on the religious sanctions which prohibited contact
between conquerors and conquered.
86
See on the development of military cities below Ch. 7.
87
ES p. 370 ff.; WG p. 222 ff.; see above Ch. 3,5.
88
Ibid.
 |
 |
 |