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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According to Weber empires can only be built and maintained from patriarchal households,
and because we know empires have existed, those patriarchal households must also have
existed, as a basis for the development of patriarchal descent.
Although this functionalist argument gives no historical insight, I consider the conceptual
connection Weber makes between 'warrior status group' and 'patriarchy' as a step forward
from the idea of an original patriarchy, Military appropriation of land and people is at least
represented on a conceptual level; one could even say that Weber presents at least a
conceptual version of the theory that patriarchy is a 'stage of development' of the relations in
the regions where the great empires ruled. 'Proven manhood' is connected to patriarchal
property, as it was historically defined - as full and unfettered property of human beings,
animals, things and land; to the Roman identity between of the 'family' of the patriarch and
his 'Vermögen', his 'wealth': his 'familia'. Weber considers this property of dependent
persons a characteristic of 'primitive patriarchalism'.
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'Rather, primitive patriachalism continues to view household authority as the power of disposition over property
even after the (by no means primitive) recognition that procreation and birth are connected. The children of all
women subject to the authority of a master are considered "his' children if he so wishes, just as the offspring of
his animals are his property. This holds whether the woman is a wife or a slave, and regardless of the facts of
paternity. The purchase and selling of children is still a common phenomenon in developed cultures, in addition
to the renting (into the mancipium) and mortgaging of children and of women.' ES p. 1007, WG p. 581; see also
Schnitger EuM p. 48 ff.
The similarity between the appropriation of children and that of the young of cattle, has made many feminists
suppose that patriarchy was developed by societies of cattle-breeding nomads, where women did not have a
position similar to that of women in societies where they gathered or cultivated plants. The Webers do not
discuss this hypothesis. Schnitger discusses the notion of cattle-breeding nomads as a phase in the development
of humanity in general and of the Indo-Germans in particular, only to reject it. For Europe and the mediterranean
countries, however, she sees cattle breeding and the wanderings it resulted in as having contributed to the
individualistic striving for freedom which, according to her, still lives on in Western European culture (p. 44).
Cattle breeding causes the 'enslaving of labor by property' (p. 45). Whoever not is strong and adroit enough, and
still more important, has no luck, will loose his cattle to others and will have to serve kinsmen who have property:
he will become a 'proletarian'. Individualism here means greed, 'Viehsucht', enslavement to cattle, in Schnitger's
words. This 'Viehsucht' smothers all other feelings and unchains all raw and warlike instincts' (p. 46). 'Larceny of
cattle is considered knightly living, a man worthy', housekeeping and the cultivating of plants are women's work
and therefore dishonorable and unworthy.
The origins of 'family' relationships, however, can also be found in agricultural societies. According to Evelyn
Reed (1975) they developed through i n d i v i d u a l appropriation of collective kinship relationships. This
individual appropriation of collective lands, the individualization of the communal property of children which
developed into 'motherhood' and later fatherhood, and individualization of sexual contacts with cross-cousins
which developed into the 'pairing family' all resulted in the forming of more permanent heterosexual relationships.
This process goes hand in hand with a shift from gathering-hunting to horticulture and agriculture: if a man works
in the garden of his girlfriend's kin, some productive relationship is founded, which has a more permanent
character than the vagaries of sex can give. Under these circumstances one could even imagine the fraternities
to transform their hunting magic, which not only serves to manipulate the behavior of animals but also the forces
of weather and seasons, into agricultural magic, and thence into a religion in which groups of priest appropriate
the ancestor spirits and transform them into goddesses that have to be served and worshipped, with compulsory
services and taxes as a consequence. The archeological material from the neolitihic Balkan cultures, presented
by Marija Gimbutas (1974) appears to support this line of interpretation, since Gimbutas found neither weapons
nor other traces of warfare. Thus instead of the warrior hypothesis Weber's analysis of routinized charisma and
transformation to priestly domination and hierocratic state formation can be used.
My conclusion is therefore that Weber's sociological concepts of charisma and its routinization could have
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