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.
87
In contrast to his treatment of 'traditional patriarchy', in which the 'master of the household'
seems to stand alone, Weber in his conceptual evolvement of 'charisma' presents the
patriarch as a group member, in this way indicating a sociological basis of his power.
The patriarch in the legal sense had as a military man inherited his property from his military
father; his 'blood' had guaranteed him admission to the charismatic education of his father's
'caste'; its military organization guaranteed his domination over his subjects. No physical or
mental superiority is needed for his domination.
The concept of 'caste' can furthermore be interpreted as a representation of the
phenomenon that not all the patriarch's subjects are his - patriarchal - kin. In the house only
those whom he himself regards as his kin are treated as such: his legal wives share, as
wives, his status, which is automatically transferred to their children; he can also adopt
children at will. All his other subjects are of a different quality and are as such excluded from
the brotherhood of superior beings.
In Weber's further analysis of the developments of 'patriarchy', however, the patriarch again
appears as an isolated individual: as the only man between non-men. In his analysis of 'the
oikos' he represents the great patriarch, without analyzing the confraternization or caste of
which he is a member.
11. The 'oikos' as an economic conceptualization of the formal patriarchal household
Weber's identification of the 'patriarchal household' with legal patriarchy forms a
indispensable building stone in his conceptualization of the 'social' - public - connections
between economy and society, since in his analysis the patriarchal household can evolve
into the economic association which the economist Rodbertus called 'the oikos'
90
. This
'oikos', in its turn, according to him can develop into a political association.
91
Weber views the patriarchal 'oikos' as one of the most common economic formations in
natural economies all over the world. It is not simply a large, selfsupporting household; it is
explanatory force in a feminist historical materialist context, where development of production and subsequent
wealth are thought to have been an incentive for groups of men, who, having lost their social economic position
of hunters, transform their hunting fraternities into warrior or magical-religious consociations. Whether Weber is
right in supposing that the warriors who used violence to appropriate the sources of wealth indeed developed
patriarchy, or whether religious consociations also constituted a base for male power and appropriation, seems to
me not the most important question, since, as Weber explains in his chapter on religious groups, patriarchal
warriors and priests, often work closely together to dominate and legitimate their domination of women and other
unfree persons. Charismatic as well as traditional d o m i n a t i o n have in any case to be understood as a r e s
u l t of social-economic developments, not as their starting point.
90
'Oikos' just is Greek for 'house'.
91
'The disintegration of the household and of domestic authority because of exchange with the outside, and the
resulting rise of the capitalist enterprise proceed in juxtaposition to the household's internal evolution into an o i k
o s, as Rodbertus called it', ES p. 381, WG p. 230. This indeed is an analysis on the highest level of abstraction,
because, as appears in Weber's paragraph on the disintegration of the household in ES p. 375 ff., WG p. 225 ff.
This process 'became possible only within the framework of a money economy', which developed later: 'As early
as in the large capitalistic households of medieval cities - for example, in Florence - every person had his own
account.' Thus it is to be understood that the transformation of patriarchal household into capitalist enterprise
occurred at quite another point in history than the development of the patriarchal oikos.
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