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 authoritarian household of a prince, manorial lord or patrician.'
92
The oikos is the
economic formation Weber considers to have been the basis of the great empires.
Weber is mainly interested in the large oikos of kings and aristocrats, where production of
goods and services is specialized to a considerable degree; he mentions workshops where
the work is being done by people who are personally unfree: servants, officials, house
priests and warriors.
93
The 'oikos' is primarily a concept not of sociology, but of economic science, as the reference
to Rodbertus and its place in Weber's argument show. He conceptualizes it as a communal
form of household differentiation
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, contrasting it to the capitalist enterprise, which produces
for the market. Viewed sociologically, there is no difference between 'oikos' and 'patriarchal
household', except perhaps in size; only a mythical nuclear family of one man, one woman
and some non-working children could be classified as an undifferentiated household. Within
a patriarchal household there will always be several more working dependents, each with
her or his own tasks.
Weber's 'oikos' therefore is nothing more than a conceptualization of the economic aspects
of the 'patriarchal household', which he employs as a term to analyze its further political
developments. The term 'household' from this point onwards is reserved for 'bourgeois' -
'private' - production relations.
In Weber's analysis of the political developments of patriarchy he is only concerned with its
public aspects: with the domination relations between men. The relations between women
and men disappear from his discussion; they are assumed to be self-evident, since all men
in the public relationships which now are the object of his analysis, have households or strive
to acquire them: they all aim at becoming patriarchs. Weber pays no attention to their
common characteristics and accentuates the differences in power between them. The
transformation of 'patriarchal household' into 'oikos' is an intermediary step in this analytical
shift from private life, which consists of the production relations in the household, to public
life, which consists of politics and production in rational masculine organizations.
Weber does not elaborate on the production aspects of the oikos; although it can engage in
trade and, in its workshops, in a limited measure of industrial production, it is in itself
economically and sociologically static; according to him, it has therefore contributed little to
Western, rational developments. For Weber the importance of the concept 'oikos' lies in the
fact that in it patriarchal economic domination can be decentralized and develop into another
kind of domination in which some of the dependent men are invested with a degree of
patriarchal power of their own and come to rule as 'men' over women, children and other
servants. Weber calls decentralized patriarchal domination 'patrimonialism'; I will discuss it in
the next chapter.
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92
'Its dominant motive is not capitalistic acquisition but the lord's organized want satisfaction in kind.'
93
'This state of affairs was approximated to a considerable extent by the royal economies of the Orient,
especially of Egypt, and to a lesser degree by the households of the Homeric aristocrats and princes; those of the
Persian and Frankish kings also appear quite similar.'
94
ES p.1010, WG p. 583.
95
It has to be noted that Weber's indication of all patriarchal rulers with masculine grammatical forms is not
correct for legal patriarchy, since female kin members - who by status contract or blood ties are part of the ruler's
status group - have often wielded patriarchal or patrimonial power; Weber does not mention this phenomenon.
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