CHAPTER THREE
Types of Rule
1. The Validity of Legitimacy
§1. As defined above (Chapter 1, §16), rulership is the chance that specific (or all) commands will be met with obedience on the part of a specifiable group of persons. It is not therefore each and every kind of chance of exercising “power” and “influence” over other people. In this sense, in the individual instance rulership (“authority”) can also rely on the most varied motives for conformity: from dull habituation to purely purposively rational considerations. Present in every genuine relationship of rule is a specific minimum of willingness to obey, hence an (outward or inner) interest in obedience.
Not every instance of rule makes use of economic means. Much less is it true that all rule has economic ends. But all rule over any number of men and women usually has need of a staff, if not absolutely always (see Chapter 1, §12, on administrative staff): there is a (normally) reliable chance that a predictably obedient group of men and women exists whose action is dedicated to the execution of general directions and substantive commands. This staff’s obedience to ruler or rulers can be based entirely on custom and practice, or entirely on affect, or on material interests, or on ideal, value-rational motives. The nature of these motives to a great extent determines the type of rule. Purely material and purposively rational motives for solidarity between ruler and administrative staff here as elsewhere imply relative instability for the latter. There are quite usually other motives as well, such as those related to affect or value-rationality. These can become quite critical in extraordinary circumstances. This relationship, like others, is rooted on a daily basis in custom and practice, together with material, purposively rational interest. However, neither custom and practice, nor interests, nor the solidarity fostered by purely affectual or value-rational motives, could provide a reliable basis for rule. Normally, there is a further element: belief in legitimacy.
All experience shows that no rulers will voluntarily rely merely on material, affectual, or value-rational motives for their Chancen of survival. Instead, they all seek to arouse and foster belief in their “legitimacy.” Besides the nature of the legitimacy so claimed, there are fundamental differences in the type of obedience, the nature of the administrative staff whose work it is to assure such obedience, and the character of rule itself. Also important are the associated differences in impact. It is therefore convenient to distinguish forms of rule according to the typical claim of legitimacy that they make. In so doing, it is easiest to begin with modern, familiar relationships.
1. The choice of this and not some other point of departure in making such distinctions can be justified only by its result. No especial problem is presented by the fact that in so doing, the significance of some other typical characteristic is underemphasised, to be then dealt with at a later point. Because of the way that the “legitimacy” of rule has very particular relationships to the legitimacy of property, it is in no respect only “ideal” in nature.
2. Not every conventionally or legally secured “claim” will be considered here a relationship involving rulership. If this were true, then the worker would, with regard to his claim to a wage, exercise “rule” over his or her employer since a court officer could, on behalf of the former, require the latter to present themselves in court. In fact, the worker is formally a partner in exchange with an employer with a “right” to receive payments. All the same, the concept of a relationship between ruler and ruled should not, of course, preclude its foundation in a formally free contract: hence, the way that the terms and conditions of employment provide for rule by the employer, and the way the feudal lord exercised rule over the serf who voluntarily entered the state of serfdom. That obedience to military discipline is formally “involuntary,” while that of the workplace is formally “voluntary,” does not change the fact that subordination to workplace discipline also implies submission to rule. Appointment as an official is also assumed by contract and, once appointed, an official can also be dismissed; even the relationship of “subject” can be voluntarily assumed and, to some extent, dissolved. Absolute lack of voluntary involvement is found only with slavery. Of course, on the other hand economic “power” secured by the enjoyment of a monopoly—in this case, the prospect of “dictating” terms of exchange to economic partners—has in itself as little to do with “rule” as it might have with “influence” arising from any kind of advantage, whether erotic, athletic, or in discussion. If a large bank is in a position to impose a standard-setting cartel on other banks, this should not be called “rule” so long as there is no kind of related obedience involved. This would mean that orders made by that bank’s managers make a claim to obedience and have the chance of being observed, execution of such orders also being subject to supervision. Of course, here as everywhere else there are marginal cases. For example, there are all kinds of intermediate stages between indebtedness and debt slavery. Even the stance of a “salon” can imply something very like authoritarian power without at the same time being necessarily a form of “rule.” In reality, it is often not possible to make such precise distinctions, but in these cases precise concepts are all the more important.
3. Of course, the “legitimacy” of rule can only be viewed as the Chance of being regarded with a relevant degree of respect, and in practice being so treated. It is far from the case that all compliance with rule is primarily, or even always, oriented to this belief. Compliance can be feigned by an individual or by an entire group purely opportunistically, can be practised out of purely material self-interest, or simply accepted as unavoidable out of individual weakness and helplessness. None of this is decisive for the classification of rule. What is important is that the form of its own claim to legitimacy is “valid” to a relevant degree, supporting its existence and defining the kind of means of rule selected. It can also happen, and in practice it frequently does, that there is such an obvious community of interest between a ruler and the administrative staff (bodyguards, praetorian guards, “Red” or “White” guards) with respect to a defenceless people that all claim to “legitimacy” can be disregarded. All the same, the nature of the legitimating relationship between ruler and administrative staff can vary greatly, depending on the manner in which authority has been founded, and to a great extent this is decisive for the structure of rule, as will become apparent.
4. “Obedience” shall mean: that obedient people mostly conduct themselves as if they, purely for their own sake, have made the substance of the command their own behavioural maxim, and this only because of the formal relationship of obedience, without regard to their own view regarding the command’s value, or lack of it.
5. Purely psychologically, the causal linkage can appear to vary, and in particular involve “dedication” or “empathy.” However, here this distinction is not of any use in seeking to typify rule.
6. The breadth of the influence that rulership exerts over social relationships and cultural phenomena is much greater than it at first sight appears. One example is the kind of rule that is exercised in school, which shapes what is treated as orthodox ways of speaking and writing. The dialects that function as the official languages of politically autonomous organisations, hence the languages of their rulers, become orthodox ways of speaking and writing, and have led to “national” separations (e.g., of Holland from Germany). In shaping youth, and therefore humanity in general, the rule of parents and school reaches well beyond an influence over (apparently) formal cultural goods.
7. That the director and administrative staff of an organisation can adopt the stance of being the “servants” of those over whom they rule of course says nothing at all about the respective character of “rulership.” The material circumstances of so-called democracy will be dealt with separately later.1
§2. There are three pure types of legitimate rule. The validity of their legitimacy can be secured primarily
1. in a rational manner: a belief in the legality of statutory orders and the right of those appointed to exercise rule to give directions (legal rule); or
2. in a traditional manner: an everyday belief in the sanctity of long-established traditions and the legitimacy of those whose authority derives from these traditions (traditional rule); or finally,
3. in a charismatic manner: the exceptional sanctity or heroic qualities or exemplary character of a person, and of the orders that this person proclaims or creates (charismatic rule).
Where rule is statutory, the legally formulated substantive impersonal order and the persons thereby appointed to exercise authority by this order are obeyed by virtue of the formal legality of its ordinances and the domain over which they have force. In the case of traditional rule, obedience is owed by virtue of piety and familiarity with the person of the ruler appointed by tradition (and bound by it). In the case of charismatic rule, the charismatic leader acquires this role by virtue of personal trust in revelation, heroism, or exemplary qualities within the domain where belief in such charisma prevails.
1. The utility of this classification can only be judged by its success in furthering systematic analysis. The concept of “charisma” (“gift of grace”) is taken from ancient Christian terminology. Rudolf Sohm’s Kirchenrecht was the first to clarify its meaning for Christian religious organisation, even though he did not use the same terminology; others, such as Holl in Enthusiasmus und Bußgewalt, made clear some important consequences.
2. That none of these three ideal types discussed below has ever appeared in a historically “pure” form should no more prevent conceptual identification in as pure a form as possible than it does elsewhere. In §11.ff., I discuss the modification of pure charisma through routinisation, and in so doing increase appreciably its connection to empirical forms of rule. But it is also true that any empirical historical form of rule is rarely simple and straightforward. And a sociological typology provides empirical historical study with an advantage that should not be underestimated: in a particular individual form of rule, it can identify in what way this is “charismatic,” “hereditary charisma” (§§10, 11), “the charisma of office,” “patriarchal” (§7), “bureaucratic” (§4), related to “social rank,” or is similar to such types; in so doing, it works with precisely defined concepts. The following is far removed from any belief that a historical reality can be entirely “captured” in the following conceptual schema.
2. Legal Rule with a Bureaucratic Administrative Staff
Preliminary remark: The following deliberately begins with a specifically modern form of administration, so that subsequently other forms can be compared with it.
§3. Legal rule relies on the validity of the following interconnected ideas:
1. that any legal norm can be established by agreement to or imposition of rationally oriented statutes—purposively rationally, or value rationally, or both—with a claim to observance at least by members of the organisation; it can also be regularly observed by persons who become involved in social relationships or social action considered relevant to the organisation, and which are within the powers of the organisation, or for territorial organisations, within their territory.
2. that every body of law is in essence a cosmos of abstract rules that have normally been established intentionally; that the administration of the law is the application of these rules to individual cases; that administration is the rational maintenance of interests anticipated by organisational orders within the bounds of legal rules; and finally, that this occurs according to general specifiable principles that can be confirmed in organisational orders, or that are at least not contravened by them.
3. that therefore the typical legal ruler, the “principal,” in making orders and issuing commands adheres to the impersonal order to which his instructions are oriented.
This is also true of a legal ruler who is not an “official,” such as an elected state president.
4. that as it is usually expressed, the person who obeys does so as a member of the organisation, and is obedient only “to the law.”
This can be as a member of an association, commune, or church, or in a state, as a citizen.
5. in conformity with 3., the idea prevails that members of the organisation in obeying the ruler are obedient not to his or her person, but to impersonal orders, and so they owe this obedience only within this established, rationally bounded substantive competence.
The basic categories of rational rule are therefore
1. the continuing rule-governed conduct of official functions within
2. a sphere of competence that covers
a) a substantive separation of duties based on a division of labour
b) with assignation of the required powers of command and
c) with definite demarcation of the means of compulsion probably required, and the conditions for their use.
An operation ordered in this manner will be called a “public authority” (Behörde).
There are “authorities” in this sense in large private enterprises, parties, and armies in exactly the same way as in “state” and “church.” An elected state president is also an “authority” according to this terminology (or a minister’s council or elected “popular representatives”). For the moment, these categories are not of central interest. Not every authority has powers of command in the same sense, but this differentiation is of no importance here.
There is then also the question of
3. the principle of administrative hierarchy (Amtshierarchie), the ordering of permanent supervisory instances for each public authority having right of appeal or of registering grievances made by subordinates with respect to their superiors. There are, however, different ways of determining whether and when the instance with which the grievance was registered itself has the power to replace an instruction requiring change, or whether this is delegated to the subordinate office about whom the complaint was first made.
4. the “rules” of procedure, which can be
a) technical rules, or
b) norms.
In both cases, their application makes specialist training necessary for complete rationality. Hence, participation in an organisation’s administrative staff is normally open only to those who can certify that they have received specialist training and have become qualified; only such a person is capable of appointment as an official. The typical administrative staff of rational organisations is composed of officials, whether these be political, hiereocratic, economic (especially capitalist), or any other kind of organisations.
5. Rationally, there is a principle of complete separation of the administrative staff from the means of administration and production. The officials, clerks, and workers belonging to the administrative staff do not personally own the material means of administration and production; these are supplied to them either in kind or in money, and they are held accountable for them. Here there is a principle of a complete separation of official or enterprise property or capital from private (household) property, and the workplace, the office, is separated from the home.
6. Where there is complete rationality, there is no appropriation of the official position to its incumbent. Where a “right” to a “post” has been created (as has happened, e.g., with judges, and these days for an increasing proportion of officials and even workers), this normally does not have as its purpose the appropriation of the post to the official; instead, [the intention is] to secure the purely substantive and “independent” character of the work done in that post such that it is bound by norms.
7. The principle that all administrative work is done in writing is maintained, even when oral discussion is the actual rule, or even a requirement, at least for preliminary discussion and submissions, and the final decisions. Dispositions and instructions are made in writing. Together, paperwork and the continuing conduct of business by officials create the office as the focal point of the action taken by any modern organisation.
8. Legal rule can assume many different forms, as will be discussed later.2 To begin with, the following presents a quite deliberate ideal-typical analysis of only the purest ruling structure of the administrative staff: “officialdom,” or the “bureaucracy.”
That the typical kind of director is left to one side is explained by circumstances that will become entirely clear later. The formal nature of the leadership of very important types of rule can be found in other types (hereditary and charismatic—hereditary monarchy; charismatic—the president chosen by plebiscite; others again are substantively rational in some important respects, but occupy a position lying between bureaucracy and charisma [cabinet government]; others again are directed by the [charismatic or bureaucratic] director of other organisations [parties]—ministries whose leadership is assumed by representatives of a particular party). As a type, the rational and legal administrative staff can be applied universally, and the type is what counts in everyday life; for on an everyday basis, rule is primarily administration.
§4. The purest type of legal rule is that effected through a bureaucratic administrative staff. Only the organisation’s director holds his position of rule either by virtue of appropriation, election, or having been designated as successor. But even the terms of his authority are also legal “competences.” In the purest type, the totality of the administrative staff is composed of individual officials (monocracy, in contrast to “collegiality,” which will be discussed later). These officials
1. are personally free and observe only substantive official obligations,
2. are placed in a fixed official hierarchy,
3. have defined official competences,
4. are appointed by contract, hence in principle on the basis of free selection, and
5. possess a specialised qualification—in the most rational case, qualified through examination and certified as such—and are appointed rather than elected,
6. are remunerated in money by fixed salaries, for the most part with a right to a pension; are liable to dismissal by a superior in some circumstances (particularly in private business); always have the right to resign; [receive a] salary that is graded mainly according to position in the hierarchy, as well as the degree of responsibility associated with the post, and additionally according to the principle that payment should be appropriate to social rank (Chapter 4),
7. treat the official appointment as their sole or principal occupation,
8. see themselves as having a career, being promoted according to age or performance, or both, depending on their superiors’ judgement,
9. work in complete “separation from administrative means” and without any personal right to the post occupied,
10. are subordinate to rigorous and uniform official discipline and supervision.
This order is, in principle, applicable to enterprises pursuing commercial, charitable, or any other kind of private ideals or material aims, is equally applicable to political or hierocratic organisations, and can also be demonstrated to have existed historically (with a greater or lesser coincidence with the pure type).
1. For example, the bureaucracy is, in principle, the same whether one considers private clinics, endowed hospitals, or hospitals maintained by religious orders. It can also be seen in the modern administrative role of the Catholic priesthood, which has expropriated practically all church livings that had formerly been privately appropriated. It is also evident in the conception of the universal episcopacy, which is thought to formally constitute a universal legal competence in religious matters. Likewise, the doctrine of papal infallibility is thought of as in fact involving a universal competence, but only one that functions “ex cathedra” in the domain of the office, thus implying the typical distinction between the domain of the office and that of the private affairs of the incumbent.3 It is just the same in the capitalist enterprise, the larger it is, the more so, and no less true of the political party as an enterprise (which will be discussed separately),4 nor of the modern bureaucratic army, led by military officials of a special kind called “officers.”
2. Bureaucratic rule prevails in its purest form where the principle of nomination of officials is adhered to. There is no such thing as a hierarchy of elected officials in the same way that there is one of nominated officials; the former approach makes it very difficult to approach even very approximately the disciplinary rigour of the latter. In that case, the subordinate can insist on selection just as much as the superior, and his Chancen do not depend on a superior’s judgement (on elected officials, see §14 below).
3. Appointment by contract, presuming free selection, is the essence of modern bureaucracy. Where unfree officials (slaves or dependants) are placed in a hierarchy with material competences—in a formally bureaucratic manner—we will talk in terms of a “patrimonial bureaucracy.”
4. In a bureaucracy, the role of specialist qualification is constantly increasing. Even party and trade union officials need specialist knowledge that is acquired empirically. The fact that a modern “minister” and a “state president” are the only “officials” requiring no specialist qualifications only goes to prove that they are officials only in a formal and not in a material sense; just like the “general director” of a large private limited company. The position of the “capitalist entrepreneur” is as completely appropriated as that of a “monarch.” At the top of bureaucratic rule, there is therefore unavoidably an element that is at least not purely bureaucratic. It is only a category of rule by virtue of a special administrative staff.
5. A fixed salary is normal. (We shall call sources of income that are privately appropriate “benefices”; for this concept, see §7). They are also normally paid in money; this is not at all central to the concept, but it most purely corresponds to the type. (Payments in kind have some similarities to benefices. A benefice is normally the appropriation of Chancen for earnings and positions.) Appropriation through leasing offices, the sale of offices, or by mortgaging offices belong to a different kind of pure bureaucracy (§7.1).
6. “Offices” that are held on a part-time basis or that are entirely “honorary” belong to categories that will be discussed later (§14 below). The typical “bureaucratic” official is a full-time official.
7. The separation of administrative means is common to both public and private bureaucracies (e.g., in large capitalist firms).
8. Collegial “authorities” are dealt with separately below (§15). They are retreating rapidly in the face of actually, and usually formally, monocratic direction (e.g., Prussian collegial “governments” have long given way to monocratic governmental presidents). Of crucial importance here is an interest in rapid and clear decisions, free from any need to compromise between different opinions and also free of changing majorities.
9. Modern officers are one category of appointed officials distinguished by their possession of a particular social rank, which will be discussed in the following chapter.5 This is in stark contrast to elected military officers, charismatic condottieri (§10), mercenaries who lead units functioning like capitalist enterprises, and officers who have bought their commissions. Patrimonial “retainers” separated from the means of administration and the capitalist proprietor of a mercenary army are, just like the private capitalist entrepreneur, forerunners of the modern bureaucracy. These will be dealt with in detail at a later point.6
§5. Purely bureaucratic administration—monocratic, documented administration—is the most formally rational way of exercising rule. Experience has demonstrated that it provides precision, consistency, discipline, rigour, reliability, and hence predictability, for rulers as well as other interested parties. It is the intensity and scope of work done, its formally universal applicability to all tasks, and its very high degree of technical perfection that render it so rational. The development of modern organisational forms in all areas—the state, the church, the army, political parties, economic enterprise, interest groups, associations, charitable foundations, and so on—is quite simply identical to the development and continuing expansion of bureaucratic administration: its emergence is, for example, the nucleus of the modern occidental state. All continuing work is done by officials in offices. One must not allow oneself to be diverted from this fact by all the apparent counterexamples: the collegial representation of interests, parliamentary committees, “red dictatorships,” honorary officials, lay judges, and the rest (especially harping on about the “evils of bureaucracy”). Our entire everyday life is harnessed to this framework. For if bureaucratic administration is, other things being equal, everywhere the most formally and technically rational [system], then it is today quite simply inescapable for the needs of personal and material mass administration. There is only a choice between “bureaucratisation” and the “dilettantisation” of administration, and the principal medium that lends bureaucratic administration its advantage is specialised knowledge, rendered entirely indispensable by modern technology and the economics of the production of goods. Assuming that the same technical performance is sought, it makes no difference at all whether this is organised on a capitalist or on a socialist basis—except that the latter demands a massive increase in the importance of a specialised bureaucracy. In the same way that those subjected to existing bureaucratic rule can usually only defend themselves by creating an equally bureaucratic counterorganisation, the bureaucratic apparatus itself has compelling and purely material (ideal) interests in its own perpetuation. A society in which officials, employees, and workers are separated from the means of administration, and where discipline and training are crucial to the existence of all except those peasants and farmers who are still in possession of the means of subsistence and provision, would simply cease to exist without it. It usually continues to function when there is violent revolution or occupation by an enemy in much the same way that it did for the previous legal government. The question is always: who controls the existing bureaucratic apparatus? And such control is only possible to a very limited degree for anyone who is not an expert: the expert privy councillor usually has in the long run the advantage of his minister in doing what he wants. The need for constant, firm, intensive, and calculable administration was created historically by capitalism—not entirely by capitalism, but undeniably primarily—and cannot exist without it. Any rational socialist system would simply have to adopt it and intensify it, and this determines the fateful inevitability of bureaucracy as the nucleus of any mass movement. It is only small-scale enterprise (political, hierocratic, social, economic) that can succeed in more or less successfully evading it. Capitalism in its current developmental stage furthers bureaucracy, even though they have both grown out of very different historical roots, and bureaucracy provides the most rational economic foundation on which capitalism can exist in its most rational form, because bureaucracy is also capable of providing it with the necessary funds.
Besides fiscal conditions, bureaucratic administration chiefly faces constraints in communication and transport. Its precision makes necessary railways, telegraphs, and telephones, and it is increasingly dependent on them. A socialist order could change nothing here. The question would instead be (see Chapter 2, §12) whether it was in a position to create similar conditions for a rational bureaucratic administration, which in this case would mean a solid administration with even more formal rules than a capitalist order. If this were not so, this would imply another major irrationality: a conflict of formal and substantive rationality of the kind that sociology so often faces.
Bureaucratic administration means rule through knowledge: this is its specific basic rational character. Besides the enormous power it gains through expert knowledge, bureaucracy (or the ruler who makes use of it) has a tendency to increase its power even further through the knowledge that it gathers in its activities: factual knowledge gathered from the documents in which it deals. The concept of “official secret” might not be unique to bureaucracy—it has roughly the same relation to specialised knowledge as commercial secrets do to technical knowledge—but it is quite specific to it, and comes from this search for power.
Often the only person with specialised knowledge and familiarity with the conditions in his own sphere of interests superior to that of a bureaucracy is the private businessman—the capitalist entrepreneur. He is the only agent that is really (or at least relatively) immune to the inescapable force of bureaucratic rule through knowledge. Everyone else has become inevitably entangled in mass organisations of bureaucratic rule, in exactly the same way that the mass production of goods is dominated by precision machine tools.
Socially, bureaucratic rule generally implies
1. the tendency to levelling, so that recruitment may be consistently made from among the most highly qualified specialists;
2. the tendency towards plutocratisation, in the interest of the longest possible specialised training (often lasting today into one’s later twenties);
3. the rule of formal impersonality: sine ira et studio, or “without hatred or passion,” and so without “love” and “enthusiasm”; impersonality impelled by concepts of simple obligation. The ideal official fulfils his office “without regard to person”: “everyone” is treated with formal equality, that is, everyone who finds themselves in the same actual situation with regard to interest.
Just as bureaucratisation creates a levelling in social rank, a tendency that is normal and demonstrably historical, so in reverse, all social levelling promotes bureaucratisation by eliminating rule by social rank through the appropriation of means of administration and administrative powers in the interest of “equality,” as well as dispossessing those holding office on an “honorary” or “part-time” basis. Everywhere bureaucratisation is the inescapable shadow of the advance of “mass democracy”—this will be treated in more detail elsewhere.7
Generally speaking, the normal “spirit” of rational bureaucracy is
1. formalism, which is furthered by all parties interested in securing personal life Chancen, of whatever kind, since the alternative would lead to sheer caprice, and formalism is the line of least resistance. Apparently, and in part genuinely contradicting the tendency for this kind of interest is
2. officials’ inclination to conduct their administrative tasks in a materially utilitarian manner in the interests of the welfare of those subjects over whom they rule. However, this substantive utilitarianism tends to be expressed in the furthering8 of corresponding regulations that are again formal, and treated formally in the bulk of cases (more discussion of this in the sociology of law).9 This tendency to substantive rationality finds support on the part of all those subjects who are not included in those strata identified in 1. who are interested in “securing” Chancen that are already possessed. The issues arising from this belong in the theory of “democracy.”
3. Traditional Rule
§6. Rule will be called traditional if its legitimacy is based on, and believed in, by virtue of the sanctity of long-established orders and ruling powers that have existed “time out of mind.” The ruler (or rulers) are determined by traditionally established regulation. They are obeyed by virtue of the dignity attributed to them by tradition. The ruling organisation is in the simplest case an organisation based on a reverence cultivated through a life lived in common. The ruler is not a “superior,” but a personal ruler; his administrative staff is not primarily formed of “officials,” but of personal “retainers”; the ruled are not “members” of the organisation, but either (1) “traditional associates” (Genossen) (§7), or (2) “subjects.” The administrative staff’s relationship to the ruler is not one of institutional duty, but of personal fidelity.
Obedience is not to statutes, but to the person appointed by tradition or by a traditionally determined ruler, and this person’s commands are legitimate in two respects:
a) in part, very much by virtue of the traditional content of dispositions made and the meaning and extent attributed to them; any infringement of the traditional limits to the legitimacy thereby created could be very dangerous for the ruler’s own traditional position;
b) in part by virtue of the ruler’s freedom of decision conferred on him by tradition.
This traditional freedom of decision mainly derives from the reverential basis of obedience, and is in principle unlimited.
There is therefore a duality governing the ruler’s action:
a) on the one hand, bound substantively to tradition;
b) on the other, substantively free of tradition.
Within the latter, the ruler is free to grant or withhold clemency on the basis of personal preference and distaste, bestowing “favour” quite arbitrarily, especially in return for gifts that become a source of regular “income.” Insofar as he follows any principle, these are principles of material ethical equity, justice, or utilitarian expediency and not, as in the case of legal rule, formal principles. The actual exercise of rule is governed by what the ruler and his administration can usually allow themselves in their dealing with traditionally deferential subjects without provoking them to resistance. If such resistance occurs, it is directed to the person of the ruler (or of his servant) who has disregarded the traditional limits to power and not against the system as such (“traditionalist revolution”).
In the pure type of traditional rule, it is not possible for laws or administrative principles to be deliberately “created” by statute. Whatever is in fact newly created has to be legitimated as something that has always existed, but which has only become known through the “wisdom” of the legislator. Only traditional documents establishing “precedence and prejudice” can be employed in the orientation of legal administration.
§7. The ruler rules either (1) without or (2) with an administrative staff. For the first case, see §7a.1 below.
The typical administrative staff can be recruited
a) traditionally, through bonds of reverence associated with the ruler, “patrimonially” from among
α) kinsmen,
β) slaves,
γ) domestic officials,
δ) clients,
ε) coloni, or
ζ) freed slaves
b) “nonpatrimonially” from among
α) persons owing personal loyalty (“favourites” of all kinds) or
β) those owing fealty (vassals), or finally
γ) officials who have of their own free will entered a position of personal loyalty.
On a)α), in traditionalistic rule it is very common to find the administrative principle that the most important positions are filled by members of the ruling family or clan.
On a)β), slaves, and a)ζ), freed slaves, can often be found in the highest positions in patrimonial administrations (in earlier times, it was not unusual for slaves to become grand viziers).
On a)γ), typical domestic officials can be found throughout Europe: seneschal, head groom, chamberlain, steward, and majordomo (superintendent of the servants and probably also of vassals). Especially important in the Orient is the head eunuch who is in charge of the harem; in African kingdoms, it was often the executioner, often everywhere the personal physician, an astrologer, and similar functionaries.
On a)δ), in China as in Egypt, the chief source of patrimonial officials was the king’s clientele.
On a)ε), there were coloni armies throughout the Orient, but this was also a feature of the period in which the Roman nobility ruled (slave armies were still a feature of the modern Islamic Orient.
On b)α), the employment of “favourites” is characteristic of every patrimonial system and often the cause of “traditionalist revolutions”) (see the end of this section).10
On b)β), “vassals” will be dealt with separately.11
On b)γ), “bureaucracy” first developed in patrimonial states, as a body of officials with extrapatrimonial recruitment. But these officials were, as will shortly be mentioned, initially personal servants of the ruler.
Under traditional rule, the pure type of administrative staff lacked:
a) definite “competence” according to objective regulations,
b) a fixed rational hierarchy,
c) regular appointment with a free contract and rule-governed promotion,
d) specialist training (as a norm),
e) (often) a fixed salary, and even more often, payment in money.
On a), in place of a definite substantive competence there is often a shifting series of tasks and powers commissioned by the ruler’s momentary and arbitrary decisions. These can become permanent, are often stereotyped traditionally, and are especially marked by competition for sources of income and advantage that are at the disposal of the persons acting on behalf of the ruler as well as the ruler himself. It is often through such interests that substantive responsibilities and so the existence of an “authority” is first constituted.
All those with permanent responsibilities are first and foremost domestic officials of the ruler. Those responsibilities that are not directly associated with household affairs (“extrapatrimonial”) are often in fields of activities that resemble their household functions or that originate in a completely arbitrary act of the ruler and only subsequently stereotyped. Besides domestic officials, there were for the most part only those who were recruited on an ad hoc basis for particular commissions.
The absence of a concept of “competence” can easily be seen by reviewing a list of the terms used for ancient Oriental officials. With very few exceptions, it is impossible to determine rationally delimited substantive spheres of activity that are permanently assigned in terms of our concept of “competence.”
The delimitation of real permanent competences through competition for and compromise over interests seeking favours and revenue was especially apparent during the Middle Ages. This had an especially profound influence. The financial interest in fees on the part of powerful English royal courts and of the legal profession were largely responsible for limiting, if not breaking, the influence of Roman and Canon law. The irrational demarcation of many official competences in all eras have frequently become stereotyped by the existence of an established set of rights to fees and related perquisites.
On b): determining who should decide a matter or can deal with a grievance, whether this should be handled by the ruler himself or can be delegated, and to whom it might be delegated are effected either
α) traditionally, settled on occasion by taking account of the provenance of particular adopted external legal norms or precedents (a higher court system); or
β) entirely at the discretion of the ruler to whom, wherever he presents himself in person, everyone else defers.
Besides the traditional system of superior courts, there is in Germanic law the principle that derives from the ruler’s power: that in the presence of the ruler himself, all jurisdiction ceases. This principle has the same source as jus evocandi, which itself stems from the ruler’s arbitrary clemency and whose modern version is that of “cabinet justice,” or the ruler’s direct interference in the process of law. In the Middle Ages, a superior court was often the authority that declared and interpreted the law, and so was the source on which local law was established.
On c), domestic officials and favourites were often recruited on a purely patrimonial basis from among slaves or dependants of the ruler. Or, if they were recruited extrapatrimonially, they tended to be the holders of benefices whom he transferred at his own (formally free) discretion. This only changed substantially with the emergence of free vassals and the conferral of offices by fief, but since the nature and scope of the fealty was not defined substantively, this made no differences to points a) or b). Promotion was entirely a matter of the ruler’s caprice and grace, unless the administrative staff had a prebendal structure (see §8).
On d), more or less all domestic officials and favourites of the ruler lack rational specialised training. Everywhere, the initiation of specialist training for those appointed (of whatever kind) marks a new era in the form of administration.
For some offices, a degree of empirical education became necessary very early on, especially the ability to read and write, which was originally thought to be a very rare “art.” This often—here China is the most important example—had a decisive impact on cultural development through the manner in which the literati conducted themselves, eliminating the intrapatrimonial recruitment of officials, and so also limiting the ruler’s power by making him dependent on members of a particular social rank (see no. 3).
On e), domestic officials and favourites are for the most part fed at the ruler’s table and looked after by his exchequer. As a rule, separation from the ruler’s table is compensated with benefices initially allocated in kind, their nature and extent becoming easily stereotyped. Besides that (or instead of that), fees are often due to those commissioned by the ruler to work outside the household, as well as to the ruler himself (sometimes according to no set tariff, being assessed on a case-by-case basis with those seeking favours).
On the concept of “benefice,” see below.
§7a. 1. The primary types of traditional rule are those where there is an absence of a personal administrative staff for the ruler:
a) gerontocracy, and
b) primary patriarchalism.
Gerontocracy is the condition in which, to the extent that rule is exercised at all in the organisation, it is done by the elders (originally in a literal sense, the most senior in years). They are considered to have the best knowledge of sanctified tradition. This often involves organisations that are not based primarily on economy or kinship. Patriarchalism is the condition in which rule is exercised within a (domestic) organisation, usually primarily based on economy or kinship, by a person determined by strict rules of heredity. It is not unusual for gerontocracy and patriarchalism to exist alongside each other. Decisive here is that the power of the gerontocrats and patriarchs is in the pure type oriented to the conception of those who are ruled over (Genossen). While the exercise of rule is the traditional prerogative of the ruler, this must be substantively exercised in the interest of members: it is an element of Genossenrecht, and not freely appropriated to the incumbent. The complete absence of a purely personal (“patrimonial”) administrative staff for the ruler is in these types definitive: the ruler remains, for the most part, dependent on the members’ wish to obey him, since he has no “staff.” For this reason, the members remain Genossen, and not yet subjects (Untertanen). Nonetheless, they are Genossen by virtue of tradition, and not “members” by virtue of statute. They owe obedience to the ruler, not to statutory regulations, but to the ruler only according to tradition. For his part, the ruler is rigorously bound by tradition.
More is offered on the forms of gerontocracy below. Primary patriarchy is related to it insofar as rule extends only so far as the household; otherwise, as with Arab sheikhs, it only has an exemplary character, charisma by example, or through counsel and influence.
2. With the development of the ruler’s purely personal (and military) administrative staff, all traditional rule tends towards patrimonialism and power is maximised towards sultanism.
Genossen now for the first time become “subjects” (Untertanen), and the ruler acquires a personal prerogative to rule instead of ruling by virtue of Genossenrecht, a prerogative appropriated to him personally like any other kind of possession, in principle capable of valorisation (of sale, of use as security, divisible through inheritance), as is the case for any other economic Chance. The external support of patrimonial powers is found in slaves who are often branded as such, in coloni or impressed subjects, or, to ensure a community of interest opposed to that of the ruler’s subjects, in mercenary bodyguards and armies (patrimonial army). Through these powers, the ruler extends the scope of grace and favour—of arbitrary rule free of tradition—at the cost of the traditional dependence associated with patriarchy and gerontocracy. Patrimonial rule is every form of rule that is traditionally oriented but whose exercise is characterised by a fully personal sultanistic rule with a form of administration that is despotic and unrestricted by tradition. The distinction is quite fluid. Patrimonial rule and sultanism are both distinguished from primary patriarchalism by the existence of a personal administrative staff.
Sometimes the sultanic form of patrimonialism appears to be entirely bound by tradition, but it actually never really is. The form is, however, not objectively rationalised, for only the spheres of despotism and of grace are developed to extremes. This is what distinguishes it from any form of rational rule.
3. Ständische Herrschaft, or “hierarchical rule,”12 is that form of patrimonial rule in which economic Chancen linked to ruling powers are appropriated to the administrative staff of particular lords. As in all similar cases (see Chapter 2, §19), such appropriation can be
a) to an organisation or a category of persons with particular shared characteristics, or
b) to an individual, either for life, or heritable, or as free property.
Hierarchical rule therefore entails
a) a constant restriction of the ruler’s unimpeded power to select his administrative staff, by appropriation of posts or ruling powers
α) to an organisation,
β) to a stratum that is qualified by social rank (Chapter 4), or
b) this often also involves, and here this will be treated as the leading “type,”
α) the appropriation of posts, thus in all likelihood, those economic Chancen (Erwerbschancen) associated with incumbency, and
β) the appropriation of material means of administration,
γ) the appropriation of powers of command,
all to individual members of the administrative staff.
Those who are appropriated in this way can be drawn historically from (1) a previously nonhierarchical administrative staff, or (2) never belonged to such a staff before appropriation.
Where ruling powers are appropriated, administrative costs are covered from the hierarchical incumbent’s own means, which are not distinguishable from his personal property. The holders of military ruling powers or members of an army formed by members of different social ranks equip themselves, and quite probably also recruit military units on a patrimonial or hierarchical basis. It is also possible that means of administration and the administrative staff are, as the object of acquisitive enterprise, financed from the ruler’s magazine or treasury, as happened with mercenary armies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (a capitalist army)—but not only here. Where hierarchical appropriation is complete, all powers are divided between the ruler and the appropriated members of the administrative staff according to their own personal rights; or they are divided by the ruler’s special orders, or by particular compromises with the regulated personal rights of the appropriated members.
Case 1: For example, the court offices of a ruler that are appropriated as fiefs. Case 2: For example, landed rulers who by virtue of privilege or usurpation have appropriated lordly rights (Herrenrechte) (usually the first is the legalisation of the second).
Appropriation to an individual can involve
1. leasing,
2. use as a pledge,
3. sale,
4. an unconditional privilege, or a privilege granted as a reward for meritorious behaviour, a gift given personally, or heritably, or freely appropriated:
a) as compensation for services or to purchase compliance, or
b) in recognition of the actual usurpation of ruling powers.
5. Appropriation to an organisation or a hierarchical stratum is usually the outcome of a compromise between a ruler and his administrative staff, or a sociated hierarchical stratum; it can
α) provide the ruler with relative freedom of choice in the individual instance, or
β) establish definite rules for the personal incumbency of the post.
6. Finally, appropriation to an individual can depend on instruction or education, which will be dealt with separately below.13
1. It is usually thought, although without much reflection, that in gerontocracy and pure patriarchalism administrative means are appropriated to the administering organisation, or to the households of which this organisation is composed: administration is conducted “for” the organisation. Appropriation to rulers as such reflects the imaginary world of patriarchalism and can be realised to a very varying extent—right up to complete property in land and complete enslavement of subjects—rulers having here a “right of sale.” Hierarchical appropriation implies appropriation to the members of the administrative staff of at least part of the means of administration. While with full patrimonialism there is a complete separation of the administrator from the means of administration, the exact reverse is true of hierarchical patrimonialism: the administrator possesses the means of administration, either fully or at least substantially. This was true of the feudal knight, who equipped himself; the feudalised baron who collected court and other fees for himself and met his obligations to his feudal lord from his own means (including those he had appropriated); the Indian jagirdar, who financed his military unit from the proceeds of benefices and possessed in full his means of administration; the colonel who recruited a mercenary unit on his own account, was in receipt of some payments from the prince’s exchequer and made up for the shortfall by limiting his engagements, was partly in possession of means of administration via requisitioning and booty, and was also subject to regulation. By contrast, the pharoah organised and equipped armies of slave and coloni commanded by royal clients—clothing, feeding, and arming them from his own stores—and was as a patrimonial ruler in full and sole possession of the means of administration. Such formal arrangements are not always the most significant: the Mamelukes were formally slaves, recruiting themselves formally through “purchase” by their lord, but in fact they monopolised powers of rule more completely than any ministerial organisation has controlled fiefs. The appropriation of land in fief to a closed organisation, but without individual appropriation, has occurred, both freely granted within the organisation by the ruler (case a)α) in the text) and with the regulation of qualification for such acquisition (case a)β) in the text) by requesting military or other (ritual) qualifications for aspirants, or where they existed, the right of precedence for relatives by blood. It was the same in the case of artisans attached to a court or guild, or with peasant holdings where the holders were obliged to perform military or administrative services.
2. Appropriation by lease (tax farming in particular), by pledging as a security or by sale, was known in the Occident, but also in the Orient and in India; in antiquity, it was not unusual for priesthoods to be auctioned. The purpose of leasing was in part purely a matter of financial policy (a financial crisis especially as a consequence of war costs), in part a matter of financial technology (securing a fixed source of income that could be used for household purposes); in the case of the pledge and of sale, this was usually purely financial, while in the Papal States it was related to the creation of nepotistic14 rents. Appropriation by pledge played a very important part in France, even during the eighteenth century, in filling judicial posts in the parlements, while the (regulated) purchase of commissions in the British army was still practiced into the nineteenth century. Privilege, as a sanction for usurpation, as a reward, or as an incentive for political service, was common in the Occident, as elsewhere.
§8. The patrimonial retainer can be sustained
a) by feeding at his master’s table,
b) by receiving donations (mostly in kind) from the store of goods and money held by his lord,
c) by the allocation of land in return for services,
d) through the Chancen of income from appropriated rents, fees, and taxes, or
e) by fiefs.
The forms of support b) to d) can be called “benefices” if they are traditional in extent (b and c) or jurisdiction (d); are always newly conferred; and are individually, but not heritably, appropriated. Existence of this form of subsistence for the administrative staff will be said in principle to be based on praebends. Here it is possible for promotion to be made on the basis of age or objectively measured achievements, while qualification by hierarchy, and so a sense of honour based on social rank, can be promoted (see Chapter 4 for the concept of “social rank”).
Appropriated ruling powers will be called a “fief” if they are primarily bestowed on qualified individuals by contract, and the reciprocal rights and duties are primarily oriented on conventional, hierarchical, and especially military, concepts of honour. Where an administrative staff is supported primarily through fiefs, this will be called “feudalism.”
The transition between fiefs and military benefices is often so gradual that they cannot be distinguished. (See the discussion on “social rank” in Chapter 4.)15
In cases d) and e), and sometimes in case c), the appropriated authoritative incumbent meets the cost of administration, and probably also that of equipage, from the revenues provided by benefices or dues related to fiefs. His own relationship as a ruler to his subjects can then assume a patrimonial character (and hence one that is heritable, alienable, partible).
1. For royal officials, domestic officials, priests, and all kinds of patrimonial retainers, having a place at the ruler’s table, or receiving what he chose to distribute to them from his stores, was the earliest form of support. The “men’s house,” the oldest form of dedicated military organisation (about which more will be said later),16 often took the form of communistic domestic consumption. Separation from the ruler, or from the temple or cathedral, and substitution of this direct support with allowances or land use was by no means always seen as desirable, although as a rule it did happen when the retainer formed his own family. Allowances in kind granted to a detached temple priest and officials were the original form of provisioning for officials across the entire Near East, and also existed in India and China, and was widespread in the Occident. The granting of land in return for military services can be found all across the Orient from early antiquity, as well as in medieval Germany, as a means of providing for household retainers, court officers, and other officials. The revenues of Turkish cavalry (Sipahi) and also of Japanese samurai and countless other forms of Oriental retainers and knights were based, in our terminology, on “benefices,” not fiefs, as will be discussed at a later point. They could also depend on specific ground rents as well as local tax revenues. The latter were generally linked to the local appropriation of governing powers, or tended to open the way for such rule, although this was not always the case. The concept of the “fief” can be elaborated only in connection with that of the “state.” It can be based either on land held patrimonially, or on the most varied forms of rents and fees.
2. Appropriated Chancen for rents, fees, and taxes are widespread in the form of benefices and fiefs of all kinds; as an independent and especially developed form, this was especially true in India. Rights to these sources of income were granted in return for the provision of military contingents and the payment of administrative costs.
§9. The pure type of patrimonial rule, and especially its hierarchised variant, treats all powers of rule and the corresponding economic rights as if they were privately appropriated economic Chancen. This does not exclude the possibility that qualitative distinctions are made between these Chancen, especially the possibility that some of them are appropriated in a form that is subject to special regulation. The appropriation of legal and military powers tends to be treated as a legal basis for the hierarchical privilege of those appropriating them, as compared with the appropriation of purely economic Chancen related to the income from domains, taxes, and other sources. In the latter, a distinction is made in the form of appropriation between those that are principally patrimonial and those that are fiscal (nonpatrimonial). For the terminology developed here, what is significant is that governing powers and Chancen of any kind associated with them can be treated as if they were private Chancen.
Quite rightly, Georg von Below, in his book Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters,17 sharply emphasises that the appropriation of judicial authority was treated separately and was a source of special hierarchical status, and that it was not possible to identify medieval political organisation as purely patrimonial or purely feudal. So long as judicial authority and other rights with a purely political origin were treated as if they were private entitlements, then it seems terminologically justified for our purposes to talk of “patrimonial” rule. As is well known, the concept was systematically developed in Haller’s Restauration der Staatswissenschaften [1816–1834]. An absolutely ideal-typical purely patrimonial state has never existed.
4.18 Ständische Gewaltenteilung, or the “hierarchical separation of powers,” is the condition in which organisations composed of those privileged by high social rank and who have appropriated governing powers compromise on a case-by-case basis with the ruler in the creation of political and / or administrative statutes, substantive administrative directives, or measures of administrative regulation, and then probably either execute these measures themselves or sometimes leave the execution of such measures to their own administrative staff, which in some circumstances has the authority to do so.
1. It makes no difference to this concept if in some circumstances strata that are not privileged by social rank (peasants) become involved in this. What is typically decisive are the autonomous rights of the privileged. It is obvious that the absence of any strata privileged by social rank would result in a different typology.
2. This type has only fully developed in the Occident. Its specific qualities and the reason for its emergence there will be dealt with below.19
3. As a rule, the Stände did not possess their own administrative staff, while a staff possessing autonomous authority was the exception.
§9a. Traditional rule generally at first affected the nature of economic activity by some reinforcement of traditional attitudes, this being most marked in gerontocratic and purely patriarchal rule, where those exercising authority have no separate administrative staff not available to the other members of the organisation. For their own claim to legitimacy, they have to therefore rely on the preservation of tradition in every respect.
Besides that, the impact on the economy depends on
1. the typical way in which the ruling organisation is financed (Chapter 2, §38).
Patrimonialism can, in this respect, mean quite different things. Typical, however, is
a) an oikos maintained by the ruler whose needs were met on a liturgical basis, mostly in kind (the contribution of goods and compulsory services). In this case, economic relationships are highly traditional, the development of markets is restricted, the use of money is mostly oriented to subsistence and consumption, and the emergence of capitalism is rendered impossible.
b) the meeting of needs through the privilege of social rank. Market development is limited here, although if not to the same degree as in a), since “purchasing power” is adversely affected by the estate’s claim to products in kind, while the productive capacity of individual economic units is used for the ruling organisations’ own purposes.
Or patrimonialism can be
c) monopolistic, in which needs are met partly through profitable activities, partly by fees, partly by tax. In this case, market development is irrationally limited to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the kind of monopoly; the major prospects for profitable activity are in the hands of the ruler and his administrative staff, and so capitalist development is either
α) directly obstructed by the administration assuming full control of productive enterprise, or,
β) diverted into a politically oriented capitalism (Chapter 2, §31), where there is tax farming, leasing or the sale of offices, and capitalistic provision for an army or administration as a financial measure.
Even where it is financed in money, patrimonialism, and especially sultanism, has irrational effects:
1. from the juxtaposition of
α) adherence to tradition in the degree and form of demands made upon direct sources of taxation;
β) complete liberty, and so arbitrariness, in setting the scale and nature of (1) fees, (2) imposts, and (3) the organisation of monopoly. All of these are claims: historically, it is the first that has been the most effective (through the petitioning of the ruler and his staff); the second, rather less so; and the third, variably.
2. There is, however, no way of reliably calculating the burden placed on the freedom to pursue private gain, or the degree to which it exists, both of which are needed for the rationalisation of the economy.
3. In some cases, it is true that patrimonial fiscalism can have a rationalising impact, through careful attention to taxable capacity and the rational creation of monopolies. But this is “accidental,” resulting from the special historical circumstances that partly existed in the Occident.
Financial policy with a hierarchical separation of powers typically takes the form of imposing charges arrived at through compromise, hence calculable charges; seeking to remove, or at least very much diminish, the arbitrariness with which the ruler creates imposts, and especially monopolies. The extent to which substantive financial policy helps or hinders rational economic action depends on the way the dominant stratum holds power, that is, whether it is
a) feudal, or
b) patrician.
The predominance of the first tends to set strict limits on the freedom to engage in acquisitive activity and on the development of markets, given the overwhelmingly patrimonial structure of feudalised powers of government, and it might deliberately, for political reasons, seek to suppress individual economic freedom and markets. The predominance of the latter can have the contrary effect.
1. What is said here will have to suffice, since these matters will be returned to and discussed more fully in a variety of contexts.20
2. Examples for:
a) oikos—ancient Egypt and India;
b) large parts of the Hellenistic world, the Later Roman Empire, China, India, parts of Russia, and the Islamic states;
c) the Ptolemaic Empire, Byzantium (in part), and in another way, the reign of the Stuarts;
d) occidental patrimonial states in the era of “enlightened absolutism” (Colbertism especially).
2. 21 It is not only the financial policy of normal patrimonial regimes that limits rational economic organisation but also the particular nature of its administration:
a) through the difficulties that traditionalism presents for formally rational regulations that can be relied on in the longer term, and that are therefore calculable in their economic significance and utility; and
b) through the typical absence of a formally trained specialist administrative staff.
The emergence of such a formally trained staff within occidental patrimonialism came about through quite unique conditions, as will be seen, conditions that only existed here and first developed from completely different sources.
c) through the broad scope of substantive capriciousness and purely personal whims on the part of the ruler and of the administrative staff. This provides an opening for corruption, which in itself is only the degenerated form of an unregulated right to charge fees, but which would have a relatively minor significance (since it can in practice be calculated) if it were a constant quantity and not something that rather fluctuated from official to official. If offices are leased, the official has a strong incentive to get the most out of what has been invested in the office by charging arbitrary, irrational, and extortionate fees.
d) through the way that all forms of patriarchalism and patrimonialism have an inherent tendency to engage in substantive economic regulation of economic activity, a tendency deriving from the nature of its legitimisation and its consequent interest that subjects be kept happy. Such regulation can be oriented to utilitarian, socially ethical, or substantive “cultural” ideals, and this undermines any formal rationality founded on a technical legal order. At its furthest extreme, this effect is decisive in the case of hierocratically oriented patrimonialism, whereas in the case of sultanism, fiscal arbitrariness is likely to be more important.
For all these reasons, it is possible under the rule of normal patrimonial powers for all of the following to emerge and often vigorously flourish:
a) mercantile capitalism,
b) capitalistic tax farming, and sale and lease of offices,
c) capitalistic provisioning of the state and capitalist financing of its wars, [and]
d) to some extent, plantation and colonial capitalism.
However, highly sensitive enterprises oriented to the market situation of private consumers, with fixed capital and the rational organisation of free labour, are incompatible with the irrationalities of jurisdiction, administration, and taxation that disturb calculability.
It is only fundamentally different where the patrimonial ruler, acting in his own political and financial interests, adopts rational administration employing specialist officials. For this, the following is needed: (1) the existence of specialist training; (2) a sufficiently strong motive—as a rule, brisk competition among several patrimonial factions within the same cultural domain; and (3) a very special ingredient: the inclusion of urban community organisations providing financial support for the competing patrimonial powers.
1. Modern, specifically occidental capitalism grew out of relatively rationally administered, specifically occidental, urban organisations (whose particular features will be dealt with separately).22 This developed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries within ständisch Dutch and English political organisations, in which bourgeois power and economic interests predominated. By contrast, there is no direct line connecting attempts to emulate this for fiscal and utilitarian reasons in the purely patrimonial or feudalised Continental states, or in the monopolies established in Stuart England, with the later emergence of autonomous capitalist development, although some agrarian and manufacturing measures, insofar as they were oriented to English, Dutch, or French models, did create very important developmental conditions for its emergence (this will also be dealt with separately).23
2. The patrimonial states of the Middle Ages can, in principle, be distinguished by the formally rational nature of one part of their administrative staff (specifically, canon and secular lawyers) from all the other administrative staffs for political organisations that have existed. I will deal separately with the source of this development and its significance.24 For the time being, the general remarks made at the end of the text will have to suffice.
4. Charismatic Rule
§10. “Charisma” is the personal quality that makes an individual seem extraordinary, a quality by virtue of which supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers or properties are attributed to the individual: powers or properties that are not found in everyone and that are thought to be the gift of God or exemplary, rendering that individual a “leader” (Führer). This extraordinary property was originally applied to prophets, to individuals thought to have special therapeutic powers or to possess legal wisdom, to those who led bands of hunters, or to military heroes. As such, magical powers were attributed to these individuals. How the relevant quality would be “objectively” and properly evaluated in terms of some kind of ethical, aesthetic, or other standpoint is, conceptually, a matter of indifference. What matters is how this quality is actually judged by those who are ruled charismatically: how “followers” see things.
There is a broad range of “great” heroes, prophets, and healers that a value-free sociology considers as equally endowed with charisma, such as a “berserker” whose manic episodes were, apparently wrongly, ascribed to the use of poisonous drugs (during the Middle Ages in Byzantium, many such people endowed with a charismatic lust for combat were retained as a kind of military instrument); “shamans,” that is, sorcerers who, in the pure type, were subject to epileptic seizures before falling into trances; possibly the founder of Mormonism, although it is hard to tell whether he was just a sophisticated swindler; a literary type such as Kurt Eisner, carried away by his own demagogic success.
1. Charisma is validated through the recognition of a personal proof by those who are ruled. This was originally effected through the performance of a miracle, bringing about a voluntary dedication to a revelation, to hero worship, to absolute trust in the leader. Where charisma is genuine, this is not, however, the basis for legitimation; it is instead rooted in an obligation on the part of those who have received the call to acknowledge their duty to provide personal proof. This “acknowledgement” is, psychologically, a quite personal dedication, a belief born of enthusiasm, or of despair and hope.
No prophet has seen his quality as dependent on the opinion of the masses; no crowned king or charismatic duke has treated those who oppose them or have remained aloof as other than in breach of duty. Anyone failing to “volunteer” for a leader’s military campaign has always and everywhere been treated with derision.
2. If proof fails to materialise, the charismatically blessed personage shows himself to have been abandoned by his God or his magical or heroic powers. If success continued to elude him, and especially if his leadership did not improve the lot of those over whom he ruled, there was a chance that his charismatic authority would vanish. This is the genuine charismatic meaning of “the grace of God.”
Even old German kings could be reviled, and this [phenomenon] is very widespread among so-called primitive peoples. In China, the monarch’s charismatic quality (unmodified by hereditary monarchy; see §11) was maintained so strongly that any misfortune, no matter what kind—not simply failure in war but also drought, flood, unlucky astronomical events, and so forth—forced him to make public amends, and possibly also forced his abdication. [In this scenario,] he did not possess the requisite charismatic, God-given “virtue,” and so was not a legitimate “Son of Heaven.”
3. Community (Gemeinde) is, as a ruling organisation, an emotional communalisation. The administrative staff of the charismatic ruler is not “officialdom,” at the very least, not one that has dedicated training. It is selected neither by social rank, nor in relation to household organisation, nor by personal dependency. It is instead selected according to its charismatic qualities: the “prophet” has his “disciples,” the “warlord” his “retinue,” while the “leader” has “trusted bodyguards.” There is no “appointment” or “dismissal,” no “career,” no “promotions.” There is only the “call” issued spontaneously by the leader on account of the charismatic quality of the person so called on. There is no “hierarchy,” only intervention of the leader prompted by a general or particular charismatic deficiency in the event of the staff’s execution of a task, possibly involving recall. There is no “sphere of authority” and “competence,” but also no appropriation of administrative powers through “privilege.” Instead, there are only spatial or substantive limits to charisma and its “mission.” There is no salary, nor any “benefice”; instead, the disciples or followers live together communistically with the ruler and live on means donated through patronage. There are no permanent “authorities,” only charismatic envoys entrusted with missions on the ruler’s behalf. There is no government, no abstract legal statutes, no due legal process oriented to such statutes, no legal wisdom or judgement oriented to traditional precedents. Instead, there are occasional judgements made case by case, in which initially the judgement of God and revelation is thought to prevail. For all genuine charismatic rule, the principle holds: “It is written … but I say to you.…” The genuine prophet, in the same way as the genuine warlord, preaches, creates, demands new imperatives in the original sense of charisma—by virtue of revelation, oracle, dedication, or: by a substantive formative will that is recognised as such by a religious, military, party, or other community purely because it issues from such a source. Acknowledgement is obligatory. If a leader of this sort encounters another of the same sort and cannot prevail on the basis of charisma, then there has to be a contest of magical powers, or a direct physical contest of the leaders whose outcome the community is obliged to recognise: only one of the contestants can be in the right; the other has to be guilty of a wrong.
Given the extraordinary character of charismatic rule, it has to be bluntly opposed to all other forms of rule—rational, especially bureaucratic, as much as traditional, especially patriarchal or patrimonial, rule, or rule based on social rank. Both of these are specific everyday forms of rule; genuinely charismatic rule is the exact opposite. Bureaucratic rule is specifically rational in the sense of being bound to rules open to discursive analysis; charismatic rule is specifically irrational since it is alien to all rules. Traditional rule is bound to precedents in the past, and in this respect, oriented to rules; charismatic rule overturns the past in its own domain, and is in this sense specifically revolutionary. It does not involve the appropriation of power in the way that one appropriates landed property, nor in respect of the lord or of local hierarchical powers. It is instead legitimate to the extent and for as long as personal charisma by force of personal proof can be maintained, which means: so long as it finds acknowledgement and can sustain belief in such proof among followers, disciples, or retinue.
The above hardly requires further discussion. This is as true of the purely “plebiscitarian” charismatic ruler (Napoleon’s “rule of genius” in which plebeians became kings and generals) as it is of prophets or great warriors.
4. Pure charisma is specifically disconnected from the economy (wirtschaftsfremd). It represents, wherever it occurs, a “calling,” a “vocation” in the emphatic sense: as a “mission” or a personal “task.” As a pure type, it disdains and rejects the economic exploitation of the gift of grace as a source of income—although this is often more an ideal than a fact. It is not that charisma is always indifferent to property and gain, something that is more typical of prophets and their disciples (see below). The military hero and his retinue seek out booty, the plebiscitarian ruler or charismatic party leader needs the material resources for power, while the first seeks in addition the material lustre of rule as a means of reinforcing his prestige. So long as the genuinely charismatic type prevails, there is only scorn for traditional or rational everyday economic activity and the realisation of a regular “income” through continuing economic activity directed to that end. Instead, charismatic rule is typically provisioned by various forms of patronage—on a grand scale with gifts, foundations, bribery, and honoraria; or on the one hand by begging, on the other, by looting or violent or (formally peaceful) extortion. From the perspective of rational economic organisation, charismatic rule is typically “uneconomic,” repudiating any kind of involvement in everyday life. Given its complete inner indifference to this, it can merely “register” irregular, casual employment. By waiving all economic concerns, a rentier existence can form the basis for some kinds of charismatic life. But this tends not to apply to the normal charismatic “revolutionary.”
The refusal of church office by Jesuits is a rationalised application of the principle of being “disciples.” It is plain that to this belong all heroes of asceticism, mendicant orders, and fighters for faith. Almost all prophets have been supported by patronage. The well-known saying of St. Paul, “If any who did not work, neither should he eat,”25 was directed against parasitic missionaries, and in no respect endorses “the economy,” but only suggests that each individual has a duty to provide for his or her own support on an occasional basis. The real charismatic comparison involving “the lilies of the field” was not literal but concerned only the degree to which taking no care for the morrow was a possibility. On the other hand, it is conceivable that, with mainly artistic charismatic disciples, their detachment from daily economic struggle would normally restrict membership to those who were “economically independent”—hence, rentiers (which is true for the Stefan George Kreis,26 at least in its initial intention).
5. Charisma is the great revolutionary force in eras bound up with tradition. It differs from the equally revolutionary force of “reason,” which either has an entirely external impact by changing life’s circumstances and problems, and so, indirectly, attitudes to these, or which works through intellectualisation. Instead, charisma can represent a transformation that begins within oneself, born of suffering or of enthusiasm, a shift in direction of leading sentiments and deeds involving a complete reorientation of dispositions and attitudes to all particular ways of life, and to the “world.” In prerationalist eras, tradition and charisma represent the near-totality of forms for the orientation of action.
5. The Routinisation of Charisma
§11. In its genuine form, charismatic rule has a specifically non-everyday character,27 creating a strictly personal social relationship in which the realisation of charisma depends on personal qualities and their personal proof (Bewährung). If this is something more than an ephemeral relationship and it becomes permanent—involving a “community” of believers, warriors, or disciples, or an organisation based on party, politics, or hierarchy—then charismatic rule has to change. For it could be said that charismatic rule in its purely ideal typical form exists only in its early stages, as it first emerges. Over time, then, charismatic rule becomes more traditional or more rational (more legal)—or indeed both in different degrees. The motivating forces here are the following:
a) the ideal or also material interest of followers in the continuation and constant revival of the community;
b) the even stronger ideal and even stronger material interest of the administrative staff—of the followers, disciples, party trustees, and so on in
1. continuing the existence of the relationship, and so
2. continuing it in such a manner that its own position is ideally and materially placed on a permanent everyday basis; externally, the creation of family life or a secure existence in place of “missions” detached from family and economy.
These interests typically become evident with the demise of the bearer of charisma and the ensuing question of succession. The way this is resolved—if it is resolved and the charismatic community continues to exist (or came into existence for the first time) is very important in determining the general nature of the social relationships thereby arising.
The resolution to this can take one of the following forms:
a) A renewed search on the basis of particular features for a man who can be the bearer of charisma.
A fairly pure type here is the search for the new Dalai Lama, a child to be selected because he embodies divine qualities, rather like the search for the new Bull of Apis.
In this case, the legitimacy of the new bearer of charisma is based on features, in other words, “rules” around which traditions are formed and to which they are connected (traditionalisation): and hence retrofitted to the purely personal character.
b) Through revelation: by oracle, the drawing of lots, divine judgement, or another selection technology. In this case, the legitimacy of the new bearer of charisma is derived from the legitimacy of technology (legalisation).
It is said that the Israel schoftim sometimes had this character. Saul was supposed to have been identified by an old war oracle.
c) Through the designation of a successor by the incumbent bearer of charisma, and acknowledgement by the community.
This is a very common form. The creation of Roman magistracies was originally entirely characterised in this way—most clearly maintained in the creation of dictators and the institution of the “interrex.”
Legitimacy is thus acquired by designation:
d) Through designation as a successor by the charismatically qualified administrative staff, and recognition on the part of the community. This should in no way be treated as an “election,” a “primary,” or a “right to nomination”; the real meaning of the process is nothing like this. It is not a matter of free selection, but a selection process that is strictly obligatory and that does not involve a majority vote but the proper identification, the selection of the proper person, the real bearer of charisma, a figure that even a minority could have successfully identified. Unanimity is a postulate and realisation that a mistake has been made, a duty; persevering with a mistake is a major transgression, a “wrong” choice being a wrong that has to be expiated—originally through the use of magic.
All the same, it does seem that legitimacy can be treated as an acquisition of rights governed by all the provisos of propriety, and for the most part effected with particular formalities (enthronement and so forth).
This is the original meaning in the Occident of the coronation of bishops and kings by the clergy or princes with the community’s active agreement; there are many analogous predecessors throughout the world. That the idea of “election” grew out of this will be discussed later.
e) Through the idea that charisma is transmitted by blood, and that it is therefore a quality inherent in a kinship grouping, especially in next-of-kin: this is hereditary charisma. The order of hereditary succession need not be the same as that for appropriated rights but can vary from it. It can also be determined by using the means listed under a) to d) to establish the “proper” heir within the kinship group.
There are instances from Africa where brothers have had to fight each other for the succession. In China, succession had to happen in such a way that the relationship of the living to their ancestral spirits was not disturbed. Very common in the Orient has been succession by seniority, or through designation by followers. In the Ottoman Empire, there was consequently a “duty” to eliminate all other possible candidates.
The clear principle of succession by primogeniture to positions of power gained ground only in medieval Europe, in Japan, and in a few other places; this very much reinforced the consolidation of political organisations by avoiding a struggle among several pretenders in the hereditary charismatic kinship group.
Belief is then no longer directed to a person’s charismatic qualities, but to the legitimacy of the position acquired by virtue of hereditary succession. (The processes of traditionalisation and legalization.) The concept of God’s “gift of grace” was entirely transformed and now means: authority by personal right, not from the acknowledgement of those over whom authority is exercised. Personal charisma can be entirely absent.
Hereditary monarchy, the mass hereditary hierocracies of Asia, and the hereditary charisma of kinship groups as characteristics of the status and qualification of fiefs and benefices (see the following paragraphs) all belong here.
f) Through the idea that charisma can be transmitted by ritual means from one bearer to another, or that it is a quality that can be created (originally through the use of magic): this involves an objectification of charisma, the charisma of office. Belief in legitimacy, then, no longer relates to a person but instead to the qualities acquired and a ritual act’s effectiveness.
The most important example: the transmission of priestly charisma through anointment, consecration, or the laying on of hands; or royal charisma transferred or confirmed through anointment and coronation. An indelible spiritual character implies the detachment of capacities linked to the office of charisma from the qualities of the person as a priest. This is what gave rise to constant conflict, starting with donatism and montanism, and up to the Puritan and Baptist Revolution (for the Quaker, the priest bearing the charisma of his office is a “hireling”).
§12. The routinisation of charisma arising from the provision of successors is paralleled by the interest in routinisation shared by the administrative staff. The staff can survive through patronage, booty, or casual revenues only so long as the charismatic ruler is in his first throes of success acknowledged by belief and enthusiasm, and his rule is genuinely extraordinary. Only among the limited stratum of enthusiastic disciples do we find followers prepared to devote their lives on a lasting basis to this “ideal,” “making” their life their “calling.” The great mass of disciples and followers wish in the long run to make their living from their “calling,” and will have to do so if they are not to disperse.
For this reason, the routinisation of charisma also involves
1. the appropriation of ruling powers and Chancen for gain to followers or disciples, and the regulation of recruitment to these groups.
2. traditionalisation or legalisation (whether with rational statutory provision or not) can assume the following typical forms:
1. the genuine form of recruitment is according to personal charisma. Followers or disciples can in the process of routinisation develop norms for recruitment, relating especially to
a) education, and
b) tests of eligibility.
Charisma can only be “aroused” or “put to the test,” not “learned” or “taught.” All the various kinds of magical asceticism (sorcerers, heroes) and all novitiates belong to this category of closure for the organisation of the administrative staff (see the discussion on charismatic education in Chapter 4).28 Only the novice who is proven will be admitted to the power of rule. The genuinely charismatic leader can resist these demands with some success—but not his successor, or at least not a successor chosen from among the administrative staff (§13.4).
The above includes all magical and warrior asceticism from the “men’s house,” with their pupils and novitiates. Whoever fails the test as a warrior remains a “woman,” excluded from the followers.
2. Charismatic norms can easily turn into norms validated by tradition and social rank (hereditary charisma). If the leader possesses hereditary charisma (§11.e)), then it is no great step to the selection and employment of the administrative staff on this basis, and quite probably also their dependants. The term “lineage state” will be used when a political organisation is closely identified with this principle of hereditary charisma—where all ruling powers, fiefs, benefices, and Chancen for gain of all kinds are appropriated in this way. All powers and all kinds of Chancen are traditionalised. Clan heads—traditional gerontocrats or patriarchs not legitimated by charisma regulate those matters that cannot be taken away from the clan. It is not the kind of position that defines the “status” of the man or his clan, but the hereditary charismatic status of the clan that determines the positions due to him.
Main examples: Japan before bureaucratisation; without any doubt to a great extent also China (the “ancient families”) before its rationalisation into territorial states; the caste system of India; Russia before the introduction of a feudal hierarchy (mjestnitschestvo) in the fifteenth century, and in other forms subsequently; and in the same way, all “hereditary social ranks” everywhere.
3. The administrative staff can promote and enforce the creation and appropriation of individual positions and Chancen for gain on behalf of its members. Depending on whether this is done by tradition or by legalisation, there then arise:
a) benefices (prebendialisation; see above, §8),
b) offices (patrimonialisation and bureaucratisation; see above, §7),
c) fiefs (feudalisation),
which now are now appropriated, instead of their original purely occasional or casual provision from patronage or booty. In particular, for a)
α) mendicant benefices,
β) benefices from rents in kind,
γ) benefices from money taxes,
δ) revenue from fees,
through the regulation and financial rationalisation of provisioning originally effected through patronage (α), or purely from booty (β, γ).
On α), Buddhism;
on β), Chinese and Japanese rice benefices;
on γ), the rule in all rational states of conquest;
on δ), masses of individual examples everywhere—especially clergy and judges, but in India also military powers.
On b): the “transformation of the charismatic mission into an office” can imply either an increase in patrimonialisation or in bureaucratisation. The first is the general rule; the second can be found in the Occident during antiquity and modernity, while it is more infrequent, more the exception, elsewhere.
On c): α—land appropriated as a fief while retaining the character of the position as one linked to the charismatic mission.
β) complete enfeoffment of ruling powers.
These are hard to distinguish, but the orientation of the position to remittances does not entirely disappear, not even during the Middle Ages.
§12a. A prerequisite of routinisation is the termination of charisma’s lack of connection to the economy, its adaption to fiscal (financial) forms of provision, creating economic conditions capable of yielding taxes and contributions. With the shift towards prebendialisation, the “laity” becomes differentiated from a “clergy,” members of the charismatic, but now routinised, administrative staff possessing a fixed share of revenue (priests of the emerging “churches”). Likewise, with the development of political organisation, “tax-paying subjects” are now confronted with vassals, the holders of benefices, and in the rational case, “state” officials who are no longer “confidantes” of a charismatic leader but appointed party officials.
This is typical among Buddhist and Hindu sects (see the sociology of religion).29 It is the same for all conquered states that have been rationalised into permanent structures, and for parties and other forms that were originally purely charismatic.
Rationalisation largely impels the organisation of charismatic rule into everyday forms such as patrimonial rule, especially forms hierarchised by social rank, or bureaucratised forms. The originally special character of charismatic rule is expressed in charismatic conceptions of honour associated with the hereditary social rank or office of those in leading positions, whether ruler or administrative staff—it is a form of prestige attached to rule. A hereditary monarch “by Grace of God” is no simple patrimonial ruler, patriarch, or sheikh; a vassal is no mere retainer or official. These points will be elaborated in the treatment of “social rank” following.
As a rule, routinisation does not come about without a struggle. At first, the personal demands originating from the ruler’s charisma are not forgotten, and historically it has been quite typical for there to be conflict between charisma acquired by heredity or associated with office, and that inhering in the person.
1. The transformation of the power of absolution (absolving mortal sins) from a power held only by martyrs and ascetics into an official function performed by bishops and priests took much longer in the Orient than it did in the Occident, influenced as it was by the Roman conception of “office.” All organisations, from the state to trade unions (and especially at the present time!), experience internal revolutions led by charismatic leaders opposing hereditary charisma or the powers of office. However, the more developed the network of economic dependences associated with a money economy are, the stronger the pressure of the daily needs of those dependent on it. The tendency towards routinisation is ubiquitous, and as a rule, quickly realised. Charisma is a phenomenon typical of the rule by prophetic religious movements or conquering political movements in their initial stages, but it is a form of rule that gives way to routinisation as soon as rule is secured, and in particular, once it has taken on a mass character.
2. In all cases, the routinisation of charisma is, of course, powerfully impelled by a striving for security: legitimisation of positions of social rule and economic Chancen for the retainers and dependants of the ruler. However, the objective necessity that orders and administrative staff adapt to the normal everyday demands and conditions of the administration also plays a part. Here there are in particular points to which administrative and jurisdictional traditions can be attached, as need dictates both for the normal administrative staff and those who are ruled over. In addition, some kind of order is needed for the organisation of the administrative staff itself. Finally, and above all, the adaptation of administrative staff and of all administrative measures to everyday economic conditions—since the covering of costs by looting, contributions, gifts, hospitality, all of which are typical of charisma in its warrior or prophetic stages, is not a possible basis for ongoing everyday administration. This is something that will be dealt with separately below.30
3. Routinisation is not therefore something that is only brought about by the problem of succession; it involves far more than this. On the contrary: the main problem is making the transition from charismatic administrative staff and administrative principles to their everyday forms. All the same, the problem of succession does affect the routinisation of the core charismatic principle: it affects the ruler himself, and his legitimacy. Contrasting with the transition to traditional or legal orders and administrative staffs, this involves very special and characteristic conceptions that can only be understood in this context. The most important of these issues are the designation of a charismatic successor and hereditary charisma.
4. As already noted, the most important historical example of a charismatic leader designating his own successor can be found in Rome. For the rex, this was effected by tradition; the nomination of a dictator, corulers, and successors in the Principate was firmly established historically. The way in which all senior magistrates invested with imperium were appointed clearly demonstrates that even for them, nomination as successor was done by a military commander, conditional on endorsement by the citizen army. The fact that candidates were examined by the officiating magistrate, and that originally he could exclude a candidate on plainly arbitrary grounds, is clear evidence of this development.
5. The most important example of charismatic followers designating a successor is the appointment of bishops, and especially of the pope, originally through the clergy and with subsequent recognition by the community. Ulrich Stutz has shown that it was probable that this way of appointing bishops was adopted in the election of the German emperor: there was designation by particular princes, followed by recognition on the part of “the people,” that is, those capable of bearing arms. Similar forms are quite common.
6. India was the classic country for the development of hereditary charisma. All occupational qualifications, especially in the assignment of authority and ruling positions, were strictly guided by principles of hereditary charisma. Eligibility for fiefs involving ruling powers was linked to membership in the king’s clan, fiefs being granted to clan elders. All hierocratic official appointments, including the extraordinarily important and influential position of guru were linked to hereditary charisma. This was also true of the redistribution of clients, together with local village roles such as priest, barber, washermen and washerwomen, watchman, and so on. Every time a sect was created, a new hereditary hierarchy was formed. (This was also true of Chinese Taoism.) And this was also true of the Japanese “clan” state (before the introduction of a patrimonial state on the Chinese model, which then became prebendiary and feudalised) where the social structure was purely based on hereditary charisma (this will be dealt with in greater detail in another context).31
The right to ruling positions by virtue of hereditary charisma developed in a similar way across the entire world. Qualification by one’s own personal attainments was replaced with qualification by birth. This is everywhere the basis of the development of hereditary aristocracies; [it was evident] among the Roman nobility in the same way as in the concept of stirpa regia (the king’s clan) among the Germans as described by Tacitus, and in the fascination with the pedigree of a new American aristocracy. This is something that happens everywhere that differences of “social rank” have taken root.
Relationship to the economy. The routinisation of charisma is in very large measure identical with the accommodation to economic conditions as the constant force of daily life. Here the economy leads; it is not led. To a great extent the reorganisation of hereditary or official charisma serves as a means for the legitimation of existing or acquired powers of disposal. Besides the not inconsiderable ideology of loyalty, the retention of hereditary monarchy is in particular very strongly influenced by the calculation that all forms of inherited and legitimately acquired property could be undermined if the inner unity of the sanctity of succession to the throne was abandoned, and it is no coincidence that hereditary monarchy is more acceptable to the propertied class than to the proletariat, for instance.
Otherwise, it is difficult to say anything very general, and at the same time valuable and substantial, about the relationship among the different possibilities of adaptation to the economy—this will have to be reserved for special consideration.32 Prebendialisation, feudalization, and the hereditary charismatic appropriation of Chancen of all kinds can, in all cases, have stereotypical effects during the transition from charisma, just as they do in their development from the early stages of patrimonial or bureaucratic rule, and in this way, have an impact on the economy. The power of charisma often has a powerful revolutionary economic impact, often initially as a destructive force that is quite likely due to its novel and unconditional orientation, but where routinisation leads towards traditionalism, it can have a quite opposite impact.
The economic factors in (charismatic) revolutions will be dealt with separately. These are quite different.
6. Feudalism
§12b. The final case (c: fief) in §12.3 remains to be dealt with separately. This is because it is possible for a particular structure of rule that has had an enormous historical significance to emerge from it: Feudalism. This is quite different from patrimonialism, as it also is from genuine or hereditary charisma. We will distinguish here two genuine forms of feudalism: that based on fiefs, and that based on benefices. All other forms in which the use of land is granted in return for military service are in reality not “feudalism” but have a patrimonial (ministerial) character; they are not “feudalism” in the sense used here and are not given any separate treatment. The different kinds of benefices will be discussed later, when dealing with their details.33
AA. A fief always includes the following:
aa) The appropriation of ruling powers and rights. A fief can be appropriated with respect to
α) powers relating to a single household, or
β) to an organisation, but limited to economic or fiscal powers, or
γ) to an organisation and including powers of command.
Fiefs are granted against services, mostly military, but also including some administrative duties. The grant takes a very specific form:
bb) primarily, and mainly, personal, for the lifetime of the ruler and of the person enfeoffed (his vassal). Furthermore,
cc) the relationship is established by contract, hence with a free man who, in the case of what is here called “enfeoffed feudalism,” possesses
dd) a specific life conduct related to his social rank as a knight.
ee) The contract of fealty is no ordinary “transaction” but establishes a brotherly relationship, albeit with unequal rights and whose outcome involves mutual obligations of loyalty. The obligations of loyalty are based on
αα) conceptions of knightly honour related to social rank, and which
ββ) are strictly limited.
The transition from type α) (see above under the discussion of c) to type β) occurs when
aaa) the fief is hereditary and transferable, presupposing the renewal of an oath of fealty to each new ruler on the part of each new incumbent, and moreover,
bbb) the enfeoffed administrative staff can enforce tenure, since all fiefs are a source of provision for those belonging to the particular section of the hierarchy.
The first, transition to a hereditary basis, comes from the quite early Middle Ages; the second emerged in its course. The conflict between lords and their vassals was related above all to the implicit elimination of this principle, which made the creation or the effecting of a personal patrimonial “power” on the part of the lord impossible.
BB. Enfeoffed administration (enfeoffed feudalism) has just as little ever been realised in absolute purity as pure patrimonialism ever was, but in its complete implementation—
aa) The authority of the lord would be reduced to the services of vassals solely by virtue of their oath of fealty; and
bb) The political organisation would be entirely replaced by a system of purely personal relations of fealty between the lord and his vassals, the latter and their own (subenfeoffed) subvassals, and on to their probable subvassals. The lord can lay claim only to the loyalty of his own vassals, these vassals to that of their own subvassals, and so forth.
cc) The lord can deprive his vassal of his fief only in the event of “felony,” and in turn the vassal in the event of the felony, his subvassal. To effect this, however, the lord must rely on the assistance of other vassals, or on the passivity of the subvassals of the “offender,” who has broken his oath of fealty. Either source of support can only be realised when each of the relevant groups recognises that the felony of their fellow vassal or lord against his lord has occurred. He cannot count on the noninterference of subvassals unless the higher lord has been able to secure recognition that opposition to an overlord in subinfeudation is in this case the exception (something that is constantly sought for, but that is not always achieved).
dd) There is a social ranking hierarchy in fiefs according to the order of their subinfeudation—in the Sachsenspiegel, this is called the Heerschilde.34 This is not, however, a “sequence of administrative levels” or a “hierarchy.” Whether a measure or a judgement can be contested, and who might be able to do so, is a matter for the upper court, not for the hierarchical system of enfeoffment (in theory, it is possible for the upper court to be granted as a fief to some incumbent of judicial power, although this did not tend to happen).
ee) Those who do not hold fiefs involving some element of patrimonial or other organisational powers in the hierarchy are “subjects,” or patrimonial dependants. They are subordinated to those who are enfeoffed to the extent that their own traditional social rank determines or permits, or to the extent that the force majeure of the enfeoffed incumbent can force them, against which military compulsion they are more or less defenceless. The principle of “no land without a master” is as true for the lord (compulsory enfeoffment) as it is for anyone who is not enfeoffed. The sole surviving element of the older system of direct organisational power is the almost universal principle that the political authority of the lord, and in particular the judicial power, are available to the lord wherever he happens to be.
ff) Powers of controlling one’s own household (disposition of powers over domains, slaves, and serfs); organisational fiscal rights (rights to taxation and contributions) and the powers of command linked to organisations (jurisdiction compulsory military service, and so powers over “free men”) are all equally objects of enfeoffment.
However, organisational powers of command were quite often made subject to special regulation.
In ancient China, there were pure rental and territorial fiefs that were distinguished by name. This was not the case during the Middle Ages in the Occident, although it was true of their relationship to social rank and in very many related qualities that are not discussed here.
Complete appropriation of organisational powers of command as enfeoffed property rights tended to be introduced only with very many transitions and irregularities, this to be separately dealt with later.35 What usually did exist was the distinction of social rank between those enjoying budgetary or purely fiscal rights, and those enjoying rights linked to powers of command: those political vassals entrusted with court jurisdictions (above all, criminal punishments involving amputation of a limb or death), and military authority (banner fief especially).
In anything like pure enfeoffed feudalism, the power enjoyed by those who rule is of course quite precarious, since it relies on a will to obedience, and so on a purely personal loyalty on the part of the enfeoffed administrative staff who are in possession of the means of administration. There is therefore a chronic latent struggle over the power to rule between the lord and his vassals; an actually ideal-typical enfeoffed administration (as in aa) to ff)) was nowhere established, or survived for very long. Instead, where the lord was able, he adopted the following measures:
aa) The ruler sought to displace the purely personal principle of loyalty either
αα) by restricting or prohibiting subinfeudation;
This was employed quite often in the Occident, but frequently by the administrative staff in its own power interests. The same was true of the alliance of princes in China from 630 BC onwards.
ββ) by voiding the fealty of subvassals to their lord in the event of a war against the higher lord; but if possible also
γγ) by securing the direct fealty of subvassals with respect to the higher lord.
bb) The ruler sought to secure his right to supervise the organised administration of ruling powers by
αα) granting all subjects a right of appeal to him or to his courts;
ββ) placing supervisory officials in his political vassals’ courts;
γγ) enforcing his own right to tax all vassals’ subjects;
δδ) appointing certain officials among political vassals;
εε) enforcing the principles
aaa) that all political powers are forfeit to him in his presence, or to any other agent he may designate, and
bbb) that as supreme lord, he may bring any case of his choosing before his own court.
The lord can claim or gain these powers from his vassals (or any other agent with appropriated powers) only if
cc) the lord creates his own administrative staff, recreates one, or reorganises one. This can be
αα) patrimonial (with retainers)
This was widespread in the European Middle Ages and in Japan in the bakufu of the shogun, which maintained very fine control over the feudal daimyos.
ββ) extrapatrimonial, recruited from the social rank of the literati;
Examples are clerical officials (Christian, Brahmin, Kayastha, Buddhist, Lamist, Islamic) or humanists (in China, the Confucian literati). On their specificity and enormous cultural impact, see Chapter 4.36
γγ) specialised, in particular, trained in law and military affairs.
This was proposed, in vain, by Wang Au Shi in the eleventh century (although at the time, this was not in opposition to the feudal regime, but to the literati). In the Occident, the civil administration made use of the university schooling of church (through Canon Law) and state (Roman Law, in England through a Common Law that had been rationalised by Roman legal thinking—these represented the seeds of the modern occidental state). Occidental military administration followed a different course, feudal organisation being first replaced by capitalist military entrepreneurs (condottieri), who were then in turn replaced by territorial princes who from the seventeenth century onwards introduced rational financial administration (in England and France this happened earlier).
In the Occident (although not in Japan), this struggle between the lords and the feudal administrative staff was largely coincident with, and in part identical to, the struggle for power with corporations based on social rank. In modern times, this everywhere resulted in the lords’ victory, and this meant the victory of bureaucratic administration, first in the Occident, then in Japan, India, and perhaps in China, initially in the form of foreign conquest. Besides purely historical political constellations, in the Occident it was economic conditions that were determinant, especially: the rise of the bourgeoisie (Bürgertum) within (occidental) towns and cities, and then the competition for power among individual states through rational (i.e., bureaucratic) administration and fiscally determined alliances with capitalist interests—as will be demonstrated later.37
§12c. Not all “feudalism” is enfeoffed feudalism in the occidental sense. Also of significance is above all
A. a fiscally determined feudalism based on benefices.
This is typical of the Islamic Near East and India under Mogul rule. By contrast, ancient Chinese feudalism before the time of Shi Huang Ti was at least in part enfeoffed feudalism, although benefices were also involved. Japanese feudalism also involved fiefs, but they were very much subject in the case of the daimyos to quite stringent control on the part of the supreme lord (bakufu); the fiefs of the samurai and the bake often originated in benefices granted to court officials (calculated cadastrially according to the yield from rice rents).
We will talk of benefice feudalism where
aa) there is the appropriation of benefices, hence rents calculated and granted according to yield; and
bb) this appropriation is personal and according to services (in principle, although not always in force, and probably associated with promotion).
The example here is the Turkish Sipahi benefices, at least legally.
But above all:
cc) this was not primarily a free, individual, and personal relationship of fealty through a fraternal contract established personally with a lord resulting in the granting of a personal fief; it mainly served fiscal purposes linked to an otherwise patrimonial (often sultanic) contributory organisation. Usually this was expressed in the grant of a yield estimated cadastrially.
Originally, the feudal system of enfeoffment often developed from economic exchanges made purely in kind—the provision of personal needs by a political organisation (involving obligations of labour and military service). Its primary purpose was to replace untrained, uneconomic armed bands no longer capable of properly equipping themselves with a trained, fully equipped army of knights bound by personal honour. The primary source of a feudal system based on benefices was usually the transformation of finance to a monetary basis (a “reversion” to financing through services in kind). This could take the form of
αα) shifting the risk of fluctuating income to entrepreneurs (and so a kind of transformation of tax farming), hence:
aaa) in return for the provision of particular military contingents (knights, probably chariots, armoured troops, supply trains, probably artillery) for the patrimonial prince’s army.
In medieval China, quotas for each of the military categories were often assigned territorially.
Either in addition to this, or solely through
bbb) meeting the costs of civil administration, and
ccc) payment of a tax to the prince’s exchequer.
This frequently happened in India.
Concessions were made so that these obligations might be met:
ddd) the appropriation of political rights of different extent, at first with regular provision for cancellation and subject to repurchase, but actually often definitively, given the lack of means.
Those who hold such definitively appropriated powers then become landowners who in addition often acquire extensive organisational political powers.
This occurred above all in India, where the source of the power over the land by the zamindars, jagardars, and tulukdars arose in this way. This is also true of large areas of the Near East, as Carl Heinrich Becker has described it (the first to properly identify how Near Eastern forms differed from occidental fiefdom). Mainly it involves tax farming; as a secondary effect, “landed property” develops from this. The Romanian “Bojars” are the descendants of the most mixed society on earth: Jews, Germans, Greeks, and so on, who first appropriated political powers through tax farming.
ββ) It can take the form of the inability to pay the soldiers of a patrimonial army, resulting in the usurpation of sources of taxation, which is subsequently legalised through the appropriation of land and subjects to officers and the army.
This was true of the famous Khans of the Caliphate, the source or model of all Oriental appropriation right up to the time of the Mameluke army (which of course was formally a slave army).
This does not always lead to the ordering of benefices according to cadastral principles, but it comes close to that and can end up as such.
Whether the fiefs of the Turkish Sipahi were closer to benefices than to fiefs will not be discussed at this point: from the legal point of view, they were capable of supporting “promotion” according to “service.”
It is clear that the two categories shade imperceptibly into one another and that any unambiguous assignment to the one or the other is seldom possible. Moreover, the feudal system of benefices is very close to pure prebendialisation, and there are fluid transitions there, too.
Using a somewhat inexact terminology, there are other forms of feudalisms besides that of enfeoffment, which depends on a free contract with a lord, and that of benefices, which has a fiscal character:
B. so-called polis feudalism, which depended on a real or fictive synoecism38 of landlords in which they enjoyed equal rights, living a purely military life based on a high degree of social honour. Its economic base is the cleros, a plot of land appropriated personally and passed on by individual hereditary succession. It is cultivated by slaves allocated on the basis of social rank and it enables its holder to equip himself.
One can hardly call this “feudalism.” It can be found only in Greece, in fully developed form only in Sparta, and developed from the conditions of the “men’s house”—given the specific conventions of honour based on social rank, and the knightly life conduct of these landowners. In Rome, the expression fundus corresponds to the Greek cleros, but there is no evidence regarding the organisation of the men’s houses (curia = co-viria), which might have taken a similar form.
There is a tendency to dub as “feudal” all military strata, institutions, and conventions that are privileged according to social rank. This practice will be avoided here as being quite imprecise.
C. And for the opposite reason, because the fief is there as an object, but
1. is not acquired by virtue of a free contract (fraternisation, neither with a lord nor with those of equal social rank), but instead by virtue of the command of one’s own (patrimonial) lord; or perhaps while free,
2. not acquired on the basis of a noble, knightly life conduct, or
3. neither of these,
so that there can be
in relation to 1., fiefs held by knights who are, however, dependants; or
in relation to 2., fiefs freely acquired by warriors who are not knightly in their conduct; or
in relation to 3., fiefs granted to clients, coloni, and slaves, all of whom are employed as warriors;
and for us, all of these are benefices.
Example of 1: Occidental and Oriental household officials; samurai in Japan.
Example of 2: Did occur in the Orient, certainly at first with Ptolemaic soldiers. The fact that subsequently land held for services was appropriated on a hereditary basis, while soldiering became an occupation in itself, is a typical product of the development of a liturgical state.
Example of 3: this is typical of the so-called warrior caste in ancient Egypt, the Mamelukes in medieval Egypt, and various other unfree Oriental and Chinese soldiers who were quite often given land, but not always.
The term “feudalism” is also used very inexactly in the sense of the existence of purely military social ranks (who are in this case negatively privileged, at least formally). This will be dealt with in Chapter 4.39
§13. What has been said can leave no room for doubt: organisations dedicated to rule and that belong only to one or the other of the “pure” types so far discussed are very rare. This is even more true since important elements of legal and traditional rule—collegiality, the feudal principle—have either not be dealt with at all, or only touched on in passing. But one thing needs emphasis: that all rule, hence all deference, is founded on a belief: the “prestige” attributed to the ruler or rulers. This is seldom unambiguous. In the case of “legal” rule, this is never purely legal. Instead, belief in legality is “acquired,” itself conditioned through tradition; violation of that tradition might be fatal for it. And it is also charismatic in a negative sense: striking failures can ruin any government, shatter its prestige, and prepare the ground for charismatic revolutions. For monarchies, therefore, lost wars reveal that their charisma lacks “proof”; for republics, wars won can be dangerous, for victorious generals can advance charismatic claims.
There were of course purely traditional societies. But they seldom last, and something that they share with bureaucratic rule is that they seldom lack a charismatic head whose position is owed to either personal heredity or office (besides in some circumstances having a purely traditional head). Everyday economic needs are met under the leadership of traditional rulers, those which were more special (hunting, war booty) under the leadership of charismatic leaders. The idea of the possibility of “statutes” is likewise rather old (mostly legitimated by oracle). But above all, whenever the recruitment of administrative staff relies on extrapatrimonial sources, a category of official is created that is distinguished from those of legal bureaucracies only in terms of the ultimate, not formal, basis of their authority (Geltung).
Purely charismatic systems of rule are likewise very rare, as are purely hereditary charismatic systems. As the case of Napoleon shows, the most strict bureaucracy can develop from charismatic rule, as can all kinds of prebendary and feudal organisations. Terminology and the development of a casuistry can in no respect aim to be exhaustive or to reduce historical reality to a schema. Its use is the ability to state what use the application of one or another characterisation of an organisation serves, or which might approximate it, and that itself is a big step forwards.
For all forms of rule, the existence of the administrative staff and the continuing action it takes to assure the execution and enforcement of orders is vital to the maintenance of deference. The existence of this action is what is meant by the word “organisation.” In turn, the solidarity of (ideal and material) interests between the administrative staff and the lord is of prime importance. For this relationship, it can be said that a lord supported in this way is stronger than any individual member, but weaker than the members taken together. For administrative staff members to obstruct a ruler, however, or take conscious action in defiance of him, requires that they deliberately engage in sociation (Vergesellschaftung) if they are to have any chance of success in undermining the ruler’s direction. Likewise, anybody seeking to break up a system of rule must, to make possible their own assumption of rule, create their own administrative staff, unless he is able to count on the connivance and cooperation of the existing staff with respect to the ruler. Solidarity of interests with the lord is strongest where the legitimacy of and support for the administrative staff itself depends on the ruler. The prospect of evading this solidarity varies from structure to structure. It is most difficult where there is a complete separation from the means of administration: hence, in purely patriarchal systems based only on tradition; in purely patrimonial systems; or in purely bureaucratic systems based on regulations. It is easiest where there has been appropriation by social rank (fiefs, benefices).
Finally, it has to be said that historical reality is a constant, usually latent, struggle between a ruler and his administrative staff over the expropriation or appropriation of the one by the other. Of decisive importance in the whole of cultural development was
1. the outcome of this struggle as such;
2. the character of that stratum of officials dependent on this outcome that assisted the ruler in winning the struggle against feudal or other appropriated powers: ritual literati, clergy, purely secular clients, household officials, legally trained literati, specialist financial officials, and private individuals without formal official status. (On these concepts, see later [discussion].)40
These conflicts and developments therefore accounted for a good part not only of administrative history but also of the history of cultures, because of the way they defined the nature of education and the manner in which hierarchies of social rank were formed.
1. Salary, Chancen for gain, allowances, and fiefs shackle the staff to their ruler in many different ways and to different degrees. (This is to be dealt with later.)41 Common to all of these, however, is the fact that anything that endangers the legitimacy of the ruler who has granted revenues, social power, and honour to an administrative staff, tends also to endanger the legitimacy of the revenues so granted and the attribution of social power and honour to the administrative staff. It is for this reason that legitimacy plays a little noticed, but very important role.
2. The recent history of the collapse of hitherto legitimate rule here in Germany is instructive. The war eroded the ties of tradition, while defeat led to a loss of prestige; this combined with a systematic habituation to illegal behaviour that undermined both military obedience and work discipline paved the way for the overthrow of the older system of rule. On the other hand, the fact that the existing administration simply continued to function, and its orders remained in force under the new authorities is an excellent example of the way bureaucratic rationality establishes an inescapable bond between the individual members of this staff and their material function. As has been mentioned, the reason for this was not only related to the private economic interests of its members—a desire to hold on to their position, salary, and pension (however understandable that might have been for the mass of officials)—but equally to a material (ideological) interest: that the breakdown of the administration under present conditions would have meant a breakdown in supplying the entire population (including the officials themselves) with the most elementary daily requirements. It was for this reason that appeals to the officials’ (material) “sense of obligation” were treated as an objective necessity even by the former legitimate powers and their sympathisers.
3. The course of the present unrest created a new administrative staff in the form of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Quite how these new staffs were to be created was something that had to be “invented,” and was also related to wartime conditions (who had weapons), a factor without which the revolution would not have been possible at all (more about this and its historical analogies later).42 Only the emergence of charismatic leaders in confrontation with the legal authorities and the creation of a charismatic following made possible the seizure of power, while it was secured and sustained by specialised administrators. Formerly, every revolution attempted under modern conditions foundered because of the indispensability of expert administrators and the absence of its own dedicated staff. The preconditions for all previous revolutionary scenarios varied greatly (see the chapter on the theory of revolutionary change).43
4. In the past, and under very different circumstances, rulers have been overthrown on the initiative of administrative staff (see the chapter on the theory of revolutionary change). A precondition for such overthrow was always the sociation of staff members, which often assumed the form of a partial conspiracy, or instead more that of fraternal bonding and sociation. The modern official’s conditions of existence renders this very difficult to effect, although as Russian developments show, it is not entirely impossible. As a rule, their efforts are no more significant than what workers wish to achieve, and are able to accomplish, through (normal) strikes.
5. The patrimonial character of officialdom is expressed above all by the way that acceptance of a personal relationship of subordination as a client is required (puer regis in the Carolingian system, a familiaris under the Angevins). Survivals of this have persisted for a very long time.
7.44 The Antiauthoritarian Transformation of Charisma
§14. The principle of charismatic legitimacy is authoritarian in principle, but it can be reinterpreted in an antiauthoritarian manner. Actual recognition of charismatic authority by the ruled is in fact based entirely on the acceptance of a “personal proof,” acceptance of which with respect to the person considered charismatic and hence legitimate is, however, obligatory. With the increasing rationalisation of organisational relationships, this acceptance tends to be seen not as the consequence of legitimacy, but as its basis (democratic legitimacy), and the designation of a successor by an administrative staff is treated as a “preliminary election” or by a predecessor as a “proposal,” and recognition by the community itself as an “election.” A ruler legitimated by virtue of his own charisma then becomes a ruler by grace of those who follow him, since the latter are (formally) free to select and put in power whomever they like, and perhaps even depose him, which would be the consequence of a loss of legitimacy following the loss of his charisma and its personal proof. The ruler is now the freely elected leader. The recognition of charismatic judicial decisions on the part of the community then develops into the idea that the community is free to create, accept, and abolish laws just as it likes, whether in general or in a particular case. However, while cases arising from dispute over “appropriate” law in the case of genuinely charismatic rule are often in fact settled by communal decision, this happens under the psychological pressure of a sense that there is only one obligatory and correct decision. In this way, the treatment of law approaches the legal conception. The most important transitional type is plebiscitary rule, the commonest examples of which are the “party leaders” of the modern state. It does, however, emerge everywhere that the leader feels legitimated as a representative of the masses, and is recognised as such. The most effective means for such recognition is the plebiscite. In the classic cases of both Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis Napoleon, this is employed after the violent seizure of state power, and Louis Napoleon used it after he had suffered a loss of prestige. Here it is not important what its real value as an expression of popular will is; formally, it is the specific means of deriving the legitimacy of rule from the freely given trust of those who are ruled, even though this be only formal, or possibly a fiction.
Once the principle of “election” has been applied to rulers as a redefinition of charisma, it can also be applied to an administrative staff. Elected officials whose legitimacy derives from the trust of the ruled, and so are liable to removal if they lose this trust, are typical of “democracies” of a particular kind, for instance that in America. They are not “bureaucratic” figures. Because they have an independent source of legitimacy, they are not strongly integrated into a hierarchical order. Their Chancen of “promotion” or employment cannot be influenced by their “superiors” (there are analogies in cases where there are several qualitatively separated charismata, as exist, for example, between the Dalai Lama and Taschi Lama). An administration formed on this basis is as a “precise instrument” technically far inferior to a bureaucratic administration composed of appointed officials.
1. “Plebiscitary democracy,” the most important type of “leader democracy,” is in its real sense a form of charismatic rule concealed by the formality that legitimacy is derived from the will of the ruled, and is only by virtue of this capable of being sustained. The leader (the demagogue) actually rules by virtue of the devotion and trust of his political following to his person as such. In the first instance, this extends to those recruited to his following, but if this gives him power, it can be extended throughout the organisation. The type is exemplified by the dictators of ancient and modern revolutions: the Hellenic aisymnetes, tyrants, and demagogues; in Rome, Gracchus and his successors; in the Italian states, the capitani del popolo and mayors; in Germany, the Zürich democratic dictatorship; in the modern state, Cromwell’s dictatorship, the leaders of the French Revolution, and the French plebiscitary First and Second Empires. Wherever legitimacy for this kind of rule is sought, it makes use of plebiscitary recognition by the sovereign people. Personal administrative staff was recruited on a charismatical basis from among talented plebeians (in the case of Cromwell, due attention was given to religious qualifications; in the case of Robespierre, personal reliability combined with certain “ethical” qualities; and for Napoleon, the entire focus was on their personal talent and utility for the aims of the imperial “rule of genius”). At the heights of revolutionary dictatorship, this took the form of administration purely through revocable mandates (as with the role of agents in the Committee of Public Safety). When certain kinds of communal “dictators” have been swept into power by the reform movement in American cities, they have generally been allowed to appoint their own staff. Both traditional and formal legitimacy are equally ignored by revolutionary dictatorship. The tendency under patriarchal rule has been to work according to principles of material justice, utilitarian aims, and state interests. Parallel to this are the workings of revolutionary tribunals, together with the substantive postulates of justice espoused by radical democracies, whether in antiquity or in modern socialism (this will be dealt with in the sociology of law).45 The routinisation of revolutionary charisma then brings about changes similar to those in the corresponding process—hence, in England the development of a professional army as a residue of the voluntary principle embraced during the civil war, and in France the prefectorial system as a residue of the charismatic administration of the revolutionary plebiscitary dictatorship.
2. The elected official everywhere implies the radical redefinition of the ruling position of the charismatic ruler as that of a “servant” of the ruled. There is no place for such a type in a technically rational bureaucracy. Since he is not appointed by his “superiors,” nor relies on them for his Chancen of promotion, but instead owes his appointment to the favour of the ruled, he has little interest in prompt discipline and earning the praise of his superior: he therefore functions as in “autocephalous” rule. As a rule, then, high-quality technical work should not therefore be expected from an elected administrative staff. (Examples are the comparison of elected officials of the American states with appointed federal officials, together with the experience of communally elected officials as against the committees appointed at the discretion of directly elected reforming mayors.) The type of plebiscitary leadership democracy contrasts with that of the leaderless democracy that shall be discussed later, characterised by the effort to minimise the rule of man by man.
Leadership democracy is therefore generally characterised by a naturally emotional dedication to and trust in the leader, which tends to result in an inclination to follow the most extraordinary, most promising leader who deploys the most attractive means of persuasion. This is the natural basis of the utopian element in all revolutions. And this also accounts for the limitation of rationality in this form of administration in modern times, which even in America did not always live up to expectations.
Relationship to the economy:
1. The antiauthoritarian redefinition of charisma normally involves a shift towards rationality. The plebiscitary ruler usually seeks support in an official staff able to work in a prompt and efficient manner. The ruler will aim to win acceptance of “proof” of his charisma among those over whom he rules, either by military glory or by improving their material welfare, in some cases pursuing both aims jointly. His primary objective will be the destruction of traditional, feudal, patrimonial, or other authoritarian powers and privileges; he secondary aim will be to create economic interests associated with his person through the solidarity of legitimacy. To the extent that he makes use of the formality and legalisation provided by the law, he is in so doing able to actively promote “formally” rational economic organisation.
2. The (formal) rationality of the economy is easily weakened by plebiscitary powers, since its legitimacy depends on the belief and devotion of the masses, and this impels it in a different direction, forcing it to implement substantive principles of justice economically. This therefore undermines the formal character of justice and administration, and elevates judicial partiality in the form of revolutionary tribunals, allocation by coupon, and all kinds of rationing and supervision in production and consumption. In this respect, the ruler is a social dictator, something that is not necessarily only a function of modern socialist forms. This is not yet the place to discuss when it is such a function, and to what results it leads.
3. Elected officials are a source of disturbance for the formally rational economy because they are often party officials rather than professional specialists, and also because the Chancen of their being dismissed or not reelected hinder the pursuit of strictly objective judicial and administrative aims without regard for the consequences. There is, however, only one instance in which this is not an obvious impediment to (formally) rational economic organisation: where the technical and economic advances made by older cultures can be applied to the economic exploitation of new areas, and where the means of production have not yet been appropriated. This provides the Chancen that there will be a sufficient margin to take into account the costs generated by the almost inevitable corruption of elected officials, and so despite this, make large-scale profits.
For Section 1, Bonapartism is the classical paradigm. Napoleon Bonaparte introduced the Napoleonic Code [Code Napoléon] with compulsory partible inheritance, destroying all established powers. He did, on the other hand, distribute fiefs to the meritorious, such that the soldier got everything and the citizen nothing, so there was glory, and on the whole, the petty bourgeoisie did tolerably well. Napoleon III adopted Louis Philippe’s principle of enrichissez-vous and promoted large building projects, but the development of Crédit mobilier ended badly, as we know.
For Section 2, the classical example is Greek “democracy” during the period of Pericles and after. Trials were not, as in Rome, determined by juries bound by the instruction of the praetor or by legal provision, and decided by formal law. In Greece, decisions were made in terms of “substantive” justice—in truth, the courts were swayed by weeping, flattery, demagogic invective, and witticisms (consider the Attic rhetoricians’ “trial speeches”; in Rome, the sole analogy is the political trial, in which Cicero took part). The upshot for Greece was the impossibility of developing formal law and a body of formal legal science on the Roman model. The Greek court was just as much a “People’s Court” as the “revolutionary tribunals” of the French Revolution and of the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, which in no respect confined themselves to bringing politically relevant trials before their lay members. By contrast, no English revolution ever moved to intervene in the judiciary, besides for highly political cases. While justices of the peace were indeed highly discriminatory, this was only the case where the interests of the propertied class were at stake.
For Section 3, the North American Union is the paradigm. Sixteen years ago, Anglo-American workers answered my question: “Why do you so often allow yourselves to be governed by corruptible party officials?” by arguing that “our big country” offered so many Chancen that, even if millions were stolen, extorted, or embezzled, there was still enough left, and that such “professionals” were a caste on whom “we” (the workers) spit, as opposed to the German kind of specialised official, who would “spit on the worker.”
Details of these connections with the economy will be treated in detail below, and not here.46
8. Collegiality and the Separation of Powers
§15. Rule can be circumscribed or limited by special traditional or rational means.
The fact of limitation of rule as such, through being bound by tradition or statute, is not here at issue, having been dealt with in §3 above. Here we are concerned with specific social relationships and organisations that limit rule.
1. Patrimonial or feudal rule is limited by privileges of social rank, to the greatest extent by the separation of powers by social rank (§8)—these relationships have already been discussed.
2. Bureaucratic rule can be limited (and where the legal type is most fully developed, it must normally be so limited, so that rule can take place only according to rules) by agencies that have a right to exist alongside the bureaucratic hierarchy, and which:
a) supervise and possibly check adherence to statutes; or
b) have a monopoly of the creation of all statutes, or of the scope of those relevant to the freedom of officials to make dispositions as they see fit; perhaps, and most importantly,
c) monopolise the granting of authorisation for the means needed by the administration.
There will be separate discussion of this below (§16).
3. Any form of rule can be stripped of its monocratic character, bound to one person, by the principle of collegiality. This can itself take different forms, however:
a) Alongside monocratic incumbents of the power to rule there will be other, equally monocratic incumbents possessing through tradition or statute the effective possibility of deferring or nullifying measures introduced by the former (collegial veto).
The most important examples are the Roman tribune (and originally the ephors of Greek antiquity); the medieval capitano del popolo; the German workers’ and soldier’s councils in the period following 9 November 1918 until the regular administration was freed from the need to have its measures “countersigned” by these councils.
Or
b) The exact opposite: agencies that are not monocratic make dispositions following consultation and taking a vote, such that, according to statute, a majority of individuals have to collaborate to achieve a binding disposition, and this cannot be done by one individual acting alone (functional collegiality). Agreement can be either
α) unanimous or
β) by majority.
c) Case a) (collegial veto) corresponds in effect to the instance where, to weaken monocratic power, there are several monocratic incumbents with equal powers and without specification of function. Mechanical means are used (lots, rotation, oracle, and intervention of supervisory agencies as in 2a) where there is competition over who should settle the matter, with the upshot that each incumbent has a veto against all the others.
The most important case here is the Roman example of the collegiality of the legitimate magistracy (consul, praetor).
d) Closely related to case b) (functional collegiality) is the case where in an agency there is a substantive monocratic first among equals, but decrees are normally supposed to be issued after consultation with other formally equal members; differences of opinion in important cases result in withdrawals by individual members of the collegium and its consequent collapse, endangering the position of the monocratic ruler (functional collegiality with a preeminent director).
The most important case is the position of the British Prime Minister with respect to his cabinet. As is well known, this has changed very much over time. The formulation given above does, however, cover most cases during the era of cabinet government.
Advisory collegial bodies alongside monocratic rulers do not necessarily weaken their rule, but quite possibly temper it through rationalisation. Nonetheless, they can, in effect, gain the upper hand over rulers. This is especially true if their position is owed to social rank. The principal cases are as follows:
e) there is a further case closely related to d) above: that a formally advisory body is assigned to a monocratic ruler who is not bound in any way by their decisions, but who, by tradition or statute, is obliged to canvas their (formally nonbinding) advice, being answerable to them if, in disregarding their advice, he is led into failure.
The most important case: the assignment of the Roman Senate to the magistracy in an advisory capacity, the former in fact developing its power over the magistracy through its control of finance. The advisory role was more or less the original idea. But given the actual control of finances, but even more, the equivalent social rank of senators and (formally) elected officials, this led to the Senate’s decisions being binding on the magistracy: the statement si eis placeret expressing the nonbinding nature of their advice later became the “if you please” that we use today for urgent directives.
f) Another variation is the case where an agency has the scope of its collegiality specified: the entrustment of preparation and presentation to a specialist competent in particular elements of the business—or possibly to different specialists for the same matter—while the decision is made by all those taking part.
In the majority of state councils or similar bodies in the past, this was more or less always the case (as, e.g., in the British Privy Council in the period before cabinet government). They never expropriated the prince, however great their power might have been. On the contrary, in some cases the prince resorted to the State Council to free himself of cabinet government (of party leaders). This was attempted in England, but without success. By contrast, the type applies quite well to the specialised ministers found in hereditary charismatic or plebiscitary (American) cases, where rulers (kings or presidents) have made appointments with the intention of supporting their own position.
g) Specified collegiality can involve a merely advisory body, whose votes and objections are laid before the ruler for his free decision (as in c)).
The difference is then only that here the functional specification is implemented with the highest degree of consistency. This is exemplified by the Prussian practice under Friedrich Wilhelm I. This arrangement always supports the power of the ruler.
h) Rationally specified collegiality is most sharply opposed to the traditional collegiality of “elders,” whose collegial discussion is treated as a process of ascertaining authentically traditional law, and quite possibly, as a means of maintaining tradition through a power of veto in the face of statutes that undermine tradition.
Examples: many of the gerousia in antiquity, the Aeropagus in Athens, the patres in Rome (although of course predominantly Type 1; see below).
i) A weakening of rule can be brought about by applying the collegial principle to the (formally, or substantively) supreme, most decisive instance—the ruler himself. Many of the types found resemble those discussed in d) to g) above. Individual responsibilities can be assumed either (a) in turn, or (b) as the permanent “area” of individuals. Collegiality lasts as long as legitimate dispositions require the formal participation of all involved.
The most important examples: the Swiss Federal Council, where the distribution of responsibilities is not clearly specified and they are fulfilled by members in rotation; the revolutionary councils of “People’s Commissars” in Russia and Hungary, and for a time in Germany; from the past, the Venetian “Council of Eleven,” and of female elders.
Many cases of collegiality within patrimonial or feudal ruling organisations are either
α) cases of the separation of powers according to social rank (collegial organisation of an administrative staff whose members enjoy a particular social rank, or of those enjoying a particular social rank who have appropriated such positions); or
β) cases where the ruler has organised solidaristic collegial representation of patrimonial officials to counterbalance sociated and privileged holders of power—councils of state as in f) above.
γ) cases of advisory, and in some circumstances, executive bodies over which the ruler presides or attends, or at least whose discussions and votes the ruler is apprised, and which by virtue of their composition partly
αα) of specialists and
ββ) of persons whose social rank leant them specific special prestige
The ruler might hope, given the rising weight of specialist demands, to supplement his increasingly dilettantist knowledge and so retain the prospect of reaching his own reasoned decision (case g) above).
In the cases included under γ, the ruler naturally lays due weight on the representation of views that are as diverse, and perhaps contrasting, as possible, these being made up of
αα) expert opinions, and
ββ) interests, so that he might remain
1. comprehensively informed, and in a position also to
2. allow contrasting positions to play out one against the other.
In case β), the ruler by contrast often (although not always) values uniformity in opinions and positions adopted. (This is the source of “solidaristic” ministries and cabinets in so-called constitutional states, or those states based on the separation of powers.)
In the case of α), the collegium representing the appropriation values unanimity and solidarity, but is not always able to achieve this, since every appropriation effected through the privilege of social rank collides with special interests.
Typical of α) are assemblies and committees based on social rank, plus the frequent vassal assemblies that preceded them even beyond the Occident ([e.g., in] China). Typical of β) are the first thoroughly collegial agencies of an emergent modern monarchy, composed for the most part, although not exclusively, of lawyers and financial experts. Typical of γ) are state councils for many widely scattered monarchies, as well as the emergent occidental monarchy (right into the eighteenth century, an archbishop sometimes had a seat in the British cabinet); these monarchies had their own councils that combined the nobility with expert officials.
Conflicts of interests among the various social ranks and their orders made it possible for rulers to profit from his struggles with them. While k) is “collegial,” superficially it can also involve sociations, in which representatives have to operate as delegates for mutually opposing political or substantive interests if they are, through compromise between these interests, to reconcile these opposing interests (compromise collegiality in contrast to a collegiality based on votes cast in parliament or office).
This occurs in a crude form where there is separation of powers by social rank and where decisions are always made through compromises between the privileged (see the discussion shortly).47 In a rationalised form, it is possible through the selection of delegates according to their permanent social or class rank (see Chapter 4), or their current diverging interests. In a body like this, so long as it has this character, taking a vote can play no role, for it involves either
α) an agreed compromise between interests, or
β) a compromise imposed by the ruler after he has given a hearing to the positions taken by the different interested parties.
More detail will be given later on the unique structure of the so-called state based on social rank.48 Relevant here are the separation of assemblies (in England “Lords” and “Commons,” while the Church had its own separate “convocations”; the division among nobility, clergy, and the Third Estate in France; the numerous distinctions among the German Stände), together with the need to engage in compromise—initially within the individual groups, then between them—if any decisions were to be made, decisions which the ruler often treated as nonbinding proposals. The recent revival of the idea of guilds representing occupations (see §22 below) suffers from a failure to recognise that here compromise, not agreement, is the sole proper means. Within free workers’ councils, matters are dealt with as if they were issues of power arising from economic conditions, and not questions on which one should vote.
l) There is, finally, a related case: collegiality by poll where several hitherto autocephalous and autonomous organisations merge to form a new organisation, and in so doing establish a (structured) right to influence decisions by the appropriation of votes to their leader or their delegates (fusion collegiality).
Examples: the representation of phylae, phratries, and clans in the councils of antiquity, the medieval clan organisation during the consulate period, the popular councils of the guilds, the delegates of craft unions in the council of a federation of trade unions, the “Federal Council” or Senate in federal states, the distribution of appointments to cabinet posts in coalition governments (at a maximum: appointment by proportion, as in Switzerland).
m) Collegiality in electing parliamentary representatives has a particular character that can be dealt with separately.49 This is based on either
α) leadership, so that members are followers; or
β) the collegial organisation of business on a party basis, which then becomes “leaderless parliamentarianism.”
For this, however, a discussion of parties is necessary.
Collegiality—apart from the monocratic type of collegiality where there is a mutual veto—almost inevitably inhibits precise, unambiguous, and in particular, rapid decision making (and in its irrational forms, it obstructs technical expertise). However, this outcome was not especially unwelcome for princes when they first introduced specialised officials. In time, however, this obstruction has been reduced, as the speed with which decisions had to be made and actions undertaken increased. Where collegial instances had executive authority, the power of leading members was generally consolidated as formal and substantive preeminence (as a bishop, a pope, the prime minister of a cabinet). Any interest in reviving the principle of executive collegiality usually originated in an interest in weakening the ruler’s position. Mistrust and resentment of monocratic leadership is less commonly found among the ruled, who for the most part call for a “leader,” than among the administrative staff members. And this is by no means only a matter relating to those lacking in privilege, but is precisely something that originates among privileged strata. There is nothing at all especially “democratic” about collegiality. Wherever the privileged have sought to secure themselves from the threat of the underprivileged they have always sought to prevent the emergence of a monocratic ruler who could find support among the underprivileged. While they have therefore sought to enforce strict equality among the privileged strata (this is dealt with separately in the following paragraph),50 they have created and maintained collegial bodies with supervisory and exclusive decision-making functions.
Types: Sparta; Venice; the Roman Senate before the Gracchi and Sulla; England repeatedly in the eighteenth century; Bern and other Swiss cantons; medieval clan cities with collegial consuls; the Mercadanza, which included merchant but not craft guilds—the last of these very easily fell prey to the nobility.
Collegiality secures a greater degree of “thoroughness” in administrative deliberations. Where thoroughness is preferred, even if at the cost of precision and speed, collegiality still tends to be preferred today, because of this and the other factors mentioned above. Nonetheless, it divides responsibility, and in large bodies all personal responsibility vanishes entirely, whereas monocracy establishes responsibility in a clear and indubitable manner. Large tasks that require quick and consistent decisions are on the whole—from a technical point of view, quite properly—put in the hands of monocratic “dictators,” who carry sole responsibility for them.
It is impossible for mass states to conduct powerful, coherent, and effective domestic and foreign policy on a collegial basis. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a means of socialising society does actually need a “dictator” who owes his position to the trust of the masses. It is not that “the masses” would not want this, but rather that parliament and party, or those in charge of “councils” cannot, and do not want to, stomach this. Only in Russia has such a dictatorship emerged with the support of the military and with the strong support of newly appropriated peasants.
The following in part summarises and in part supplements what has already been said.
Collegiality has had, historically, a dual meaning:
a) first, plural appointments to the same office, or a number of offices with similar competences competing with each other, each with the power of veto over the other. This involves a technical separation of powers to minimise rule. This sense of “collegiality” was most directly reflected in the Roman magistracy, where every official act was subject to intercession by a magistrate, so that the rule of individual magistrates might be weakened. In this way, each individual magistrate remained an individual, and the magistracy was composed of such individuals.
b) second, a collegial decision-making process: the legitimate formulation of a command only by the cooperation of several persons, requiring either unanimity or a majority. This is the modern concept of collegiality, although not one unknown in antiquity. It can be either (1) collegiality of the supreme command and so rule itself; (2) executive collegiality; or (3) the collegiality of advisory agencies.
1. Collegiality of management can be based on
α) the fact that the ruling organisation concerned is based on a sociation or a communalisation (Vergemeinschaftung) of several autocephalous ruling organisations, all of which demand their social share of power (synoeicism in antiquity, wherein collegial councils were organised by clans, phratries, and phylae; medieval town organisations representing noble families; the medieval guild organisation in the Mercadanza with the women’s council or guild deputies; the “Federal Council” in modern federal states; the effective collegiality of ministries or high-level government ministers appointed by party coalitions [at a maximum: appointment by proportion, as in Switzerland]). Collegiality is thus here a special case of the principle of representation applied to social rank or canton. Or:
β) for the want of a leader, jealousy among those competing for the position of leader, or, alternatively, efforts on the part of those who are ruled to minimise the rule of one individual. For a mixture of these reasons, this has happened in the course of most revolutions, both as a “council” of officers and as one linked to soldiers in revolt, or as in the Committee of Public Safety or the council of “popular representatives.” In a normal peacetime administration, it has nearly always been the latter motive that has been the deciding factor—antipathy with regard to an individual “strongman” for the collegiality of high-level agencies. This has happened in Switzerland and, for example, in the new Baden Constitution (in this case, it was the socialists who expressed this antipathy: they sacrificed the strict administrative unity needed for socialisation for fear of creating an “elective monarchy”). The most important influence here was the animus against leaders on the part of party officials (in trade unions, party and constituency). Or,
γ) on the “honorary” nature of social rank dictating the assignment of leadership positions, as the product of aristocratic rule based on social rank. Every privileged stratum in this system of ranks fears a leader supported by the emotional devotion of the masses at least as much as a democracy that is inimical to such leadership. The rule of the Senate, and the actual attempts to rule through united councils are part of this, likewise the Venetian and other constitutions. Or
δ) in the struggle of princes against increasing expropriation by specialised administrative officials. Modern administrative organisations always began at the highest level of occidental states with collegial agencies—as with, incidentally, the exemplary development of the Orient’s patrimonial state: China, Persia, the Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire. The prince not only sought to avoid any one person’s development of a position of power but hoped above all to keep decision making in his own hands through the system of voting and countervoting in a collegium, and since he was increasingly a dilettante lacking specialist knowledge, he hoped in this way to better maintain the necessary oversight of administration rather than deferring to the power of individual officials. (The function of the highest authorities lay initially with collegial bodies that played the role of something between counsel and executive. It was only with the especially irrational and independent intervention of princes in financial matters that specialist officials intervened, as with the reform of Emperor Maximilian, and here the prince had to concede for very pressing reasons.) Or,
ε) in the hope that collegial deliberation might balance out specialist expertise and diverging material or personal interests, thus making compromise possible. Hence, for instance, in the direction of communal administration, which was on the one hand at the local level open to oversight, which rendered major technical problems more evident, while such communal administration did naturally tend to depend more on compromises between material interests—so long, that is, as the masses acquiesced to the rule of those strata privileged by the possession of property and education. The collegiality of ministries has similar technical foundations: where it is absent, such as in Russia, and although less markedly, in the German Empire of the former regime, it was never possible to develop an effective degree of solidarity between government agencies. Instead, there was perpetual conflict around resources and competences.
The reasons given under α, γ, and δ are purely historical in character. The modern development of bureaucratic rule has everywhere led in mass organisations—whether state or city organisations—to a weakening of collegiality in effective direction. For quite unavoidably, collegiality reduces (1) promptness of decision; (2) unity of leadership; (3) clear personal responsibility, ruthlessness externally, and the maintenance of internal discipline. Hence, for these and economic and technological reasons that will be discussed later,51 where collegiality survived in mass states involved in world politics it was eroded in favour of the prominence of a political leader (or a prime minister). It was much the same in nearly all large-scale patrimonial organisations, especially the strictly sultanic variants—there was always a need for a leading personality (the Grand Vizier) besides the prince, so long as no court favourite took his place. One person has to assume responsibility. Legally, the prince was not this person.
2. The collegiality of executive agencies was intended to support objectivity and, above all, the integrity of the administration; in the interest of these objectives, the power of individuals was to be weakened. It has, however, almost universally given way to the technical superiority of monocracy, and for the same reasons (this is what happened in Prussia during the “governments”).
3. The collegiality of bodies confined to an advisory capacity has always existed, and will certainly continue to do so. This is very important from the viewpoint of historical development (as will be mentioned at the proper place);52 especially in those cases where the “counsel” offered the magistrate or prince was for all intents and purposes “binding.” This needs no discussion in this casuistry.
By “collegiality,” here is always meant “collegiality of rule”: by agencies that either themselves administer or directly influence administration through the advice they give. As has been indicated above, the behaviour of parliamentary assemblies, or of those based on social rank, will not yet be discussed.53
Historically, collegiality is behind the initial elaboration of the concept of “agency” (Behörde), since it was always associated with the separation of “bureau” from “the household” (of its members), of a private staff from an official staff, and of administrative resources from private wealth. For that reason, it is no coincidence that the modern administrative history of the occident begins with the development of collegial agencies composed of specialised officials, just like every enduring order did in its own way: whether patrimonial, feudal, based on social rank, or any other traditional political organisation. It was in particular only collegial, quite possibly solidaristic, corporate bodies that were able to effect the gradual political expropriation of an occidental prince who was becoming a “dilettante.” All other things being equal, for individual officials it was likely that, faced with irrational instructions from the prince, personal obedience would outweigh dedicated resistance. While the prince recognised the transition to a system based on specialised officials as inevitable, the usual response was to develop in response an advisory collegial system (councils of state) where the balance to be struck between votes for and against any one measure enabled the prince to remain in control, despite being a dilettante. Only after a rational, specialised body of officials was finally and irrevocably victorious was the need felt for the solidarity of the highest collegial bodies, and of parliaments in particular (see §21); this was effected through the monocratic leadership of a prime minister who was both backed by the prince, and who provided backing to him. It was in this way that the general tendency to monocracy and to bureaucratic administration prevailed.
1. The importance of collegiality to the emergence of modern administration can be easily judged from the struggle between Emperor Maximilian and his own financial administration. The latter had been created at a time of acute danger from Turkish invasions, but the emperor persisted in going over the heads of his officials and arbitrarily issuing instructions and pledging securities for loans. The expropriation of the prince began through financial problems, here for the first time involving matters in which the prince lacked political expertise—he became a dilettante. This first occurred in the Italian city-states with their commercially organised accounting systems, then in French Burgundy, then in the German territorial states, and developing independently of this among the Normans in Sicily and in England (Exchequer). In the Orient, the divan played a similar role, as did the yamen in China, the bakufu in Japan, and the Senate in Rome (in Rome, the absence of rationally trained specialist officials led to a reliance on the empirical knowledge of “elder” officials, so that bureaucratisation did not play a leading role).
2. Collegiality played a similar role in the separation of the private household and official administration, as did large voluntary trading companies in the separation of household and economic enterprise, wealth and capital.
§16. Political power (Herrengewalt) can be further moderated by
4.54 the functionally specific separation of powers: the transfer of various specific “functions”—if effected legally (constitutional separation of powers), then functions that are defined rationally—as political powers (Herrengewalten) to different incumbents in such a way that directives related to matters involving several such incumbents can only be realised legitimately through compromise between them.
1. The “functionally specific” separation of powers can be contrasted with a separation of powers in a system of social ranks. In the former, political powers are distributed according to their objective character among incumbents differentiated according to power and supervisory capacity. This is done “constitutionally,” although that does not necessarily mean that it is done according to a statutory and written constitution. Distribution is made in one of two ways: either by ensuring that distinct dispositions are the responsibility of different incumbents, or by ensuring that dispositions of the same kind can only be legitimately made through the cooperation of several political incumbents—through a compromise that is more than a formal procedure. It is not “competences” that are here distributed, but “political rights” (Herrenrechte).
2. The functionally specific separation of powers is not necessarily modern. Here we have the distinction between independent political and independent hierocratic power—instead of Caesaropapism or theocracy.55 The specific competences of the Roman magistracy can also be regarded as a kind of separation of powers; likewise, the specific charisma of the ama, and the effectively independent position of the Chinese (Confucian) Hanlin Academy and of the “censors” with respect to the monarch. It was also usual in patrimonial states, as in the Roman Principate, to separate judiciary and civil finance from the military in the lower levels of the staff. And lastly, of course, every kind of distribution of competences. However, the concept of “separation of powers” then loses all precision; for practical purposes, it is better to reserve the term for the separation of the highest level of political power itself. If this is done, then the rational form of separation of powers, laid down constitutionally by statute, is entirely modern. Any budget in a “constitutional” state, but not necessarily a parliamentary state, can only be concluded by a compromise between the legal authorities (the crown and one or more representative chambers). Historically, Europe developed from a separation of powers in a system of social ranks, theoretically founded in England by Montesquieu, and then later, Burke. Going further back, the separation of powers developed from the appropriation of political powers and administrative means to the privileged, and also from increasing financial needs, whether these were regular and administrative, arising from social and economic pressures, or irregular, primarily arising from warfare. In these cases, the ruler could do nothing without the consent of the privileged, nor often in their view, should he do anything. Compromise was needed, and the consent of the assemblies, necessary. From this there arose historically the negotiation of a budget compromise and compromise over statutes—neither of which belong to the separation of powers in a system of social ranks as they do in the constitutional system.
3. The constitutional separation of powers is a specifically unstable structure. The genuine structure of rule is defined by answering the question: What would happen if a statutorily correct and vital compromise (e.g., over the budget) was not arrived at. Today, a king ruling England without a budget would risk his crown, but a governing Prussian king would not, since in the prerevolutionary German Empire dynastic powers were decisive.
§17. Relationships to the economy. 1. Collegiality with rationally defined functions in legal agencies can increase the objectivity and personal detachment with which dispositions are made, and so advantage the conditions of existence of rational economic organisation, even when a reduction in the precision with which functions are carried out occurs. The very large capitalist potentates of the present day, just like those of the past, favour monocracy as an organisational form—in politics as in all those matters important for them in life. They consider it to be more “discreet,” more accessible personally, lending greater access to justice and administration for the interests of the powerful—and rightly so, in German experience. By contrast, collegiality involving a right of veto, and collegial agencies arising from irrational appropriation or the power of a traditional administrative staff, can have irrational consequences. The collegiality of financial authorities associated with the emergence of specialised officials has, on the whole, been of very great advantage to the rationalisation of the economy.
The monocratic American party boss, and not a party administration that is often collegial, is a “good thing” as far as the party’s financial patrons are concerned. He is for this reason indispensible. In Germany, large sections of so-called heavy industry have supported the rule of bureaucracy, and not a parliamentary system that has so far in Germany been administered collegially: and for the same reason.
2. As in any appropriation, separation of powers tends to create definite, if not yet rational, responsibilities, and in so doing introduces an element of “calculability” into agencies’ functioning. In this way, it favours the (formal) rationalisation of the economy. Efforts to abolish the separation of powers by Soviet Republics, the French Convention, or the Committee of Public Safety are entirely directed to a more or less substantively rational reorganisation of the economy, and so work against formal rationality.
All details belong to more specialised discussion.56
9. Parties
§18. Parties are sociations based on (formally) free recruitment that are intended to lend power to leaders of organisations, and so by extension, provide their members with (ideal or material) Chancen—in the realisation of objective aims, or the gaining of personal advantage, or both. They can be transitory sociations, or they can be intended to last; they can be formed in an organisation of any kind, and assume any kind of organisational form, [including those] with a charismatic following, or traditional retainers, or adherents sharing purposively or value-rational aims, or a general perspective on the world. They can be oriented more to personal interests, or to objective aims. In practice, they may be officially, or in fact, intended to enable their leader to gain power so that he can appoint the party’s staff to administrative positions (party based on patronage). Or they can primarily, and consciously, represent the interests of social ranks or classes (party based on social rank or class); or they can pursue substantive and objectives aims, or be oriented to abstract principles (party based on a particular view of the world). Appointing its own members to posts in the administration tends to be a subsidiary aim, the objective party “programme” not infrequently a means of recruiting outsiders to membership.
Conceptually, parties are only a possibility within organisations, whose leadership parties seek to influence or conquer; it is possible to form party cartels across organisations, however, and this is not a rare occurrence.
Parties can employ all means to achieve power. This is because wherever the leadership is appointed by a (formally) free vote, and statutes created by ballot, they are primarily organisations intended to gain votes and influence the direction of legal parties by ballot. Since support for a party is in principle given freely and voluntarily, the basis for a legal party is in practice that the pursuit (Betrieb) of politics is always the pursuit of interests. Here the question of “economic” interests is entirely secondary: we are dealing here with political interests, which means interests oriented ideologically, or to power as such. This all means that the pursuit of politics
a) lies in the hands of party leaders and members of the party’s staff;
b) implies that the role of active party members is for the most part limited to acclamation. They may under some circumstances play some supervisory function, participate in discussion and remonstration, or even initiate internal revolutions;
c) implies that the inactive but sympathetic masses of electors or voters are mere fodder (Werbeobjekt) during elections or referenda (passive “collaborators”), whose votes are only taken into account as a way of orienting the party staff’s electoral strategy (Werbearbeit) when engaged in an ongoing power struggle.
While not always the case, what remains concealed are
d) the contributors to party funds.
Other parties with a formally legal organisation can be primarily
a) charismatic parties, where there is disagreement over the charismatic qualities of its leader: of the charismatically “right” man (this takes the form of schism);
b) traditional parties: where there is agreement over the way traditional power is exercised according to the leader’s inclinations and grace (this takes the form of open revolts against “renewal”).
c) parties based on belief—usually, but not inevitably, identical to a): disagreement over the substance of worldview or belief (this takes the form of heresy, which can also occur in rational parties, such as socialist parties);
d) parties based purely on appropriation: here there is disagreement with the ruler and his administrative staff over the way appointments are made to this staff, very often identical to b), but not necessarily.
Organisationally, party orientation with respect to the obedience of supporters and staff can correspond to the same typology of rule as in all other organisations: charismatic and plebiscitary (belief in a leader); traditional (attachment to the social prestige of the leader or someone prominent to whom he is close); or rational (attachment to the “statutory” election and appointment of leader and staff).
All further detailed discussion belongs in the Staatssoziologie.57
Party finance is a central question economically, for the way influence is distributed, and for the substantive direction taken by the party: whether money is raised in small contributions from the masses, whether it is supported by patrons sharing an ideology, whether the party has been bought, directly or indirectly, by interested parties, whether money is raised through the Chancen opened up by the party, or from defeated opponents—but these matters also properly belong to the Staatssoziologie.
1. By definition, parties only exist within organisations (whether political or otherwise) and in the struggle for their control. Within parties, there can in turn be subparties, and this very often happens—typically as ephemeral sociations in every nomination campaign for an American presidential candidate, or as a permanent sociation such as the German “Young Liberals.” As for cross-organisational parties, examples are those based on social rank, such as the Guelphs and Ghibellines in thirteenth-century Italy, and those on class, such as the modern Social International.
2. The present discussion considers the most central feature of a party to be free recruitment, creating a (formally) voluntaristic basis for the party according to its organisational rules. There is here a major distinction of crucial sociological significance from the organisation’s prescriptions or rules regarding sociations. Even where organisational rules take account of the existence of parties, as for instance in the United States and with our system of proportional representation, and even on occasion seek to regulate their constitution, this voluntary aspect always remains untouched. If a party becomes a cohesive bloc, a sociation formally incorporated into the organisation’s administrative structure—as, for example, was true of the Guelfs in the statutes of thirteenth-century Florence—then it is no longer a “party” but a suborganisation of a political organisation.
3. In a genuinely charismatic ruling organisation, parties are necessarily schismatic sects; their struggle is fuelled by their belief and so not something capable of final resolution. It can be similar in a strictly patriarchal organisation. Wherever these appear in a pure form, these two party forms are normally quite alien to parties in the modern sense. In the usual organisations formed on the basis of hereditary charisma or social rank, retainers and pretenders to office who rally around a pretender to the throne present a stark contrast. Personal followings are also common in aristocratic city-states governed by unpaid officeholders, but also in some democracies. The modern type of party first emerges in the legal state with a representative constitution. This will be elaborated in the Staatssoziologie.58
4. Examples of pure parties of patronage in the modern state can be classically found in the two major American parties of recent times. Examples of objective parties founded on a particular “worldview” are older conservative parties, the older liberals, and the older bourgeois democracies, later social democracy (with a strong admixture of class interest here), together with the German Zentrum [Centre Party] (since the realisation of nearly all its demands, the Zentrum has become very much a party based purely on patronage). For all of these parties, even for the purest class parties, the stance adopted by party leaders and the party’s staff tends to be heavily influenced by their ideal and material interest in power, position, and remuneration. Their voters’ interests are only taken into account to the extent that their neglect would imperil their electoral Chancen. This last element is one of the reasons for hostility to the party system.
4. Parties’ organisational forms will be dealt with separately.59 Common to all of them is that a core of the personnel that controls the active leadership of the party, formulating slogans and selecting candidates, are joined by “members” who play a much more passive role, while the broad mass of the membership is simply an object to which candidates and programmes are presented for a choice to be made. This state of affairs is unavoidable, given the voluntary character of the party, and represents what is here called the pursuit of “interests.” (By “interests” is here meant “political” and not, for instance, “material” interests, as has already been stated.) This is the second point on which the party system as such is criticised, and marks the formal relationship of party enterprises with capitalist enterprises, which are likewise based on the valorisation of formally free labour.
5. The role of major contributors in party finance is by no means confined to “bourgeois” parties. Paul Singer, for example, was a major contributor to the SPD [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; Social Democratic Party of Germany] (donating in addition to humanitarian causes) and, so far as is known, purely for his own reasons. This was the basis for his position as party chairman. The parties involved in the Russian Revolution of February 1917 were entirely financed by major Moscow donors. The same is true of other German parties of the Right, which are financed by heavy industry, while the Zentrum receives occasional support from Catholic multimillionaires.
For quite understandable reasons, however, the financing of parties by such major donations are the most obscure part of party history, even though this is one of its most important aspects. In some cases, it seems probable that a “machine” (a caucus, more on this concept below)60 has been “bought.” Otherwise, there is a choice: either electoral candidates bear the lion’s share of their costs (the British system), so that the candidates are plutocrats; or the costs are borne by the “machine,” so that candidates are dependent on party officials. This has been truer in one way or the other ever since parties became permanent organisations, from thirteenth-century Italy right up to the present. What we cannot do is conceal this with phraseology. Of course, there are limits to party finance: it can only promote issues for which there is a “market.” But as with the relationship of capitalist enterprise to consumption, today the power of the supply side has been enormously enhanced by advertising, especially when one thinks of radical parties of the Left or of the Right.
10. Disempowered Administrative Organisation and the Administration of Representatives
§19. Organisations can seek to reduce to a bare minimum the powers they possess with respect to executive functions (minimisation of rule) by the administrator acting solely according to the will of its members, in their “service.” This is best achieved in small organisations whose entire membership can be assembled in one place, who know one another, and who treat each other as equals. Larger organisations have also attempted this, such as urban corporations in the past, as have regional communes. The usual technical means are
a) brief periods of office, if possible only in between consecutive assemblies;
b) standing right of recall;
c) the principle of appointment to posts by turn or by lot, so that each “has their turn”; hence, avoidance of power accumulating with those possessing specialist or secretarial knowledge;
d) a strict imperative mandate for the conduct of office (substantive, not general, competence), as determined by the assembly;
e) strict accountability to the members’ assembly;
f) the obligation to bring to the assembly (or to a committee) any special or unforeseen question;
g) a number of associated posts assigned to special issues, hence
h) the part-time character of the appointment.
If the administrative staff is appointed by ballot, this takes place in a full assembly of members. Administration is effected for the most part orally, with written records being made only insofar as rights need documentation. All important directives are presented to the assembly.
This type of administration, and those similar to it, is called “direct democracy” for as long as the general assembly remains effective.
1. The North American township and the smaller Swiss cantons (such as Glarus, Schwyz, Appenzell, and so on) approach with respect to size the limits of possibility of “direct democratic” administration (whose technical aspects will not be discussed here). Attic democracy actually far exceeded these limits, while the parliaments of the early medieval Italian city did so to an even greater extent. Clubs, guilds, and scientific, academic, and sports associations of all kinds often conduct themselves in this form. But it is equally capable of transfer to the internal equality of “aristocratic” associations whose members do not wish there to be anyone of superior standing to themselves.
2. An important precondition here, besides the local or personal—ideally both local and personal—small scale of the organisation, is the absence of qualitative tasks that could only be handled by specialist professional officials. Even if efforts are made to restrain the role of such officials, this does represent the seed from which bureaucracy would grow, and it is above all capable of neither appointment nor dismissal by genuinely “directly democratic” means.
3. The rational form of direct democracy is intrinsically quite close to the primitive form of gerontocratic or patriarchal organisation, where administration is likewise conducted “at the service” of members. But in those cases, there is (a) the appropriation of administrative power, and (b) normally a strict connection to tradition. Direct democracy is a rational organisational form, or can become one. The transitional forms will be discussed shortly (§§20–22).
§20. “Notables” are persons who,
1. by virtue of the economic situation, are able to act as part-time leaders and administrators of an organisation, working unpaid on a continuing basis, or receiving nominal payment as an honorarium.
2. For whatever reason, they enjoy a high level of social estimation, and this gives them the Chance to hold office in a formally direct democracy thanks to the trust of its members, this engagement being at first voluntary, but ultimately traditional.
The private resources of such a notable are absolutely necessary to provide the “availability” requisite for appointment: that the person can live for politics without needing to live from it. Those who possess this status to the greatest degree are rentiers of all kinds, possessing incomes from land, slaves, cattle, housing, or bonds. Next, there are those who work, but whose daily business allows them to conduct political business on the side: those in charge of seasonal businesses (hence, landowners), lawyers (because they have an “office”), and different kinds of self-employed people. Also strongly represented here are patrician merchants involved in business on an occasional basis. Least available are independent commercial entrepreneurs and workers. Every direct democracy has a tendency to revert to “administration by notables,” ideally, because they are especially well qualified with regard to experience and objectivity, and materially, because they are very cheap, in some cases incurring no costs whatsoever. The notable in part possesses the objective means of administration, or uses his own property as such; these means are also in part provided by the organisation.
1. The relation to social rank will be dealt with later in the casuistry relating to this use of notables.61 The primary source is wealth in all primitive societies, possession of which is often the sole factor in determining “chiefly” quality (the conditions are discussed in Chapter 4, §3). It is also possible that hereditary charisma might play a role, or just the fact of being available at that particular time.
2. American townships practice a rotation of offices that has its roots in natural law, but if one examines the lists of officials appointed in Swiss cantons it is very easy to see the constant recurrence of the same names, even of [the same] families. The fact of greater “availability” for occasional tasks in part goes back to older German assemblies and in part to the initially strictly democratic cities of northern Germany, and this was one of the sources for the emergent differentiation of the meliores and the council patriciate.
3. Administration by notables can be found in all kinds of organisations; it is, for instance, typical of political parties that have not been bureaucratised. It always implies extensive administration: while it is “unpaid” by the organisation, if it so happens that very urgent economic and administrative issues call for precise action, it can then become “very expensive” for the individual members.
Both genuine direct democracy and genuine administration by notables run into technical difficulties once numbers in the organisation pass a certain (admittedly elastic) level (a few thousand members with equal and full rights); or when administrative tasks arise that call for both specialised training and consistent direction. If this is left to permanently employed specialist officials working under the direction of ever-changing directors, then the administration is in fact normally in the hands of those who do the work, whereas the interventions of the latter remain for the most part dilettantist in character.
A typical example of this is the situation of German university rectors, who take turns at academic administration alongside their professorial duties, as compared with the university administrator, and even in some circumstances, his staff. The American university president, by contrast, is appointed for a significant period, and besides exceptional cases, could create his own university administration that was something more than fine phrases and posturing. In Germany, only the vanity of the academic staff on the one hand, and the bureaucracy’s interest in power on the other, prevent the introduction of this solution. It is much the same everywhere.
Direct democracy in the absence of a ruler and administration by notables can also only survive authentically so long as no parties form on a permanent basis, seek to advance themselves, and seek to appropriate official functions. As soon as this happens, the leader of the victorious party and his administrative staff impose a structure of rule, whatever the means deployed and despite the continuation of all forms of the former administration.
This is quite frequently the way “old” relationships are broken up.
11. Representation
§21. By “representation,” will be primarily understood the situation discussed in Chapter 1, §11: that the action of specific members of an organisation (representatives) is imputed to the remainder, or viewed by the latter as an action that is for them “legitimate,” which should be treated as having binding validity for them, and is actually so treated.
Within organised rule, however, representation can assume several typical forms:
1. Appropriated representation. The leader (or a member of the administrative staff) possesses the appropriated right of representation. As such, this is very old, and can be found in patriarchal and charismatic ruling organisations (hereditary charismatic, office-holding charismatic) of the most varied kind. The power of representation is traditionally circumscribed.
Clan sheikhs or tribal chiefs, the elders of Indian castes, hereditary hierarchies in sects, the Indian village senior, the Mark senior, hereditary monarchs, and all similar patriarchal and patrimonial leaders of organisations of all kinds are part of this. Authority to conclude contracts and agreements of a statutory form with the elders of neighbouring organisations can be found even in the most primitive conditions ([e.g.,]Australia).
Very close to appropriated representatives are:
2. Representation through independent social ranks—not as such “representation,” for it is primarily regarded as the advancement and enforcement solely of their own (appropriated) rights (privileges). But it does have a representative character (and so is sometimes treated as such) insofar as the repercussions of agreement to any financial or legal settlement among social orders go beyond the privileged person to strata lacking such privilege.62 This did not merely involve socmen but also others with social rights not held by privilege, such that quite usually the fact of their being bound by the settlement was presumed, or expressly claimed.
All feudal courts and assemblies of groups privileged according to social rank, including the “social estates” of late medieval Germany and modernity, belong here. The institution can be found only occasionally in antiquity and areas beyond Europe, and is not a general “transitional stage.”
3. The most radical contrast to this is precommitted representation: delegates—elected by rotation, or selected by lot, or by some other similar means—whose power of representation is strictly limited by an imperative mandate and right of recall, and which is precommitted to the agreement of those represented. These “representatives” are in reality officials in the employment of those they represent.
The imperative mandate has existed since time immemorial, and played a role in organisations of the most varied type. The elected representatives of the French Communes were almost always tied to the latter’s cahiers de doléance. At the present time, this form of representation can be found in the Soviet republics, where they pay the role of surrogates for a direct democracy that is impossible in mass organisations. The precommitted mandate can certainly be found in organisations of the most diverse kind outside of the medieval period and of the Occident, but nowhere has it been of great significance.
4. Free representation. The representative, as a rule elected formally or appointed by rotation, is committed by no instructions and has a free choice in his behaviour. He is obliged only by his own objective convictions, and is under no obligation to the interests of those who have delegated him.
Free representation in this sense in sometimes the inevitable consequence of incompleteness in, or lack of, instruction. In other cases, however, this implies the choice of a representative who becomes a figure of authority for his voters, and not their “servant.” Modern parliamentary representation has in particular assumed this character, sharing with legal rule the general objectification of a commitment to abstract political and ethical norms.
The most developed form of this kind of representative body in modern political organisations is that of the parliament. Without voluntary party participation, its function cannot be explained. It is parties that present candidates and programmes to politically passive citizens, and through compromise and voting within parliament create norms for the administration, actually supervise this administration, support it with their confidence, or overthrow it if their confidence is lost—if they are able to gain a majority at an election.
The party leader and the administrative staff that he appoints—ministers, state secretaries, and possibly also undersecretaries—are the “political” leadership of the state. Their posts depend on their party’s electoral victory, and they are forced to resign following electoral defeat. Where party rule is fully developed, they are imposed on the formal head of state by virtue of the party being elected to parliament. The head of state, expropriated from rule, is limited to the following roles:
1. choosing the leader of government in negotiations with the party, and formally legitimating him by appointment; also,
2. as a legalising agency for the dispositions made by the current head of the party.
The “cabinet” of ministers, in other words, the executive committee of the majority party, can be organised either in a more monocratic or a more collegial fashion; in a coalition government, the latter is unavoidable, while the former is the form that functions with greater precision. The usual means of maintaining power are: confidentiality of government business and solidarity in the face of attacks from followers seeking position, or from opponents. If there is a lack of a substantive and effective separation of powers, this leads to the complete appropriation of all power by the staff of the incumbent party. Leading posts, but also sometimes the posts of administrative officials, become spoils for supporters: this is parliamentary cabinet government.
We will later come back on several occasions to the facts laid out in Wilhelm Hasbach’s brilliant political polemic (wrongly called a “political description”).63 My own text on “Parliament and Government under a New Political Order”64 expressly emphasises that it is a polemic born only of the contemporary situation.
If the party government’s appropriation of power is incomplete and the ruler retains independent power (or alternatively, such power is retained by a president with similar powers—e.g., one who has been elected by plebiscite), and especially if the power of appointment to office is retained, including the power of appointing military officers, then we have constitutional government. In particular, this can develop where there is a formal separation of powers. The coexistence of a plebiscitary president with a representative parliament is a special case: plebiscitary-representative government.
The leadership of an organisation dedicated purely to parliamentary government can on the other hand be filled simply by election to government authorities (or those of the leadership) by parliamentary vote. This is purely representative government.
The governing powers of the representative organs can be greatly restricted and legitimated through approval by direct reference to those who are ruled: provision for referenda.
1. Peculiar to the Occident is not representation in itself, but instead free representation in conjunction with parliamentary bodies. It also can be found in antiquity, but is otherwise only present in part (assemblies of delegates in confederations of city-states, but in principle only with precommitted mandates).
2. The abolition of imperative mandates was very much influenced by the position adopted by the prince. French kings consistently required that the conditions on which delegates to the Estates General were elected left these delegates free to vote for the king’s motions, since an imperative mandate would have made this impossible. In the British Parliament, the way it was composed and business conducted (to be addressed below)65 led to the same result. The degree to which, as a result, members of parliament saw themselves, right up until the 1867 reform, as a privileged social estate is no more evident than in the strict exclusion of the public from parliamentary proceedings (there were heavy fines for newspapers that reported on proceedings right up to the later eighteenth century). The theory was that members of parliament were “representatives of the whole people,” which meant that they were not bound by mandate (that they were not servants, but masters—although this was not a sentiment that was ever uttered); this formulation was already part of the literature before the French Revolution lent it classical form.
3. We will not here deal with the way that the British king (and others on the same model) was gradually expropriated by an unofficial cabinet government oriented to parties, nor with the reasons for a singular development that would eventually gain universal significance. Given the absence of bureaucracy in Britain, this development was not as coincidental as is often claimed. Nor will the American plebiscitary-representative system based on a function of separation of powers be discussed here; nor the development of the referendum whose material role is as a means of expressing distrust in corrupt parliaments, together with its connection in Switzerland, and now in some German states, to pure representative democracy. Here we are concerned with establishing a few leading types.
4. So-called constitutional monarchy, generally defined in terms of the appropriation of official patronage exclusively to ministers and the power of command to the monarch, can in fact be very similar to the purely parliamentary British model. However, this by no means excludes the possibility of a politically capable monarch such as Edward VII making, as a figurehead, an effective contribution to the direction of political life. More detail on this later.66
5. Representative bodies are not necessarily “democratic” in the sense of an equality of rights (the franchise). On the contrary, it will become apparent67 that the classical soil for the existence of parliamentary rule tends to be an aristocracy or a plutocracy (as in England).
Connection with the economy: this is extremely complicated, and will be discussed separately later.68 Some preliminary remarks can be made here:
1. The disintegration of the economic basis of the older social ranks was a condition for the transition to “free” representation, in which arena those with demagogic talents had free rein, without needing to heed the existence of social ranks. Responsible for this disintegration: modern capitalism.
2. The need for predictability and reliability in the functioning of the legal order and the administration, a vital need for rational capitalism, led the bourgeoisie to limit patrimonial princes and the feudal nobility through an institution in which citizens had a decisive voice, supervised administration and finance, and could also participate in the revision of the legal order.
3. At the time of this transformation, the development of the proletariat did not have any political weight, nor did it seem to present any danger for the bourgeoisie. Moreover, any threat to the power of the propertied was neutralised unhesitatingly by imposing a property qualification on the right to vote.
4. The formal rationalisation of economy and state that was favourable to the interests of capitalist development was strongly supported by parliaments. It appeared easy to gain influence with parties.
5. Once parties had become established, demagogic activity increased in step with the extension of the franchise. The need to win over the proletariat through foreign conflict, and disappointment at the discovery that they were not in fact a more “conservative” force than the bourgeoisie, led rulers and ministers everywhere to favour what eventually became an equal right to vote.
6. Parliaments operated normally as long as they were dominated by the classes of “cultivation and property” (Bildung und Besitz)—notables, in other words. Being “among their sort” rather than purely class-oriented parties, they were distinguished by social rank and the different forms of property holding, which accounted for their differences. With the onset of the power of purely class parties, especially the proletarian parties, the situation of parliament changed, and changed itself. But in this process, the bureaucratisation of the parties plays a very strong role (the system of caucuses), which is of a specifically plebiscitary character and transforms the member of parliament from the “master” of a constituency of voters into a servant of the leader of the party machine. This will be dealt with separately.69
§22. Representation by agents aligned with interest groups involves those kinds of representative bodies in which the appointment of representatives is not a free one, made without regard to occupation, social rank, or class, but in which the occupation, social rank, or class position of the representative is aligned with that of those he represents, each group being represented by persons of its own sort.
Representation of this kind can mean quite different things:
1. according to the permitted occupations, social ranks, and classes;
2. to the extent that voting or compromise is the means for the settlement of arguments;
3. in the first case: according to the numbers in each of the categories.
This can be either radically revolutionary or radically conservative. It is in any event the product of the emergence of large class-based parties.
Associated normally with the creation of this kind of representation is the intention of removing the right to vote from particular social strata. Either
a) substantively, restricting the numerical predominance of the masses by distributing mandates to occupations in such a way as to counteract this numerical predominance; or
b) formally, restricting the economic power of the dominant strata by limiting the right to vote to those without property (the so-called soviet state).
In theory at least, this form of representation will weaken the grip of interests on parties and politics, although all hitherto experience shows that it will not be abolished. Again, in theory, the significance of financial means in elections can be so weakened, but how far this can go is doubtful. Representative bodies of this kind tend towards leaderlessness. This is because the only professional representatives of interests who will come forwards are those able to devote all of their time to the service of a particular interest, which for the poor strata means: salaried secretaries of interest groups.
1. Common to all the historically older bodies based on “social rank” is representation with compromise as the means for the settlement of disputes. This prevails today in “workers’ associations,” and everywhere that negotiation between advisory and executive authorities is practised. No numerical value can be placed on the “importance” of an occupation. Above all, the interests of the mass of workers and those of the (increasingly fewer) entrepreneurs are often greatly antagonistic; allowance has to be made in some way for the fact that the latter, while numerically weaker, are likely to be better informed (although of course also particularly self-interested). Arriving at a decision made by adding such heterogeneous elements—heterogeneous by class, or by social rank—is a mechanical nonsense: a ballot paper as the last resort for settling conflict is proper to parties that argue and compromise, not to “social ranks.”
2. Where organisations based on social rank are composed of elements that are roughly equal socially, it is possible to make use of the paper ballot: for example, made up only of workers, as in the “workers’ councils.” The prototype for this is Mercadanza at the time of the conflicts between guilds: made up of delegates from the individual guilds, voting was by simple majority, but nevertheless was in fact under pressure from the risk of fragmentation if especially powerful guilds were commanded the most votes. Even the entry of clerical workers into the workers’ councils created problems; their proportional share of the vote was regularly mechanically reduced. When representatives of farmers and craftsmen were supposed to join, matters became really complicated. Voting by ballot to reach a decision became entirely impossible once so-called higher occupations and entrepreneurs were supposed to be involved. Organising the working community on a basis of parity means that “blackleg” union members support the employers, while sympathetic employers help workers prevail, thus allowing the most unworthy class representatives to decide matters.
But then again, peaceful times would create sharp antagonism between workers in purely proletarian councils. And these would probably effectively paralyse the councils, or at any rate put a stop to any Chancen for the skilful playing off one interest against another—this is why the bureaucracy is so favourable to the idea. The same thing would happen between the representatives of farmers and workers. Any attempt to organise such representative bodies on a basis other than one that is strictly revolutionary ultimately leads only to another Chance for gerrymandering in other forms.
3. The Chancen for representation by occupation are not slight. During periods of stabilisation in technical and economic development, they will be extremely great. “Party life” would in any case then abate to a great extent. As long as this precondition does not hold, there can of course be no thinking that occupational representation will eliminate parties. From the “workers’ councils,” whose procedures we now witness, to the Federal Economic Council, by contrast a huge number of new spoils for loyal party members will be created, spoils that will be exploited. Economic life will be politicised, and politics economised. Depending on one’s ultimate values, there are quite distinct positions that can be taken with respect to these Chancen. This is how things are, and not otherwise.
Characteristic of the Occident are: genuine parliamentary representation in which political life is the voluntaristic pursuit of interests, from which develop plebiscitary party organisations and all their consequences, such as the modern idea of rational representation through agents of interest. These can only be explained by the particular course that the development of social ranks and classes took in the Occident, a process that created here during the Middle Ages, and only here, its early forms. “City” and “social ranks” (rex et regnum), “bourgeois” and “proletarian,” existed only here.
1. Thorough treatment of this was probably planned for later sections on the sociology of the state, on which Weber was lecturing on his death. See MWG III / 7, Allgemeine Staatslehre und Politik (Staatssoziologie).
2. This is probably a reference to a future section of his Staatssoziologie that was never drafted.
3. For a modern reader, these remarks on the evolution of religious bureaucracy are extremely cryptic in the original, and I have here generally adopted Parsons’s useful gloss, rather than seek a closer, and consequently obscure, translation.
4. There is no subsequent discussion of party organisation.
5. There is no subsequent discussion of this point.
6. Although there is some discussion of this in MWG I / 22-4, pp. 198–200, this is of course an earlier draft, even though it was printed as pp. 664–65 in the 1922 edition.
7. As in the previous note, a draft for such discussion can be found in MWG I / 22-4, pp. 201f., corresponding to pp. 666–67 in the 1922 edition.
8. Forderung (claim, demand) in the 1922 edition and in MWG I / 23, p. 467, but this makes more sense as a misprint of Förderung (furthering, advancing, promoting).
9. While there is a draft for this (MWG I / 22-3, pp. 275f., 280–82, corresponding to pp. 387ff. in the 1922 edition), the chief significance of this remark is that Weber intended to develop a revised version of that draft, but never did so.
10. This idea is not elaborated any further in Chapter 3.
11. There is a subsequent discussion in §12.b.
12. See TSEO p. 347 n. 27: Parsons rightly points to the difficulties of translating this terminology of Stand, sometimes in English rendered as “estate,” by Parsons himself in chapter 4 as “status group” (p. 428). See the entry Stand, Stände in the Translation Appendix.
13. As noted in the Translation Appendix, Weber insists on using “appropriation” for what is otherwise understood as “assignment” or “allocation,” and when coupled with the difficulty of rendering ständisch relationships into English, the foregoing passages become very tortured in translation. Parsons does a very good job of glossing them into continuous prose (TSEO pp. 348–49), but they are presented here in their original format to make clear how Weber organises his argument.
14. “Nepotism” originated in the Papal States, where positions were given to nephews of popes and bishops.
15. Chapter 4 is a fragment, and there is no further discussion of this issue.
16. While this had been touched on in Chapter 2, §26, there is no further treatment of this.
17. Georg vοn Below, Der deutsche Staat des Mittelalters. Ein Grundriß der deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte. 1. Band: Die allgemeinen Fragen (Leipzig: Quelle und Meyer, 1914).
18. That is, “4.” in relation to §7a.3 above.
19. There was no subsequent discussion of this point.
20. Weber does come back to deal with these issues in part III, chapter 8, of the 1922 edition, pp. 718–52, but this is, of course, a previous draft, not the further discussion that he promises here.
21. That is, in relation to 1. at the start of §9a.
22. Probably a reference to the section on Staatssoziologie that Weber was planning. An earlier draft became part II, chapter 8, of the 1922 edition (pp. 513–600), now published as MWG I / 22-5.
23. While there are elements of such a discussion in part III of the 1922 edition, this is again a stub that Weber never developed in 1919–1920.
24. No drafts for such analysis were found.
25. 2 Thess. 3:10.
26. Stefan George (1868–1933) was a poet and aesthete who became the inspiration for a “circle” of disciples. Edith Hanke notes Weber’s interest in this phenomenon and attributes to it a pivotal role in his development of the idea of “charisma.” MWG I / 22-4, pp. 41, 54.
27. Here “routinisation” is a translation of Veralltäglichung, meaning to “reduce charisma to an everyday matter.”
28. This section was never drafted.
29. This is an indication that when Weber wrote this, he had in mind a section on the sociology of religion.
30. This point was never developed.
31. Drafts for this are reprinted in MWG I / 22-4, pp. 518–19; pp. 772–73 in the 1922 edition.
32. No drafts for any such discussion survive.
33. No drafts for any such discussion survive.
34. Composed about 1220, the Sachsenspiegel (Saxon Mirror) was a compendium of law and custom that identified seven different layers of social rank as part of the Heerschilde, the military shield.
35. This was not a point Weber developed, but the earlier draft version contained some material on it. See MWG I / 22-4, pp. 290ff.; pp. 694ff. in the 1922 edition.
36. The fragment of Chapter 4 does not include any discussion of this.
37. No such elaboration appears to have been drafted.
38. The merging of villages into a city-state.
39. The fragment of Chapter 4 does not contain anything developing this point.
40. In §20 below, the last category is discussed, but otherwise this is probably a reference forwards to a section on Staatssoziologie that was never drafted.
41. While this is discussed in the older drafts (MWG I / 22-4, pp. 295–311; pp. 697–702 in the 1922 edition), no newer material exists.
42. A reference to later (unwritten) chapters mentioned below.
43. This would have been an entirely new departure.
44. In WuG, this was erroneously numbered 6, instead of 7.
45. While some elements of this can be found in the older version of the sociology of law (MWG I / 22-3, pp. 603–9, WuG, pp. 495ff.), no more recent material has survived.
46. There is no further discussion of this.
47. It is not clear exactly what this refers to.
48. There is no specific discussion of this either in the remainder of Chapter 3 or the fragment of Chapter 4. Some remarks can be found in the older draft, MWG I / 22-4, pp. 411–13, WuG, pp. 736–39.
49. This is possibly a reference to a later section on Staatssoziologie.
50. There is in fact no further treatment of this issue in §16.
51. This point was never elaborated.
52. There is a corresponding passage in the draft (see MWG I / 22-4, pp. 221–28, WuG, pp. 673–76), but nothing more recent.
53. There was no further discussion of this point.
54. In relation to §15.3 above; WuG, p. 165, misnumbers this as §16.3.
55. Both are combinations of secular and spiritual power: in the former, the secular power assumes spiritual power; in the latter, it is the reverse.
56. No such further discussion appears to have been drafted.
57. No further material was found. Weber was lecturing on Staatssoziologie when he died.
58. No such elaboration appears to have been drafted.
59. No such elaboration appears to have been drafted.
60. See §21 below for a brief discussion.
61. No such elaboration appears to have been drafted.
62. This passage is very compressed and cryptic, using what might appear to be synonyms for “representation” and “agreement” in referring to the practice of medieval assemblies in arriving at a “reconciliation” (in the modern accounting sense) of financial or legal issues.
63. Wilhelm Hasbach, Die Parliamentarische Kabinettsregierung. Eine politische Beschreibung (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1919); no further direct reference is made to this work.
64. See Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronalnd Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 130–271. This was a pamphlet published in May 1918, developing arguments originally made in a series of newspaper articles published between April and June 1917.
65. No further discussion of this topic follows.
66. No further discussion of this topic follows.
67. No further discussion of this topic follows.
68. There are no remarks on the connections among representation, parliamentarism, and the economy beyond the preliminary points made here.
69. No further discussion of this topic follows.