Max Weber “Economy and Society” – I
Chapter III, pp. 212-254: The types of legitimate domination
DOMINATION – the probability that certain specific commands (or-all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons. It may be based on the most diverse motives of compliance: all the way from simple habituation to the most purely rational calculation of advantage. (p.212)
“OBEDIENCE” will be taken to mean that the action of the person obeying follows in essentials such a course that the content of the command may be taken to have become the basis of action for its own sake. (p.215)
There are THREE PURE TYPES of legitimate domination. The validity of the claims to legitimacy may be based on:
1. Rational grounds – resting on a belief in the legality of enacted ‘rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands (legal authority).
2. Traditional grounds – resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them (traditional authority); or finally,
3· Charismatic grounds – resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him (charismatic authority) p. 215.
Legal Authority: the Pure Type (pp. 217 – 220)
Rests on the acceptance of the validity of the following mutually interdependent ideas:
1. That any given legal norm may be established by agreement or by imposition, on grounds of expediency or value-rationality or both, with a claim to obedience at least on the part of the members of the organization.
2. That every body of law consists essentially in a consistent system of abstract rules which have normally been intentionally established. Furthermore, administration of law is held to consist in the application of these rules to particular cases.
3. That thus the typical person in authority, the “superior,” is himself subject to an impersonal order by orienting his actions to it in his own dispositions and commands.
4. That the person who obeys authority does so, as it is usually stared, only in his capacity as a “member” of the organization and what he obeys is only “the law.”
5. The members of the organization, insofar as they obey a person in authority, do not owe this obedience to him as an individual, but to the impersonal order.
The fundamental categories of rational legal authority:
(1) A continuous rule-bound conduct of official business.
(2) A specified sphere of competence (jurisdiction). This involves: (a) A sphere of obligations to perform functions which has been marked off as part of a systematic division of labor. (b) The provision of the incumbent with the necessary powers. (c) That the necessary means of compulsion are clearly defined and their use is subject to definite conditions. A unit exercising authority which is organized in this way will be called an “administrative organ” or “agency”.
(3) The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy; that is, each lower office is under the control and supervision of a higher one.
(4) The rules which regulate the conduct of an office may be technical rules or norms.
(5) In the rational type it is a matter of principle that the members of the administrative staff should be completely separated from ownership of the means of production or administration.
(6) In the rational type case, there is also a complete absence of appropriation of his official position by the incumbent.
(7) Administrative acts, decisions, and rules are formulated and recorded in writing, even in cases where oral discussion is the rule or is even mandatory.
The purest type of exercise of legal authority is that which employs a bureaucratic administrative staff, consisting of individual officials functioning according to the following criteria:
(1) They are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations.
(2) They are organized in a clearly defined hierarchy of offices.
(3) Each office has a clearly defined sphere of competence in the legal sense.
(4) The office is filled by a free contractual relationship. Thus, in principle, there is free selection.
(5) Candidates are selected on the basis of technical qualifications.
(6) They are remunerated by fixed salaries in money, for the most part with a right to pensions.
(7) The office is treated as the sole, or at least the primary, occupation of the incumbent.
(8) It constitutes a career. There is a system of “promotion” according to seniority or to achievement, or both. Promotion is dependent on the judgment of superiors.
(9) The official works entirely separated from ownership of the means of administration and without appropriation of his position.
(10) He is subject to strict and systematic discipline and control in the conduct of the office.
Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization—that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy—is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. (p. 223)
Social consequences of bureaucratic domination:
(1) the tendency to “leveling” in the interest of the broadest possible basis of recruitment in terms of technical competence.
(2) the tendency to plutocracy growing out of the interest in the greatest possible length of technical training. Today this often lasts up to the age of thirty.
(3) The dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality: “Sine ira et studio,” without hatred or passion and hence without affection or enthusiasm. The dominant norms are concepts of straightforward duty without regard to personal considerations. (p. 225)
Traditional Authority: The Pure Type (pp. 226 – 241)
Authority will be called traditional if legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in by virtue of the sanctity of age-old rules and powers.
The person exercising authority is not a “superior”, but a personal master, his administrative staff does not consist mainly of officials but of personal retainers, and the ruled are not “members” of an association but are either his traditional “comrades” or his “subjects”.
Obedience is owed not to enacted rules but to the person who occupies a position of authority by tradition or who has been chosen for by the traditional master. The commands of such a person are legitimize in one of two ways:
a) partly in terms of traditions which themselves directly determine the content of the command and are believed to be valid within certain limits that cannot be overstepped without endangering the master traditional status;
b) partly in terms of the master’s discretion in that sphere which tradition leaves open to him; this traditional prerogative rests primarily on the fact that the obligations of personal obedience tend to be essentially unlimited.
Thus there is a double sphere:
a) that of action which is bound to specific traditions;
b) that of action which is free of specific rules.
In the pure type of traditional authority it is impossible for law or administrative rule to be deliberately created by legislation.
The master rules with or without an administrative staff.
The typical administrative staff is recruited from one or more of the following sources:
(I) From persons who are already related to the chief by traditional ties of loyalty. This will be called patrimonial recruitment. Such persons may be
a) kinsmen,
b) slaves,
c) dependents who are officers of the household, especially ministeriales,
d) clients,
e) coloni,
f) freedmen;
(II) Recruitment may be extra-patrimonial, including
a) persons in a relation of purely personal loyalty such as all sorts of “favorites,”
b) persons standing in a relation of fealty to their lord (vassals), and, finally,.
c) free men who voluntarily enter into a relation of personal loyalty as officials.
In place of a well-defined functional jurisdiction, there is a conflicting series of tasks and powers which at first are assigned at the master’s discretion.
Gerontocracy and primary patriarchalism are the most elementary types of traditional domination where the master has no personal administrative staff. (p.231)
Gerontocracy – a situation where so far as rule over the group is organized at all it is in the hands of elders. (p.231)
“Patriarchalism” – a situation where, within a group (household) which is usually organized on both an economic and a kinship basis, a particular individual governs who is designated by a definite rule of inheritance. (p.231)
Patrimonialism and, in the extreme case, sultanism tend to arise whenever traditional domination develops an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master. (p.231)
Estate-type domination (standische Herrschaft) is that form of patrimonial authority under which the administrative staff appropriates particular powers and the corresponding economic assets. (p.231)
The patrimonial retainer may receive his support in any of the following ways:
a) by living from the lord’s table, ,
b) by allowances (usually in kind) from the lord’s magazines or treasury,
c) by rights of land use in return for services (“service-land”),
d) by the appropriation of property income, fees or taxes,
e) by fiefs. (p.235)
Traditional domination and the economy
Under the dominance of a patrimonial regime only certain types of capitalism are able to develop:
a) capitalist trading,
b) capitalist tax farming, lease and sale of offices,
c) capitalist provision of supplies for the state and the financing of wars,
d) under certain circumstances, capitalist plantations and other colonial enterprises.
All these forms are indigenous to patrimonial regimes and often reach a very high level of development. This is not, however, true of the type, of profit-making enterprise with heavy investments in fixed capital and a rational organization of free labor which is oriented to the market purchases of private consumers. This type of capitalism is altogether too sensitive to all sorts of irrationalities in the administration of law, administration and taxation, for these upset the basis of calculability. (p.240)
Charismatic authority: The Pure Type (pp. 241-
The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a “leader.” (p. 241)
It is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma. This recognition is freely given and guaranteed by what is held to be a proof, originally always a miracle, and consists in devotion to the corresponding revelation, hero worship, or absolute trust in the leader. (p.242)
If proof and success elude the leader for long, if he appears deserted by his god or his magical or heroic powers, above all, if his leadership fails to benefit his followers, it is likely that his charismatic authority will disappear. (p.242)
An organized group subject to charismatic authority will be called a charismatic community. It is based on an emotional form of communal relationship. The administrative staff of a charismatic leader does not consist of “officials”; least of all are its members technically trained. It is not chosen on the basis of social privilege nor from the point of view of domestic or personal dependency. It is rather chosen in terms of the charismatic qualities of its members. The prophet has his disciples; the warlord his bodyguard; the leader, generally, his agents. (p. 243)
There are no established administrative organs. (p. 243)
The routinization of Charisma
Charisma becomes either traditionalized or rationalized or a combination of both.
The problem of succession. Possible types of solution:
(a) The search for a new charismatic leader on the basis of criteria of the qualities which will fit him for the position of authority (Dalai Lama).
(b) Revelation manifested-in oracles, lots, divine judgments, or other techniques of selection.
(c) Designation on the part of the original charismatic leader of his own successor and his recognition on the part of the followers.
(d) The conception that charisma is a quality transmitted by heredity; thus that it is participated in by the kinsmen of its bearer, particularly by his closest relatives. This is the case of hereditary charisma.
(e) The concept that· charisma may be transmitted by ritual means from one bearer to another or may be created in a new person – the charisma of office. (pp.246-248)
For charisma to be transformed into an everyday phenomenon, it is necessary that its anti-economic character should be altered. It must be adapted to some form of fiscal organization to provide for the needs of the group and hence to the economic conditions necessary for raising taxes and contributions. When a charismatic movement develops in the direction of prebendal provision, the “laity” becomes differentiated from the “clergy” , that is, the participating members of the charismatic administrative staff which has now become routinized. These are the priests of the developing “church.” (p.251)
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2010-09-20 07:18:20