The Emerald Guide to Max Weber by John Scott

Author:John Scott [Scott, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781787691926
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

6.5. URBAN COMMUNITIES

While Weber’s working papers on the economy, law, and domination have a clear focus on the rise of modern, rational capitalism and its forms of governance and administration, his working paper on the city seems to stand very much alone. It is concerned, almost exclusively, with discussions of the ancient and medieval Italian cities. Nevertheless, it has an important place in his overall scheme and has some significant connections with his discussion of the economic order. The paper on the city was, in fact, explicitly cast in relation to the sociology of domination, but where the main focus of his work had been on authority, Weber saw his discussion of the city as an examination of ‘non-legitimate domination’. This term is related to the category of domination by virtue of a constellation of interests, which he had discussed in his papers on domination and that he saw as a feature of economic activity in the market. His account of the ancient and medieval cities of Europe was designed to show the origins of this particular form of domination.

Weber draws a contrast between the Western city and the cities of the Oriental world. The cities of the Asian civilisations, he argues, were politically embedded in their surrounding agrarian societies. Their members were tied by relations of kinship or caste solidarity to the villages of the surrounding countryside and so had only limited opportunities to develop any significant political autonomy as urban centres. In the West, on the other hand, such personal bonds to the countryside were weak or non-existent and urban centres were able to establish an autonomy as ‘communes’.

Cities in the West that were fortified and based around a local or regional market were able to establish legal regulations and forms of judicial administration that were specific to them because of their ‘privileged’ standing relative to the feudal ruler. The cities were legally defined as ‘burghs’ or boroughs by royal charter, and their citizens were recognised as ‘burghers’ or as ‘bourgeois’. Urban merchants were therefore able to enjoy an independent participation in the local government of their city and they were able also to form burgher fraternities such as trade guilds to regulate their economic activities and promote their collective interests.

The medieval Western city, then, was a settlement in which the domination exercised by a patrimonial or feudal ruler had been usurped by groups of the ruled. The city was an enclave within which autonomous but non-legitimate domination had been established by rentiers, entrepreneurs, and merchants who could achieve a dominance over others living within their cities by virtue of their power to spend, employ, or trade with urban artisans and professionals and with agrarian interests in the surrounding countryside. Their domination rested on this constellation or conjunction of economic interests.

Weber recognises two variants of the Western city. Where landed rentiers formed an important element among the urban residents and maintained a status superiority over commercial burghers, they were able to dominate urban governance, control the city’s trading activities, and operate as a city state.

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