Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism, and Empire-Building in The New States^x

See, for example, Gabriel Almond and Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics (Boston 1966). For Bendix, see his Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York 1964) 2, and “Modernization and Inequality,” a paper prepared for Session I, Sixth World Congress of Sociology, ISA, mimeographed, 52 ff.

See Part I, Chap. 3, and Part II, Chaps. 10–16, of my forthcoming variorum edition of Economy and Society (New York 1968).

See S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political Systems of Empires: The Rise and Fall of the Historical Bureaucratic Societies (New York 1963).

See Donald N. Levine, “Ethiopa: Identity, Authority, and Realism,” in Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton 1965), 245–81; also Levine, Wax and Gold: Tradition and Innovation in Ethiopian Culture (Chicago 1965). Levine’s fascinating accounts disregard the literature on patrimonialism. For a detailed description of personal rulership and palace intrigues, see Richard Greenfield, Ethiopia (London 1965). On the much more precarious Iranian case, see Leonard Binder, Iran: Political Development in a Changing Society (Berkeley 1962); and now also Norman Jacobs, The Sociology of Development: Iran as an Asian Case Study (New York 1966).

For one of the latest examples, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, former member of the Irish delegation to the United Nations and vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana from 1962 to 1965, “The Counter-revolutionary Reflex,” Columbia Forum, ix (Spring 1966), 21 f.

For an excellent discussion of authoritarianism, see Juan J. Linz, “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain,” in E. Allardt and Y. Littunen, eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems (Helsinki 1964), 291–341. Linz argues that “Max Weber’s categories can and should be used independently of the distinction between democracy, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. Within each of these systems the legitimacy of the ruler, for the population or his staff, can be based on one or another of these types of belief. While we want to stress the conceptual difference between authoritarian regimes and traditional rule, we also want to suggest that they sometimes have elements in common and that the students of such regimes could gain as many insights from Weber’s analysis of patrimonial rule and bureaucracy as those of totalitarianism have gained from his thinking about charisma” (pp. 319, 321). My approach differs from Linz’s suggestion in that it treats patrimonialism not only as a type of traditional belief but also as a strategy of rulership. For another treatment of authoritarianism, which does not emphasize the issue of personal rulership, see Lewis A. Coser, “Prospects for the New Nations: Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, or Democracy?” in Coser, ed., Political Sociology (New York 1966), 247–271.

In his discussion of patriarchalism and patrimonialism, Weber pointed out that traditionalist authority is not sufficient to ensure conformity with the directives of a patriarchal head; the ruler must be particularly responsive to his group as long as he does not have an efficient staff; once he has it, he must be responsive to his staff, lest he risk his power or even his position. In the language of the pattern variables, patrimonial organizations are particularist, but I shall show below that this is not necessarily so; on the other hand, Parsons himself long ago stressed the inherent instability of universalist orientation within legal-rational bureaucracy (The Social System [New York 1951], 268).

Almost forgotten are the charges of liberal Democrats in 1960 that J. F. Kennedy “bought” the nomination of his party, meaning that he had such great financial resources that he could build an overpowering nationwide machine.

“White House and Whitehall,” The Public Interest, 1 (Winter 1966), 55–69.

See Harry Schwartz, “Brezhnev Favors Old Colleagues,“ New York Times, July 15, 1966.

See Irving Louis Horowitz, Three Worlds of Development (New York 1966), 263.

Weber’s example was Gladstone and Chamberlain’s Liberal party machine, to which he gave much attention. See Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber (New York 1958), 106; on the relation of Weber’s position to Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” see Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa 1963), 255 f.

The distinction between charismatic authority and leadership is embedded in Weber’s work, but was made explicit in Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber (New York 1960), 301, and was elaborated independently in Robert Bierstedt, “The Problem of Authority,” in Morroe Berger and others, eds., Freedom and Control in Modern Society (New York 1954), 71 f.

“Charisma, Order, and Status,” American Sociological Review 30,2 (April 1965), 199–213.

For the first major study of Nkrumah’s downfall, see Henry L. Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah: A Study of Personal Rule in Africa (New York 1966).

Economy and Society, Part II, chap. 12: 5.

See Lloyd Fallers, Bantu Bureaucracy (Chicago 1965, first published 1956), 241 f., 248 f. In spite of his recognition of universalist elements in traditional relationships, Fallers continues to think in terms of the dichotomy of bureaucracy and charisma (p. 250).

See Denis Warner’s account of the practices of the South Vietnamese commanders in The Reporter (May 5, 1966) 11 f.

“The Thai Bureaucracy,” Administrative Science Quarterly, v (June 1960), 70, 77, 80. See also Fred W. Riggs, Thailand: The Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity (Honolulu 1966).

“Turkey: The Modernity of Tradition,” in Pye and Verba, 172 f. 187.

The term “state-building” can perhaps substitute for “empire-building,” but it does not imply equally well the integration of disparate elements. In Weber’s terminology, which is applied here, the state is defined as a group that asserts an effective monopoly of legitimate force over a given territory; this definition does not specify the cultural and social aspects of the problem of political integration. The United States and the Soviet Union, which face tasks of international integration, can be called great or global empires (Weltreiche); expansionist states may be called “imperialist” in the conventional sense.

It should not be forgotten, however, that Imperial Germany remained a federation of states under the hegemony of Prussian constitutional monarchism (or monarchic constitutionalism), which combined dominant features of traditionalist patrimonialism with subordinate legal-rational (constitutional and bureaucratic) arrangements.

Weber and Eisenstadt have been almost alone among sociologists in giving systematic attention to the phenomenon of empire. Weber dealt with it throughout his career: in his book Roman Agrarian History and Its Importance for Public and Civil Law (1891), in his essay “The Social Causes of the Decline of Ancient Civilization” (1896), in his book The Agrarian Conditions of Antiquity (1909), in the major body of Economy and Society (1911–1913), and in the collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion. Eisenstadt applied structural functionalism to the great “patrimonial-bureaucratic” empires, as Weber called them. Both writers have been particularly concerned with the reasons for the empires’ ultimate failure, the causes of stagnation and disintegration.

Peddlers and Princes (Chicago 1963), 155 f. For an informative analysis of neotraditionalism in Indonesia, see Ann Ruth Willner, The Neotraditional Accommodation to Political Independence: The Case of Indonesia, Center of International Studies, Princeton University, Research Monograph No. 26 (Princeton 1966).

Clark Kerr and others, Industrialism and Industrial Man (New York 1964), 3, 221.