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Personal Rulership, Patrimonialism, and Empire-Building in the New States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Guenther Roth
Guenther Roth
Affiliation:
Free University of Berlin
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Extract

The concrete lessons of recent history have helped us to appreciate the paramount importance of the political preconditions of social and economic development in the new states. The basic problem of political stability must be solved before all others—or everything else may be in vain. For this reason, some of the scholarly attention that used to be focused on social and economic development has shifted to political organization and has given prominence to terms such as “nation-building,” “political culture,” and “democratization.”

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , January 1968 , pp. 194 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1968

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References

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

2 See Part I, chap. 3, and Part II, chaps. 10–16, of my forthcoming variorum edition of Economy and Society (New York 1968)Google Scholar.

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

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

5 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 fGoogle Scholar.

6 For an excellent discussion of authoritarianism, see Linz, Juan J., “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain,” in Allardt, E. and Littunen, Y., eds., Cleavages, Ideologies and Parly Systems (Helsinki 1964), 291–341Google Scholar. 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 die 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 Coser, Lewis A., “Prospects for the New Nations: Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism, or Democracy?” in , Coser, ed., Political Sociology (New York 1966), 247–71Google Scholar.

7 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], 268Google Scholar).

8 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.

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

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

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

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

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

14 “Charisma, Order, and Status,” American Sociological Review, xxx (April 1965), 199–213Google Scholar.

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

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

17 See Fallers, Lloyd, Bantu Bureaucracy (Chicago 1965, first published 1956)Google Scholar, 241f, 248f. 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).

18 See Denis Warner's account of the practices of the South Vietnamese commanders in The Reporter (May 5, 1966), 11 fGoogle Scholar.

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

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

21 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.

22 It should not be forgotten, however, diat 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.

23 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.

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

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