Abstracts
Patrimonial Alliances and State Penetration: An Historical Dynamic with Applications to Revolutionaries, Gangs, and Mafias
Abstract: The major dynamic of the past 500 years in the West has been the growth of the military state and its penetration into society, creating special purpose organizations first for tax extraction, then for other purposes of social control and social mobilization. The growth of bureaucracy is largely the result of this process, although the bureaucratic pattern has been borrowed by nonstate organizations for most other purposes as well. Conversely, state penetration has been aimed directly at reducing patrimonial household structures. States have been only partially successful in this. I will examine some of the theoretical reasons which affect the degree of success of state penetration, by way of examining such anti-state or state-rival organizations as revolutionaries, gangs, and Mafias.
Patrimony and Collective Capacity. A Theoretical Outline
This paper investigates the impact of patrimonial structures on collective capacity. As noted by Weber and, more recently, by Adams, the private appropriation of public office can be a factor of expansion as well as a factor of decline. Focusing on the incentive structures generated by patrimonial relations, I develop a systematic analysis of the conditions bearing upon this variation in outcomes and assess the relevance of theoretical claims inferred from this analysis in light of contemporary and historical cases. Three questions orient this inquiry. First, can this variation in outcomes be traced to different patterns of appropriation? Second, is the differential impact of patrimonial relations conditional on exogenous political and economic factors? Third, how does this analysis fare at different levels of the state organization?
From Colonial Patrimonialism to Familial Postcolonialism: Democracy, Dynasty and Dystopia in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines
This paper aims to do two things. First, it aims to provide a definition and account of colonial patrimonialism as experienced in the global periphery during the imperialist expansion of the late nineteenth-century. The central process here is colonial state formation, which displaced myriad forms of local political relations and transplanted western-style patrimonialism that were usually grafted unto displaced local political relations. Drawing on a comparative study of the cases of British Malaya and the American Philippines, I argue that colonial rule not only created a new kind of patrimonialism, but also that paternal colonial rule created the possibility and necessity of signifying the myriad forms of local political relations as ‘oriental despotism’ with all the racial and gender tropes of colonial ethnographic discourse. Theoretically, this calls for a rethinking of Max Weber’s classical conception of patrimonialism and its evolution, especially for his comparative sociology of civilizations. Second, this paper aims to explicate the development of patrimonialism into the postcolonial period. Drawing on the comparative study of the successor states of the same cases, I argue that the signification of oriental despotism made colonial patrimonialism modern and progressive and caused anti-colonial nationalism to respond with intimate familial imaginations coupled with networks built on familial bonds of trust to challenge it. These nationalist familialisms then influenced the way the postcolonial polity was structured through the violence of anti-colonial revolution and Cold War decolonization. As a result, the postcolonial state was marked by bureaucratic development combined with a heady mix of democratic institutions, dynastic power and dystopian visions of moral collapse. This study calls for the conceptual re-evaluation of the ideal types of neo-patrimonialism and corporatism that have been employed in recent neo-Weberian work on postcolonial state formation.
Patrimonialism under the Sign of Modernity: Toward a New Research Program for Economic Sociology
Contemporary economic sociology is faced with a conundrum: for all the efforts to assert the “embeddedness” of economic practices within the social fabric, its proponents have not gone as far as they could in offering a truly sociological economics. On the other hand, over the past quarter-century, significant advances have been made in the study of the political and economic significance of patrimonialism. However, these studies have almost exclusively concentrated on ancient, medieval, and early modern social formations, or on less developed countries and political machines in industrial and post-industrial societies. The present paper explores whether the assumption that patrimonialism is an archaic social phenomenon, and therefore, in modernity, a remnant, might fruitfully be displaced by recognition of modern instances of patrimonialism. Preliminary sketches on this issue will focus on U.S. cases drawn from the following arenas: (1) state administration of land; (2) cities’ development of water systems; (3) capitalist deployment of franchises; and (4) state administration of electronic “space.” If this approach is deemed fruitful, it holds out the promise of helping to initiate the development of a sociological economics of contemporary capitalism.
Family Firms: A Contrast between the Patrimonial and Patriarchal Origins of East Asian Economic Organization
On the eve of industrialization in South Korea and Taiwan, the two societies differed dramatically in how family practices shaped the organizational development of family-owned firms and family-owned business groups. In South Korea, as industrialization began, past history and current family practices made an economy organized through large, centrally controlled business groups a likely possibility, a path of least resistance. By equal measure, in Taiwan, in the same period, past history and then current family practices made an interlinked small-firm economy also a likely possibility. Both paths mirrored a pre-industrial past and rest on reproduced patterns of household and inter-household authority that are best described as patrimonial in the case of South Korea and patriarchal in the case of Taiwan. The paper will describe and analyze these two distinct organizational trajectories
Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin's Russia:
Legitimating Authoritarianism in a Post-Ideological Era
Recently there has been a resurgence of works analyzing Russia under Putin as a "neo-patrimonial" state, including authors as diverse as Georgi Derluguian and Richard Pipes. In this paper I will argue that while this approach to analyzing Putin's regime captures some important aspects of the situation today, it neglects a key difference between post-Soviet Russia and "traditional" patrimonialism in Weber's sense--namely, that all subjective sense of Russia's connection with "traditional authority" has been hopelessly severed by seven decades of Soviet charismatic modernization. Thus, while there are certainly patrimonial elements in Putin's recentralization of the "power vertical" linking each Russian citizen to the state, his deployment of "macho" imagery designed to make him appear as the genuine father of his country, and his efforts to return to some elements of tsarist state symbolism so as to form a consensual new basis of legitimation, neither Putin's "staff" nor the public at large have any subjective belief that Putinism represents a genuine return to "ancient" Russian traditions that were "valid of yore." On the contrary, Russians in general perceive Putin's strategy, quite accurately, as an effort to mix and match tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet symbolism instrumentally so as to avoid any return to "ideology" of either the liberal or Marxist-Leninist variety--which is precisely why his rhetorical strategy has been so popular. If this is "patrimonialism," then, it's a peculiar form of "instrumental patrimonialism" that mimics the form of past Russian imperial authority without any of the tsarist, Soviet, or Westernizing content. Such an instrumental patrimonialism may face a serious legitimation crisis as the Putin regime gives way to the Putin-Medvedev duumvirate
Grandpa State instead of Bourgeois State Fictitious Patrimonial Politics in China’s Age of Commerce, 1644-1839
The Qing state in eighteenth-century China has been lauded by historians as a rationalizing administrative apparatus constituted by a sophisticated internal communication system, rigorous legal codes, as well as meritocratic examination and recruitment institutions. But it was still far from a rational bureaucracy in a Weberian sense. Since the late seventeenth century, Manchu emperors had reinstated the Confucianist schema of filial piety to regulate the internal hierarchy of the bureaucracy and define the bureaucracy’s relation to its subjects. Under this schema, the body politics of the empire at large was imagined as a grand patrilineage. Emperor-officials and officials-subjects relations were conceptualized as father-son relations, with the emperor as the grand patriarch. This reinstatement of the vertical hierarchy of filiality was to displace the liberal strain of Confucianism that fueled the rise of a dissident public sphere, which was grounded on horizontal and fraternal political alignments among intellectuals, officials, and commoners, during the late Ming period in the seventeenth century. This patrimonial imagination rendered the Qing state a “rational-patrimonial” one, which was rational in its constitution but patrimonial in its imagination. As a result, the rational procedures that the state sought to regulate itself and the social was often interspersed with moralistic persuasion, paternalistic compassion, and capricious exercise of fatherly violence. This rational-patrimonial tradition of political power survived the collapse of the Qing empire, and continued to shape successive paternalistic-authoritarian regimes in twentieth-century China.
Political Familialism in a Stalemate State: A View from the Ground in Lebanon
Lebanon may not have typified a classical patrimonial state in the Weberian sense, but has consistently displayed practices that one may call familial politics. The state did not consolidated itself sufficiently to withstand internal or external pressures. State functions have been regularly displaced onto non-state actors and institutions. The state repeatedly has collapsed in the face of the unrelenting challenges of the past half century. Currently, the state is stalemated, without a formal president and without consensus on the basic rules of parliamentary elections. Other than brief moments, the state, from the point of view of the ground of its citizens, has been viewed as unable to deliver to the citizenry without personalized mediation and intervention, largely based in familial relationships or idiomatic kinship. This paper addresses the idioms and practices of familialism as politics in Lebanon, from the ground up, looking at the manner in which citizens have managed and believe they must manage their day to day affairs, as they intersect with the state, during and in the "aftermath" of the civil war which began in 1975 and technically ended in 1990. It considers transnationalism as a response to stalemated state-building and the workings of transnationalism on political familialism from the perspective of a sector of the citizenry.
Contemporary African Neopatrimonialism in Historical Perspective
Many scholars argue that the inefficiency and corruption that is pervasive in most African state administrations is a consequence of their patrimonial (or neopatrimonial) structure, and some even include corruption in the definition of neopatrimonialism. We argue that this is only partially true. Patrimonialism, as Weber used the term, is a broad concept covering several different aspects of administration and including several distinct subtypes. In the structural context in which African state administrations are embedded, some aspects of patrimonialsm are inefficient and facilitate corruption, but others, including forms of decentralization and partial privatization, are in fact more efficient than centralized bureaucratic administration. We use a comparative analysis of tax administration in African states to distinguish between the positive and negative consequences of different aspects of patrimonialism in contemporary Africa.
Where Does Patrimonialism Come From?
What are the institutional and ideological bases of patrimonial politics? How do holders of patrimonial power extend their control over state offices and authority? I address those questions by examining early modern European states and then consider the extent to which patrimonialism has reemerged in the contemporary United States. I contend that patrimonialism is an extreme manifestation of elite appropriations of power and property in both the American state and civil society.
Patrimonialism and Constitutionalism in Late Eighteenth Century Poland
Poland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was more a mélange of patrimonially organized latifundia than a sovereign state. Descriptions of the organization of work and politics on these magnate estates stress an overlay of voluntaristic clientage ties on top of a set of less voluntaristic, more purely patrimonial relations. Boundaries separating the personnel of these various estates were firm; thus they were mutually autonomous, competing economic and political organizations. National politics was characterized both by contests between a weak, elective monarchy and overwhelmingly powerful local lords, and by shifting alliances among these lords to achieve political ascendancy. Hence politics was factional. However, shifts in the network organization of this factional politics in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, combined with a retooling of traditional political culture symbols, facilitated the ‘invention’ of a constitutional regime in 1791, a remarkable accomplishment of political order out of disorder
Antipodean Patrimonialism?
This paper will consider whether the term patrimonialism can be applied to a particular, keenly contested and racially bifurcated aspect of Australian history: the relations between ‘squatters’ and those with competing civil and property claims. The discussion will draw parallels between Australia and other settler societies.
“Squattocracy” has had a lively currency in Australian political history. It was first used to designate the social, political and economic power of pastoralists who acquired use rights over vast stretches of grazing land in the early years of white settlement. For many 19th century colonial activists, it was the key enemy of ‘closer settlement’, capitalist farming and industry, and democratic reform. Squattocracy was associated with the long domination of upper houses of Australian legislatures by inherited wealth. It has been a periodic target of those determined to achieve the principle of ‘one man, one vote’. Squattocracy also figured prominently in periodic public debates on the class character of early Australia, and on the role of ‘ruling elites’ more generally.
There may be two distinct histories of patrimonialism in Australia. The Australian colonies were among the pioneers of ‘universal’ male and later female franchise in the nineteenth century; Aborigines gained [de jure] full citizenship only in the late 1960s. While the squatter’s patrimonial rule over white settlers was arguably short-lived, that over some groups of Aboriginal people persisted, for good or ill, for more than a century.
Open Elite? Social Mobility, Marriage and Family in Florence, 1282-1494
Using a statistical data set on 55,471 Renaissance Florentines, compiled over twenty years, this article examines trends in social mobility, in marriage patterns, and in patrilineage structure from 1282 to 1494. The primary findings of the research are the following: 1) Family social mobility both in wealth and in political office was high in Florence, with family mobility in wealth higher than family mobility in political office. Rates of social mobility in intermarriage were much lower. 2) The patrilineage-family model of the Florentine medieval elite diffused into the middle classes during the Renaissance, at the same time as it weakened among the large medieval families that originally exemplified it. 3) Paradoxically, high social mobility existed in Renaissance Florence because of contention among three inconsistent principles of elite consolidation: (a) patrilineage, (b) wealth, and (c) political factionalism. All three of these inconsistent principles affected both intermarriage and family growth. 4) The Albizzi regime was the time when Florentine society most decisively opened up.
Locating the « Family-State ». The Forgotten Legacy of Javanese Theories of the State as a Public Domain (17th-20th c.)
Even in contemporary reports on KKN (Corruption, collusion and nepotism) in post-Suharto Indonesia, the idea still looms large that there exists a cultural Javanese peculiarity in terms of State-building : an “autochtonous” ideological feature that could explain bureaucratic failures and the ongoing process of the “privatization of the State” (Hibou 2004). Whatever it may mean, “Javanese culture” is then taken to always have been hostile to the idea of the State as a “public domain” free of any association with private interests : family connections and lineage solidarities would have strongly militated against the birth, in modern age Java, of the kind of constitutionnalist theories that led, in 16th and 17th c. Western Europe, to the divorce between the princely elite fortunes and the State’s Treasury. In the same vein, the imperial encounter between the VOC and Javanese political societies in the early decades of the 17th c. is sometimes still deciphered as a “clash of cultures” pitting a rational-capitalist chartered company, linked to and fed by an emerging metropolitan Republican political order asserting the virtue of “public welfare”, against a bunch of backward “patrimonial polities”.
Yet, this evolutionnist narrative, that roots itself in a faulty functionalist rendering of Weber’s originally subtler considerations, has been powerfully challenged in the past decades. On the one hand, more in-depth research on 17th c. European polities has shown that these were not at all immune from – nor adverse to – “private interests”. Even in “absolutist” France, the State often was “captured” by powerful elite families that succeeded in entrenching themselves in first-rank official positions from one generation to the other, and that accordingly saw State resources as their own – if only for the reason that they had to buy them before being able to make a profit out of them (Richet 1973). The clearcut distinction between the “patrimonial State” and its “absolutist” nemesis (Anderson 1974), or between a corporatist ancien régime and a “capitalist” modern State, has come under heavy fire (Minard 1998). As for the Dutch Republic of the “Golden Century”, it has been demonstrated that it was sustained and manned by a nexus of family connections that made nepotism widespread at the highest levels (Adams 2005, De Bruin 1991). Going hand-in-hand with the political marginalization of the Nobility councils (Ridderschappen) and the fierce struggle that the House of Oranje-Nassau led against the States-General to keep its Stadhouderate status, the ascent to power of the regenten class provided wealthy merchant families with almost unlimited opportunities to get access to the Republic’s upper administrative positions. The Netherlands East Indies Company’s overseas capital, Batavia, was similarly in the greedy hands of a few powerful extended families whose members were everywhere in command (Gelman-Taylor 1983, Blussé 1997). The Dutch State and its overseas extensions were ruled not by rational bureaucrats but by profit-seekers who saw no contradiction whatsoever between private enrichment and “public welfare”.
On the other hand, a prejudice-free reading of a specific kind of local courtly literature makes us wonder whether Javanese polities truly were “patrimonial States” with no notion at all of a “public domain” of norms and resources. The serat (“mystical songs”) and the babad (“kingly chronicles”) written in the 17th, 18th and 19th c. Mataram kraton by the court-poets (pujangga) for the blood aristocracy and the priyayi service nobility indeed spell out an elaborate theory of the State (negara) as an autonomous (id est arch-soverein and timeless) entity peopled by highly-qualified government specialists (punggawa). Starting under the reign of Sultan Agung (r. 1613-1646), there actually took place, in the Mataram kingdom of East and Central Java, a process of both administrative and ideological transformation, linked to the consolidation of the priyayi status group. The priyayi were raised to an aristocratic condition by the king, but they could not beget their status and administrative positions to their sons : they were to lose their aristocratic titles after two or three generations. They therefore had no choice, to assert a moral identity of their own that would help them protecting their families’ rank, but to devise a theory of the State that would make the holding of high bureaucratic positions a question not only of one’s genealogical fame, but also of one’s acquired skills and virtues (Moertono 1968, Mudjanto 1987, Condronegoro 1995).
Out of this harsh status battle between the priyayi and the bangsawan (blood nobility), there emerged something like a bureaucratic theory of kingly power and State “management” that did equate the “service of the king” to an ascetic accomplishment (many Serat state that being in the service of the king is like practising tapa : ascetic exercises that lead to experience the deep vacuity of the ego and to accumulate kesakten – mystical strength). To legitimately and efficiently take care of State affairs, it was not anymore sufficient to rely upon a patronym : one had to prove its commitment to the “peace and prosperity” of the negara by living the life and showing the self-restraint skills of a pandito (ascetic). Even if it made heavy use of the overarching language of family loyalties to symbolically express the kingdom’s foundational hierarchies (the word priyayi meaning the “younger brothers” of the king), this priyayi theory of State affairs can nevertheless be compared to the constitutionnalist theories of the noblesse des Parlements in late 16th c. France (Hanley 1983). It indeed was the unintended product of a never-ending status war that took place not between merchants and aristocrats, but inside the aristocratic elite, between the service nobility and the blood aristocracy. And it did put into motion a process of institutionnalization that gradually severed the links between the main princely families and the highest kraton offices (like that of patih, that in the 18th c. fell into the hands of powerful priyayi families like the Danureja).
But starting with the tactical mistakes of Sultan Agung’s successor Amengkurat 1st (r. 1646-1677), and reaching a turning-point with the 1755 Giyanti Treaty, the negara of Mataram lost most of its political autonomy to the VOC – that meddled into Javanese succession affairs like a bull in a China shop. After the bloody Java War (1825-1830), the priyayi became part of the new Dutch colonial apparatus : they were turned into paid ambtenaren of the native branch of the imperial bureaucracy, the Pangreh Pradja (Sutherland 1979). The Dutch thereafter made use of the language of family intimacy to sanctify the administrative hierarchies of the colony. In official documents, the priyayi of the Pangreh Pradja were termed the “younger brothers” of their European counterparts, and following in the footsteps of the Kartasura-VOC treaties’ tradition, they themselves ceremonially refered to the Governor general as an “uncle” or a “father”. This language of family connections even gained strong currency during the Ethical period (1901-1926), when colonial reformers styled themselves the “guides” and “benevolent tutors” of the priyayi. An ancient priyayi language of State affairs and a colonial rhetoric of affectionate proximity, jointly expressing an “hegemonic pact”, therefore seemed to strongly reinforce each other. But in the 1920s and 1930s, this family affairs’ language also was used by those key ideological opponents to Dutch rule who belonged to the underground world of mystical teaching. Ki Hadjar Dewantara’s theory of democratie met leiderschap relied upon the idea of the absolute submission of all the murid to a guru equated to an unchallengeable Father (Tsuchiya 1990), and Raden Supomo’s anti-democratic “integralistic State” theory was built upon a “family principle” (kekeluargaan) tactically posited as an essential component of the “true Indonesian culture”. The language of State affairs as family affairs hence became both the language of the colonial State and the idiom of its nationalist denial.
Post-Independence continuities are no less intriguing. Sukarno made explicit reference to Ki Hadjar’s teachings when he proclaimed the “Guided Democracy” (Demokrasi Terpimpin) in 1957 (Reeve 1985). General Suharto liked to quote ancient mystical priyayi sayings about the “undifferentiated nature of the ruler and the ruled” (the kawula-gusti relationship) and styled himself the Father of Development (Bapak Pembangunan) (Pemberton 1994). In New Order Indonesia, hierarchical relationships inside both the State apparatus and big private companies often were expressed through the bapak-anak buah (“father-beloved children”) or the kakak-adik (“younger brother-older brother”) metaphors (S. Shiraishi 1997). This led both political scientists and anthropologists to stress long-term cultural continuities in the way power is seen and expressed in Java, and even to diagnose an Indonesian cult of “authoritarian leadership” (Pye 1985). Yet our brief overview of the priyayi, then colonial, then nationalist political uses of the language of State-as-family affairs leaves us with a number of open questions regarding this crystal-clear culturalist narrative. Firstly, the priyayi theory of State affairs did have a “checks-and-balances” dimension : as a corporatist claim to the advent of a skilled roturier class of government specialists, it spelled out the limitations of kingly power and asserted the relative autonomy of the negara with regards to the aristocratic office-holders’ economic and genealogical capitals. Postcolonial authoritarian uses of the priyayi mystical understandings of State affairs selectively leave aside this part of their ideological legacy. Secondly, the priyayi were not part of the post-1949 State apparatus : they were violently driven out of power by the pemuda and the new military elite during the “Physical Revolution” of 1945-1949 (Anderson 1972). That the New Order regime made use of bits and pieces of their mystical theory of politics to legitimize its excesses of power does not tell us anything about they taking a part in the contemporary reinvention of “patrimonial politics”. One should not look for a sole direct line of ideological transmission, but rather register conflicting multiple genealogies. There is no Javanese or priyayi ghost culture behind past or current KKN affairs, if only for the reason that the priyayi political thought was both multi-layered and transformative : it cannot be reduced to a single-sided argument for patrimonial authoritarianism. The mystical worldview it partook of advocated not ostentatious macht but ascetic self-restraint. A forgotten lesson.
Bibliography
ADAMS Julia, The Familial State. Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005.
ANDERSON Benedict, Java in a Time of Revolution. Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1972.
ANDERSON Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, Verso, 1985 [1974].
BLUSSE Leonard, Bitter Bonds. A Colonial Divorce Drama of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, Markus Wiener, 1997.
CONDRONEGORO Mari S., Busana adat Kraton Yogyakarta. Makna dan fungsi dalam berbagai upacara, Jogjakarta, Yayasan Pustaka Nusatama, 1995.
DE BRUIN Guido, Geheimhouding en verraad : de geheimhouding van staatszaken ten tijde van de Republiek (1600-1750), ’s Gravenhage, SDU Uit.,1991.
GELMAN-TAYLOR Jean, The Social World of Batavia. European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Vivek Sharma
War, State Formation and Territorial Formation in Europe
Patrimonial Politics and Imperial Networks at the Cape, c1652-1795
This paper extends Julia Adams' insights into patrimonial patriarchal governance to examine the formation of colonial society at the Cape of Good Hope. The Cape was one of the only Dutch colonies to produce a stable settler society. This paper contends that the model of familial institutions and networks that linked the formation of the Dutch state to the VOC can also be employed at a local level to examine class formation in the colonies.