The Basic Structure of Unseparated Spheres in a Feudal FrameworkFramework

In the feudal states of pre-communist times, the lack of separation of spheres of social action manifested in a series of interrelated phenomena, which were present in different degrees in different civilizations. These basic structures are illustrated on Figure 1.2, depict-ing a model that features the root cause, the consequent societal structures—concerndepict-ing every social stratum—and the rulership structures—concerning the ruling elite.

On the left side of the figure, we can follow the chain of phenomena regarding per-sonal relations:

Figure 1.2. The logic of basic structures of pre-communist societies. Dark grey represents the root cause, medium grey represents the consequences for personal relations, and light grey represents institutional consequences.

◆

Traditional (feudal) networks. In Weber’s writings, feudalism appears as a specific type of rank order, whereby “rank” stands for a logic of stratification in which economic institutions are still embedded in feudal political and legal struc-tures. In this order, the distribution of power and life chances is determined primarily by the structure of interrelated obligations, in particular the obedience owed to a personal master, whose claim to authority is based on age-old rules and on ‘status honor’. [In feudalism], the basis of social power is in a network of social ties and obligations [whereas] the capacity to monopolize and accu-mulate this power is justified by reference to ‘traditional authority’” (emphasis added).³¹ In Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, Gil Eyal, Iván Szelényi and

31 Eyal, Szelényi, and Townsley, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, 68.

Rudimentary or lack of separation of spheres of social action

Patrimonialism Patronalism

Root cause

Societal structures

Rulership structures

Collusion of power and ownership Traditional (feudal) networks

40 • 1. Stubborn Structures

Eleanor Tonley emphasize the competing logics of rank and class in pre-communist societies, although they admit that

“[in] Hungary and Poland—and […] to an even greater extent in pre-revolutionary Russia—social capital was of a traditional type, based on feudal social rank, and the power of the gentry remained unbroken throughout the pre-communist era. As a result, the process of embour-geoisement in these countries was blocked, subverted, or slowed down,” meaning class formation did not take place to a degree that the logic of class could dominate a social structure based on traditional (feudal) networks.³²

On the one hand, the societal structure of feudal net-works meant that the lack of separation of spheres of so-cial action was legitimate and formalized, extended to the everyday life of everyone in pre-communist societies.

A good illustration is provided by Geoffrey Hosking, who explains that in imperial Russia “the landlord was the de-cisive authority figure in the serf’s life: he was employer, judge, tax-collector, police chief and recruiting-sergeant rolled into one.” According to Hosking, such merger of activities was prevalent up to the abolishment of serfdom by Alexander II—and that reform was enforced rather half-heartedly before 1917.³³ On the other hand, along the meticulous formal hierarchy of feudal rank order, in-formal personal relations dominated in the allocation of positions and resources.³⁴ Indeed, the dominance of per-sonal relations is typical to pre-modern societies,³⁵ but in the case of feudalism, this does not mean that formal titles lose their importance in such settings. On the contrary, informality in feudalism exists as an extension to formality: one has a formal rank, and it is their formally granted power and re-sources they can use for personal considerations. Conversely, it can happen under feudalism that, as in the famous case of Cosimo de’ Medici, a network is created out of formal and informal (personal) relations in marriage, trade, and patronage to advance political career and facilitate the attainment of formal positions.³⁶ But informal rank alone—without accompanying formal position—does not grant power to anyone, and informal networks do not replace formal institutions either.

Patronage, which constituted a special merger of political and market action in Imperial Russia, also developed along formal feudal hierarchies by lords using their legally granted powers (see Box 1.2).

32 Eyal, Szelényi, and Townsley, Making Capitalism Without Capitalists, 24–26.

33 Hosking, “Patronage and the Russian State,” 309–14.

34 Shlapentokh and Woods, Contemporary Russia as a Feudal Society, 151–55.

35 North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, 30–76.

36 Padgett and Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434.”

Box 1.2. Patronage in imperial Russia.

“Patronage is an ongoing, hierarchical but to some extent mutual relationship under which a client of-fers goods, services or support to a patron in return for protection and perhaps promotion of the client’s interests or other benefits. It is an informal relation-ship which contains no element of contract and is unrelated to law as officially understood. […]

[P]atronage in imperial Russia worked in four main ways: (i) Monarchical proximity, which favoured those who […] served at court or had the regular right of access to the court. (ii) Kinship, which fa-voured those linked by birth or marriage to families enjoying high rank or status. (iii) Geographical lo-cation, which drew in those who had served in the same province or on the same mission as an official later promoted to high office, if he valued their talents or enjoyed their company. (iv) Institutional position, which drew in those who had worked to-gether in the same office, especially if it had special-ist functions, such as the State Chancery […]. [A]ll four remained important right up to 1917.”

– Geoffrey Hosking, “Patronage and the Russian State,” The Slavonic and East European Review 78, no.

2 (2000): 302, 312–13

1.3. Thesis B: The Separation of Spheres Followed Civilizational Boundaries • 41

◆

Patronalism. Narrowing our focus to the ruling elite, the corollary of feudal net-works and patronage in rulership structure is “patronalism,” as interpreted by Henry Hale in his seminal work Patronal Politics.³⁷ In general, patronalism involves hierarchical ordering of social networks, dividing people into a small number of rulers—patrons—and a large number of dependent subordinates—clients [à 2.2.2.2]. As a rulership structure, patronalism embodies “the personalized ex-change of concrete rewards and punishments through chains of actual acquain-tance,” as opposed to “abstract, impersonal principles such as ideological belief or categorization like economic class.”³⁸ Patronalism also entails a coercive, tyrannical hierarchy, where the patron at the top is empowered to reward and punish clients on a discretional basis [à 2.4.6]. Indeed, societies all over the world “found it natural to extend their forms of handcrafted rule through personal networks as they grew in scale from the original, small-scale communities where everyone knew everyone else,” so it is no wonder that in default of the process of separation of spheres of social action “patronalism has been a fixture of the [pre-communist]

region’s politics from the time its very first major polities appeared.”³⁹

On the right side of the figure, we can follow the chain of institutional phenomena:

◆

Collusion of power and ownership. In countries of the Western civilization today, private ownership refers to a bundle of rights of a private owner, who can dispose of his property at his own volition as far as he does not violate the corresponding rights of others. Freedom of ownership includes the right to sell and accumulate wealth, legally protected against private harassment and apart from the political sphere. However, the lack of separation of political and market spheres leads to the institutional setup known in Russian literature as “power&ownership” (vlast-sob-stvennost). Although we are going to use this term in a narrower sense throughout the book [à 5.5.3.5], in the literature it has been applied to the specific ownership relations characterized by the lack of separation of spheres of social action. As Andrey Ryabov writes, the distinctive features of this institution “were perhaps most clearly presented in Igor Berezhnoy and Vyacheslav Volchik’s work as the following: ‘1. The granting of ownership rights for certain property is only pos-sible with active participation of the state as the main agent of distribution (or redistribution); 2. Any property might be expropriated at any time if the authorities (at any level) become interested in its redistribution; 3. State or other authorities collect rent (either explicitly or implicitly) from the property within the framework of power&ownership.’ Publications like this one have stressed that the institution of power&ownership is based on full or partial monopolization by the state, or rather by the groups that control it, of the functions of whole sectors of, or the entirety, of the national economy. […] In Russia, power&ownership has demonstrated amazing vitality, having played a huge role in the country’s history

37 Hale, Patronal Politics.

38 Hale, Patronal Politics, 9.

39 Hale, Patronal Politics, 41.

42 • 1. Stubborn Structures

since the 15th century. […] The Tsar’s monopoly on land, like in oriental societies, was what constituted the economic basis of the authoritative autocratic state and its dominating role in national economy until the collapse of monarchy in 1917.”⁴⁰

The collusion of power and ownership can be classified as a societal structure because property relations define the connections between people in the entire society, down to the everyday life of ordinary subjects of a feudal state.

◆

Patrimonialism. A Weberian term, patrimonialism derives from the household administrations of a chief and refers, as a characteristic of a regime, to the indivis-ibility of public and private spheres, as well as the treatment of society as a pri-vate domain by those who hold political power.⁴¹ As a rulership structure, this is the corollary of the collusion of power and ownership, which implies the lack of separation of the private economy (market action) from the public sphere (political action). Moreover, it is important to note that patrimonialism, though it goes hand in hand with it, is not the same as patronalism. For, in our understanding, the latter refers to certain actors and the presence of personal, patron-client ties of vassalage, whereas patrimonialism refers to institutions or spheres, which an actor (typically a patron) can administer as if it was his private domain.

While Western polities are generally protected from the private appropriation of the public sphere by the constitutional guarantees which have been developed to separate the political sphere from the spheres of market and communal action, the lack of separation in Eastern civilizations manifested in explicitly patrimonial institutions and rulership during imperial times, before the communist era.

Both being corollaries of the lack of separation, personal and institutional specificities reinforce each other. On the level of societal structures, the collusion of power and owner-ship involves the element of discretional disposition of property on the basis of feudal rela-tions, and in turn, the deeply rooted tradition of patronage merges ownership with power by turning all property and products into currency in a market for favorable (or simply fair) treatment by other, higher feudal entities. As far as rulership structures are concerned, patrimonialism requires the patronal subjugation of subjects, whereas patronalism means the enforcement of the (private) will of the patron over the interests of his subjects, the public. Indeed, patrimonialism is the systemic involvement of the political sphere into market and communal activities, whereas patronalism refers to the personal dependence of the people which distances such rulership from the Western ideal of an impersonal, and non-patrimonial, professional bureaucratic administration, in the Weberian sense.⁴²

These phenomena were present in imperial China, which Weber described as “the most consistent political form of patrimonialism,”⁴³ as well as the Islamic and Orthodox historical regions, as exemplified by the above-quoted passages referring to imperial

Rus-40 Ryabov, “The Institution of Power&Ownership in the Former USSR,” 416.

41 For a meta-analysis, see Fisun, “Neopatrimonialism in Post-Soviet Eurasia.”

42 Weber, Economy and Society, 218–19.

43 Weber, 1090–91. Also, see Eisenberg, “Weberian Patrimonialism and Imperial Chinese History”;

Hamilton, “Patriarchy, Patrimonialism, and Filial Piety.”

1.3. Thesis B: The Separation of Spheres Followed Civilizational Boundaries • 43 sia (which involved both historical regions before communism).⁴⁴ Populated by feudal

states at the time, the structures were present in the Western-Christian historical region as well, but more mildly and with greater respect for individual autonomy. As Hun-tington explains, most societies of the Western-Christian civilization “included a relatively strong and autonomous aristocracy, a substantial peasantry, and a small but significant class of merchants and traders. The strength of the feudal aristocracy was particularly significant in limiting the extent to which absolutism was able to take firm root in most European nations. [Social] pluralism early gave rise to estates, parliaments, and other in-stitutions to represent the interests of the aristocracy, clergy, merchants, and other groups, [whereas individualism] developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the […]

acceptance of the right of individual choice […] prevailed in the West by the seventeenth century.”⁴⁵ Huntington points out that these characteristics were not “always and univer-sally present in Western society,” and some of them “appeared in other civilizations. […]

The combination of them was, however, […] what gave the West its distinctive quality.”⁴⁶ What needs to be noticed is that the features Huntington attributes to Western civ-ilization centered on the respect of autonomy of certain social groups, as well as plural structures, as opposed to the omnipotent authority of a single lord. In contrast, “Russia had no or little exposure to the defining historical phenomena of Western civilization,”

with most of the distinctive features of Western Christianity being “almost totally absent from the Russian experience.”⁴⁷ This means that precisely those cultural traits were missing that were the bedrock of the separation of spheres of social action in the Western Christian civilization. Attempts at modernization and civilizational shifting, such as the one initiated by Peter the Great at the turn of 17-18^th century, eventually led only to strengthening cen-tral power, the diametrically opposite direction that would have been needed for a West-ern-type separation of the spheres of social action.⁴⁸

The unseparated spheres of social action under feudalism, as well as the different levels of separation in different civilizations is nicely illustrated by Szűcs, who compares feudal relations in the Western-Christian and Eastern-Orthodox historical regions. As he writes, a specific feature of Western feudalism was “the presence of human dignity even under subjection. In general outside Europe but even in the Russian principalities a ‘man of service’ would bow to the ground, kiss the hand of his lord or even throw himself down and kiss the hem of his lord’s garment. In the western ceremony of homagium the vassal would go down on one knee with head erect, and then place his hands into the clasped hands of his lord. The new relation was finally sealed with a mutual kiss. An age that ex-pressed all in emphatic symbols and spectacular gestures could not have found a better way to express the basic model of a relation that strove by all means to transplant that symbol-ism into practice. […] The same holds true of moral feelings. The ‘honour’ of the individual was a central element in the ancient system of values, and the ‘fidelity’ of the subordinate was of central importance in every society that was based upon systems of dependence,

44 For a classic analysis, see Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime.

45 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 69–71.

46 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 72.

47 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 139.

48 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, 140.

44 • 1. Stubborn Structures

but the two were morphologically exclusive: the honor of the knight and the fidelitas of the vassal only attained an organic fusion in western feudalism. Europe directly inherited human dignity as a constitutive element in political relations not from Antiquity but from feudalism, and of course preserved it where human dignity remained present in the organic western process of changes in forms” (emphasis added).⁴⁹

1.4. Thesis C: Communist Dictatorships Arrested and

Im Dokument POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES (Seite 67-72)