The Greeks in history

Weber had already stressed in “Agrarverhaeltnisse im Altertum” that this was the fundamental difference between the Occidental (Graeco-Roman) world and Oriental world (ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Israel)… The citizen-state as a self-organizing military body developed in the coastal civilization of the Graeco-Roman world, because there the aristocracies had access to the gains made from commerce and thus could reduce the kingdom to a merely military leadership... Later they had to accept the political participation of the bulk of the citizenry who, as hoplites, provided most of the military. Priests were always mere functionaries of the community: they could claim no independent authority in political questions.
In the civilizations at the banks of great rivers, the necessity of river regulation and irrigation strengthened the primordial kingdoms and nurtured the development of a centralized bureaucracy subject to a monarch with an indisputable monopoly in political, military, and economic power. The monarch could rely on the support of a privileged priesthood. On this basis there later emerged what Weber described as “authoritarian liturgical state”. In the end this authoritarian liturgical state, especially as it has been created in Ptolemaic Egypt, came to dominate the later Roman Empire.
In his view commune building depends on the ability of the members to unite in a ritual community that he calls Verbruederung (confraternity) a community based on artificially-created and free-willed mutual ties, not in consanguinity. This meant that the community depended on the equal rights (in principle at least) of all its members, solidarity against non-members, connubium and a common cult symbolically expressed in communal cult-meals.
The notion of Verbruederung explains the fundamental difference between Occidental and Oriental city-dwellers and their different potential for commune-building; it also allows Weber to accentuate an important distinction between European Antiquity and Middle Ages.
In pre-Christian Antiquity… confraternity materialized in the union of heads of sibs that originally constituted the city-state by means of synoikismos (the real housing-together in an urban center or the constitution of a singular political center for hitherto separate communitites). The patrician clan, however, tried to preserve their ritual exclusivity with respect to the plebeians, an exclusivity abolished only after prolonged struggles… According to Weber, the ancient city-states failed to reach the intensity of confraternity that was later achieved in the medieval commune… In the European Middle Ageds confraternity possessed a positive religious basis, since all the members already belonged to the same church, as symbolized in the community of the Eucharist. (Of course, this inevitably implied the outsider-status of the Jews)…
In “Die Stadt” he makes the famous distinction between the ancient homo politicus and the medieval homo oeconomicus:
Whereas in Antiquity the hoplite army and its training, and thus military interests, increasingly came to constitute the pivot of all urban organization, in the Middle Ages most burgher privileges began with the limitation of the burgher’s military duties to garrison service. The economic interests of the medieval townsman lay in peaceful gain through commerce and the trade, and this was most pronouncedly so for the lower strata of the urban citizenry…

Weber followed a long tradition of criticism that held Graeco-Roman Antiquity responsible for cultivating the omnipotence of the state and preventing economical progress. This tradition goes back to the Scottish and French Enlightenment. It then was taken up in the French postrevolutionary debate (in reaction to the cult of Antiquity fostered by the Jacobins). In 1819 Benjamin Constant summarized and sharpened it in his famous essay on the distinction between the freedom of the ancients and that of the moderns. Finally, the tradition was developed in greater historical detail by late-nineteenth-century authors such as N.D. Fustel de Coulanges and Jacob Burckhardt.

Wilfried Nippel

***

Wilfried Nippel. Homo politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: the European Citizen According to Max Weber. In: Anthony Pagden ed. The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge UP, 2002.