An outline
Over the coming months as I survey the history of ‘medieval’ societies I will replace the rather ambiguous term ‘status’ with the more definite concept of ‘social rank’ (e.g. political rank, administrative rank, legal rank). ‘Rank’ is in some respects more clumsy. Should we speak of ‘rank societies’, ‘ranked societies’, or ‘ranking societies’? What we lose in elegance we nevertheless make up for in precision and in application across languages. As will be seen, ‘rank’ as applied to differences between ‘kings’ and ‘magnates’ conveniently embraces the subtle distinctions between German stände, the ‘aristocracies’ of other European territories, and the clerical powers. This allows me to focus on general or consistent patterns without losing sight of the finer variables.
Also, by using the word ‘rank’ to denote socio-legal ‘standing’ with regard to rights to collect taxation, control of ‘estates’, and other monopolisations of privilege I can more freely and without confusion utilise the Latin word status, the origin of the word ‘state’.
In effect, status is a mental phenomenon that becomes ‘the state’. I will examine the idea of ‘status’ in the writings of medieval inheritors of ancient Greek and Roman political and legal doctrines in the terms subsequently interpreted by modern scholars (initially Walter Ullmann, Gaines Post, Quentin Skinner). I will draw on a wide range of writings to choose an appropriate terminology for categorising type 7 ranked rulers and individuals who undertook organised rulership in European territories. And I will explain what in my mind must be the prerequisite criteria for claiming a ‘state’ exists.
With these initial conceptual exercises complete it will be possible to approach the history of European ‘ranking societies’ chronologically from late Rome (400s) through to early modern England (1600s). I will suggest further glosses on conceptualisations of medieval governed territorial units as needs arise. I will propose that although the concept of state existed, actual governance was undertaken on the basis of ranking.
There was tremendous variety and intricacy in European ranking arrangements for governance. Two patterns of empire may be discerned and compared — organised Roman empire and the experiments of the German Reich with system governance. There were in addition quite consistent patterns throughout, in particular the fragmentation of polities which Chris Wickham and others conceive as ‘cellular’ — after Robert Fossier’s identification of a post-Carolingian “regrouping (encellulement)”.
My aim is to demonstrate that ranking interests and practices continuously and fairly deliberately pushed aside ‘state’ ideals. It is for this reason that I have experimentally categorised type 7 medieval society as ‘rank over state’ with a causative differentiation of rank and status. I will test the juxtaposition of concrete rank against abstract status.
Medieval European society is then hypothesised as a probable interplay of the ideals of macro-governance (common good) and the imperatives of micro-governance (local interests). The forms in which this played out in combined evolutions of administration with law and representation created the conditions for eventual transitions to the type 8 society ‘state systems’. It goes without saying that the new package of interpretative schemas I have so far developed — the formulas of border-bond-bind, the variability-selection evolutions, the organisation-system selections, the legitimation signal codings, and the utilitarian π calculations — will continue to apply throughout.
Peasant Wedding, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Date: 1568)
Illustration with a wedding included
Some of the issues to be dealt with later in more detail are introduced usefully in a passage from Jack H. Hexter’s The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (1973):
During the medieval centuries status and its derivatives in the vulgar tongues tended to cling fairly close to a matrix that emphasised the notion of being established, fixed, permanent. Most generally it bore the implication of a fixed or definite condition, a meaning that survives in our phrase “man’s estate”, and, in view of the contemporary mores somewhat anomalously, in the phrase “the state of matrimony”.
When put to social use in the Middle Ages status ordinarily signified social condition, place in the social order, rank. A man was of haut, moyen, or bas état, of high, middle, or low rank, depending on his wealth and prestige and the social acceptability of his way of living.
In a society in which a passion for legal prescription and definition paralleled, if it did not seriously temper, a native proclivity toward violence and in which custom quickly became transformed into law, the social condition or status or estate of individuals and especially of groups could more or less accurately be described by the cluster of legal duties to which they were subject and of legal privileges which they enjoyed.
This led status toward the first of its medieval political meanings. The duties and privileges of princes were sufficiently different from those of other men to require separate legal definition. So the law came to speak of the estate, l’état, lo stato of the prince—king, duke, or other. Now the legal duties and privileges of the various conditions or orders or estates of men were theoretically at least concomitants of their social function; they provided the defined sphere of obligations and rights allotted to the various orders of men so that they might perform the tasks, necessary to the welfare of the social whole, to which God had called them. Like all callings, the calling of the princes came from God, but it was by virtue of the very function of the prince a call to authority, to rule. So the legal definition of the prince’s status took the form of a bundle of rights and duties with respect to ruling, what the English were fond of calling the royal prerogative. This bundle defined what the prince did as a ruler; put into practice it described—in a sense, was—the government of his principality. So the status, lo stato, the estate of the prince came close to identification with the political governing of his principality.
Status, however, acquired a second political meaning during the Middle Ages. Just as the prince had an estate, or status, the principality itself was always in a certain condition or status, a signification of the word still preserved in America in the regular presidential report to Congress on “the state of the union”. As early as 1258 a ruler speaks of taking the lead in rectifying the status regni nostri per concilium fidelium [the state of our kingdom by the council..].
About a century thereafter the use of the term in connection with a body politic had come at times to refer to its fundamental condition, its constant ordering, its constitution, and Giovanni Villani speaks of one, who aimed to tradire il popolo e sovertire lo stato della città [betray the people and subvert the state of the city].
So by the fifteenth century status and its vulgar derivatives had acquired two strictly political senses, one of which focused on the ruler and the acts of ruling, the other on the order, political structure, way of life of the ruled.
Problems of ‘status’ are solved by ‘rank’
Most modern sociological conceptions of social rank (i.e. what until now was called “status”) are principally inspired by Max Weber’s short passages on Stand or Stände in the two-volume collection Economy and Society. In the original translations (mainly by American sociologist Talcott Parsons) Stände was translated as “status”. However, the recent translation of the first four methodological chapters of Weber’s Economy and Society (by British sociologist Keith Tribe) seems to me to make a persuasive historical and linguistic case for using the term “social rank” instead of “status”.
Stand, Stände: In early modern Germany, the Stände, local groups based on family and social rank, controlled the right to taxation, so that a monarch seeking to raise money had first to reach agreement with the different Stände. The term persists in modern German: the Beamtenstand, for example, being public officials and civil servants as a social group. Early modern England had no such equivalent—the right to taxation ran through parliament, which, although assuming different forms through the centuries, combined territorial and social representation in the Commons and Lords, respectively, constituent ‘houses’ of a Parliament since the early fifteenth century. Hence, the idea that power lay in the hands of specific, nonterritorial social groups was inconceivable, or more exactly, was consigned to the past once Henry Tudor brought the rivalry of the Houses of York and Lancaster to an end in 1485. Our problem, then, is that the social distinction implied by Stand has no conceptual corollary in modern English …
The initial Weberian discussion of motivational interests in my first book Capitalism, Institutions, and Economic Development created two new categories of ‘interest’ — ‘status interest’ and ‘procedural interest’ — in addition to the usual ones of ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ interests. I was relying on the Parsons translation of Stand as “status”. Now I have come to rely on the new translation. Thanks to Tribe, Weber’s concepts have been clarified and made even more persuasive to English-speaking audiences.
I expect to ‘reissue’ my discussion of motivational interests here on Social Science Files, substituting ‘rank’ for ‘status’. The reason is that in my current study of type 7 medieval society I want to preserve the important notion that social rank existed as a distinct motivating interest alongside material, ideal, and procedural interests.
Below is a slightly shortened version of Weber’s definition of ‘rank’. My emphases will be on ‘monopolisations’ of rights, privileges, functions. Hierocratic (church) functions lay, as earlier, in legitimations of rulership and purveyances of identity. But churches became more interesting in the medieval period because overwhelmingly they had the administrative, legal and literacy expertise that ruling political organisations needed.
Weber’s definition of ‘social rank’
A “social rank” can be defined as many persons who within an organisation attract
a) special estimation due to their social rank, and possibly also
b) are able to lay claim to particular monopolies by virtue of their social rank.
Social ranks can arise
a) primarily through the particular way members of the rank lead their lives, especially including their occupation (social ranks based on life conduct, or occupational ranks),
b) secondarily, through hereditary charisma, successfully laying claim to prestige by virtue of being descended from persons of a certain social rank (social rank by descent),
c) through the social rank’s appropriation of political or hierocratic ruling powers as monopolies (political or hierocratic social ranks).
Development of social rank by birth is usually a form of the (hereditary) appropriation of privileges to an organisation or a qualified individual. Each permanent appropriation of Chancen [calculable probabilities], especially those related to rule, tends to contribute to the formation of social ranks. Each instance of the formation of social rank tends to lead to the monopolistic appropriation of ruling powers and Chancen [calculable probabilities] for gain.
… social ranks develop and exist chiefly by monopolising the provisioning of organisations—whether this is liturgical, feudal, or patrimonial. A society is a “society of ranks” when the social structure is organised by rank …
… Every society based on social rank is ordered conventionally, through the regulation of life conduct; this therefore creates irrational conditions for consumption. This obstructs the free formation of markets, through monopolistic appropriation, and by obstructing the free disposition of individuals’ capacities to engage in gainful activity on their own account.
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My ideas and interpretations in this post are original under copyright and must be attributed to ©2023 Michael G. Heller
This post is a ‘peer reviewed’ publication
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