Rules of Neighborhood via Divisions of Labor, Scarcity, Need
Max Weber, genius of joined-up concept construction
Weber wrote:
Social Aspects of the Division of Labor: The Appropriation of the Material Means of Production:
When land is appropriated by individual economic units, it is usually for the period of actual cultivation until the harvest or, so far as, by virtue of clearing or irrigation, land is itself an artifact, for the period of continuous cultivation. It is only when scarcity of land has become noticeable that it is common for rights of cultivation, pasturage and use of timber to be reserved to the members of a settlement group, and for the extent of their use to be limited. When that happens, appropriation may be carried out by an organization. This may be of differing sizes, according to the mode of use to which the land is put — for gardens, meadows, arable land, pastures, or woodland. These have been appropriated by progressively larger groups, from the individual household to the whole tribe. Typical cases are the appropriation of arable land, meadows, and pastures by a kinship group or a neighborhood group, usually a village. Woodland has usually been appropriated by broader territorial groups, differing greatly in character and extent. The individual household has typically appropriated garden land and the area around the house and has had shares in the arable fields and meadows. The system of shares may find expression (i) in the de facto egalitarianism of the assignment of newly tilled fields where cultivation is "ambulatory" (as in the so-called field-grass husbandry), or (ii) in rationally systematic redistribution under sedentary cultivation. The latter is usually the consequence of either fiscal claims for which the village members are collectively held responsible, or of political claims of the members for equality. The unit of the production organization has usually been the household …
The Principal Forms of Appropriation and of Market Relationship
According to the theoretical schemes which have been developed [earlier in the book], the classification of the modes of appropriation in their technical, organizational aspects, and of the market relationships is exceedingly complex. But actually, only a few of the many theoretical possibilities play a really dominant role.
With respect to agricultural land:
(a) There is the “ambulatory” cultivation by household units, which changes its location whenever the land has been exhausted. The land is usually appropriated by the tribe while its use is temporarily or permanently appropriated by neighborhood groups, with only temporary appropriation of the use of land to individual households. The extent of the household group may vary from the individual conjugal family, through various types of extended family groups, to organized kin groups or a widely extended household community. (Agriculture is "ambulatory" as a rule only in relation to arable land, much less commonly and at longer intervals for farmyard sites.)
b) Sedentary agriculture. The use of arable fields, meadows, pastures, woodland, and water is usually regulated by territorial or village associations for the smaller family household. Gardens and the land immediately-surrounding the buildings are normally appropriated by the immediate family; arable fields, usually meadows, and pastures, by the village organization; woodland, by more extensive territorial groups. Redistribution of land is usually possible according to the law, but has generally not been systematically carried through and is hence usually obsolete. Economic activities have generally been regulated by a system of rules applying to the whole village. This is a “primary village economy”. It is only in exceptional cases, such as China, that the extended kinship group has constituted an economic unit. Where this is the case, it has generally taken the form of a rationalized organization, such as a clan association …
[there follow concept-constructions for categories of seigneurial, plantation, estate, peasant farmer, and non-agricultural appropriations and market relationships…]
Law, Convention, and Custom…
… Obviously, the borderline between custom and convention is fluid. The further we go back in history, the more we find that conduct, and particularly social action, is determined in an ever more comprehensive sphere exclusively by orientation to what is customary.
The more this is so, the more disquieting are the effects of any deviation from the customary. In this situation, any such deviation seems to act on the psyche of the average individual like the disturbance of an organic function. This, in turn, seems to reinforce custom.
Present ethnological literature does not allow us to determine very clearly the point of transition from the stage of mere custom to the, at first vaguely and dimly experienced, "consensual" character of social action, or, in other words, to the conception of the binding nature of certain accustomed modes of conduct.
Even less can we trace the changes of the scope of activities with respect to which this transition took place. We shall thus by-pass this problem. It is entirely a question of terminology and convenience at which point of this continuum one shall assume the existence of the subjective conception of a “legal obligation”.
Objectively the chance of the factual occurrence of a violent reaction against certain types of conduct has always been present among human beings as well as among animals. It would be far-fetched, however, to assume in every such case the existence of a consensually valid norm, or that the action in question would be directed by a clearly conceived conscious purpose. Perhaps, a rudimentary conception of "duty" may be determinative in the behavior of some domestic animals to a greater extent than may be found in aboriginal man, if we may use this highly ambiguous concept in what is in this context a clearly intelligible sense.
We have no access, however, to the "subjective" experiences of the first homo sapiens and such concepts as the allegedly primordial, or even a priori, character of law or convention are of no use whatsoever to empirical sociology. It is not due to the assumed binding force of some rule or norm that the conduct of primitive man manifests certain external factual regularities, especially in his relation to his fellows. On the contrary, those organically conditioned regularities which we have to accept as psychophysical reality, are primary. It is from them that the concept of "natural norms" arises. The inner orientation towards such regularities contains in itself very tangible inhibitions against “innovations", a fact which can be observed even today by everyone in his daily experiences, and it constitutes a strong support for the belief in such binding norms …
BORDERLINE ZONES BETWEEN CONVENTION, CUSTOM AND LAW.
Finally, any rebellion against convention may lead the environment to make use of its coercively guaranteed rights in a manner detrimental to the rebel; for instance, the host uses his right as master of the house against the guest who has merely infringed upon the conventional rules of social amenity; or a war lord uses his legal power of dismissal against the officer who has infringed upon the code of honor. In such cases the.conventional rule is, in fact, indirectly supported by coercive means. The situation differs from that of "unguaranteed" law insofar as the initiation of the coercive measures is a factual, but not a legal, consequence of the infringement of the convention, although the legal right to exclude anyone from his house belongs to the master as such. But a directly unguaranteed legal proposition draws its validity from the fact that its violation engenders consequences somehow via a guaranteed legal norm. Where, on the other hand, a legal norm refers to “good morals”, i.e., conventions worthy of approval, the fulfillment of the conventional obligations has also become a legal obligation and we have a case of indirectly guaranteed law …
… According to our definition, the fact that some type of conduct is "approved" or "disapproved" by ever so many persons is insufficient to constitute it as a "convention"; it is essential that such attitudes are likely to find expression in a specific environment. This latter term is, of course, not meant in any geographical sense. But there must be some test for defining that group of persons which constitutes the environment of the person in question. It does not matter in this context whether the test is constituted by profession, kinship, neighborhood, status, group, ethnic group, religion, political allegiance, or anything else. Nor does it matter that the membership is changeable or unstable. For the existence of a convention in our sense it is not required that the environment be constituted by an organization (as we understand that term). The very opposite is frequently the case. But the validity of law, presupposing, as we have seen, the existence of an enforcement machinery, is necessarily a corollary of organizational action. (Of course, this does not mean that only organizational action — or even mere social action — is legally regulated by organization.) In this sense the organization may be said to be the "sustainer" of the law …
The Neighborhood: An Unsentimental Economic Brotherhood
The household meets the everyday demands for goods and labor. In a self-sufficient agrarian economy a good deal of the extraordinary demands at special occasions, during natural calamities and social emergencies are met by social action that transcends the individual household: the assistance of the neighborhood. For us, the neighborhood is not only the "natural" one of the rural settlement but every permanent or ephemeral community of interest that derives from physical proximity; of course, if not specified further, we refer most of the time to the neighborhood of households settled close to one another.
The group of neighbors mav take on different forms depending on the type of settlement: scattered farms, a village, a city street or a slum; neighborly social action may have different degrees of intensity and, especially in the modern city, it may be almost non-existent. To be sure, the extent of mutual help and of sacrifices that even today occurs frequently in the apartment houses of the poor may be astonishing to one who discovers it for the first time. However, not only the fleeting "togetherness" in streetcar, railroad or hotel, but also the enduring one in an apartment house is by and large oriented toward maintaining the greatest possible distance in spite (or because) of the physical proximity, and some social action is likely only in cases of common danger. We cannot discuss here why this attitude has become so conspicuous under modern conditions as a result of the specific sense of individual dignity created by them. Suffice it to note that the same ambivalence has always occurred in the stable rural neighborhood: the individual peasant does not like any interference with his .affairs, no matter how well-meant it may be. Neighborly co-operation is an exception, although it recurs regularly. It is always less intensive and more discontinuous than the social action of the household, and the circle of participants is far more unstable. For in general, the neighborhood group is merely based on the simple fact that people happen to reside close to one another. In the self-sufficient rural economy of early history the typical neighborhood is the village, a group of households bordering upon each other.
However, the neighborhood may also be effective beyond the fixed boundaries of other, in particular political, structures. In practice, neighborhood means mutual dependence in case of distress, especially when the transportation technology is undeveloped. The neighbor is the typical helper in need, and hence neighborhood is brotherhood, albeit in an unpathetic, primarily economic sense. If the household is short of means, mutual help maybe requested: the loans of implements and goods free of charge, and "free labor for the asking" in case of urgent need. This mutual help is guided by the primeval popular ethics which is as unsentimental as it is universal: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. (This is also nicely indicated by the Roman term mutuum for an interest-free loan). For everybody may get into a situation in which he needs the help of others. If a compensation is provided, it consists in feasting the helpers, as in the typical case of neighborly help for house construction (still practiced in the German East). If an exchange takes place, the maxim applies: “Brothers do not bargain with one another”. This eliminates the rational market principle of price determination.
Neighborliness is not restricted to social equals. Voluntary labor, which has great practical importance, is not only given to the needy but also to the economic powers-that-be, especially at harvest time, when the big landowner needs it most. In return, the helpers expect that he protect their common interests against other powers, and also that he grant surplus land free of charge or for the usual labor assistance — the precarium was land for the asking. The helpers trust that he will give them food during a famine and show charity in other ways, which he indeed does since he too is time and again dependent on them. In time this purely customary labor may become the basis of manorial services and thus give rise to patrimonial domination if the lord's power and the indispensability of his protection increase, and if he succeeds in turning custom into a right.
Even though the neighborhood is the typical locus of brotherhood, neighbors do not necessarily maintain "brotherly" relations. On the contrary: Wherever popularly prescribed behavior is vitiated by personal enmity and conflicting interests, hostility tends to be extreme and lasting, exactly because the opponents are aware of their breach of common ethics and seek to justify themselves, and also because the personal relations had been particularly close and frequent.
The neighborhood may amount to an amorphous social action, with fluctuating participation, hence be "open" and intermittent. Firm boundaries tend to arise only when a closed association emerges, and this occurs as a rule when the neighborhood becomes an economic group proper or an economically regulatory group. This may happen for economic reasons, in the typical fashion familiar to us; for example, when pastures and forests become scarce, their use may be regulated in a “cooperative" manner, that means, monopolistically. However, the neighborhood is not necessarily an economic, or a regulatory, group, and where it is, it is so in greatly varying degrees. The neighborhood may regulate the behavior of its members either through an association of its own: witness the Flurzwang [the compulsory regulation of tilling and crop rotation under the open-field system]; or a regulation may be imposed by outsiders (individuals or communities), with whom the neighbors are associated economically or politically (for example, the landlords of tenement houses). But all of this is not essential for neighborly social action. Even in the self-sufficient household economy of early times, there is no necessary identity among neighborhood, the forest regulations of political communities, especially the village, the territorial economic association … and the polity; they may be related in very diverse ways. The size of the territorial economic associations may vary according to the objects they comprise.Fields, pastures, forests and hunting grounds are often controlled by different groups, which overlap with one another and with the polity. Wherever peaceful activities are the primary means of making a living, the agent of joint work, the household, is likely to have control, and wherever maintenance depends upon land seized by force, the polity, and more so for extensively used land, such as hunting grounds and forests, than for pastures and fields.
Furthermore, the individual types of possessions tend to becomes scarce at different historical stages and hence subject to regulatory association; forests may still be free objects when pastures and fields are already economic ones and their use has been regulated and appropriated. Hence, diverse territorial associations may appropriate different kinds of land.
The neighborhood is the natural basis of the local community (Gemeinde)—a structure which arises only, as we shall see later ["The City"], by virtue of political action comprising a multitude of neighborhoods. Moreover, the neighborhood may itself become the basis of political action, if it controls a territory such as a village; and in the course of organizational rationalization, it may engage in activities of all kinds (from public schools and religious functions to the systematic settling of necessary crafts), or the polity may impose them as an obligation. But the essence of neighborly social action is merely that sombre economic brotherhood practiced in case of need.
The Source:
Max Weber, Economy and Society, University of California 1978 [pp. 130-132, 144, 320-324, 360-363]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.