Abstract
Max Weber’s “The City” has been the first and foremost masterpiece of sociology of the city in Western culture, yet it is neither a text of urban sociology nor a text of urban history. It is rather a text on power, as part of the chapter on “Types of power” in Economy and Society, the unfinished Weberian summa opus. It is a chaper devoted to “not legitimate power”. The city is the prototype of a power created through usurpation of Empire’s power by groups of free men, the future bourgeois class, in Middle Ages’s Europe. Types of ancient cities, from elitist democracy to the plebeian city, are sketched. Their importance and significance are, since then, universal and still alive. Not in the East, however, from China to india, where the concept of “citizenship” never took place and State’s domination is still the negative feature of Eastern societies. The future of cities in Western nations is therefore linked to the long-lasting struggle of competitive world conceptions and views.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The following citation of Weber’s text gives us back the richness of his contrasting models, whose actuality is very important: the Hanse has been recently rediscovered as a model of contemporary networked cities, and the commenda has been applied to explain how the start-up enterprises of Silicon Valley act today to collect risk capital.
“The large consumers can be rentiers spending their business incomes (today mainly interest on bonds,
dividends or shares) in the city. Whereupon purchasing power rests on capitalistically conditioned monetary rentier sources as in the city of Arnheim. Or purchasing power can depend upon state pensions or other state rents as appears in a "pensionopolis" like Weibaden. In all similar cases, one may describe the urban form as a consumer city, for the presence in residence of large consumers of special economic character is of decisive economic importance for the local tradesmen and merchants.
A contrasting form is presented by the producer city. The increase in population and purchasing power in the city may be due, as for example in Essen or Bochum, to the location there of factories, manufactures, or home-work industries supplying outside territories thus representing the modern type. Or, again, the crafts and trades of the locality may ship their goods away as in cities of Asiatic, Ancient, and Medieval types. In either case the consumers for the local market are made up of large consumers if they are residents and for entrepreneurs, workers and craftsmen who form the great mass, and merchants and benefactors of land-rent supported indirectly by the workers and craftsmen. The trade city and merchant city are confronted by the consumer city in which the purchasing power of its larger consumers rests on the retail for profit of foreign products on the local market (for example, the woolen drapers in the Middle Ages), the foreign sale for profit of local products or goods obtained by native producers (for example, the herring of the Hansa), or the purchase of foreign products and their sale with or without storage at the place to the outside (intermediate commercial cities). Very frequently a combination or all these economic activities occurred: the commenda and societas maris implied that a tractator (traveling merchant) journeyed to Levantine markets with products purchased with capital entrusted to him by resident capitalists.”.
References
Brenner N (ed) (2014) Implosions/explosions: towards a study of planetary urbanization. Jovis, Berlin
Elden S (2013) The birth of territory. University of Chicago press, Chicago
Kantorowicz EH (1957) The king’s two bodies. a study in mediaeval political theology. Princeton University
Le Galès P (2002) European cities: social conflicts and governance. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Paci E (1950) La Città. Introduzione di Enzo Paci, Max Weber, Bompiani, Milano
Perulli P (2017) The Urban Contract. Community, governance and capitalism. Routledge, London and New York
Pizzorno A (1993) La politica assoluta e altri saggi. Feltrinelli, Milano
Sassen S (1991) The global city: New York. Tokyo, Princeton University Press, Princeton, London
Sassen S (2007) Territory, authority and rights: from medieval to global assemblage. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Schmitt C (1922) Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. MIT Press, Boston
Taylor PJ (2013) Extraordinary cities: millennia of moral syndromes, world-systems and city/state relations. Edward Elgar, UK
Tilly C (1990) Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990–1990. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Perulli, P. (2022). Max Weber, Die Stadt (1922), English Edition, Max Weber, The City, Edited and Translated by Don Martindale and Gertrude Neuwirth, the Free Press, 1958. In: Perrone, C. (eds) Critical Planning and Design. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93107-0_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93107-0_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-93106-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-93107-0
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)