Is the Brazilian state “patrimonial”?
Manuscript submitted to Latin American Perspectives (BZS-15)
First submitted 20 February 2013
Revised and resubmitted 6 August 2013
Revised again and resubmitted 21 February 2014A.W. Pereira
Professor and Director, Brazil Institute
King’s College London
Paper prepared for presentation at “Intimate Ethnographies of the Brazilian State”, a workshop at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA, 27-28 April
Introduction
The concept of patrimonialism is an appealing one to scholars of the Brazilian state. “Patrimonialism” apparently has much to offer: the notion of an incomplete separation of the public and private spheres; a theory about the late and uneven development of a rational-legal public administration; and an explanation of the origins and persistence of personalism, clientelism, patronage, and corruption that are said to distinguish the Brazilian state. If the success of a concept can be gauged by its use, then “patrimonialism” is extremely successful.
However, “patrimonialism” is frequently used in ways that are very different from Weber’s original usage and has a variety of sometimes contradictory meanings in the hands of different authors. How to empirically measure patrimonialism is also contested. The term is often employed as a descriptive (and wholly pejorative) label for near-universal political practices, rather than as an explanatory concept. This conceptual stretching and imprecision limit the usefulness of the term. Patrimonialism is also often used to create a dichotomy (patrimonial or personalistic, clientelistic practices versus rational legal, universalistic procedures) that obscures the complexity of the Brazilian state. Furthermore, the patrimonial concept is sometimes used to justify orthodox liberal prescriptions for the Brazilian state, in which the only viable solution for personalism and clientelism and the creation of universalism is the radical downsizing of the state in favor of the alleged impersonalism of the market.
This articlepaper attempts to gauge the applicability of the patrimonial concept to the Brazilian state. It first examines the evolution and appeal of the concept, from Max Weber through Raymundo Faoro to contemporary authors. It then argues that patrimonialism is increasingly misleading as an explanation of the workings of the “commanding heights” of the Brazilian state, the top level of the Federal public administration. In the conclusion, I suggest that the concept of patrimonialism should not be discarded entirely but instead applied in a more limited way to particular attitudes and practices within the Brazilian state and society. Patrimonialism is thus best seen as one of several different grammars or logics operating within the Brazilian state.
This topic is important because patrimonialism is one of those concepts that have been used as a key to understanding Brazil. Others are Freyre’s casa grande e senzala (big house and slave quarters); Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s homen cordial (cordial man); Caio Prado Jr.’s colonial capitalist development; Oliveira Viana’s organic idealism; Vitor Nunes Leal’s coronelismo; and Roberta da Mata’s personhood. Patrimonialism is ubiquitous in popular discourse, journalism, and scholarly analysis. The patrimonialism of the Brazilian state is taken by many as a given. But because it has become so commonplace, it is especially necessary to critically examine the concept.
I Some uses of Patrimonialism as a Concept and the Brazilian State
Max Weber is generally recognized as the originator of the contemporary concept of patrimonialism. His ideas about the subject can be found in Economy and Society (Weber 1978). For Weber, a patrimonial state is based at least partly on traditional, rather than rational-legal, authority and is characterized by a fusion of personal and public power in the state’s leaders, originally the monarch and his court. For Weber, patrimonial domination “regards all governing powers and the corresponding economic rights as privately appropriated economic advantages…In particular, the appropriation of judicial and military powers tends to be treated as a legal basis for a privileged status position of those appropriating them…” (Weber, 1978: 236). Furthermore, in a patrimonial state “the prince organizes his political power…just like the exercise of his patriarchal power…[and] military and judicial authority are exercised without any restraint by the master as components of his patrimonial power” (Weber, 1978: 1013).[1]
For Weber, patrimonialist domination grows out of patriarchal domination, or the master’s personal subjugation of the dependents in his household. Patriarchal domination is based on traditional claims to legitimacy, the most basic being filial piety, and compliance with norms based on subjects’ strict personal loyalty to the master. Weber contrasts this type of power to bureaucratic domination, in which norms are based on rationality and appeals to abstract legality, and rules are enforced through administrators who posses specialized professional knowledge (Weber, 1978: 1006-7). Weber considers patrimonial domination to be an outgrowth of patriarchal rule; as larger political units evolved out of households, so domination became more complex.
Weber refers to three key elements of patrimonial rule. First, in a patrimonial order, the armed forces are personally loyal to the ruler and are used to quash other potential rulers. Because the armed forces are not loyal to the state as such, but merely a particular ruler, patrimonial rule tends to be unstable. A challenge to, removal of, or death of a ruler often provokes the fragmentation of the military. The second element is that the ruler’s political and economic needs are met through the obligations of collectivities, such as corps, guilds, or communities. Typically, rulers grant monopoly privileges to these collectivities, in which membership is compulsory, in return for the collectivities’ regular fulfillment of certain material obligations. Finally, the administration of a patrimonial state consists primarily of officials who are personally dependent on the ruler. This administration is not bureaucratic, nor is it based on professional specialization; it responds directly to and represents the personal will of the sovereign.[2]
Weber’s account of how administration in patrimonial states works is complex. Weber uses several different adjectives and refers to the “estate type of patrimonialism”, the “patrimonial-military” state, the “patrimonial-bureaucratic state”, “semi-bureaucratic political patrimonialism” and the “stereotyped and arbitrary pattern of [the] patrimonial state”. He also distinguishes between local and central patrimonialism, and uses the term to apply both to states and to countries. These terms arise because Weber recognized that patrimonial rulers, while desirous of utterly dependent soldiers and administrators who were personally loyal to them, often had to sacrifice some degree of control for pragmatic reasons. The social forces that they were most likely to share power with were the landed aristocracy or notables rooted in local areas. For example, landed aristocrats often gained considerable control over armed forces, as can be seen in the case of Prussia in the nineteenth century, while elite groups often gained considerable power within state institutions. This process of “appropriation” of the state administration by elites took several forms, depending on the type of elite involved: “proprietary office holding”, where elites gained hereditary rights to offices in the state administration; “enterprising”, in which commercial elites engaged in tax farming, the sale of offices, and other activities, managing the state administration for their own profit; and “local patrimonialism”, in which local elites, usually landed aristocrats, monopolized state authority in their regions (Ertman, 1997: 8). Despite his recognition of the ubiquity of “appropriation” of offices, however, Weber seems to have regarded patrimonialism in its purest form to be unmediated rule by dependents of the ruler – i.e. the macropolitical equivalent of the patriarch’s rule over his own household.[3]
In Weber’s treatment, the patrimonial state is marked by a struggle between, on one hand, a ruler who desires to rule through dependent subjects who will maximize the execution of his arbitrary will, and local notables, with their own claims to aristocratic privilege and position, who will want to maximize their place within the state. Weber refers to the ebb and flow of this struggle, but nowhere does he suggest that history everywhere resolves itself in one clear direction. Thus the estate type of patrimonial state is a mixture of arbitrary rule through personal dependents of the ruler and hereditary offices controlled by local notables. In the bureaucratic patrimonial state, the ruler has taken away the hereditary offices from the local notables and professionalized the administration. Administrative structures consisting of different combinations of hereditary offices and positions held by the rulers’ dependents – at least in Western Europe – are eventually replaced by bureaucratic, modern states run on the basis of well-known precepts of professional public administration.[4]
Throughout his writings on the subject, Weber consistently sees patrimonial rule as the opposite of rational-legal bureaucracy (and of feudalism). Patrimonial states are marked by state agencies whose jurisdictions are not rationally or consistently divided; in which arbitrary rule-making and the invocation of tradition are the norm; and in which the separation of the public and the private is incomplete or nonexistent – the “public” administration serves to aggrandize the personal interests of the ruler(s), without a commitment to the greater good of some larger entity. Furthermore, patrimonialism, marked by arbitrariness and personal loyalty to rulers, may encourage and coexist easily with “political” or mercantile capitalism; state authorities can cartelize production among an oligarchy of privileged producers. However, patrimonial rule inhibits the development of the industrial capitalism that flourished in Weber’s day. This depends upon rational calculation, a mass market, and predictable rules.
To summarize Weber’s view of patrimonialism, it is first of all a form of traditional rule – distinct from charismatic and rational-legal rule - that grew out of the patriarchal household. Second, it is a historical category that Weber applied largely to premodern states. Third, patrimonialism exists across cultures and is a relatively broad term, not referring to any particular type of political system” (Jary and Jary, 1995: 478-479). Weber considered the people in his own county, Germany, to have a preference for a strong leader who could play the role of “father of the nation”, and saw this as a legacy of patrimonial rule. Weber discusses a huge number of variants – patrimonialism can refer to both rule by dependents of a ruler and rule by elites who have appropriated public offices, or some mixture of the two. Patrimonialism is an ideal-type whose elements could be found throughout history, all over the world. It is part of a spectrum with the modern European Rechsstaat on one end, and Oriental “sultanism” (a strictly patriarchal variant of patrimonialism) on the other (Weber, 1978: 1091). Fourth, patrimonialism is defined in contrast to rational-legal public administration marked by meritocratic recruitment, professional training, performance-based promotion, long-term civil service careers, competitive salaries, and orientation to “objective” state interests rather than personal ones – the ideal-type “Weberian” bureaucracy. Finally, the concept of patrimonialism was part of Weber’s ambitious attempt to develop a theory of the mutually constitutive development of industrial capitalism and rational, bureaucratic public administration in the West.
If Weber’s ideas about patrimonialism are well known, the use of the term to describe the Brazilian state is a less familiar story. Perhaps surprisingly, its use is fairly recent, dating to the late 1950s. Paradoxically, the term appears not to have been used before the end of World War II, when the Brazilian state was more “patrimonial” than it has been since. Karl Loewenstein’s analysis of the Vargas regime (1942) one of the most serious treatments of Brazilian politics by a U.S.-based political scientist of the 1940s, for example, does not mention the word. Similarly, Victor Nunes Leal’s landmark Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto [Coronelism, the Hoe and the Vote] (1949) does not use the term. What was common in this era was to refer to the patriarchalism of Brazilian society – the unbridled power of the master of the big house or casa grande over the household, both slaves and family members. References to this can be found, for example, in Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves (1978: xxxii), first published in 1933, and Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil [Roots of Brazil] (1956: 102-3).[5] Given that Weber saw patriarchalism as the foundation of the patrimonial state, it might have been logical to make this connection, but nobody seems to have done so before 1957.
It was the publication of Raymundo Faoro’s Os Donos do Brasil [The Masters of Brazil] in that year that seems to have prepared the way for the subsequent flood. That flood was not immediate, however; Faoro’s book was admired but not widely imitated. Foreign observers such as Richard Morse (1973) used the term, but neo-Weberian analysis had few adherents in Brazil itself. Scholars such as Caio Prado Junior (2001) held to the traditional Marxist view that state forms were ultimately shaped by the forces of production. As long as Marxism remained powerful in Brazilian intellectual life, the idea that the Brazilian state was “patrimonial” remained a minority view. The publication of Simon Schwartzman’s Bases do Autoritarismo Brasileiro [Bases of Brazilian Authoritarianism] in 1975 (reissued in 1982 and 1988) was another important step in the process. Schwartzman’s book appealed to readers tired of authoritarian rule. Subsequent developments in global and Brazilian politics, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decline of orthodox Marxism, turned the trickle into a flood, and the term increasingly came into vogue. What is striking today is how many social scientists, both within and outside of Brazil, are willing to characterize the Brazilian state as patrimonial.
However, these “patrimonialisms” are not equal. It is important to understand how the Weberian concept, in the hands of Faoro, undergoes a fundamental transformation. For Faoro, patrimonialism is a subtype that is peculiar to Luso-Brazilian state formation. It is medieval in origin but now modern – it does not tend to wither away with the development of capitalism, as it did for Weber, and hinders the development of a pluralistic civil society in Brazil. It is defined in contrast to an ideal-typical modern state characterized by a capitalist rule of law. For Faoro, patrimonialism explains Brazilian economic and political backwardness and is the original sin and ultimate destiny of the Brazilian state. In Faoro’s words, “The power – sovereignty – is appropriated exclusively by the minority, which does not emanate from the nation, but rather formed and shaped the latter. It does not act as a delegate of the people – as the state is understood in democratic doctrine –“ but is instead an ordering power [mandatário] and a maker of deals [gestor de negócios]…” (Faoro, 2001: 263).