This is a phrase that is applied by Weberian scholars (e.g. Eisenstadt) to contemporary non-Western states to signify the “corruption” or “augmentation”, depending whether one wants to emphasize the negative or positive implications, of modern bureaucratic rational-legalism by patrimonialism.
The latter term, as used by Max Weber, refers to the type of rule that is based on patriarchy, that is, the rule of the father in the family. In other words, the patriarchal form of authority is projected beyond the family into the political and symbolic regimes of society at large. It is not the patriarchal family writ large, but the “scaling up” of the patriarchal family. In contrast to the rational-legal authority exercised by modern bureaucracy, patrimonialism is based on traditional authority and does not distinguish between the personal and public patrimony (personal estate) of the ruler and the state. Historical examples of patrimonialism include European principalities and monarchies of the feudal past, and the Chinese and Ottoman Empires.
Neopatrimonialism commonly refers to non-Western states that show “symptoms” of patrimonialism such as hierarchical personalistic relations between rulers and the ruled (oftentimes referred to as patron-client relations), extensive use of state resources to maintain these personalistic relations (patronage), paternal authoritarian leadership often by a strongman symbolically marked as the nation’s father. Historical examples include the Philippines and Indonesia, especially during the Marcos and Suharto regimes.
Singapore, under Lee and Goh, is never, to my knowledge, described as neopatrimonial despite having the same “symptoms”. Why? Because though the patrimonial features of the Singapore state are strong, the bureaucratic rational-legal features are just as strong. But does not neopatrimonialism describe, precisely, a hybrid patrimonial-rational-legal type of rule which Singapore exemplifies? Having grown up here being ding-donged and confined between the strictures of paternalistic structures and relationships and rational-legal institutions and procedures, I find this problematic. “Neopatrimonialism” has wrongly become an ideal type of corruption by native patrimonialisms of modern Western bureaucratic government introduced by the colonials, and is contrasted to “developmental states”, of which Singapore is supposed to exemplify.
So then, comparing the cases of British Malaya and the American Philippines, my paper reworks neopatrimonialism as a process of hybrid state formation that has its origins in the cultural politics of colonial state building. Because of the precariousness of state power in the face of “native” resistance and class conflicts, colonial state building involved the deepening of patron-client relations for political control and stability and of bureaucratic rational-legal institutions for economic development. I counterintuitively propose as a concluding implication that developmental states exemplify the “successful” pole of neopatrimonialism, in that patron-client relations and bureaucratic rational-legal institutions are both well deepened and balanced. The cultural politics determine “success” or “failure”.
Postcomprehensible? Let me know which parts are. I appreciate all comments and criticisms, theoretical or empirical, and, also, recommendations of relevant works — email me. The first draft of the paper was presented at the international conference on “Lineages of Patrimonialism, Then and Now” organized by Julia Adams (who IMHO is the foremost scholar on Weber’s patrimonialism) and Mounira Charrad, at Yale University in May this year. I’m submitting this revised version for their book manuscript, which will be reviewed by an academic press. This means there will be opportunities for further revision, which your comments would help lots.
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September 14, 2008 at 5:39 pm
socect
Hi Daniel…
A minor point and question…
You write: “It is not the patriarchal family writ large, but the “scaling up” of the patriarchal family.”
What is the distinction you are drawing? (just curious, because I use both of these terms sometimes; but haven’t thought about them as significantly different…)
Still reading… so will comment further…
Eric
September 14, 2008 at 6:12 pm
socect
I hope I can find time for the whole paper soon. Thanks for the brief outline here.
One thought… not sure how much this relates until I read your whole paper…
I was just lecturing this past week on kinship; among other things that societies with less-complex socioeconomic relations of production (foraging, horticultural) very stongly organize social relations around kinship. In more complex agricultural (e.g. with complex irrigation systems) and especially industrial and post-industrial societies, kinship is replaced (displaced) by other cultural systems of social organization – states, corporations, organized religion, etc.
FYI, lecture outline can be found here: Lecture on Families and Kinship.
In the course of developing the lecture, with regard to “fictive kinship”, it struck me that there are two distinct ways this is used. In a more accurate sense, it is when people in a society organized in important ways by kinship will “adopt” outsiders into kin-networks specifically so they can then be dealt with in culturally appropriate ways. In a sense, you don’t know how to act toward someone until they are in an appropriate kinship category.
On the other hand, in cases like Indonesia or the Philippines (or elsewhere), cited as “patrimonial” – with Suharto or Marcos as “father of the nation” – this is far more metaphorical; using the language of kinship to impute authority (for instance).
The issue you are identifying is a question of to competing cultural rules for identifying inheritance of power. Under patrimonialism, power (culturally legitimized authority) is appropriately passes through bloodlines (specifically, from fathers to sons). But also, culturally, the “patron-client” relationship is supposed to replicate the “father-son” relationship (scaled up and/or ‘writ-large’… that’s what I get from Julia Adams). Under bureaucratic-rationalism, presumably meritocracy should dictate the selection of individuals to fill particular roles (the Confucian exam system, for example).
I think the point of calling Indonesia or the Philippines (fairly or not) neopatrimonial as opposed to Singapore (again, fairly or not) is the extent to which one or the other of these principles prevail and how widespread they are.
An interesting point is that attention to “corruption” can often be read as a discursive attempt to delegitimize patrimonialism in favor of bureaucratic-rationalism. (I’m not saying that stamping out ‘corruption’ is a bad thing; but it is a discursive contest between competing cultural systems.) Singapore does institute anti-patrimonial discourse – in the strict sense of nepotism – to an extent perhaps not found in the other examples you cite (e.g. the forms we have to fill out every year at NUS stating that we have not hired or done business with anyone we are related to).
Ok… maybe those are rather random thoughts. Will leave it at that for now…
Eric
September 15, 2008 at 11:03 am
Daniel Goh
Thanks Eric, do keep them coming, they are very useful as a lightning rod for me to congeal my thoughts and clear my blind spots, as this is very much a new exploration to me.
I don’t see the simple extension of patriarchal relations into the rest of society, into extra-familial institutions as patrimonial — this seems more like the fictive kinship that you are describing. Family-run business firms may be patriarchal with the extension of family-son relations running through non-kin relations, perhaps with some employees treated as ‘god-sons’ etc.
But if the entire corporate sector is organized according to a series of cascading and overlapping patriarchal-like patron-client relations that are integrated with bureaucratic and even meritocratic systems, then it becomes patrimonial. This is what I mean by scaling up: there is a qualitative shift, to the extent, I would argue, that the patriarchal family may cease to exist without affecting patrimonial system. Another way to look at this, thanks to your fictive kinship example, is not the incorporation of extra-familial relationships into patriarchal institutions but the permeation and articulation (in the engineering sense) of the patriarchal principle throughout extra-familial institutions without the need of the patriarchal institutions as the basis for these extra-familial institutions.
In this respect, concerning socioeconomic organization, I do like Gary Hamilton’s distinction between the patriarchal and patrimonial bases of Taiwan and South Korea’s contemporary economic organization (among the conference papers), with the former dominated by small-medium family-run enterprises and the latter by the Chaebols.
My interest is in the “modern” and “postcolonial” state. Patrimonialism would be the scaling up of some native patriarchal familialism (which could differ from the Western European father-son, primogeniture model) to the political system. Julia’s work on early-modern Holland state formation is interesting, as it shows this kind of scaling up that was historically experienced in the establishment of the modern state.
I argue in the paper that neopatrimonialism is different because it was based on fictive patrimonialisms imagined and oftentimes idealized by the colonials to establish the colonial state. There are no real patriarchies, so to speak, that was scaled up. Instead, what happened was the implementation of a hybrid patrimonial and rational-legal system, sui generis , that then plugged its roots into real patriarchies in the periphery, transforming them at the same time.
I also argue that neopatrimonialism has come to take on, wrongly, the meaning of the prevalence of the patrimonial principle of organization in a certain state such as Indonesia and Philippines. One of the original conceptions of the term (Eisenstadt, Roth, Roniger who wrote in the late 1960s and 1970s) was that it referred to hybrid formations and processes, not patrimonialism with a facade of modern rational-legalism and a mere ideal type of recalcitrant corruption.
This is getting somewhat long, so I’ll get back to you on the metaphoric construction versus symbolic constitution of neopatrimonialism, and also the wider comparisons between Southeast Asian examples. For Singapore, without going into the economy which presents a more complex picture, the political organization of state-society relationship is neopatrimonial because patron-client relations extend from the center to the periphery, from the nerve center of the cabinet to the core institutions of government and down to the “grassroots” organizations.
And this is not “corruption”, and I would posit that patronage and meritocracy predominate as the dominant principles, the exact balance of which depending on the location in the chain of relations (my guess and hypothesis is that it gets more patronage-like towards the periphery). Singapore, in this sense, is a successful example of neopatrimonialism as hybrid state formation.
September 20, 2008 at 11:46 am
socect
Thanks Daniel.
That IS a useful distinction between a sociocultural form “scaled up” as opposed to “writ-large”.
On hybrid “bureaucratic-rational” and “patrimonial” forms, we should talk. I think you are onto something important here.
(Which I’ve been thinking about recently as well)….
Best, Eric
October 13, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Julian Go
Daniel: Came across your neopatrimonialism paper. Some of your approach to the Philippines reminded me a lot of a whole series of works dealing with the relationship between state-formation on the one hand and on the other patron-clientlism and extended kinship networks in the Philippines: e.g. Ben Anderson’s “Cacique Democracy,” Paul Hutchcroft’s article on state formation since the US period, John Sidel’s work, and especially the edited collection by McCoy, “Anarchy of Families” which is all about state-formation and processes akin to what you are calling ‘neopatrimonialism.’ In short, there’s an entire massive literature already out there. I’m curious as to why you don’t cite this work? Is it not worthwhile in your view? I know Ileto has a serious critique of a lot of it, but in terms of substance it seems like it might be worthwhile to at least address, if only to clarify where you stand in relation to it.
Hope all is well in Singapore.
October 14, 2008 at 8:37 am
Daniel Goh
Hey Julian, good to hear from you!
Thanks for the critical comments, do keep them coming. I’m rather strongly influenced by Sidel’s work (and to some extent Abinales in your edited volume), especially his critique of the state-society approach to the Philippines; and I must have assimilated this into my own theoretical unconscious, as I did not cite him here, surprisingly. You’re absolutely right that it is important to address this literature, just that it had gotten quite out of hand when I did (see below on what I did) and it was taking me away from my main argument and my main target literature, state-centered comparative-historical sociology — but you have convinced me to add a footnote on this in the next revision.
I had a longish section on the relationship between ‘neo-Weberian’ scholarship and what I termed as ‘mainstream historiography’ that I removed to trim the paper for submission. I focused on Malaya in the deleted section, My main point was that mainstream historiography largely replicates imperial discourse in attributing the patrimonial features of colonial state formation to corruption by native patrimonialisms. In this sense, I’m agreeing with Ileto’s critique. But I’m also extending the critique in two ways for the purposes of my argument.
One, the implications of misreading neopatrimonialism as native corruption when state-centered sociologists based their comparative analysis on mainstream histories rather than primary archival work (e.g. Kohli). Two, anthropological research done in the decolonizing or postcolonial period, particularly those concerning studies of patron-client relationships on the ground, offer us better sources if we need secondary sources (e.g. James C. Scott in Malaysia). On the last point, I think the mainstream histories (for example, I do use McCoy’s pieces in the paper) are also worthwhile insofar as they can be mined for historical ethnographic information, critically, without replicating the ‘native corruption’ view.
p.s. Thanks again for your hospitality in Boston.
October 15, 2008 at 2:52 am
Julian Go
Daniel: Right on! Yes, I like the way you use the neopatrimonialism concept as different from the work of those whom Ileto criticizes, which is why I think it’d be good for you to clarify the distinction up front! To be able to talk about “corruption” in a way that doesn’t reproduce the Orientalism that Rey pinpoints is an important and necessary task, so I appreciate your effort here. Cheers, Julian
March 31, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Andrew
Dear Daniel,
Do take a look at the private papers of some of the Asian Legco members–how they viewed the governors’ rule.
Tan Cheng Lock
Tay Lian Teck
Tan Chin Tuan
SQ Wong
Lim Boon Keng
Try Sultan Ibrahim’s. One of the Alsagoffs was rather political, also, ask the Elias clan.