Russia under the Old regime

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the closed world of its oikos to the realm at large, transforming Russia (in theory, at any rate) into a giant royal estate. However, even after it had laid formal claim to all Russia being its private domain or votchina (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries), the Russian government lacked the means to make the claim good. It had no alternative, therefore, but to continue the old dyarchic arrangement, farming out the bulk of the country to the landed gentry, clergy and bureaucracy in return for fixed quotas of taxes and services. But the principle that Russia belonged to its sovereign, that he was its dominus was firmly established; all that was lacking to enforce it were the financial and technical means, and these were bound to become available in due course.

Since Aristotle, political thinkers have distinguished a special variant of'despotic' or 'tyrannical' governments characterized by a proprietary manner of treating the realm, although no one seems to have worked out a theory of such a system. In Book III of his Politics, Aristotle devotes a brief paragraph to what he calls 'paternal government' under which the king rules the state the way a father does his household; but he does not develop the theme. The French theorist, Jean Bodin, in the late sixteenth century spoke of a 'seigneural' monarchy under which the ruler owned his subjects and their properties (see below, p. 65). In Hobbes's Elements of Law, governments are divided into two basic types, the Commonwealth, formed by mutual consent for the purpose of protection from external enemies, and Dominium or 'Patrimonial Monarchy' created as a result of conquest and submission 'to an assailant for fear of death'.1' But Hobbes, too, having stated the issue, let the matter drop. The term 'patrimonial regime' was revived and introduced into current usage by Max Weber. In his threefold division of types of political authority, distinguished mainly by their administrative character, Weber defined the 'patrimonial system' as a variant of personal authority based on tradition (the other variant being 'charismatic'). 'Where authority is primarily oriented to tradition but in its exercise makes the claim of full personal powers, it will be called "patrimonial authority".'1* In its extreme form, 'Sultanism', it entails complete ownership of land and mastery over the population. Under a patrimonial regime, the economic element absorbs, as it were, the political. 'Where the prince organizes his political power - that is, his non-domainial, physical power of compulsion vis-a-vis his subjects outside his patrimonial territories and people, his political subjects - in the same essential manner as he does his authority over his household, there we speak of a patrimonial state structure.' 'In such cases, the political structure becomes essentially identical with that of a gigantic landed estate of the prince.'19

There is considerable advantage in retaining the term 'patrimonial' to define a regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power. 'Despotism', whose root is the Greek despotes, has much the same etymological origins, but over time it has acquired the meaning of a deviation or corruption of genuine kingship, the latter being understood to respect the property rights of subjects. The patrimonial regime, on the other hand, is a regime in its own right, not a corruption of something else. Here conflicts between sovereignty and property do not and cannot arise because, as in the case of a primitive family run by a paterfamilias they are one and the same thing. A despot violates his subjects' property rights; a patrimonial ruler does not even acknowledge their existence. By inference, under a patrimonial system there can be no clear distinction between state and society in so far as such a distinction postulates the right of persons other than the sovereign to exercise control over things and (where there is slavery) over persons. In a patrimonial state there exist no formal limitations on political authority, nor rule of law, nor individual liberties. There can be, however, a highly efficient system of political, economic and military organization derived from the fact that the same man or men - kings or bureaucracies - dispose of the country's entire human and material resources.

Classic examples of patrimonial regimes are to be found among the Hellenistic states which emerged from the dissolution of the empire of Alexander the Great, such as Egypt of the Ptolemies (305-30 BC) and the Attalid state in Pergamum (c. 283-133 BC). In these kingdoms, founded by Macedonian conquerors, the ruler controlled all or nearly all the productive wealth. In particular, he owned the entire cultivated land which he exploited partly directly, through his personal staff using his own labour force, and partly indirectly, by distributing estates on service tenure to his nobility. The Hellenistic king was often also the country's principal industrialist and merchant. The primary purpose of this kind of arrangement was to enrich its sovereign proprietor. Rather than seeking to maximize resources, the emphasis lay on stabilizing income, and to this purpose the government often set fixed quotas of goods which it expected to receive, leaving the remainder to the inhabitants. In extreme cases, such as Hellenistic Pergamum, something close to a planned economy seems to have come into being. Because there was no free market, social classes in the customary sense of the word could not arise; instead there were social estates organized hierarchically to serve the king and tending to ossify into castes. There was no nobility with defined rights and privileges, but only ranks of servitors, whose status depended wholly on royal grace. The bureaucracy was powerful but it was not permitted to become hereditary. Like the nobility, it owed its status and privileges to the king.80