With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish a fragment of "The Political and Administrative Concept of the City" from the book "City" by Max Weber. "The City" is the fourth book of the "small series" by Strelka Press. The first three are The Vanishing City by Frank Lloyd Wright, Urbanism as a Way of Life by Louis Wirth, and Why a Man Should Be Well Dressed by Adolph Loos.
Political and administrative concept of the city
From the fact that in our study of this issue we had to talk about the "economic policy of the city", about the "urban district", "city authorities", it is already clear that the concept of "city" can and should be introduced not only in a number of those considered before still economic categories, but also in a number of political categories. The prince can also carry out the economic policy of the city, to whose sphere of political domination the city with its inhabitants belongs as an object. Then the economic policy of the city, if it takes place at all, is carried out only for the city and its inhabitants, but not by the city itself. This is not always the case. But even in such a situation, the city remains to one degree or another an autonomous union, a “community” with special political and administrative institutions. In any case, we can state that it is necessary to strictly distinguish the economic concept of a city analyzed above from its political-administrative concept. Only in the latter sense does the city own a special territory. In the political and administrative sense, a city can also be considered a settlement that, by its economic nature, could not claim such a name.
In the Middle Ages, there were "cities" in the legal sense, nine-tenths or more of whose inhabitants - at least significantly more than among the inhabitants of very many settlements that were considered "villages" in the legal sense - provided themselves exclusively with the products of their agricultural production. The transition from such an "agricultural city" to a consumer city, a producer city or a trading city was, of course, fluid (fl üssig).
However, each settlement, which is administratively different from the village and considered as a "city", is usually characterized by a special way of regulating land tenure relations, unlike land relations in the village. In cities, in the economic sense of the word, this is due to the specific basis of the profitability of owning urban land: this is the ownership of a house, to which the rest of the land is only attached. In administrative terms, the special character of urban land tenure is primarily associated with other principles of taxation and, at the same time, in most cases, with a decisive feature for the political and administrative concept of a city that goes beyond the purely economic analysis: with the fact that in the past, in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, in Europe and beyond, the city was a kind of fortress and the seat of the garrison. Nowadays, this sign of the city has completely disappeared. However, in the past it did not exist everywhere. So, he was usually absent from Japan. Therefore, following Rathgen, one can doubt whether there existed at all "cities" in the administrative sense [Karl Rathgen, "The Economy and the State Budget of Japan" (1891)]. In China, on the other hand, every city was surrounded by huge rings of walls. However, there, apparently, and very many economically purely rural settlements, which in the administrative sense were not cities, that is (as will be shown below) did not serve as the seat of government institutions, have long been surrounded by walls.
In some areas of the Mediterranean, for example in Sicily, the person living outside the city walls, and therefore the villager, the farmer, was almost unknown - a consequence of centuries of insecurity. In ancient Greece, by contrast, the city of Sparta prided itself on the absence of walls; however, another feature of the city - the location of the garrison - was characteristic of Sparta in a specific sense: precisely because it was a permanent open military camp of the Spartans, it neglected the walls. There are still disputes about how long there were no walls in Athens, but in them, as in all Hellenic cities, except Sparta, there was a fortress on a rock - the Acropolis; Ecbatana and Persepolis were also royal fortresses, which were adjacent to the settlements. In any case, as a rule, the oriental and antique Mediterranean, as well as the medieval city meant a fortress or walls.
