Medieval urban citizenship in the West in Max Weber’s historical sociology

Abstract

Recent decades in social sciences have been marked by the interest in citizenship as the most important phenomenon of the contemporary world due to its current problems associated with globalization, relations between world centers of power along the North-South and West-East lines and growing migration flows between countries and continents, and also due to the urgent, politically relevant, human rights problems. The search for solutions to these problems has led to debates in both academic circles and wider intellectual public about the extent to which the democratic model of citizenship, which historically developed in the West in modernity, can meet the new global challenges of our time. Although such debates focus on the contemporary issues of citizenship, civil rights and civic identity, they also have an important historical-sociological dimension according to Max Weber’s question formulated about a century ago: what was the universal potential of the democratic idea of citizenship that emerged in the West in the modern era, and what were the premises of this model of citizenship at the previous stages of the Western historical development? Thus, Weber considers the institution of citizenship in the broader context of comparative historical sociology which studies the difference in the paths of historical development of the West and the East. One of the closest predecessors to the modern model of citizenship in the West is medieval urban citizenship. To understand the evolution of pre-modern models of citizenship in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Weber’s ideas remain essential in the theoretical and heuristic perspective, forming the historical sociology of ancient and medieval citizenship in his works The City and General Economic History . The article presents an attempt to reconstruct the ideal-typical model of medieval urban citizenship in Weber’s interpretation, supplementing it with some necessary materials from other relevant sources.