The resultant situation presented an antinomy: its economic conditions and external situation required Russia to organize militarily and therefore politically in a highly efficient manner, and yet its economy inhibited such organization. There was a basic incompatibility between the country's possibilities and its needs.
The manner in which this predicament was resolved provides the key to Russia's constitutional development. The state neither grew out of the society, nor was imposed on it from above. Rather it grew up side by side with society and bit by bit swallowed it. The locus of original political authority was the private domain of the prince or tsar, his oikos or dvor. Within this domain the prince reigned absolute, exercising authority in the double capacity as sovereign and proprietor. Here he was in full command, a counterpart of the Greek despotes, the Roman dominus, and the Russian gosudar', that is lord, master, outright owner of all men and things. Initially, the population of the princely domain consisted mainly of slaves and other persons bonded in one form or another to the proprietor. Outside his domains, where the population was free and exceedingly mobile, the Russian ruler exercised very little authority at first, his power being confined largely to the collection of tribute. This kind of dyarchy established itself in the forest zone during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at the same time when in England, France and Spain the modern western state was beginning to take shape as an entity separate from the ruler. From the solid base of authority furnished by their private domains, the Russian princes - gradually and only after having overcome massive resistance - spread their personal power over the free population living outside these domains. The princely dynasty of Moscow-Vladimir, which emerged as the country's leader, transferred the institutions and practices which it had initially worked out in
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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.