Средневековое городское гражданство на Западе в исторической социологии Макса Вебера

Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Социология. 2023. Т. 23. № 4. С. 704–719.

Dmitriev T.

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

Keywords: Запад, Восток, Макс Вебер, историческая социология, West, historical sociology, East, Homo oeconomicus, Max Weber, medieval urban citizenship, oathbound brotherhood, homo politicus, средневековое городское гражданство, братство, скрепленное клятвой