Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond (review)

This recent volume is disappointing because it fails to confront the serious flaws inherent in the concept of neopatrimonialism. While no concept is perfect, the emergent critical literature on neopatrimonialism highlights that its problems go well beyond definitional ambiguity and contradictory explanations. Neopatrimonialism is bedeviled by a confusion that has contributed to its being used to conflate individual predatory behavior with forms of political authority based on the purported logic of the neopatrimonial state. Moreover, the concept lacks any clear theoretical foundation because many scholars assume that Weber’s ideal types of patrimonial and legal-rational authority structures are theories. Ideal types, however, are not theories; they are just abstractions.

Even though critiques of neopatrimonialism are mentioned in the introduction and other critical articles are cited in the bibliography, the collection unfolds without any systematic engagement of such criticism. In a very short concluding chapter, Daniel Bach, in fact, recognizes unintentionally the fundamental problem when he states that “the concept of neopatrimonial rule has stimulated research on a widening range of issues and areas pertaining to African politics since the 1980s. The concept has contributed to promote intermediary grids of interpretation that invite caution, without calling for the straightforward rejection of grand theories and exclusive agency-focused perspectives” (221). Apparently, what Bach means is that neopatrimonialism has emerged as an effective meso-level concept. But the critics of the concept doubt this is so. In fact, how the concept is employed ranges from large though unfounded theoretical postulations—that the logic of the neopatrimonial state accounts for sub-Saharan Africa’s economic underdevelopment, its weak revenue-raising capabilities, and inherent inflationary propensities—to mundane anecdotal illustrations of the arbitrariness of personalized power. Thus the ecumenical reading of neopatrimonialism that Bach proposes belies such excessive conceptual claims and theoretical vacuity.

Taken together, none of the chapters constitutes a serious effort to rethink the concept of neopatrimonialism, although part 1, “Concepts and Their Relevance,” begins with Hinnerk Bruhns’s excellent analysis of how Max Weber developed the concept in Economy and Society. In chapter 2, Bach explores how the concept has been used to explain political and social phenomena in Africa and elsewhere. Part 2, “New Orientations and Debates,” focuses on specific examples: Big Man rule, warlordism, and patron–clientelism. Part 3 turns to case studies outside Africa, in the Philippines, Brazil, Uzbekistan, and Berlusconi’s Italy. Ironically, Bruhns’s opening discussion of Weber’s notion of ideal types points to why subsequent chapters miss the mark. As Bruhns states, the “forms of personal rule . . . did not correspond to any of the three Weberian ideal types of legitimacy (legal-rational, traditional or charismatic)” (10). More tellingly, he asserts that “the reference to Weber seems for the most part to serve only as a legitimating function, or even purely decorative one” (11). This insightful point notwithstanding, the volume unfolds with precisely such decorative references to Weber as if affixing “neo” to his ideal-type patrimonialism somehow gives it the necessary conceptual apparati and theoretical clarity.

Subsequent chapters, therefore, do little but rearrange the decorative patina and illustrate the concept’s analytical inadequacy. Chapters 3 and 4, for example, focus on agency. Here the impression is that neopatrimonialism is primarily a concept that helps explain political entrepreneurship and power. In chapter 3, Compagnon states that “Weber was the first author to focus on the specificities of politics, a domain in which actors ‘strive for power either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as power for power’s sake . . . ” (47). Leaving Machiavelli aside, Compagnon’s main point is that Weber’s theory of domination provides a microfoundation for understanding what many view as the personalization of authority and power in sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, while the authors choose not to reflect on the conceptual problems of neopatrimonialism, Compagnon inadvertently highlights those very problems. In his essay, as...