Abstract

Weber made a fundamental contribution to Sinology despite ignorance of the language, reliance on limited sources, many factual mistakes, and the fundamental methodological error of using data separated by two or three millenia as evidence of a social structure falsely assumed to be unchanging. Weber saw the stability of Chinese society as resulting from a balance between the Emperor-with his instrument the bureaucracy-and local lineages and guilds. His ideal type of patrimonial bureaucracy leads to some distortion of the evidence, and his picture of the lineage is overdrawn; nevertheless he asks all the right questions and his concepts lead to a more profound knowledge of Chinese social history