Abstract: Ideal-types are preliminary sketch maps, simplifications to help scholars get to grips with historical phenomena too multifarious to be represented, or even understood, through point-by-point description. Some of the main long-term features of the medieval Church can be captured in a preliminary way by the following ideal-types. (1) It employed formal legal rules ingeniously designed to make good the deficiencies of its bureaucratic underpinning (so formal legal rationality and bureaucracy are not welded together as in the original Weberian version of the ideal-type). (2) Hierarchical differentiation was a value, as in Hinduism as conceived by Louis Dumont (not merely as in modern management where hierarchy is primarily instrumental). (3) Purity rules: Hierarchy was intricately linked with condensed symbolism — an ideal-type borrowed from the anthropologist Mary Douglas.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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