Review of David Schloen’s The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (2001)

The weirdly conservative world of J. David Schloen
In Roland Boer's Blog

As part of my sacred economy project, I have finally finished working through J. David Schloen’s The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (2001). It is eminently useful, obsessive, rambling, conservative, and ultimately flawed. The basic thesis is that Max Weber’s patrimonialism (patronage) is a valid category for understanding the politics and economies of pretty much every society in the ancient Near East, at least until the ‘Axial Age’ in the first millennium when ‘rationalisation’ began. He also deploys Paul Ricoeur for his theoretical armoury in order to provide what he feels is a ‘dialectic’ between fact and symbol (it is really more of a wooden correlation)...

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