In a patrimonial monarchy, the ruler's power is fundamentally based on the ownership of a majority of the country's territory as private property.
This ownership allows the ruler to generate income from the land, which can be used to support the royal court, maintain an army, and exert immense political influence and authority.
Julia Adams, states: "In Weber's Economy and Society, patrimonialism mainly refers to forms of government that are based on rulers' family-households.
She states that Weber has used patrimonialism to describe, among other systems, "estatist[clarification needed] and absolutist politics of early modern Europe".
"[5] J. I. Bakker, a sociologist at the University of Guelph, states:[6] The key focus in the model [patrimonialism] is the extent to which legitimate authority is based primarily on personal power exercised by the ruler, either directly or indirectly.
In his The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama states on the matter: Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism.
These forms of social cooperation are the default ways human beings interact in the absence of incentives to adhere to other, more impersonal institutions.
[7]Richard Pipes cited the Egyptian Ptolemies and the Attalids of Pergamon as early patrimonial monarchies, both successor states to Alexander the Great's empire.