Max Weber's socio-historical studies on city contain, as well known, a typology of local civil community, based on methodic comparison between various cities in the world history, especially between the occidental and the oriental; the classical ancient and the medieval; the north-european and the south-european in the Middle Ages; etc. Weber attaches more importance to the local civil community as a political association ("Gemeinde") than the mere urbanized place. He builds some pairs of city-types, based on the aforesaid methodic comparison, and, putting in the centre of his schematic consideration the occidental, the medieval, the north-european, and the English city-types, composes a system of introversive-successively and multistratifiedly combined city-types. The composition which thus forcuses upon the medieval English type originates from his basic intention to make clear why only the occidental society could create a peculiar sort of the universal and exhaustive rationalization of all the cultural spheres in the world. Criteria which Weber sets up in framing these city-types are extremely complicated, but their principal parts are : the decay or relaxation of the primitive ethnic factor in the city community ("Vergesellschaftung"), the emancipation of economy in the city community from the religious-magic domination ("Entzauberung"), and the differentiation of economy in the city community from the power-politics. In measuring with these criteria, the non-occidental city stayed, generally, of so low standard that they did not constitute civil community, while the occidental one was more or less of higher : the medieval was higher than the classical ancient, and similarly in the Middle Ages the north-european than the south-european. And finally the English one was the highest, because it was, in spite of having extremely limited political autonomy, of highly economic-oriented character, concentrating their demands to the Parliament and controlling the King's state affairs in the nationwide scale. But even the English type had still limitation in its substantial character of status body ("Standesverband"),though it became already minimum as compared with all of other types. The English bourgeois revolution in the seventeenth century broke through this limitation, but also sublimated the local civil community as a cultural idea of local self-government (one of the constitutional principles of the civil society).
