The "iron cage" and the "shell as hard as steel": Parsons, Weber, and the stahlhartes gehäuse metaphor in the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism

History and Theory

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 153-169

  Baehr, Peter ^a  

^a LINGNAN UNIVERSITY   (Hong Kong)

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EID: 11844250147     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00160     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. For their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I am indebted to Judith Adler, Charles Camic, Randall Collins, Richard Hamilton, Hartmut Lehmann, Volker Meja, Stuart Pierson, Guenther Roth, Lawrence A. Scaff, Richard Swedberg, Keith Tribe, and Gordon C. Wells
2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, transl. Talcott Parsons, with a foreword by R.H. Tawney. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1930), 181
3. Ed Andrew, Closing the Iron Cage: The Scientific Management of Work and Leisure (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1981)
4. Michael Schwalbe, Unlocking the Iron Cage: The Men's Movement, Gender Politics, and American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
5. Michael S. Roth, The Ironist's Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)
6. Andrew Gamble, Hayek: The Iron Cage of Liberty (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996)
7. Weber wrote two versions of The Protestant Ethic, both of which employ the stahlhartes Gehäuse metaphor. See Weber, "Die protestantische Ethik und der 'Geist' des Kapitalismus, II. Die Berufsidee des asketischen Protestantismus," Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 21 (1905), 1-110, at 108
8. and Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Vol.1 (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1920), 17-206, at 203-204. Parsons translated the 1920 version. For a survey of the major differences between the editions
9. see Lichtblau and Weiß's introduction to Die protestantische Ethik und der "Geist" des Kapitalismus, ed. Klaus Lichtblau and Johannes Weiß (Bodenheim: Athenäum Hain Hanstein, 1993), vii-xxxv
10. Guenther Roth, "Interpreting and Translating Max Weber," International Sociology 7 (1992), 449-459
11. Hans Gerth was the real translator. On the moral dynamics of the Gerth and Mills collaboration, particularly with respect to the From, Max Weber project, see Guy Oakes and Arthur J. Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 15-56
12. Roth, "Interpreting and Translating Max Weber," 455
13. For two such ominous readings, see George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks, London, and New Delhi: Pine Forge Press, 1993), 162
14. and Jane A Rinehart, "It May Be a Polar Night of Icy Darkness, but Feminists are Building a Fire," in McDonaldization Revisited: Critical Essays on Consumer Culture, ed. Mark Alfino, John S. Caputo, and Robin Wynyard (Wesport, Conn: Praeger, 1998), 9-38
15. Peter Ghosh, "Some Problems with Talcott Parsons' Translation of 'The Protestant Ethic'," Archives Européennes de Sociologie 35 (1994), 104
16. Gisela J. Hinkle, "The Americanization of Max Weber," Current Perspectives in Social Theory 7 (1986), 89
17. More precisely, the "Vorbemerkung" (Preliminary Remark) to the first volume of Weber's Religionssoziologie
18. Ghosh, "Some Problems with Talcott Parsons' Translation of 'The Protestant Ethic'," 118
19. Keith Tribe, "Translator's Appendix," in Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber's Science of Man (Newbury: Threshold Press, 2000), 205-216
20. Martin Albrow, Max Weber's Construction of Social Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), 214
21. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 40 ff
22. Roth, "Interpreting and Translating Max Weber," 457
23. The term "iron cage" is endorsed by Harry Zohn in his translation of Marianne Weber's Max Weber: A Biography [1926] (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), 342
24. by Guenther Roth, in "Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History," in Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83-131, at 87
25. and by Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism [1976] (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, with a new Afterword) (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 291, n. 11
26. It also appears prominently in the titles of books by Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber, and Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Knopf, 1970). However, when Mitzman translates the passage from which, purportedly, the "iron cage" metaphor is drawn, he departs from Parsons's interpretation. Mitzman quotes Weber as stating, "But fate decreed that the cloak should become a housing hard as steel." For Mitzman, the '"housing hard as steel,' of course, recalls the 'secure house' of his father's generation that Weber had publicly refused to enter in 1893. But Weber now recognized the ascetic mien of his mother as well as the bureaucratic spirit of his father as a threat to his autonomy" (172). For some pertinent comments on Mitzman's usage
27. see Edward A Tiryakian, "The Sociological Import of a Metaphor: Tracking the Source of Max Weber's 'Iron Cage'," Sociological Inquiry 51 (1981), 27-33, at 28-30
28. Eric Matthews's translation in the W. G. Runciman anthology has "casing as hard as steel," Weber: Selections in Translation, ed. W. G. Runciman, transl. Eric Matthews (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 170
29. That phrasing is also preferred by Stephen P. Turner, "Bunyan's Cage and Weber's Casing," Sociological Inquiry 52 (1982)
30. For a helpful discussion of some of the problems in rendering Gehause
31. see Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs's remarks in Weber: Political Writings (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68, n. 57; 90, n. 11; 374
32. Talcott Parsons, "Letter from Talcott Parsons to Benjamin Nelson, January 24, 1975," Harvard University Archives (HUG [FP] 42.8.8, Box 10, 1975)
33. Cf. Richard Swedberg, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (Princeton, N.J.:Princeton University Press, 1998), 262-263, n. 44
34. Talcott Parsons. "Letter from Talcott Parsons to Edward Tiryakian, March 2, 1979." Sociological Inquiry 51 (1979), 35-36
35. The language of confinement is also a prominent motif in the tracts of Martin Luther. See, for instance, his discussion of "the iron bars of ceremonies" (which Luther considered necessary for an ordered life) in "The Freedom of a Christian Man" (1520)
36. and of "the prison of sin and death" in "Preface to the German Translation of the New Testament" (1522)
37. See The Protestant Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 3-29, 37-42, at 28, 40
38. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress From This World to That Which is to Come, ed. James Blanton Wharey and Roger Sharrock [1678] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 34-35
39. Francis Quarles, Emblemes and Hieroglyphikes of the Life of Man [1635] (Hildesheim, Zurich, and New York: G. Olms, 1993)
40. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, transl. R.J. Hollingdale [1883] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 46
41. I thus take a very different view to Edward Tiryakian ("The Sociological Import of a Metaphor," 30) who remarks: "I suggest both that Weber was inspired by this passage and that he strongly identified not only with 'the Man' of despair but also with Christian."
42. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, transl. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [1927] (New York: Harper, 1962), §§29-30 = 172-182
43. For an illuminating discussion of the difficulties of this term, see Richard Poll, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 64-68
44. Iron appears in Group VIII of the Periodic Table, and is distinguished by the atomic number 26, the atomic weight of 55.847
45. and the chemical symbol Fe. Daniel 2:1-49. The first three ages are of gold, silver, and bronze ("brass"). "And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise" (2:40)
46. The sequence of bronze and iron is touchingly reversed in J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron: A Novel [1990] (Harmon ds worth: Penguin Books,1998), 50
47. See also 73, 75, 82, 124-126
48. For another ancient myth of ages (composed in the early seventh century BCE) in which iron figures prominently, see Hesiod's Work and Days, lines 106-201. Hesiod's degenerative succession of metallic "races" culminates in the miserable men of iron of which he himself is a member. "Not ever during the day will men cease from labor and grief; not even at night will they cease from being oppressed⋯ And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal people too, when they turn out to be grey-templed at birth."
49. For Weber's analysis of iron ("the most important factor in the development of capitalism") see General Economic History, transl. Frank H. Knight [1927, 1923] (New York and London: Collier Books, 1961), 227, 275.1 am grateful to Charles Camic for directing my attention to this source
50. Both iron and steel have strong masculine (and martial) overtones. Popular iconography is full of images that link iron and steel to forms of manhood: consider Iron John, John Henry (the "steel driving man"). Superman, The Man of Steel, etc. For more subtle connotations of iron, see Primo Levi's portrait of Sandro in The Periodic Table, transl. Raymond Rosenthal [1975] (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 37-49
51. For a brief overview of the revolution in steel production unleashed by the Bessemer process, see Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency [1997] (New York: Penguin, 1999), 155-160
52. Writing for the New York Evening Post's "Review of the Century" (Jan. 12, 1901)
53. Andrew Carnegie anointed the new era thus: "Farewell, then, Age of Iron
54. all hail, King Steel, and success to the republic, the future seat and center of his empire, where he is to sit enthroned and work his wonders upon the earth," To which Carnegie's biographer aptly adds, "This was a curiously belated vive from one who had been largely instrumental in enthroning steel as monarch some thirty years earlier.⋯" John Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie [1970] (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 307
55. See, especially, Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management [1911] (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications,1998), 51-60
56. The totemic identification of steel with fortitude, efficiency, and modernization is nowhere more evident than in the Communist experiments of the twentieth century. Lenin eagerly embraced Taylorism: "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government" (1918), in Lenin: Selected Works Vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1968), 695-732
57. Stalin means "man of steel." The subject is too complex to pursue here in any detail, but one of its more tragic manifestations was the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960)
58. Mao's catastrophic attempt to outstrip Great Britain in steel production within a fifteen- year period. Exponentially increased steel production was one of his "two generals" (the other, far more disastrous, was the Lysenkoist campaign to accelerate grain production). On the backyard furnace campaign during the Great Leap
59. see Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China's Secret Famine (London: J. Murray, 1996), 63-64; cf. William Henry Chamberlin, Russia's Iron Age (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937)
60. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History [1948] (New York: Norton, 1969), 98
61. As Nietzsche did in his scabrous comments on "the priests" in The Will to Power, section 397: "Morality is a menagerie; its presupposition is that iron bars can be more profitable than freedom, even for the prisoners; its other presupposition is that there exist animal-trainers who are not afraid of terrible means-who know how to handle red-hot iron. This frightful species which takes up the fight against the wild animal is called 'priest'⋯ .Man, imprisoned in an iron cage of errors, became a caricature of man, sick, wretched, ill-disposed toward himself, full of hatred for the impulses of life.⋯.," The Will to Power, transl
62. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [1901] (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 214
63. Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm, "Der Eisenhans," in Kinder-und Haus- marchen, gesammelt durch die Bruder Grimm (Grimms Marchen), ed. Heinz Rolleke [ 1850] (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), 757-765
64. See Marianne Weber's characterization of her husband, impatient about wasting time on his visit to New York: "Only when he was bored and wasted time needlessly-as on a streetcar ride of several hours through New York that was undertaken in the protective custody of a hospitable American colleague⋯.-did the lion secretly rage in his cage, and then it was hard to restrain him from breaking out," Max Weber: A Biography, 281
65. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 181
66. Of course, cages can also be occupied by people who are just doing a certain kind of job: for instance, postal workers in the late nineteenth century and later for whom the wood and wire lattice "cage" was a means of protection from thieves. For a play on "cage" as both protective and confining simultaneously, see Henry James, In the Cage [1898] (London: Martin Secker, 1919), 5-6, 17, 51- 52, and passim
67. A history of this incident can be found in one of Weber's sources, E. Belfort Bax, Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists (London and New York: S. Sonnenschein; Macmillan, 1903), 282-331
68. David Chalcraft, "Bringing the Text Back In: On Ways of Reading the Iron Cage Metaphor in the Two Editions of 'The Protestant Ethic,'" in Organizing Modernity: New Weberian Perspectives on Work, Organization and Society, ed. Larry J. Ray and Michael Reed (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 16-45, at 29-39
69. Again one recalls Marianne Weber, this time describing Max Weber senior's last days: "It was not given to the aging man to break through the shell (Gehäuse) of his own nature" (Max Weber: A Biography, 232)
70. Steel is a vital metaphor not only in Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920), but also in Jünger's Battle as Inner Experience (1922)-"we are at once the smith and the flashing steel"⋯. "steel forms, whose eagle gaze seeks out the clouds above the whirling propellers, who are cramped into the apparatus of tanks, who venture Hell's journey through rolling minefields"-and The Worker (1932) where the coming "steel order" is ardently prophesied
71. See Thomas Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-1945 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996)
72. the quoted remarks come from 65, 72, 126
73. For a while, Jiinger had close associations with the Stahlhelm (the steel helmet was introduced to German infantry in 1916), the largest and most influential nationalist- conservative veterans' organization of the Weimar Republic. In 1934 it was renamed the Nationalsozialistischer Frontkämpferbund and. proving itself to be insufficiently Nazi, was dissolved shortly thereafter. The image of steel, however, continued to find employment in the Third Reich
74. see Goebbels's evocation of "steely romanticism"(stä hlernde Romantik) as discussed in Jeffrey Herf's Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 195-196, 220
75. Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis," in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, foreword by John Updike [1915] (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 89
76. In aphorism 13 of Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope and the True Way, Kafka wrote that "A cage went in search of a bird." (Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka, ed. Erich Heller [New York: Pocket Books, 1946],237.)
77. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 322
78. Though Arendt was a markedly anti-Weberian thinker along a number of axes, the conclusion to The Human Condition has some uncanny parallels with Parsons's translation of The Protestant Ethic's finale. She remarked (322)
79. "The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning ⋯. It is quite conceivable that the modern age-which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity-may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known."
80. Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999)
81. Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
82. Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 1997)
83. The Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (London: Routledge, 1995)
84. Max Weber, "Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order," in Weber: Political Writings, ed. and transl. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs [1917] (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156-158
85. I have modified Speirs's translation. Weber writes: "Etwa ein Zerbrechen des stählernen Gehäuses der modernen gewerblichen Arbeit? Nein!"
86. Weber, "Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order," 158 (Weber's emphasis)
87. This final desideratum also comes across forcefully in the conclusion to Weber's 1896 pamphlet on the stock and commodity exchanges (Die Börsenverkehr) that he penned for the Göttingen Worker's Library (edited by Friedrich Naumann)
88. See Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924), 289-322, at 320-322. His argument is that so long as nations carry out a "ruthless and unavoidable" economic struggle, a strong German stock and commodity exchange is vital, though inescapably in tension with demands for "ethical culture" and "welfare institutions."
89. I am drawing on a letter from Guenther Roth to me, March 6, 2000; cited with Roth's permission
90. Weber, "Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order," 159
91. See also Max Weber, "Bourgeois Democracy in Russia" and "Russia's Transition to Pseudo-Constitutionalism," in Max Weber. The Russian Revolutions, transl. and ed. Gordon C. Wells and Peter Baehr [1906] (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1997), 109, 233
92. Weber, "Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order," 268
93. "Whether in the shape of American 'benevolent feudalism,' the German 'welfare institutions,' or the Russian factory constitution-everywhere the empty shell (Gehäuse) of the new serfdom stands ready; it will be occupied to the degree that the pace of technical-economic 'progress' slows down and the victory of 'income' over 'profit' together with the exhaustion of what remains of 'free' lands and the 'free' markets, renders the masses 'compliant,'" "Bourgeois Democracy in Russia," 108
94. This is the view of Richard Swedberg who argues that the image of "the iron cage" (the designation Swedberg prefers) is "an attempt to capture the fate of the 'common man' in capitalism-in particular the suffering felt by the industrial worker in the inferno of the modern machine and all the ills that come from that⋯. The image that to my mind best expresses Weber's idea of the iron cage ⋯ is one of the etchings of Max Klinger which portrays a skeleton smashing skulls, with the kind of iron contraption with which you produce gravel for roads"; letter from Professor Swedberg to me, January 23, 2000
95. cited with Swedberg's permission. The etching referred to is no. 10 of Klinger's "Eve and the Future" cycle (Third Future)
96. Karl-Ludwig Ay discerns some change in Weber's attitude towards the end of the Great War when he campaigned for universal and equal suffrage of the returning soldiers. "Max Weber: A German Intellectual and the Question of War Guilt after the Great War," in Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, ed. Sam Whimster (Basingstoke: Macmillans, 1999), 110-128, at 114
97. Ibid
98. For an extended discussion of Weber's concept of "the masses," and especially their putative "irrationality," see Peter Baehr, Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World: A Study in Republicanism and Caesarism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 236-242
99. "Selection" (Auslese) and its cognates (e.g. "struggle for existence") is a recurring theme of Weber's work carrying both Darwinesque and Nietzschean connotations. See, for example, Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 2, 16, 84, 134, 180, 225, 267, 283, 306. For a sociological definition of "selection,"
100. see Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich [1922] (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 38-40
101. "The question which stirs us as we think beyond the grave of our own generation is not the well-being human beings will enjoy in the future but what kind of people they will be, and it is this same question which underlies all work in political economy. We do not want to breed well-being in people, but rather those characteristics which we think of as constituting the human greatness and nobility of our nature"; "The Nation State and Economic Policy (Inaugural Lecture, 1895)," in Lassman and Speirs, Weber: Political Writings, 1-28, at 15
102. Weber goes on to say that the quest for "social justice" is a lesser standard of value for political economy than "the quality of the human beings reared under [certain] economic and social conditions of existence" (emphasis omitted)
103. Weber, "Bourgeois Democracy in Russia," 110
104. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 29 on his selective "translation" of Parsons's The Social System
105. Accordingly, that is the rendering settled on in the first English translation of the 1905 version of "The Protestant Ethic." The edition will appear in early 2002 as Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism: The Essay of 1905 Together with Weber's Rebuttals of H. Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl, ed., transl., and with an Introduction by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin Books)
106. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 226-247
107. One of its more recent manifestations is George Ritzer's distinction among the three major attitudes toward a "McDonaldized society" as a cage of iron, velvet, and rubber. See The McDonaldization of Society, 160-163
108. and The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions. (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 4, 77-78, 164
109. Keith Tribe, "Translator's Introduction," in Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 7
110. Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan H. Turner, The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 145-167
111. Bernard S. Silberman, Cages of Reason: The Rise of the Rational State In France, Japan, the United States, and Great Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
112. Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity, Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994), 64, 89-103
113. Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, transl. Eden and Cedar Paul [ 1915] (New York: Dover Publications, 1959)
114. And by the French translator of The Protestant Ethic. Thus Jacques Chavy follows Parsons in rendering stahlhartes Gehause as "une cage d'acier." L'éthique Protestante et Vesprit du Capitalisme. (Paris: Plon, 1964), 246
115. The German version of Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1998). Volker Meja pointed this out to me
116. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn [1923] (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 76