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“Shell as Hard as Steel” (Or, “Iron Cage”): What Exactly Did That Imagery Mean for W eber?
Author(s) -
Douglass R. Bruce
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of historical sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.186
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-6443
pISSN - 0952-1909
DOI - 10.1111/johs.12093
Subject(s) - symbol (formal) , meaning (existential) , variety (cybernetics) , aesthetics , image (mathematics) , popularity , capitalism , philosophy , literature , sociology , linguistics , epistemology , art , psychology , computer science , social psychology , law , artificial intelligence , political science , politics
M ax W eber did not invent the image of the iron cage; it was T alcott P arsons who created that image in preparing the first translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism into E nglish to be published. But that has not prevented it from catching on and even acquiring the status of a popular symbol of W eber's entire view of modern life. Despite its popularity, however, the image does not have a commonly accepted meaning. In part this is because of the creative uses to which it has been put by other scholars, but it is also a result of the fact that W eber himself used the G erman terms that were the source of P arsons’ translation in a variety of different ways over the course of his scholarly career. The purpose of this paper is to examine those uses to determine whether the meanings they convey add up to something coherent, and if so, what exactly that meaning was.