The Iron Cage: Historical Interpretation of Max Weber

by Catherine Ross (Editor)

This major study of the father of modern sociology explores the intimate relationship between the events of Max Weber's personal history and the development of his thought. When it was first published in 1970, Paul Roazen described The Iron Cage as "an example of the history of ideas at its very best"; while Robert A. Nisbet said that "we learn more about Weber's life in this volume than from any other in the English language."Weber's life and work developed in reaction to the rigidities of familial and social structures in Imperial Germany. In his youth he was torn by irreconcilable tensions between the Bismarckian authoritarianism of his father and the ethical puritanism of his mother. These tensions led to a psychic crisis when, in his thirties, he expelled his father (who died soon thereafter) from his house. His reaction to the collapse of the European social order before and during World War I was no less personal and profound. It is the triumph of Professor Mitzman's approach that he convincingly demonstrates how the internalizing of these severe experiences led to Weber's pessimistic vision of the future as an "iron cage" and to such seminal ideas as the notion of charisma and the concept of the Protestant ethic and its connection with the spirit of capitalism. The author's thesis also serves as a vehicle for describing the social, political, and personal plight of the European bourgeois intellectual of Weber's generation.In synthesizing Weber's life and thought, Arthur Mitzman has expanded and refined our understanding of this central twentieth-century figure. As Lewis Coser writes in the preface, until now "there has been little attempt to bring together the work and the man, to show the ways in which Weber's cognitive intentions, his choice of problems, were linked with the details of his personal biography. Arthur Mitzman fills this gap brilliantly."

Genres: Sociology

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't usually read through books that I don't like very much. That's one reason, I suppose, why most of the books I manage to finish have five-stars. (Also..., I'm a notoriously easy grader -- preferring to be harder on myself than on others.)

And this one was no exception: a blend of the biography, intellectual history, and psychoanalysis of Max Weber -- I gave up at the midpoint.

Though I'm a great admirer of Freud (-- I spent a full year in college reading huge portions of the corpus, and with great attention --), I've never had any interest in Freudian interpretations of literary or historical figures. In fact, I take the position that Freud's own theory -- which insists that psychoanalysis can only really be conducted on a subject who is *present* in the flesh (-- since, after all, only the living subject can provide the therapists/interpreter with those associations of ideas that alone reveal the underlying aetiologies of our various behaviors, dreams, neuroses, or whatever…) -- precludes it.

Weber, of course, was a man of prodigious intellect; he had a excruciatingly difficult relationship with his overbearing and authoritarian (Bismarckian) father; he had a violent fight with his father in 1894, whereupon, seven weeks later, the old man died (from an ulcer, apparently). Weber suffered enormous guilt. And for five years, he suffered from such a sever depression that he could not work, and he could not return to teaching for another 20 years -- until shortly before his own death.

Given this, it may be granted that an attempt at psychoanalyzing Weber (and his work) is not wholly illegitimate. In fact, Mitzman finds plenty of instances where Weberian theories seem plausibly to reflect a repressed struggle with authority….

But alas, it is only 'plausible'. And even if one DID thereby find the source and aetiology of Weber's doctrines, one would STILL learn almost nothing about the structure of those doctrines in themselves -- for genetic interpretations of philosophy almost always prove themselves to be quite useless.

Anyway…, some interesting material here; an intelligent author, for sure; a dubious method. Certainly not the "intellectual biography" I was looking for.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me feel really bad for Max Weber, who wrote all of his books from inside of an iron cage.