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
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4496732 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Baehr (0000-0001-7921-7162, Lingnan University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 153-169 |
| Publication date | 2001-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/0018-2656.00160 |
| OpenAlex | W2125999891 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 78 |
| References cited | 2 |
In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the "iron cage." This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery (in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress); and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the "shell as hard as steel": a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in which "steel" becomes emblematic of modernity. Steel, unlike the "element" iron, is a product of human fabrication. It is both hard and potentially flexible. Further, whereas a cage confines human agents, but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a "shell" suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being. After examining objections to this interpretation, I argue that whatever the problems with Parsons's "iron cage" as a rendition of Weber's own metaphor, it has become a "traveling idea," a fertile coinagein its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers
Aesthetics · Art · Bureaucracy · Capitalism · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Metaphor · Modernity · Politics · Protestant work ethic · Protestantism · Sociology · Subject (documents · Theology · Law · Philosophy · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
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| Unique citing works | 78 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3,55 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2026 (23) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 76 |