The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber

This 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. Throughout his life, Weber was racked by emotional torment and agonized by the state of the society in which he moved. His boyhood response to his authoritarian family was deeply traumatic--and led to a psychic crisis when, in his thirties, he expelled his Bismarckian 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. Arthur Mitzman 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. In synthesizing Weber's life and thought into a coherent whole, Mitzman has expanded and refined our understanding of this central figure.--From publisher description.