Weber's "Iron Cage"

Our reading this month was first published not as a book but as a two-part scholarly article. Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the founders of modern sociology, published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904-05 in the journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (The Archive of Social Science and Social Politics).

Weber's interests lie in the parallel developments of Calvinist religious sects and the capitalist economic system in 16th-century Europe.

One of the surprise joys of exploring the classics comes when we chance upon a famous buzz line of the western tradition. Such a moment occurred for me upon revisiting The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber contends that whereas the English Puritans wanted to work in a "calling," we moderns work because we simply have no other choice. He quotes the Protestant theologian Richard Baxter, who wrote that the desire for material goods should only rest on the shoulders "like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment." Then comes Weber's zinger on the modern condition: "But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage [emphasis added]." (See p. 100, Great Books Reading and Discussion Program, Series 4, Vol. 1).

According to Wikipedia's article on Weber's "iron cage," the original German might also translate as "steel-hard housing." Either way, it doesn't sound pleasant, and the meaning seems pretty clear. Modern, materialistic, ultra-rational society makes us all cogs in a wheel.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism dazzled me upon my first encounter with it as a college freshman, but I still find it difficult to classify this text. Is it sociology? History? Philosophy? A political tract? An academic essay punctuated with occasional romantic/lyrical flights?

In the end it doesn't matter what you call it. A great scholar and writer produced The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, a work that offers up a great chicken-and-egg riddle:

What comes first, how we do or how we think?