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
Document Type
Journal article
Source Publication
History and Theory
Publication Date
5-1-2001
Volume
40
Issue
2
First Page
153
Last Page
169
Abstract
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 coinage in its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers.
DOI
10.1111/0018-2656.00160
Print ISSN
00182656
E-ISSN
14682303
Publisher Statement
Copyright © Wesleyan University 2001
Access to external full text or publisher's version may require subscription.
Full-text Version
Publisher’s Version
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Baeher, P. (2001). 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. History and Theory, 40(2), 153-169. doi: 10.1111/0018-2656.00160