The Iron Cage
Subtitle: Historical Interpretation of Max Weber
By: Catherine Ross
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9781315132761
Description: "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."--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Chapter CONTENTS; title: chapter INTRODUCTION; title: part PART I The Late-Bourgeois Generation 1864-1903; title: chapter 1 Weber's Family Background and Youth (1864-1886); title: chapter 2 In the Father's House (1886-1892); title: chapter 3 Assault on the Junker Hegemony; title: chapter 4 Orestes and the Furies; title: part PART II Estrangement and Eros 1903-1920; title: chapter 5 Recovery: The Yoke of History; title: chapter 6 Marx, Nietzsche, and the Spirits of Defiance; title: chapter 7 Asceticism and Mysticism; title: chapter 8 Aristocracy and Charisma in Weber's Political Thought (1911-1919); title: chapter 9 Weber's Retreat from Ascetic Rationalism (1907-1920).