The Iron Cage

Historical Interpretation of Max Weber

Catherine Ross, Arthur Mitzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780878559848
• eBook ISBN: 9781351480604
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART I

The Late-Bourgeois Generation
1864-1903

1

Weber’s Family Background and Youth (1864-1886)

WEBER’S PROMETHEAN DEFIANCE of the political and intellectual forces of his day was in many respects an attempt to transcend history: the history of his epoch, of his own experience, but also, in a very real sense, of his ancestors. For the masterful analyst of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, and the rebel who was pursued through his mature years by the avenging furies of his own psyche, were welded together by genealogy. On both sides of his family, Weber descended from Protestants who had fled their homelands to escape the wrath of outraged Catholicism; but from refugees in the name of true religion, they had somehow, by the nineteenth century, become capitalist magnates. For their tormented descendant, sorting out the strange relationships between religious rebellion, asceticism, and productivity was to become—after his breakdown—a form of autotherapy, a means of tracking down the elusive demons within him by the techniques of historical scholarship and sociological insight.

On the paternal side, Weber’s ancestors had been driven from Salzburg because of their “evangelical” convictions.^* Karl August Weber, the grandfather, had been a member of the merchant patriciate in Bielefeld. A Unen dealer, he became for his grandson a model of the early capitalist entrepreneur, still dominated by a traditionalist view of the world. Marianne Weber said of him, “Making money was neither an end in itself nor a sign of probity, but stood mainly in the service of a comfortable, customary way of life. Accordingly, the labor tempo was moderate.” This man married Lucie Wilmans, the daughter of a prominent Bielefeld physician; she bore four sons: the eldest and youngest of these were Karl David Weber and Max Weber, respectively, uncle and father of the author of Die Protestantische Ethik.^†

Karl David Weber, the eldest brother of Max Weber, Sr., continued the family linen concern in Bielefeld but radically transformed the old patriarchal business methods to meet the competition of modern, machine-made cloth. He systematically organized the cottage industry of the area by enticing the peasants from their sandy soil to engage in permanent rather than casual home weaving, and delivered yarn to them. He also sought the wholesalers, bringing them samples rather than waiting for their visits. K. D. Weber’s colleagues had previously avoided such methods, and viewed his innovations with disgust, until they decided to emulate him. In his nephew’s work on the spirit of capitalism, this uncle served as a prime example of the modern entrepreneur,¹ the affirmation of whose creative energies contrasted sharply with Weber’s lifelong condemnation of the eudaemonistic ethic represented by his own father.

Max Weber, Sr., was born in 1836, studied law and, about i860, worked for the city government of Berlin while editing a liberal weekly. Never a democrat, he belonged in the early ‘6o’s to the Constitutionalists, a splinter party that stood for “a strong Hohenzollern monarchy and full recognition of the rights guaranteed the people.”² He married Helene Fallen-stein in 1863 and moved to Erfurt, where he became a magistrate. Max Jr., the first of eight children, was born on April 21,1864. In 1869, Weber Sr. moved his family to Berlin, where he became first a city councillor and then a member of both the Prussian House of Deputies (1868-97) and the Reichstag (1872–84).³ In Berlin, Weber Sr. became part of a circle of liberal intellectuals and politicians that included Treitschke and the elder Rickert. He followed Bennigsens pro-Bis-marckian lead in the National Liberal Party and, though he once appeared to be on the left wing of his party,^* he seems to have developed in his maturity a satisified, comfortable view of life which forbade any political idealism that might require personal sacrifice.⁴

Max Weber, Sr., thus carried into the plane of political life the comfortable, patriarchal bourgeois patterns of his father, except that, unlike his father, he was not his own master. The Prussian state determined what was possible for him, and a certain hedonistic abhorrence of suffering encouraged in him, at least in the eyes of his daughter-in-law, a spineless acquiescence to the status quo.

The sociologist’s maternal grandfather, G. F. Fallenstein, was born in 1790 in Thuringia, the son and grandson of schoolteachers. Educated both in natural science and in languages, he was in his youth a tutor, secretary, translator, and romantic poet. Inspired by Jahn, he enlisted in the Lützow Freikorps in 1813 to aid in Prussia’s liberation from Napoleon. In 1816, when the wars had ended, he took a position as a civil servant in Düsseldorf, where he became the model of a diligent, self-sacrificing bureaucrat. Despite abundant praise from his superiors, he was not advanced, because his democratic beliefs made him an advocate of political equality and a foe of the dominant reaction in Berlin. Only in 1832 did he receive an appropriate position in Koblentz.⁵ Shortly before he started work in the new position, his wife died; in 1835 he took as his second wife Emilia Souchay.

Emilia’s great-grandfather, Jacques Souchay, though born in Orléans in 1689—i.e., four years after Louis XIV had outlawed French Calvinism by revoking the Edict of Nantes —had emigrated as a young man to Geneva, where his brothers were already settled, and from there had made his way to Hanau, where he settled down as a goldsmith. In the next century his descendants accumulated a great deal of wealth. Emilia, the daughter of a merchant patrician in Frankfurt and a paragon of sorrowing ethical religiosity, became the mother of several daughters, on all of whom she vigorously impressed her religious convictions and one of whom, Helene, in turn did her best to transfer these convictions to her son, Max Weber. Marianne Weber summarizes the moral heritage that Emilia Fallenstein gave to her daughters as follows:

To all was given a profound emotional existence which made their life both rich and difficult, and a bravery with which they approached their fate fearlessly and calmly. All controlled their lives as much through religious as through vital power. All shaped their daily lives through moral passion and selfless goodness.⁶

By marrying into the Souchay family, Fallenstein ended his financial problems, which had earlier been considerable.

He retired in 1847 to Heidelberg, where he built a large house on the Neckar opposite the castle and became acquainted with a good part of the local professoriat: indeed, he found the historian Gervinus companionable enough to invite him to live in his house and tutor his daughters.⁷ Nonetheless, Fallensteins worldly success brought him little personal happiness. Curiously anticipating the fate of his son-in-law, Max Weber, Sr., he found himself increasingly estranged from his Calvinist wife, in whose eyes his success, based largely on her dowry, must have been less than impressive and whose continuous self-torment over her spiritual imperfection was incomprehensible to him.⁸ A man of the world to the end, Fallenstein concerned himself in his last years with the preservation of Napoleonic law, which, despite his lingering hatred for Napoleon, he thought more suitable for the Rhineland than Prussian law and whose arbitrary revocation by the Hohenzollern regime would, he feared, estrange the population from Prussia.

Gervinus, his friend, who was married but childless, continued to live in Fallenstein’s house after his death, tutoring his daughters and apparently developing a more than fatherly interest in one of them. When Helene was sixteen years old, she was forced to repel his advances, an experience which left her with a permanent distaste for sensual passion.^* Despite his rejection, Gervinus continued to try to dominate Helene’s life; soon after his misguided adventure, he tried to marry her off to a student of his. To escape this situation, she fled to her sister Ida in Berlin, recently married to the liberal historian Hermann Baumgarten. It was there that she met and became engaged to Max Weber, Sr., a friend and political colleague of Baumgarten. Two years later, in 1863, they married.⁹ Erfurt, where Weber had by then been appointed magistrate, was a lifeless city according to Marianne Weber, and at the urging of Ida Baumgarten, Helene spent her time studying the nonconformist theology of Channing and Parker.

As his parents’ eldest child Max Weber, Jr., felt throughout his youth and early manhood a strong sense of responsibility for his siblings, who were to include three brothers (among them the sociologist of culture Alfred Weber) and four sisters (two of whom died in childhood).

Unquestionably stimulated by his father’s political and intellectual discussions with such men as Bennigsen, Dilthey, Treitschke, Sybel, and Rickert,¹⁰ Max was in addition clearly the possessor of remarkable gifts. Indifferent to his school assignments, he read avidly on his own: Machiavelli at age twelve; soon after, the Greek and Roman classics; then, in the years before university study, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Kant. To escape the tedium of the classroom, he gradually read through secretly, at his desk, a forty-volume edition of Goethe. Letters from the fourteen-year-old Max to his older cousin, Fritz Baumgarten, who had attended the university in Berlin, show an extensive and critical knowledge of Homer, Herodotus, Virgil, Cicero, and Livy; the earliest of these letters brought on the (unmerited) rebuke from Fritz that Max had stolen his insights from Mommsens History of Rome.^*

Tension between Helene Weber and her husband arose early in their marriage and could not have escaped the notice of their eldest son. Even cousin Fritz wrote home to his mother during his 1877 study semester at Berlin: “I understand now why you quarrel so easily with Uncle . . . He has it indeed impermissibly good with his Helene and is a genuine despot.”¹¹ But the trouble, so strangely paralleling the difficulties of Helene’s parents, had begun long before 1877 and arose from the basic incompatibility of the pleasure-loving Berlin politician with his pious wife. From the time of his move to Berlin, in 1869, Marianne writes, Helene found it “increasingly difficult to approach her husband with her own spiritual and religious interests—for they are basically not vital needs for him, and wordly life, office, politics, socialization demand his time.” The death of a four-year-old daughter in 1876 crystallized their estrangement. Though Max Sr. at first shared his wife’s sorrow, he soon returned to his normal frame of mind and looked on uncomprehendingly at her prolonged and desolate bereavement; “It was ... his nature to withdraw from prolonged personal suffering, not to permit any long interruption of his enjoyment of life.” Helene, as was her custom, refused to make an issue of his coldness, but shared her now doubled grief with her sisters.

What may long have been evolving now broke through to consciousness: clarity over the fact that the love of her youth is made of quite other spiritual stuff than herself . . . And despite her inclination to modesty and self-deprecation, she applies instinctively unshake-able standards to the emotional life of others, and her husband does not measure up to them—Helene hid behind a veil of renunciation and inner loneliness and thus began a continuing estrangement from her husband.¹²

Compounding this emotional disharmony was Max Weber, Sr.’s, tendency to compensate for the flexibility and compromise imposed on him by the broader political arena by maintaining that patriarchal despotism at home of which cousin Fritz complained to his parents. An enthusiastic supporter of Bismarck in the ‘70’s during the Chancellor’s alliance with the National Liberals, he became somewhat critical in the ‘8o’s, when the Catholic Center Party replaced the liberals in Bismarck’s favor, but would never accept the risks of sharp opposition. “Fundamentally,” writes Marianne Weber, “he fends off the recognition of any difficult problematic in life. In his later years, he cultivated an inner indolence, and withdrew from suffering and compassion. His liberal political ideals could not work out, and new ideologies, which might have required some degree of sacrifice, did not inspire him.”¹³ Domestic authoritarianism was the inversion of this political softness. Marianne writes that he was “too strongly convinced of his own superiority and of his permanent right to prestige and authority” to be much of a companion to his sons, and that “some characteristics, e.g., his way of letting himself be served by his wife, evoke secret criticism in the children, although they follow his example.”¹⁴

These tensions imposed on Weber, as an adolescent, the necessity to choose between his parents, a necessity which was later to be objectified repeatedly in the voluntarism of his doctrine of values, his insistence on strictly personal responsibility for ultimate standards of judgment.¹⁵

Under the pressure of these competing domestic allegiances Weber’s earliest choice did not, however, go to his mother, but to his father. For the father’s defects were balanced by a goodnaturedness when not crossed, worldly eminence, and most important, a stimulating intelligence, manifested in lively parlor discourse with political and intellectual friends— which supplied a vital need for the observant boy and which the mother could not offer. Moreover, Helene Weber too had her authoritarian inclinations, especially in her younger years,¹⁶ and her real qualities of understanding, compassion, patience, and deep religiosity had little significance for the youth who, inspired by Machiavelli, found Cicero pusillanimous in dealing with Cataline.¹⁷ Thus, his early choice between his mother’s “ethic of conscience” (“Gesinnungs-ethik”) and his father’s “ethic of success” (“Erfolgsethik”) was clearly for the latter.¹⁸

WEBER LEFT HOME at eighteen to attend the university in Heidelberg, where his mother had grown up and where one of her married sisters was then living. The youth who left Berlin was thin, studious, and, because of his precocity, shy and virtually without companions of his own age. During his three semesters at Heidelberg, he underwent a transformation in both physique and personality. After some initial reluctance, he joined the Alemanni, his fathers dueling fraternity, where he learned, beside the art of fencing, that of drinking enormous quantities of beer—which put a permanent end to his willowy boyishness. Indeed, getting away from home seemed to induce a sudden flowering of masculinity in Weber, and if, as Marianne Weber says, the youth identified more with his father than his mother his first semester at the university could only have strengthened this identification. Apart from joining his father’s fraternity, he chose as his major field of study his father’s profession of law. Weber later said of these years, “The customary posture of decisiveness in fraternity life and as non-commisioned officer undoubtedly had a strong effect on me at that time and did away with the characteristic inner shyness and insecurity of the boyhood years.”¹⁹

This is by no means to suggest that Weber’s intellectual growth ceased at Heidelberg. In his first semester, apart from his law courses, he studied political economy with Knies, whose place on the Heidelberg faculty he was to take in 1896, medieval history with Erdmannsdörffer (reading two of Ranke’s major works), and the history of philosophy with Kuno Fischer. In Heidelberg, too, he was close to his relatives. Apart from a somewhat misanthropic uncle, the church historian Adolf Hausrath, he became friendly with another of his Baumgarten cousins, Otto, who was then...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE LATE-BOURGEOIS GENERATION 1864-1903
• PART II: ESTRANGEMENT AND EROS 1903-1920
• CONCLUSION: WEBER AND GERMAN HISTORY
• Abbreviations Used in Footnotes and Notes
• Notes
• Index