The Iron Cage Revisited: Max Weber in the Neoliberal Era

At the start of the twentieth century, when Germany, among other nations, was undergoing industrialization, Max Weber famously characterized modern life in words that have often been translated as ＂iron cage.＂ During the industrial era, that image caught on and was often used by scholars to express concerns about the extent to which the actual character of modern life contradicted its emancipatory promise. But we are living in a different time now, when the conditions under which we live seem to be quite different from the ones that pertained in Weber’s day. It is a time when, in some respects at least, life seems to be freer and more conducive to experimentation, which has led some people to conclude that our societies have escaped from Weber’s ＂cage.＂ But is that really true? This book challenges that notion, considering the consequences for our way of life of the triumph of neoliberalism as a political force.

R. Bruce Douglass is Associate Professor and former Chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown University, USA, where he teaches political and social theory. He has also served as Dean of the Faculty of Georgetown College. He has taught at the University of Virginia as a visiting professor and has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is the co-editor of Liberalism and the Good, Catholicism and Liberalism and A Nation under God?