Weber, Goethe, and the Nietzschean Allusion: Capturing the Source of the "Iron Cage" Metaphor

Abstract

Edward Tiryakian recently argued that Max Weber was so deeply affected by John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress that he personally identified with one of its characters, a man who was trapped in an iron cage of despair. Therein, Tiryakian claimed, lies the origins of the famous “iron cage” metaphor that appears in the final pages of Talcott Parsons' translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Challenging his view, this article argues that Weber was little affected by his reading of Puritan material, since he subsumed its example of inner worldly asceticism into German ideational models provided by Nietzsche and Goethe. The “iron cage” metaphor is the result of a mistranslation by Parsons, and cannot be attributed to Weber. Moreover, by conceiving of the Puritans as Übermenschen, Weber was unable to see the extent to which a desire for revenge against those in power helped to shape the economic activities of at least one Puritan group, the Quakers.