The 'iron cage' and the 'shell as hard as steel':: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes-Gehause metaphor in The 'Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'

In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehause 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 tis readers.