ABSTRACT
Weber’s use of the iron cage metaphor presupposes value judgments that are not explicitly articulated in his writings. The claim of this chapter, however, is that it is possible to determine what he probably had in mind on that matter if one is prepared to read “between the lines,” and it is designed to show what his view is likely to have been. In the first instance, it proposes, the state of affairs to which Weber applied that imagery was undesirable for the obvious reason that it deprived the people affected of the ability to control their own fate. But it was also undesirable for the less obvious reason that it involved a kind of behavior he regarded as irrational even though, paradoxically, that behavior was a by-product of the desire modern people tended to have to conduct their affairs as rationally as possible. For in Weber’s view rationality consisted above all in pursuing objectives that were consciously chosen on their merits. But the process of “disenchantment” modern societies had undergone fragmented their thinking about values in ways that made it difficult for them to have deliberately chosen goals in anything other than people’s private lives. All they could agree on was the value of instrumental rationality, which they tended to pursue with great dedication but without the guidance that would come from having substantively rational goals on which they could agree. So they typically found themselves pursuing a quest for ever more efficient means as though it were an end itself.
