ABSTRACT
Arthur Mitzman's book The Iron Cage. An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber starts off on the wrong foot. Max Weber never used the expression "The Iron Cage". The psychohistorical approach makes sense in Weber's case, because of the sharply antagonistic personalities and attitudes of his parents and Weber's personal involvement in the rift between them. Mitzman is very right when he emphasizes that the contradiction in Weber's personality as well as in his work became more pronounced in the last decade of his life, after he had emerged from his oedipal trauma. He reacted to the deepening cultural pessimism of the era and the flickering romantic-heroic excitement that went with it. Much has been made of Weber's stress on the power of religious ideas versus the Marxian stress on the efficacy of the socioeconomic substructure. Weber's sympathy, or rather his grim anxiety, is on the side of personality against rationality.
