ABSTRACT
But it is neither the truth of historical doom nor the truth of science that speaks through Weber's pessimism. Despite disquieting similarities between our world and the "iron cage" in which Weber saw himself trapped, our options are far more open than his, our values more fluid, and our youth determined to wrest control over their fate from impersonal bureaucracies. At the heart of Weber's vision lies only the truth of his epoch, his country and his station, the truth of a bourgeois scholar in Imperial Germany. It was developed under agonizing personal pressures, themselves exerted and maintained by the dilemmas of family, social milieu, and his torical position. The broadest ramifications of these dilem mas have been sketched by Talcott Parsons in his essay on "Social Structure and Democracy in Pre-Nazi Germany."1 They are the dilemmas of a man of passion in a highly re pressive family situation and society which, in parallel ways
4 INTRODUCTION and under the threats of madness and social ostracism, blocked the expression of passion.
