The Iron Cage: Max Weber's Historical Interpretation & Analysis - Essential Reading for Sociology & Political Science Students" 使用场景：Perfect for university courses, academic research, and book clubs discussing classical sociological theories.

Max Weber redefined rationality in terms of goal-rationality ("Zweckrationalität") and value-rationality ("Wertrationalität"), showing how social structure controls the rationality that academics hope might really be scientific logic, but can never be logical. Academics like to wish that everyone get enough education and become scientifically logical in their lives. So, they decry religion is 'irrational' and promote social programs like Marxism ('scientific' socialism), Liberalism ('education'), and similar fascist ideologies as 'rational.' Setting up an ideological program, like socialism, simply imposes social goals, giving academics the mission to train bureaucrats for holy missions in which the ends justify the means.The minimal social system of tyrannical father, feckless mother, and intelligent son produced a man acutely angry with his father for tyranny and acutely angry with his mother for weakness. The conflicts gradually transformed him from youthful 'conservative' to adult 'liberal.' Weber in his youth idolized strict centralization of government on the model of the Prussian aristocracy to which his father was heir. He wrote a dissertation on the subject of agricultural production and strict government management. Mitzman does a very good job of presenting the dissertation as a vital document. Weber, in his adulthood, did a 180 and became a champion of liberal governance. Mitzman's biography uses the historical evidence of Weber's correspondence and of interviews of the era judiciously to demonstrate how the transition occured as Weber's father's arteries hardened before the father's death and his mother sank more and more often onto the fainting couch after the father died. The period of Weber's transformation covers the death of the father, the disastrous outcome of the First World War (which had Weber's hopeful commitment) and the early 1920's, which had Weber's rueful resentment of what had happened in Germany thanks to cult of Purssianism.The importance of the theory of rationality is that non-rational action or commitment to goals and values regardless of consequences always trumps scientific logic. So, the programs of the academics are hopeless, because the non-rational thought drives academics to fanaticism. Weber was not a fantatic in any concrete movements, but thanks to Weber's unfinished Sociology of Religion (http://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Religion-Max-Weber/dp/0807042056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364077361&sr=1-1&keywords=Weber%2C+the+sociology+of+religion), The Religion of China (http://www.amazon.com/Religion-China-Max-Weber/dp/0029344506/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364077452&sr=1-1&keywords=Weber%2C+the+religion+of+China), The Religion of India (http://www.amazon.com/Religion-India-Sociology-Hinduism-Buddhism/dp/8121505712/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364077489&sr=1-1&keywords=Weber%2C+the+religion+of+India), the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (http://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Ethic-Spirit-Capitalism-Twentieth-Century/dp/0140439218/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364077527&sr=1-1&keywords=Weber%2C+the+protestant+ethic), we can understand better (if we look) how non-rational action controls scientific rationality today.Understanding how academics create the iron cage of bureaucracy is so important today, since the academy peoples the bureacracy with its creatures and bureaucracy grows now relentless out of proportion to human needs. Academics uses the bureaucratic pulpit to harrangue everyone daily, 'preaching their musty rules' for socialism, scientology, feminism, vegetarianism, and against smoking, fracking, global warming and the host of giant asteroids humans are heir to.Weber probably would not have recognized his problems with his parents without years of psychotherapy, but we get to see how intractable fundamentalism can develop out of social commitments over the years of a man's life, fully documented and easily readable without psychological jargon. The feeling that Mitzman communicates of Junkerism and family organization at the turn of the last century carried rewards in every page. Mitzman, too, shows the how Prussian Germany pivoted on the academic-bureaucratic axis, Weber's whole life goal being academic appointments with the help of his father's bureaucratic connections. You get a feel for German centralization that is hard to develop from reading sociology and a better understanding how the Olympians in the academy build the scientific tyranny of the bureaucratic iron cage.