The Iron Cage-Max Weber and Weberian Marxism

Marx and Weber are two thinkers who are indispensable for understanding the world we live in. This world continues to be capitalist, albeit in different forms than in the 19th century. Undoubtedly, the theoretical tools offered by these two authors are not always sufficient to understand some contemporary realities - for example, the ecological crisis; But that certainly doesn't mean they are any less important. Because we are more than ever, more than in the time of Marx or Weber, subservient to the total power of impersonal forces - market, finance, debt, crises, unemployment - which impose themselves on individuals like an inexorable destiny. Never before have the iron rules of modern industrial capitalist civilization exerted such an oppressive and coercive power over the people. As Aurélien Berlan, one of the new generation writers, wrote, the feeling of being trapped under the yoke of a world governed in all its aspects by external powers is getting stronger in every field.

Are we doomed to the slavery of future times, as Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" seems to proclaim? Is this a Verhangnis , an unavoidable, blind fate from which there is no way to escape? This was never Marx's opinion; notwithstanding all the radical pessimism of either the Weberian Marxists or Adorno and Horkheimer. We may ask ourselves if this was Weber's opinion. Moreover, some parts of his work confirm this: We sometimes find a Nietzschean "heroic submission" in him. But sometimes, in some parts of his work, especially the last paragraphs of The Protestant Ethic , it seems that, on the contrary, he has left us an open window into utopia, into the “landscapes of desire” that Ernst Bloch called Wunschlandtschaften . We can see this as the indispensable partnership established between the pessimism of the mind and the optimism of the will, which Antonio Gramsci talked about: the book in your hand is woven in this partnership of warp and weft.

-M. Löwy-

(From the Promotional Bulletin)

Dough Type: 2nd Dough

Size: 13 x 19.5

First Print Year: 2018

Number of Printings: 1st Edition

Language Turkish