Max Weber and the `Faustian Universality of Man'

Abstract

Famously, the final pages of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic present a powerful diagnosis of the condition of modern man trapped in an `iron cage' of impersonal economic processes. Yet just above these famous words Weber tells us something else, that what we have sacrificed in entering the iron cage is `the Faustian universality of man'. What does Weber mean by this phrase, and why does he point us to the writings of Goethe at this key point in the book's conclusion? This paper argues that both the phrase `Faustian universality' and Weber's philosophical footnotes reveal a deeper and hitherto neglected argument, giving us a very different diagnosis of modernity than that usually associated with the `iron cage'. Following the clues Weber left us leads us to a more complex and challenging picture of The Protestant Ethic's lasting message.