Class and the Classroom

By: George Scialabba

Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell

One of the most fruitful ideas to emerge from twentieth-century social theory is Max Weber’s notion of the “iron cage” of purposive rationality. Weber argued that once some principle of organization - market competition, say, or ideological orthodoxy - has achieved dominance in the spheres of production and governance, the rest of a society’s institutions find themselves gradually but inexorably adopting the same principle. In an ideology-dominant society, everything fluid turns to stone; in a market-dominant society, everything solid melts into air.©2015 Foreign Affairs (P)2015 Audible, Inc.