Concept
rationalization
In Weber, the progressive making of the world calculable and predictable; associated with disenchantment and the image of the “steel-hard shell” (iron cage).
Weber’s rationalization thesis describes the historical process of the idea that in principle we can master all things by calculation and of the stripping of the world of religious and metaphysical explanations (“disenchantment”). According to the SEP author the thesis is one of his two best-known contributions.
Weber does not see rationalization as unequivocal progress. Calculability and predictability increase individual freedom, but the same force can reduce a person to a cog in a bureaucratic machine. The image of the stahlhartes Gehäuse at the end of The Protestant Ethic (“shell as hard as steel”; “iron cage” in Parsons’s English translation) expresses this second face. You can see the same outlook in Simmel’s metropolis essay: a city life ruled by the clock and by calculation.
Looking at media feeds and algorithms through this concept is our interpretation; Weber did not write about them.
Example
If all the clocks in Berlin ran an hour wrong, the city’s economic life would be thrown into disorder (Simmel, 1903).