By Hernán B. Aliaga
Continuing with our philosophical vignettes from Berlin, a taster of one of the most important thinkers and polymaths of the last century. Max Weber was a critic of capitalism but with more complex variants than Marx. His description of rationalisation can be read as an important predecessor of the concept of hegemony as stated by Antonio Gramsci
What if I told you that the same process that gave us science, technology, rights, and hospitals is also the one that confines us to empty routines, impassive bureaucracies and soulless jobs? Max Weber called this process rationalisation.
Rationalisation is the way how modernity organises life: everything must be measurable, predictable, efficient. Emotions, traditions and mysteries are displaced by the logic of means and ends, the computation of costs and benefits. We gain control but we lose wonder, vital intensity, spark and meaning.
The consequence is what Weber called an “iron cage”: not a prison imposed from the outside, but a rationalised structure of rules, functions and procedures that, once internalised, molds human action according to criteria of utility, efficiency, and professionalism. Repression is no longer necessary: the modern subject demands of himself to be effective, methodical and productive, as if his sense of worth or secular salvation depended on it.
In this professionalised cage —where everything works but nothing “resonates,” as Hartmut Rosa will later say— the world becomes disenchanted and life becomes functionally correct but existentially mute.
A “disenchanted” world no longer inhabited by gods, symbols or sacred values but by figures, data and procedures. Everything is explainable, nothing is awe-inspiring. Before, a forest could be a magical place inhabited by spirits; today, it is a natural resource managed by forestry engineers and measured in cubic meters of timber. In the past, love could be destiny; nowadays, it is a match optimised by algorithms. Before, death could be a sacred transition, a shared mystery; now, it is a hospital procedure covered by insurance and codified by protocols.
In this total clarity, in this perfect and functional proceduralism, something essential is extinguished.
Because in this completely rationalised environment, there is no longer any mystery, no symbolic dimension, no metaphysical depth.
Weber, of course, does not reject rationality in any way but he warns of its profound ambivalence: the more we perfect control, the more we narrow the horizon of meaning.
The cage not only imprisons the body, but extinguishes the soul as well.
Hernán B. Aliaga is a writer and a social philosopher. He is a former lecturer at Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru. He has been educated between Lima and Berlin where he now lives and is working on his doctoral thesis on social theory. He is an active commentator on social media. This is the first of a series of articles on social philosophy for Perro Negro in English. Most have already posted in Spanish in his Instagram page. You can also follow him on https://hernanbaliaga.substack.com/ and TikTok
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