Those readers of a certain age who, as undergraduates in college, were rightly assigned to read Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism will without much effort recall certain phrases from the conclusion of that book. They are able to do so because those phrases, with their rhetorical flourish, are memorable, describing, perhaps too melodramatically, what is taken to be modern life. The most famous of those phrases is the description of the circumstances of our life as being an “iron cage,” inhabited by, to refer to another of those well-known phrases of that conclusion, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart: this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”