Max Weber

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts.

The world is a great enchanted garden.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.

The state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence.

The 'calling' is a religious concept, a gift of grace from God.

The development toward a bureaucratic structure is a slow, powerful, and irresistible process.

The Puritan's idea of a calling was that of a task set by God, which he had to fulfill in the world.

The 'spirit' of capitalism, in the sense in which we use the term, is the attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically, and which applies this profit to the accumulation of capital.

The state is a compulsory political organization with a centralized government that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory.

The 'disenchantment of the world' means that there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.

The bureaucratic form of organization is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings.

The 'iron cage' is a metaphor for the increasing rationalization inherent in social life, particularly in Western capitalist societies.

The modern capitalist enterprise rests on the calculation of capital.

The 'calling' is a religious concept, a gift of grace from God, which imposes upon the individual the duty to work diligently in his worldly profession.

The 'disenchantment of the world' is the process by which modern society has become increasingly secularized and rationalized, losing its sense of magic and mystery.

The 'spirit' of capitalism is characterized by a rational pursuit of profit and a systematic organization of labor.

The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state.

The 'iron cage' of bureaucracy is a metaphor for the dehumanizing effects of rationalization and the increasing control of individuals by impersonal rules and procedures.

The 'calling' is a religious concept that emphasizes the importance of hard work, diligence, and asceticism in one's worldly profession.