Iron Cage

The German sociologist Max Weber—who’s perhaps best known for his writings on what he called the Protestant work ethic and capitalism, though he was also one of the key players in interweaving sociology with economics—coined the phrase “stahlhartes Gehäuse,” which translates to “steel-hard casing,” but which was later reinterpreted as “iron cage,” to refer to the encasement of capitalistic systems within which modern human beings live.

Said another way: the structures of capitalistic theory, the bureaucracies that maintain and enforce the strictures of that theory, and the practical consequences of capitalistic philosophies that manage scarce resources (but also our social, relational, and even chronological considerations in the modern world) have created a flexible but nearly indestructible shell in which we all operate, often without realizing we’re inside anything at all (this shell is solid but invisible).