The Twentieth Century Intermingles Marxian and Weberian Ideas

Weber deserves to be named as the individual who set off modern conflict sociology. Not that Engels and Marx were not more fundamental, but for them sociology was buried in politics and (especially for Marx) in economics and philosophy. Weber, although an economist and a lawyer by academic training, nevertheless helped found the German Sociological Association and identified his own work as sociological. Furthermore Weber's comprehensive efforts to lay out all the factors that would go into understanding the development of capitalism set the contours of the field. In the generations after

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Weber, sociology became much more directly empirical, relying not only on historical comparisons, but also on systematic research efforts to gather new data. The historical and comparative data -- which are of course empirical, too, though collected in a different way -- have come to be treated in a more explicitly theoky-building and theory-testing way than Weber himself treated them. His pioneering efforts and his ideal types provided the nucleus of concepts and theories that were fleshed out by subsequent research and of course transformed as our theoretical viewpoints continued to develop.

Politically, of course, Marxism has maintained a distinctive identity throughout the twentieth century. This has obscured the fact that intellectually the conflict tradition, common to both Marx and Weber, has gone on from both of them and that there has been a great deal of crisscrossing between the lines. We even see this in the young generation that followed right after Weber. One of the intellectuals that frequented Weber's salon at Heidelberg was a young Hungarian Marxist, Georg Lukács, whom Weber greatly respected despite their disagreements. Lukács, like his Italian counterpart Antonio Gramsci, bucked the tide of Marxian economism and materialism and developed a Hegelian account of class conflict that emphasized the "false consciousness" of the higher social classes. In Lukács's view, the higher social classes were more alienated from reality and from true human essence than the oppressed lower classes because they purveyed the reified ideology of the permanence of the capitalist order. How much Weber influenced Lukács's ideas is not clear, but it does illustrate the way in which Marxians and Weberians were already part of the same intellectual circle.

Another instance of this intermingling is the development of sociology at Frankfurt. There the so-called "Frankfurt School" of Marxists, led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, had a research institute endowed by a wealthy supporter (again the material means of mental production). Adorno's ideas went in the direction of Lukács' philosophy of alienation and reification, whereas Horkheimer brought in Freudian theories to synthesize with Marx. Another member of the school was Herbert Marcuse, who took both of these

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themes and fashioned a critique of capitalist culture that later served as a rallying cry for the radical wing of the student movement in the 1960s. A more materialist form of Marxism was produced by Karl Wittfogel, who tried to show that China and other forms of "Oriental Despotism" were distinctive because of their own economic base. In Wittfogel's view, they were "hydraulic civilizations," based not on the private landed property of an aristocracy or slave owners, but on irrigation works built by the state. Hence the state itself was the key economic entity in the Orient and private classes did not strongly develop. Here again we see that the Marx Engels scheme was not simply a finished set of stages, but an incentive to understand the variety of societies in world history by the variety of economic factors. And it fits with the point just made above that the state itself must be seen as an economic entity in its own right.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1115