Karl Marx And Weber's Theory Of Criticism

During our studies on the classical sociological theorist there has been a heavy focus on three key figures inspired the enlightenment period. Karl Marx was one of the first enlighten thinkers of his time, he saw the usefulness of observing the world with empirical data to obtain information about the world. He view the mode of production and the source of materialism the source for all things. He viewed the interaction between people and the material they worked with influence each other. He also believed that capitalism created a sort of alienation between all things in the world: Alienation from work, from people and from the world itself. He also focused on the bourgeoisies and their interaction with the proletariat class. Following Marx
Weber focused more on the “individual rather than the collective whole” (Craig Calhoun 2012, 267). Max Weber regarded scientific knowledge of society and culture as a one side fact of evidence to support it. The individualness of things not support by just the “nature of things” but by the one who seeks out the information themselves. Weber 's conception of sociological explanation is rooted in his notions of interpretation and the ideal type. Weber, approaching social science in a manner which allowed him to escape the pitfalls of historicism, attempted to devise procedures to permit more generalizable inferences than historians typically permitted themselves. When it comes to discussing social classes, Weber emphasized that there are two major factors to remember: power and financial status. Social class is not an efficient way for one to protect their position or wealth in a society because it is all market based. The alternative to social classes are Status groups. They have a better chance of unified collective actions, they “express the fact that above all else a specific style of life is expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle” (Craig Calhoun 2012, 315). Weber saw a fundamental problem of modern society as a weakness in capitalism, however unlike Marx, it is the process of rationalization and the increase of bureaucracies that bring a threat to creativity and the idea of
These three, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, have collectively given individual insight into how they believed society worked, giving a broader look into analyzing the general populace while given multiple viewpoints that furthers the complexity and assorted basis of developing social changes that further the continual shifting of society, while inheriting certain truths and facts that continue to stay relevant within today’s time period and expected future generations to