Karl Marx and Max Weber

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Weber’s treatment of class and status indicates the mannes in which the material bases of society is related to the ideological. Social conflicts can result from one or the other, or both. Social action is motivated by both, thought is some cases more one than the other. By bringing is status, Weber provides a more flexible view of the details of social differences, and their implications for the lived experience of social actors. Weber’s sketch on social stratification presents his wision as following: classes are defined by the market power, and this is the position that a person occupies in the exchange market. From his point of view the social classes are based on three factors: power, wealth and predtige. He defines classes as a group of individuals that share common factors that determines their life chances. He starts form the idea of class situation, precisely from the typical probability of each individual in a society. „Weber did not believe that class interests necessarily led to uniformity in social actions. Neither communal nor societal action in the inexorable result of class interest. Weber challenges, here, the Marxian notion of the primarily material basis of social action. He is not denying it outright, but rather, introducing an element of unpredictability. Weber did not believe that proletarian revolutionary action would arise as a certain result of structural contradiction.”(Prof. Timothy Shortell, Weber’s Theory of Social Class)

He also considered religion as a huge social factor in the evolution of the society. The emergence of protestantism was considered by him the main change in society, it bringing beliefs, he argued that the new values introduced: austerity, freedom of thought and autonomy were values required in the creation of capitalist thoughts and actions which led to the industrial revolution.

In conclusion the two scholars have similar views on the question of social order, but both of them prioritized an another aspect of this. Marx considered class division as the most important source of social conflict, while Weber’s analysis of class is similar to Marx’s, he discusses class in the context of social stratification more generally. Marx’s vision had a huge influence in the 20th century, mainly in the Eastern European countries, majority of Asian countries and some countries in Africa and Cuba. His ideology was to ideal to work properly, that it is what Weber considered, and it was true, because of the fall of the Communist and Socialist systems at the end of the 1980’s and beginning of the 1990’s. Still today, socialism is saw by many people as an ideal form of society, but our world functions on capitalist ideas. Weber’s understanding of social order is the strongest and most pertinent to our world today, his division of classes, and the movement between them is present in today society. Because of his rational vision and because he rejected positivism, he could construct an understanding sociology, by which he observed the individuals actions and thoughts and the motive behind these.

In the end Weber's analysis of social order expanding Marx's theory, showing how, within a capitalistic democracy there is space to correlate along different lines than entirely economic ones. Marx suggests that capitalism as a system wraps political and economic interpratiation of society into one. At this stage, it would seem that Marx and Weber's theories of how people organize themselves are not, in the end, so remarkably different. While Weber's theories depend on capitalism and democracy, they might be thought of as more comparative at their root, while Marx's theories are firmly planted in a pure, material analysis of modern relationships.

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