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Modern society, or modernity, according to Giddens (1990) is defined as modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards & which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. Karl Marx and Max Weber are two prominent social scientists who had different views on modern society, but it is still important to compare and contrast their work in order to better understand modernity.
Karl Marx was a deep and complicated thinker, but his ideas are presented in very simplistic and politically motivated ways. For Marx, of course, the central features were capitalism and all of the consequences that came with capitalism, everything from alienation to forced labor to class divisions and exploitation in society. Marx’s theory of alienation grew out of the young Hegelians (particularly Ledwig Feuerbach), who argued that people ascribed to God qualities which they themselves actually possess. He criticizes the alienation that arises from capitalism and defines it as a condition of profound loss of control over one’s own activities and creations and this in turn renders those activities and creations meaningless and oppressive. Our ability to create freely and autonomously and on behalf of society is central to our humanity. Capitalism takes away our control over our activities and creations and in turn something that is supposed to make us happy, it turns out make us feel like we are oppressed. Furthermore, the more capitalism advances, the more impoverished the workers become. “The worker becomes poorer the richer is his production, the more it increases in power and scope. The worker becomes a commodity that is all the cheaper and the more commodities he creates. The depreciation of the human world progresses in direct proportion to the increase in the value of the world of things. Labour does not only produce commodities; it produces itself and the labour as a commodity…” (86). Under capitalism, workers are alienated from the product of their labour, the process of production, their “species-being”, what makes them human and other people.
Max Weber made many great contributions to the social sciences but what’s clear about Weber is that he was a systematic thinker who cross disciplinary boundaries and in many ways transcended them and is an originator of so many foundational concepts and ideas in ways of thinking that in many ways continue to influence different branches of the social sciences. Like Marx, Weber wants to identify the central features of the modern world. Both recognized that society was changing radically and wanted to identify what was special about the modernization. He tells us it was about capitalism, or specifically what he calls modern capitalism, and this was also central from him. In fact, he tells us this was the most fateful force in modern life; But he doesn’t focus so much on these other dimensions of capitalism in a way that Marx did. Instead, he emphasizes a different feature of modernity and this is rationality, or an approach he took in his work known as rationalism. He begins his introduction to the text, the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, by arguing that scientific knowledge and observation have existed elsewhere but the rational proof that you see in western science. Moreover, he claims we also see in the west a systemic, rational approach to everything from law, music, architecture to institutions of social life including things like education, the state and economy. In fact, his idea of rationalism and its centrality, not just to capitalism that this becomes embedded in the emergence of the modern world in general.
Rationalization for Weber must be seen as part of the foundation of the modern western world – its tendency to favor in all aspects of the social and cultural identity modes of thinking and acting of a rational character rather than modes inspired by respect for tradition or those allowing the spontaneous expression of emotions. He is not indicating that this is positive or negative and in fact elsewhere in his writings we can see that he has a sense that there is a loss of spirit that comes along with capitalism that comes along with these developments of rationality and rationalism in the modern world. Here he is not indicating in the introduction to this text that these are positive developments or negative developments, rather he is framing them as an objective change in the way that western societies have come to think and act in these different areas – that these are peculiar to western modes of thinking and that this warrants exploration for him.
In general, rationality is a matter of fact attitude for understanding the world around you and acting versus an attitude that attributes events to unseen magical forces – it’s a reliance on reason as a guide for belief and action. Weber emphasizes the sheer complexity and multiplicity of rationalism’s meanings and how rationalism is manifested in specific places or parts of society like the law or the economy. He has other views on rationalism but in the context of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, he highlights essentially two kinds of rational action. First is what we generally tend to think of as rationality, which is instrumental behavior driven by an assessment of the costs and benefits of particular courses of action, with the objective of maximizing a rationally chosen goal. This is fairly similar to the way we think of rationality today, which is the idea that individuals have preferences, that those preferences are ranked and that individuals attempt to maximize the benefits to themselves. Weber contrasts this with a second kind of rationality that he calls value-oriented rationality and here he believes that there is a related but separate way of going about the world and this is behavior driven not by thoughts of material gain but by commitment to a particular value. The action that individuals take in this context are determined by whether those actions serve that value. However, he tells us that the value a person pursues might actually produce economic behavior so it might not be motivated by instrumental reasons, but it might result in a kind of instrumental action. Conduct based on economic rationality is central to the development of modern capitalism and what Weber is trying to show us, which is in stark contrast to Marx in terms of explaining the origins of capitalism, is that according to Marx it was primarily a material change in the way that society produced and those material changes had impacts on the way that people thought about the world under capitalism. Weber is acknowledging that of course material changes and the modes of production and technology matter tremendously for the development of capitalism and so much else of social life but what he’s saying here is that ideas also matter – there could be a change in the economy but if you have a particular set of religious ideas then that might act as an inhibitor in the way that you will go about acting in the world. Weber is going to offer us an ideational view and this contrasts with the material view of the development of capitalism. He argues that modern capitalism is not just a quest for acquisition or profit and says that this has always existed. Instead, he says capitalism is the methodical pursuit of profit and modern capitalism is different from the age-old profit maximization for three reasons. First, he tells us that modern capitalism is centered around the organization of free labor and here he sounds like Marx. Second, he says that its defined by the separation of the business from the household. Third, he tells us that modern capitalism is built on double-entry bookkeeping, which is the systematic keeping track of debits and credit. What this formulation of accounting for one’s business activities made possible for capitalists was the ability to evaluate rationally the consequences of their past decisions – they could calculate exactly the resources currently available to them and those that would be forthcoming in the future. All of these different phenomena Weber argued originated from modern times in the west and so this if the foundations of his text.
Marx’s theory in general tells us that the reformation and the rise of Protestantism was an ideological reflection of the economic changes taking place in the early development of capitalism and he has this explanation in theoretical terms that you have a given material mode of production and from that flows a superstructure of political, social ideas and institutions that derive their meaning and significance from the underlying material mode of production. Weber is arguing against that and what he is telling us is that the reformation (change in religious ideas) played a central role in spurring economic changes, not the other way around.
The spirit of capitalism is an attitude of mind or an ethos held among the early capitalists. Weber use an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin’s writings as a prototypical example of the spirit of capitalism. Here we find some of the typical tenets of capitalism – profit maximization as a part of daily life not only for firms but also individuals, disciplined activity and duty. Profit achieved through hard work is seen as a moral end on to itself – you don’t want the profit in order to spend it, you just want the money for the sake of money itself. Weber contrasts this spirit of capitalism with the attitude of traditionalism, or the belief that returns on economic activity should remain at what he refers to as “customary levels” just enough to support one’s customary way of life. This attitude of traditionalism blanketed Europe but gradually in certain pockets, the attitude changed, and it just so happens that intended to change first and most thoroughly in those areas in which the protestant reformation began.
What Weber is explaining to us is that it was this change in values which lead to a change in the ideas that individuals held about their place in the world and what they should be doing with their lives and that when they chose to use their lives to labor on behalf of god, this resulted in “let’s not spend five hours working and then head to the tavern” as he said happened in traditionalism, but we must labor throughout the day, throughout the week and we must labor in order to produce on behalf of the glory of god. This is this idea that one is constantly engaged in work that to waste time is to waste the ability to produce. He tells us that once modern capitalism is established it no longer needs religious ideals to keep it going; Once it is established it becomes a force that essentially sucks everyone in regardless of their religious beliefs and taken on a life of its own. Here we see some affinity with Marx’s idea that capitalism is a force that we can’t escape or control, which was his idea of alienation. Weber refers to capitalism as what he calls an ‘iron cage’ – this is the idea that modern capitalist life is forced on to the individual and everyone must play by the rules even after those rules have lost all religious meaning and significance.
To conclude, Marx and Weber do agree with each other to some extent on certain issues; They both had perceived the social class as the groups which are formed and also structured out from the economical relationships and also believe that class form the info influential social actors in the reference of the capitalist industry. Both of these arguments seem to be equally as compelling for me due to the strong arguments each of the two theorists make.
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