Studies in Social and Political Theory (RLE Social Theory) by Anthony Giddens

Author:Anthony Giddens [Giddens, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317650645
Google: 3_pTBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-21T05:00:57+00:00

Marx and Weber: problems of class structure

Over recent years, there has grown up a tradition of scholarship, particularly among American authors, which treats the writings of Max Weber on issues of class structure, class conflict and capitalism as ‘extensions’ or ‘elaborations’ of Marx’s views on these matters. Perhaps the origin of this standpoint is to be found in Gerth and Mills’s introduction to what was, and probably remains, the most widely used selection of translations from the spectrum of Weber’s works. ‘Much of Weber’s work’, they say, is ‘informed by a skilful application of Marx’s historical method’; and they continue: ‘Part of Weber’s own work may be thus seen as an attempt to “round out” Marx’s economic materialism by a political and military materialism.’83 The intellectual relation between Marx and Weber is a matter of some complexity since, as has just been indicated, Weber’s proximate polemical targets were often the leading Marxists of his time, whose versions of Marxism were mainly of a ‘mechanical’ kind. But there are clear conceptual continuities between Marx and Weber in the latter’s use of the terms ‘class’, ‘class conflict’ and ‘capitalism’,84 and it is important to recognize that such terminological similarities readily may serve to gloss over what are perhaps the most deep-lying divergencies between the two thinkers.

Weber’s specific use of ‘class’ connects both with his characterization of ‘capitalism’ as a type of socio-economic organization, and more generally as the modern Western form of society and culture, on the one hand, and with the emphases of his methodological writings on the other; all of these decisively separate his views from those of Marx. It is commonly accepted that Weber’s famous threefold differentation of class, status and party is in some part directed polemically against what Weber saw as Marx’s tendency to reduce too much of history to the history of class struggles. ‘Status groups’ (Stände) play a major role in history, and are not based directly upon economic relations as classes are; and in recognizing the third mode of organization linked to the promotion of interests, the formation of parties in the modern polity, Weber gives conceptual recognition to his theme that politics is not merely, or even perhaps primarily, an expression of class divisions. But it is not these factors alone that set Weber’s analysis off from that of Marx: the more basic differences centre upon the notions of ‘class’ and ‘class conflict’ themselves.

Weber, like Marx, accepts that ‘ “property” and “lack of property” are … the basic categories of all class situations’;85 and his typology of ‘ownership’ and ‘acquisition classes’ is based upon such a categorization. But most of the weight in Weber’s discussion is placed upon the advantages that can be mobilized in market relations by the possession of particular types of property – combined with the stress that the kinds of services that can be offered on the market also provide for the differential mobilization of market advantages among the propertyless. For Weber, ‘class’ is thus distinctively associated with the

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