Weber And Marx: The Clash Of Titans

Weber and Marx: The Clash of Titans This week we made a transition from Marx to Weber, another influential sociologist whom doctrines were still being studied and widely applied despite decades have passed. Marx primarily focused on the critique of capitalism and its exploitation of labor workers which caused class struggles. Weber, on the other hand, focused more the motivation behind people’s actions and the political structure of bureaucracy. His most notable works are on modernization and bureaucracy. In this week’s reading, we mainly go through Weber’s definition of the terms and foundation laid for his later work, to help us better understand his doctrines. Most scholars start by defining the terms they use at first. It laid the ground …show more content…
The social relationships can be open to outsiders or rather exclusive. A social relationship that is closed or limits to the outsiders, he called it as an organization, which always have four different types: autonomous, heteronomous, autocephalous, and heterocephalous. Weber also famously talked about power, the ability to carry out one’s own will with regard to others resistance, which is very similar to domination. Different organization, i.e., the state and the church, have their own means of enforcing convention and law, each uses different legitimate domination. Weber named three types of legitimate domination as rational grounds, traditional grounds, and charismatic grounds. He stated that it is rare to see an organization only using one type of legitimate domination; a mixture of domination is more common. Without any concrete theories from Weber to discuss, I shall compare Weber with Marx. Using Weber’s framework to study Marx would be interesting to say the least. Marx based a lot of his …show more content…
Comparing their ideologies might be foolish, but it is also fun to see how the two ‘titans’ in sociology would react to each other’s concepts. One thing I like about Weber more than Marx is his writings. Marx’s targeted audiences were the working class, who did not have a much-advanced education like Marx had, and less free time to read as they were expected to work long hours, yet Marx’s writings are both laborious and arduous. Although Marx explained it as there is no easy way to science and truth, but it is still counter-intuitive as not many working class would be able or willing to read what he intended them to read. Weber, to me, is easier to understand and better at explaining his