ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the broad classical explanations of Karl Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Du Bois, from which many modern thinkers have drawn. Marx is discussed first because virtually all of his central ideas were formulated before any of the others and because subsequent theories are often viewed as reactions to Marx’s work. The widespread nature of social inequality makes explaining it all the more important. The capitalist structure itself strengthens its seeming inevitability by creating a working class that because of custom and training comes to view “the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature”. According to Marx, capitalism as a mode of production has gone through three principal stages: cooperation, manufacture, and modern industry. In modern industry, machines are organized into a division of labor similar to that which existed among laborers during the manufacture period. Weber contended that alienation, impersonality, bureaucracy, and, in general, rationalization would be permanent societal features.
