ABSTRACT
As Löwith notes at the beginning of his essay, his comparison involves a three-way relation, with himself as the third term. His lifelong preoccupation with Heidegger’s existential ontology of human existence led him naturally to interpret Marx and Weber as being centrally concerned with the human condition; not in general, as with much existentialist writing, but under capitalism. In so doing, he provided an important corrective to those views which saw Marx as either a political polemicist or a purely ‘scientific’ analyst of the laws of motion of capitalism, and which took Weber at face value as an empirical scientist eschewing value judgements and speculative philosophy.
