ABSTRACT
Berger is emphatically clear that the classical sociologist with whom he has the most intimate affinity is Max Weber. Durkheim's introduction and creatively innovative employment of macro-level concepts such as anomie and egoism are emphatically manifestations of understanding of aggregated subjective meanings that easily match in explanatory power and flexibility anything that Weber produced. Furthermore, in 1986, Berger's condemnation of Marx's work for introducing philosophical assumptions in the form of his labor theory of value, in place of social scientific concepts that can be organized into testable propositions, has implications that seem to elude him. In writing The Capitalist Revolution, Berger seems not to have noticed that the uniformly favorable good economic times of the post-World War II era had already begun to fade rather badly. Though positivism rejects introspective and intuitive knowledge, it's difficult to imagine how Durkheim could have derived some of his most influential and fruitful concepts, especially macro-level ideas pertaining to his research on suicide.
