ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the theories that Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber formulated to account for the development of industrial capitalism and modern industrial society. They are still important today because they influenced virtually all subsequent writers who have dealt with issues of social change. Marx argued that the classical political economists ignored the historical specificity of capitalist social relations when they failed to distinguish between different kinds of class structures and forms of exploitation. Durkheim was concerned with the individualism, cult of the individual, and the breakdown of traditional social institutions that accompanied the rise of market exchange and an economy separated from other realms of social being. Weber focused on the interplay of increasing industrialization, instrumental rationality, notions of scientific progress and efficiency, national economic policies, and the state as they penetrated other realms of life—values, habits, customs, and traditions.
