ABSTRACT
Weber’s sociology is much closer to Marx than Durkheim’s is, comprising a critique of so-called vulgar Marxism, i.e. the idea that social life, including culture, is a simple function of the economic structure. Weber took Marx for a vulgar Marxistunderstandably, given the unavailability to him of Marx’s early writings, which unequivocally contradict such vulgar readings. Coming from a very different philosophical background from that of Marx, Weber was allied to the Neo-Kantian rather than the Hegelian tradition in German thought. Neo-Kantians were philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who followed the teachings of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant saw human beings as existing only partly in the world of natural causality, and partly in a realm of freedom, governed by moral rules rather than causes. Consequently, human beings could not be understood entirely by natural science; the study of their moral and spiritual life would have to be pursued by other means. Nevertheless, Weber shared some of Marx’s key assumptions and also his core concern with the nature of capitalism. However, he held very different conceptions of the nature of history, and also of the methodology of historical and sociological studies.
