ABSTRACT
Weber’s sociology is much closer to Marx than Durkheim’s, 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 Marxist-understandably, given the unavailability to him of Marx’s early writings, which quite unequivocally contradict such vulgar readings. Coming from a very different philosophical background to Marx, Weber was allied to the Neo-Kantian rather than 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. This meant that human beings could not be understood entirely by natural science and that 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 of the methodology of historical and sociological studies.
