ABSTRACT
Karl Marx died one hundred years ago and, throughout the duration of this year, all over the world, his work is being remembered and celebrated. Nicholas Luhmann, in his anti-Marxist, rather than Marxist, book on the sociology of knowledge, provides people with a theory through which they can understand the modern character of Marx’s undertaking. Luhmann characterizes the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a period of transition from premodern societies to modern societies. For Marx, modernity was born with industrial capitalism. Marx often referred to finance and commercial capital as antediluvian forms of capital. As is well known, it was Max Weber who first coined the concept “rationalization” and distinguished it from rationality. Marx emphasized several times that modern, socioeconomic classes differ substantially from all previous social classes, and he described this difference in many ways.
