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Brandy Payne

Midterm
Questions 2 and 3

Social thought is often categorized as either idealist or materialist. There is a distinction between the two that many may have trouble seeing. I am going to be discussing the views of Karl Marx, which was a materialist, and Max Weber an idealist. I hope that at the end of this essay one will be able to decipher between the two men’s point of views and the difference between an idealist and a materialist.

Karl Marx’s focus on the process of social change, is so central to this thinking that it informs all his writings (Masters of Sociological Thought 1977:55). He felt that a society was not based on the positions that people held but by the organization of people within the environment. He thought that there was an inequality within the communities based on the three divisions of labor; hunting and fishing, rearing animals and agriculture.

Marx’s materialism is not the denial of the importance of ideas, concepts, and values for people, like the materialism of Feuerback, but an assertion that ideas ultimately have a material origin in the real conditions of existence (handout on Marx and Engels). He stated that division of labor leads to emergence of stratification. Because humans produce their own means of life, the means available to them to do so determines their level of existence. These are what Marx called the "productive forces" of society (www.real-socialism.org). He felt that men and women make their own history and that through out history men change nature to make it better serve their own interest and well doing this they change themselves within the process. They don’t acknowledge the change but it is done.

Marx’s says: “Men begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence in producing their means of subsistence men indirectly produce their actual material life (Masters of Sociological Thought 1977:55). He felt that people are influenced by categories of people, as distinct from individuals. I tried to think of a definition for materialist and all I could come up with was that it was tangible. Marx’s was not a believer of a unilinear evolution. Marx’s felt that with the change that was going to happen that the working class would eventually dominate a classless society.

Max Weber believed that reality was too complex to be entirely known or understood. He felt that man as a active, purposive, and free actor in the realm of culture and history could not be dealt with by the analytical and generalizing methods appropriate for the investigation of nature (Masters of Sociological Thought 1977:244). In his views to analysis one must particularize rather than generalize. This means that in order to take apart something, one must not look at the whole view they must take a closer look at the smaller things that make up the big picture.

He was greatly influenced by three men, Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert, and Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey wanted to teach Weber a combination of materialism and idealism. He taught Weber that human knowledge could only truly be found through experience and internal process. Man could not learn merely through structured lecture, or should I say understand through this. He thought that one had to understand the forms of social action to get the drift of historical change.

Richert and Windelband tried to teach him that generalizing thought is not inapplicable. This is very close to what Dilthey had taught him. Weber believed that the shift from rational action is crucial. He states that rationalization of economic action can only be realized when traditional notions about just prices or just wages are discarded and a positive ethical sanction is provided for acquisitive activities aimed at maximizing the self interests of the actor (Masters of Sociological Thought 1977:226). I feel that he is trying to say that in order to understand or to make a change you need to forget about what is expected and begin to think about what is deserved.

One difference Weber had with Marx is when he defined class as a category of men. People are placed into classes by their consumption patterns rather than where they stand economically or politically. In Webers view every society is divided into groups. These groups and strata stand to create difference within the society.

So in summary, Marx was a dialectical materialist who insisted that ideologies arise out of material conditions and serve the interests of social classes. Weber was an idealist who insisted that ideologies have an independent existence, and that there may be an "elective affinity" between ideologies and class interests (http://www.6sociologists.20m.com/). Marx felt that in order to get change there must be social conflict. Where as Weber felt that change came from structural or historical forces. Marx believed that the modern worker is not in control of his fate, is forced to sell his labor (and thus his self) to private capitalists. Weber countered that loss of control at work was an inescapable result of any system of rationally coordinated production (Coser, 1977:232). To end this I will leave you with a quote from Max Weber speaking about what the future might hold. "No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has obtained a level of civilization never before achieved" (Weber, 1904/1930: 181).