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Essay / Karl Marx and Weber's Theory of Criticism - 1091
During our studies of the classical sociological theorist, there has been a strong focus on three key figures who inspired the Enlightenment period. Karl Marx was one of the first enlightened thinkers of his time. He saw the usefulness of observing the world with empirical data to gain insights about the world. He considers the mode of production and the source of materialism as the source of all things. He considered that the interaction between people and the material they worked with influenced each other. He also believed that capitalism created a kind of alienation between all things in the world: alienation from work, from people, and from the world itself. He also focused on the bourgeoisies and their interaction with the proletarian class. After MarxWeber, he focused more on “the individual rather than the collective whole” (Craig Calhoun 2012: 267). Max Weber considered scientific knowledge of society and culture to be a secondary piece of evidence to support it. The individuality of things is not supported only by the “nature of things”, but by the one who seeks the information himself. Weber's conception of sociological explanation is rooted in his notions of interpretation and ideal type. Weber, approaching the social sciences in a way that allowed him to escape the traps of historicism, attempted to devise procedures that would allow for more generalizable inferences than historians generally permitted. When it comes to discussing social class, Weber emphasizes that there are two major factors to remember: power and financial status. Social class is not an effective way to protect one's position or wealth in a society because it is entirely market-based. The alternative to social classes are status groups. They are more likely to lead unified collective actions, they “express the fact that above all a specific lifestyle is expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle” (Craig Calhoun 2012: 315). Weber saw a fundamental problem of modern society as a weakness of capitalism, but unlike Marx, it is the process of rationalization and the increase in bureaucracies that pose a threat to creativity and the idea of economics. These three, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber, collectively gave individual insight into how they believed society worked, giving a broader look at analyzing the population at large while also giving perspectives multiple which reinforce the complexity and varied bases for the development of social changes which favor the continuous evolution of society, while inheriting certain truths and facts. which continue to remain relevant in today's period and which await future generations