Page 69 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

founding text of the Western Marxist tradition is widely agreed to be
Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, first published in
1923, a work clearly indebted to its author’s own one-time mentor,
Max Weber (1864–1920). Before we proceed to an account of Western
Marxism, a brief detour through German sociology therefore becomes
necessary. Weber himself is undoubtedly the key figure in the
development of German sociology. A direct contemporary of Kautsky,
his work was informed by a very immediate response to Second
International Marxism. It is common in the anglophone literature to
link Weber together with Emile Durkheim as the “founding fathers”
of sociology, and to contrast the classical sociology thereby constructed
with the classical Marxism of Marx and Engels. In my view, this
exaggerates the affinities between Weber and Durkheim, and also
overlooks the extent to which Marx and Weber can both be situated
within a specifically German tradition of debate about culture and
society. Weber’s stress on the causal efficacy of culture, it seems to
me, is better seen as an important corrective to an over-emphasis on
material factors in SPD Marxism than as embodying any outright
rejection of Marx’s Marxism per se. This is certainly the position
which Weber himself took in 1905: “it is, of course, not my aim to
substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic
causal interpretation of culture and of history”. 40
Western Marxism would learn three things from Weber: that ideas
matter a great deal more than Kautsky and Plekhanov had imagined,
and significantly more than had Marx; that the capitalist system remains
subject to a developmental logic of rationalization; and that social
order depends substantially on political legitimacy. The first such
lesson is asserted most effectively in The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism. Weber clearly accepted, and indeed became
fascinated by, the type of correlation between social stratification
and cultural belief that Marx had analysed in terms of ideology. Between
Marx (or, at least, Engels) and Weber there is no real disagreement as
to the correlation between Calvinism and capitalism. What Weber
insists on, however, is the view that Protestant beliefs played an active,
energising, rôle in the social process by which capitalism came into
being. Thus The Protestant Ethic is designed to demonstrate the extent
to which “religious forces have taken part in the qualitative formation
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and the quantitative expansion” of the spirit of capitalism.
The rationalization thesis is central to Weber’s account both of

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