Page 71 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 62

Contemporary Cultural Theory

been a problem. Subsequent Marxisms have found it much less
easy, however, to reconcile the two notions. Marxism has often
appeared in the guise of an objective science, dispensed by a
proletarian, or supposedly proletarian, political party; sometimes
as proletarian consciousness, or ideology, whether that of party
or union; and sometimes as the critical consciousness of opposi-
tional intellectuals. But these have rarely been combined so
effectively or so apparently unproblematically as in Marx.

Weber on rationality and legitimation
Classical German sociology was conceived substantially in
reaction to the challenge of Marxism. Max Weber (1864–1920), the
German ‘bourgeois Marx’, became a sociologist, Albert Salomon
famously observed, ‘in a long and intense debate with the ghost
of Marx’ (Salomon, 1945, p. 596). This debate, in turn, decisively
shaped the subsequent history of German sociology; and also
of what is often termed ‘western Marxism’, a phrase coined by
the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty to describe the
tradition of critical Marxism that developed in western Europe,
especially in Germany, in more or less deliberate opposition to
official, Soviet, ‘scientific’ Marxism (Merleau-Ponty, 1974). It is
common in the Anglophone literature to link Weber 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. But 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 us, is better
understood as an important corrective to the overemphasis on
material factors in scientific Marxism than as embodying an
outright rejection of materialism per se. This was certainly Weber’s
own view: ‘it is . . . not my aim to substitute for a one-sided mate-
rialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation
of culture and of history’ (Weber, 1930, p. 183).
Critical theory would learn three things from Weber: that ideas
mattered a great deal more than scientific Marxism had imagined,

62