structural:scholar_edition
Inspirations

Another major influence in Weber's life was the writings of Karl Marx and socialist thought in academia and active politics. While Weber agreed with Marx on the importance of social conflict, he did not think that it would destroy a society if the traditions that upheld it were valued more than it was. Furthermore, the thought that a social conflict would have been resolvable within the preexisting social system. Writing in 1932, Karl Löwith contrasted the work of Marx and Weber, arguing that both were interested in the causes and effects of Western capitalism, but they viewed it through different lenses. Marx viewed capitalism through the lens of alienation, while Weber used the concept of rationalisation to interpret it. Weber also expanded Marx's interpretation of alienation from the specific idea of the worker who was alienated from his work to similar situations that involved intellectuals and bureaucrats. Scholars during the Cold War frequently interpreted Weber as having been "a bourgeois answer to Marx", but he was actually responding to the issues that were relevant to the bourgeoisie in Wilhelmine Germany. In that regard, he focused on the conflict between rationality and irrationality.