Economic Sociology

Economic Sociology: A Brief History

The birth of economic sociology can be found in the writings of Karl Marx. Marx made it his mission to combat the German historicist emphasis placed on G. W. F. Hegel's idealism. The historicist tendency to give causal primacy to idealist factors was replaced by the emphasis Marx and Frederick Engels placed on the material roots of social change. Marx worked to provide a general theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of capitalism, but criticized the political economists for their naïve understanding of how the market produced class antagonism. The general theory of economic development Marx proposed placed class at the center of analysis and posited the inevitable decline of capitalism to be replaced by socialism. Marx did not champion the idea of the mutual constitution of [Page 252]state and economy but, rather, saw the political structure of a society as growing out of, legitimating, and obscuring the exploitation upon which an economic order is based.

Although Marxist historical materialism was a powerful strain of economic sociology, Max Weber developed another distinct strand. Weber disliked both the overly rigid theoretical framework of Marxist historical materialism and the atheoretical just-so studies of his German historicist predecessors. Weber's work refocused analysis on the institutions that condition the motivations, goals, and possibilities for economic action ignored by Marx, and, as such, Weber's concern with the state was much deeper than was Marx's. Weber's focus on “social action,” or action oriented toward another person, made him consider power, belief, habit, and the role that organizations play in economic life as central to his economic sociology. Weber emphasized that the political order was linked with the legal order that provided the basis for the economic order in a given society.

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