Marx The Sociologist

Pure German philosophy was Marx’ starting point.

He was a Neo-Hegelian.

• He accepted his master Hegel’s fundamental attitudes and methods.
• But he and his group replaced, with opposites, the conservative interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy

He used Hegelian phraseology. But this is all.

He never betrayed positive science for metaphysics.

Marx the sociologist used his extensive command of historical and contemporaneous facts for his aims.

The economic interpretation of history does not mean that men are, consciously or unconsciously, wholly or primarily, actuated by economic motives.

On the contrary, the explanation of the role and mechanism of non-economic motives and the analysis of the way in which social reality mirrors itself in the individual psyches is an essential element of the theory and one of its most significant contributions.

Marx did not hold that religions, metaphysics, schools of art, ethical ideas and political volitions were either reducible to economic motives or of no importance.

He only tried to unveil the economic conditions which shape them and which account for their rise and fall.

The whole of Max Weber’s facts and arguments fits perfectly into Marx’s system.

Social groups and classes and the ways in which these groups or classes explain to themselves their own existence, location and behavior were of course what interested him most.

He poured the vials of his most bilious wrath on the historians who took those attitudes and their verbalizations (the ideologies or, as Pareto would have said, derivations) at their face value and who tried to interpret social reality by means of them.

But if ideas or values were not for him the prime movers of the social process, neither were they mere smoke.

In the social engine, they were the transmission belts.

We cannot touch upon that most interesting post-war development of these principles which would afford the best instance by which to explain this, the Sociology of Knowledge. 3

But it was necessary to say this much because Marx has been persistently misunderstood in this respect.

Even Engels, at the open grave of Marx, defined the theory as meaning that individuals and groups are swayed primarily by economic motives.

But this is wrong.

Marx called the economic interpretation of history as the materialistic interpretation.

But it is entirely meaningless.

Marx’s philosophy is no more materialistic than is Hegel’s.*

His theory of history is not more materialistic than is any other attempt to account for the historic process by the means at the command of empirical science.

This is logically compatible with any metaphysical or religious belief—exactly as any physical picture of the world is.

Medieval theology itself supplies methods by which it is possible to establish this compatibility.4