SOURCE: "Marx, Weber, and Contemporary Sociology," in Max Weber's Political Sociology: A Pessimistic Vision of a Rationalized World, edited by Ronald M. Glassman and Vatro Murvar, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 69-81.

In the following essay, Wrong explains the influence of Marxist theory on Weber's thought.

The failure of our multiple particular researches conducted with increasingly precise and complex methods to cumulate into a coherent overall vision of the world largely accounts for the immense flowering of interest in recent years in the so-called classical sociologists. This new interest has been especially pronounced in the cases of Marx and Weber, both of whose work was preeminently historical in focus, guided by what the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch called the "principle of historical specificity."

A major theme of recent discussions of Weber has been his relation to Marx and Marxism, discussions that have revised the simplistic view of Weber as an...