SOURCE: "Logic and Fate in Weber's Sociology," in For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, second edition, SAGE Publications, 1996, pp. 3-28.

In the following essay, Turner discusses Weber as a neo-Kantian thinker, and contrasts his sociological ideas with those of Karl Marx.

With the development of various radical movements in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxists became increasingly insistent on demonstrating the presence of a sharp dividing line between conventional sociology and Marx's theory of society. In mounting a critique of the claims of sociology to a scientific status, Marxists have frequently selected Max Weber's sociology as the principal illustration of the limitations of sociological reasoning or of its irreducible ideological underpinnings. Weber appears to have come to the forefront of this debate because sociologists themselves have claimed that Weber provides the only valid reply to Marx's analyses of socio-economic relationships. Weber's studies of...