The Basic Connotation Of Marx, Weber’s Modernity Thoughts And Its Comparative Study

Modernity has been an enduring topic of academia, in essence, modernity is thethe fundamental characteristics of modern society. Modernity throughout many fieldssuch as economy, culture, social, political and other fields, and it has become the coreproblem of today, and in contact with the social development and human destinyclosely.This dissertation centers upon the question domain of modernity criticism,thoroughly explaining the sociological theories of Karl Marx and Weber and making acomparison between their theories. This dissertation though discussing their theoriesto find the logic clue to their theoretical development.Karl Marx and Weber are the modern socialists of German, they studied deep onthe origin of capitalism, but got different conclusion. Karl Marx was a pioneer tostudy modernity, he described modernity by“Commodity”,“Capital”,“Alienation”.Commodity is the starting point of his critique of Modernity, he thought that thepresence of commodity makes society has taken changes a lot, on the other hand, theexchange of commodity changes relationship between people and people into therelationships of things. Marx thought “Capital” is the essence and fundamentalprinciple of modernity, but also the crux of the problem of modernity, it is establishedthe basic direction for us to study modernity problem. Marx used “Alienation” tointerpret modern capitalism, deeply insight into how modern capitalism destroysmen’s humanity, introduced the critique of modernity into the real society, andbased on practice to explore the outlet of the freedom of the comprehensive. So,Marx’s critique of modernity was to rebuild modernity, and finally realizes thehumanity liberation.Weber thought modernity is rational, he put the modernization process ofcapitalism as a disenchantment and secularized historical process of”rationalization”,rational penetrated into all areas of society, mainly in the cultural, social, economicand political fields. Thus, to extend the rational as a simple people’s thinkingability to the person’s action, social and history and other reality field, and to describe the evolution of the development of the modern western society, and to explaincapitalism took place in the west, and try to use the spirit of Capitalism to promotethe development of capitalism.There are two logics in Weber’s rational: culturalaspect and social aspect.The cultural aspect reflects the contradiction betweenobjective reason and subjective reason, the universal of reason was dispelled, and thevalue pluralism arises;The social aspect reflects the objective rational internalcontrol value rationality.Then,Weber diagnosed as "significant loss" and "free loss".He thought that human cannot walk out the cycle of objective rational overwhelmedthe rational value, and ultimately he made pessimistic explanation to theconsequences of modernity.After the discussion and comparison of Marx and Weber’ thought of modernity,this paper reached a conclusion that the relation of the their modernity thought is nota rival, but a relationship of inheritance and development. A study of their thought notonly can provide theoretical basis for the understanding of modern society for us, butalso provide a effective way to further understand modern society.