Institutional Culture: Weber And Marx

When talking about Weber's research on the modern capitalism in the West, Chinese scholars always stress on his achievement of religions sociology, but underrate or even ignore his analysis of western social institution, one of his great achievements. To some degree, this is mostly due to the lack of institution analysis in Karl Marx's dualistic analysis of society, that is the analysis of two kinds of relationships: one is the relationship between productive forces and production relations, the other is the relationship between economic basis and superstructure. Therefore, it is quite necessary to make a comparative research on institutional civilization of Weber's and Marx's, as which can provide theoretical references to develop Marxism.When probing to the emergence of western capitalism and its condition, Weber put forward four institutional conditions as proofs for his ideas about institutional analysis, namely contractual feudal autocracy, rational economic system, pluralistic authority and legal bureaucracy. In his opinion, these four institutions are not only the locomotives that spur western society on to modernization, but also more rational explanations of the unsuccessful change of social formation into a modern one in China in modern times.