The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast the analytic and argumentative format employed by six different political theorists, three of whom can be characterized as "classical" and three of whom are categorized as "modern." In the first set are Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Joseph Schumpeter. In the second, the "modern" theorists to be examined are Barbara Geddes, Benedict Anderson, and Ronald Rogowski. At issue is not the specific ideas and hypotheses regarding class, meanings and individuals advanced by each theorist, but rather the argumentative strategies used by each to make a case. The units of analysis to be employed are class, meaning, and individuals -- each of which figures largely in the work of the six theorists.
Max Weber (p.2) begins his argument with a "stylized fact" that reduces factual complexity to a single general proposition. From fact, he reduces his argument to a stylized argument that Protestants were overwhelmingly the agents and authors of capitalism. His formula is indefinite in its early presentation (Weber, p. 2), and presents a stylized answer but fails to identify the relationship between his key variables (capitalism and the Protestant ethic). Capitalism is posited as a dependent variable, with Protestant belief the independent variable (Weber, p. 2).
In essence, Weber (p. 1 of 3) makes a "Verstehen" argument from meaning, an argument that concerns what an action means and not what it accomplishes. He takes the view that a collective property of society shapes individuals' conduct; his emphasis is on how a specific sort of social and economic system emerged, the sources and meaning of its emergence, and the reason why it emerged in one locale and not in another. Weber (p. 2 of 4) conceptualizes dependent variables as phenomena contrasted to an "ideal of natural order", contrasting capitalism to this natural order of things and focusing on the ways in which meaning was identified ...