The problem of capitalism was the principal theme of both Marx and Weber. But the two theorists approached the topic from different angles, guided by distinctive overarching questions about modern capitalist society. Marx's (or, more properly, Marx's and Engels') central concern was the discovery of the economic laws that explained how capitalism worked and how it would, eventually, break down as its excesses created the conditions for revolutionary change. Weber, however, was primarily interested in how capitalism came to be and why it developed in Western Europe rather than some other civilization. Because they had disparate views of history and of economics Marx and Weber developed very different answers when addressing similar questions. Following a brief discussion of these underlying positions the differences become apparent in the comparison of Marx's and Weber's concepts of power and their theories of social stratification in capitalist societies.
Marx saw history in terms of social classes which are economically constituted and have always "stood in constant opposition to one another," engaging in battles that ended every time "either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes" (Marx & Engels, History, 1994, p. 4). For Marx, therefore, capitalism was merely the most recent version of social organization in this historical process and, having looked at its vast inequities and misery, he was intent on describing its inevitable collapse and its succession by a workers' state--as predicted by his economic conception of history. Weber, however, rejected the notion of inevitable historical stages in the evolution of modes of economic production and was more intent on historical comparison as a means of explaining the emergence of capitalism. He concentrated, therefore, on the multiplicity of factors that produced Western capitalism and his sociological ideas ev...