Re: rationalisation and reification

[Philip Ferguson <plf13@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Sean, for your thoughtful post.  I'm big into Lukacs, so always like
to see him get some credit for his thinking.

You say:
>Weber is mostly just footnotes and quibbles with Marx and the majority of it
>is shit.  Nevertheless, Weber serves bourgeois sociology quite nicely. He is
>always invoked as the more subtle "multi-causal" not "economically
>deterministic"  not "stagist"  sociological thinker.

What is crucial here, I guess, is that 'sociology' itself did not just
emerge in the normal course of educational improvement and capitalist
development.  It was very much *a specific creation* creation of the
bourgeois intelligentsia *in the face of the challenge represented by
Marxism*.  Sociology was their answer to Marx at the level of social
investigation, rather like 'economics' was their answer to the
revolutionary challenge represented by the labour theory of value - and the
generally radical insights of (bourgeois) political economy itself - once
the proletariat came on the scene and Marx produced his critique of
political economy.

I never did sociology beyond stage 2 papers (ie second-year undergraduate),
but I was always struck - and still am, as a lot of my current friends have
done sociology in recent years - at how consciously, and self-consciously,
sociology attempts to discredit Marx.  It is a discipline which is fixated
on Marx and destroying his impact, not so much by a full-frontal assault -
as one often gets in 'economics' - but by the far worse, and more
effective, method of chopping him into bits and 'incorporating' some of
these bits, thereby obliterating the *revolutionary* heart of Marx and
Marxism.  It also puts them in a better position to try to delude their
students that sociology is 'value-free' and, by appearing even-handed, lets
them attack the bits of Marx they find threatening (ie anti-capitalist).

Cheers,
Phil

PS: BTW, does anyone know any good books on the subject of the
origins/evolution of sociology?