Max Weber and Karl Marx were two of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century. They both wrote about capitalism, inequality and class structure. Both Weber and Marx had very different ideas about how these things worked, but their conclusions were similar in a number of important ways. Both Weber and Marx argue that religion is a social phenomenon. Weber argues that all religions are based on the idea of salvation and that the spread of Christianity was due to its ability to provide salvation for people who were suffering from a crisis in their lives. Marx argued that religion was a means by which the ruling class controlled the working class.
Weber argued that capitalism was based on a particular type of rationality: instrumental rationality. This type of rationality was concerned with means-ends relationships — how to achieve the desired outcomes. Weber believed that people would try to optimize their behavior on this basis to achieve their goals as efficiently as possible. He argued that this would lead them to adopt rational rules and procedures that could be measured objectively, so they could compare alternatives and choose what was best for them.
Marx argued that capitalism created its own internal contradictions (contradictions between its own aims and its actual results). These contradictions were inherent in the system itself, not just individual capitalists or companies within it. Marx believed that these contradictions would eventually lead to a crisis point where the system would collapse under its own weight.
