Marx and Weber on Liberalism as Bourgeois Ideology

Abstract

Almost everyone who has investigated the subject agrees that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries a great social transformation occurred, primarily in England and France, but to a lesser extent in other European countries and America as well. In sociopolitical terms this change is generally characterized as the rise of liberalism and is linked with the English, French and American Revolutions. The socioeconomic factors are summarized under the general heading of the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. Finally, there are several cultural dimensions to these changes, most notably the Protestant Reformation, but also the great advances in science, the declining status of the patriarchal family, new trends in philosophy, etc. It is generally felt that these dramatic events, which have shaped the course of Western civilization for four centuries, are, in some way, linked together.