The ancient economy, Modernity and the East and West relationship: the contributions of Karl Marx and Max Weber

Abstract

The work of Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Max Weber (1864-1920) on the economy and society of the ancient world inaugurate a new perspective in relation to the economists of the 18th and 19th centuries and in debates about the old economy locked in Germany in the late 19th century. Different from neoclassical economists and the modernists and primitivism, these authors will defend the thesis of a radical break between the old world and the modern. A discontinuity marked, for Marx, the birth of the capitalist system, and for Weber, of modern capitalism. In addition to this similarity, these thinkers have reinforced the Eurocentric view by stating that the cultural and political roots of modern west lie in Classical Antiquity, reinforcing a tradition of thought of deep rifts between the ancient societies of the East and the societies of the Greco-Roman world, much contested in current historiography.