Disciplinary Narratives about Marx and Weber versus Complexity of Shifting Boundaries

• In Event: 508 - Section on Marxist Sociology Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 02. Theory and Praxis

Abstract

Interest in Marx and Weber is significant in the sub-disciplinary area of “economic sociology”. Economic sociology is not just the sociology of economic institutions. It is really a kind of theory of “political economy” where the word “political” is dropped in favor of the more encompassing “social”. The term meant that in Weber’s day. There term “social economics” or Sozialoekonomie (Sozialökonomie) is not as widely used today as it was in 1900. In North America a key term was “institutional economics”. Today most academic economists either follow an orthodox version of Neo-Classical Economics and marginal utility theory or a heterodox kind of economics which may still be quite mathematical but borrows fundamental assumptions from graph theory or set theory. There are very few institutional economists outside of Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Marxian and Neo-Marxian circles and networks. Several disciplines today were basically just political economy in the past. Rural sociology is a discipline that can benefit from looking back at its intellectual origins in this way.

Author

• J. I. Hans Bakker, University of Guelph