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Karl Marx: Ideas
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In opposing the dominant ideas of his time, Marx was led to a resolute relativization of those ideas. The eternal verities of dominant thought appeared upon inspection to be only the direct or indirect expression of the class interests of their exponents. Marx attempted to explain ideas systematically in terms of their functions and to relate the thought of individuals to their social roles and class positions. We must go astray, he believed, "if . . . we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that in a particular age these or those ideas were dominant, without paying attention to the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, and if we ... ignore the individuals and the world conditions which are the source of these ideas."
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It stresses that while Marx himself was not a sociologist, he did make significant contributions to its theoretical evolution, particularly in the area of social stratification and/or class theory. Historically, while sociology in some parts of the world has mirrored Marx’s ideas, in other parts Marx was totally ignored. No matter his historical plight within sociology, Ritzer contends that Marx’s contributions must not be overlooked. The chapter begins by discussing Marx’s life, paying particular attention to key historical and intellectual forces which influenced him. A biographical sketch is ... offered. Key concepts discussed by Ritzer include the following: the dialectic, human potential (powers and needs, consciousness, activity, sociability, unanticipated consequences), alienation, emancipation, commodities, capital, private property, division of labor, social class, class consciousness, false consciousness.
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Marx was a relativizing historicist according to whom allsocial relations between men, as well as all systems of ideas,are specifically rooted in historical periods. "Ideas andcategories are no more eternal than the relations which theyexpress. They are historical and transitory products."3For example, whereas the classical economists had seen thetripartite division among landowners, capitalists, and wageearners as eternally given in the natural order of things, Marxconsidered such categories as typical only for specifichistorical periods, as products of an historically transientstate of affairs.
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