Throughout our studies of the classical sociological theorist there has been a strong focus on three key figures who inspired the period of the Enlightenment. Karl Marx was one of the first enlightened thinkers of his time, he saw the usefulness of observing the world with empirical data to gain information about the world. He considers the mode of production and the source of materialism to be the source of all things. He saw the interaction between people and the material they worked with as influencing each other. He also believed that capitalism created a kind of alienation among all things in the world: alienation from work, from people, and from the world itself. He also focused on the bourgeoisies and their interaction with the proletariat class. Following MarxWeber focused more on the “individual rather than the collective whole” (Craig Calhoun 2012, 267). Max Weber viewed scientific knowledge of society and culture as supporting evidence. The individuality of things is not supported only by the “nature of things”, but by the seeker of the information itself. Weberian conception of sociological explanation has its roots in his notions of interpretation and ideal type. Weber, approaching the social sciences in a way that allowed him to escape the traps of historicism, attempted to devise procedures to allow more generalizable inferences than historians typically allowed themselves. When it comes to discussing social class, Weber points out that there are two main factors to remember: power and financial status. Social class is not an effective way to protect one's position or wealth in a society because it is all market-based. The alternative to social classes are status groups. They have greater possibilities for unitary collective actions, “they express the fact that above all a specific lifestyle is expected from all those who wish to belong to the circle” (Craig Calhoun 2012, 315). Weber saw a fundamental problem of modern society as a weakness of capitalism, however, unlike Marx, it is the process of rationalization and the increase of bureaucracies that put at risk the creativity and idea of these three, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, collectively provided an individual vision of how they believed society functioned, taking a broader look at the analysis of the population at large, while at the same time providing multiple viewpoints that favor the complexity and assorted underpinnings of development of changes social ones that favor the continuous change of society, inheriting some truths and facts that continue to remain relevant in today's time period and are expected to do so by future generations
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