Theorising Culture: Weber, Simmel and Social Action

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Marxist thought effectively marginalised the concept of culture assimilating it to a reductive base — superstructure model. Marxism failed to theorise the complex relation of culture to society and to spell out the complex links between cultural forms, practices and institutions and the economic and political structures. Nothing was more fateful to the study of culture than its definition of culture as ‘echoes’ of a real-life process, its forms corresponding directly to specific class interests and ideology. In contrast, classical sociology — Durkheim, Weber and Simmel — emerging as a distinctive discipline and differentiating itself from history, psychology, politics and economics through defining a specific object of study — society — and an appropriate methodology, engaged from its beginnings in a debate on the nature of culture.