Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Marianne Weber's work is being only slowly recovered and studied; her sociology in general and her analysis of social change in particular are informed by and respond to the ideas of Marx ( Weber 1900 ), of her husband Max, of their mutual friend Georg Simmel, and of feminist activists and theorists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Key. Of these, her debate with Max is arguably the most important. Like him, she embraced a historical-comparative methodology. But her feminism led her to reject his stance in value neutrality, to offer a radically different interpretation of the significance of Protestantism and capitalism, and to use a three-part model of social change, in which ideas are only an equal player with materiality and human agency. Marianne Weber's sociology emerges today as an almost archetypal representative of the practice of feminist sociology: it has as its central problematic the fundamental feminist principle of describing and explaining society from the standpoint of women and using those descriptions and explanations to analyze how to change society in the direction of greater justice. Her theories of social change are interwoven with the ongoing feminist commitment, common to critical sociologists generally, that the purpose of sociology is not just to know the world but to change it, and the corollary principle that in order to know the world one must ... log in or subscribe to read full text