Modern & Capitalist Society - a Comparative Analysis

Sociology

Modern & Capitalist society, a comparative analysis

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Final Paper

To Dr. F. Acuto

By

Thibault Debreil

Comparative analysis of the Modern and Capitalist society

“Modern man is the slave of modernity: there is no progress that is not running at its most complete servitude." –Paul Valery

        Every society since centuries have suffered from class struggle which led to a fight between oppressor and oppressed that allowed the destruction of a society and the reconstitution of another one.

According to Karl Marx the society of the nineteenth century is a “simplified class antagonism”^[1] society developed by the bourgeoisie’s control over the means of production. The owners exploit the workers in order to accumulate profit. Marx highlights the genesis of Capitalism and modern society through changes in technology and economy.

For the German sociologist Max Weber Capitalism is characterized by a new way of thinking: the “spirit of capitalism”. This morality inspired by the protestant dogma extols the work as finality and will be the expansion force of Capitalism. “The major problem of the expansion of modern capitalism is not that of the source of capital but that of the expansion of the Spirit of Capitalism”^[2].

The multiplicity of definitions about capitalism and modern society reveals the difficulty to characterize a social construction, as it is eminently subjective. A comparative analysis of sociological theories seems to be the most effective approach to understand and develop the nature of the main social construction of humanity. Comparing ideologies of authors as Marx, Weber, Foucault and Durkheim will allow us to study the way these social thinkers understand and characterize modern and capitalist society.

One of the main divergences toward the Capitalist society is the nature of this particular historical and social formation. We will focus on the emergence and the different social representations that put the society in motion in order to highlight its dynamic. The Modern society’s dynamic has generated a marked change of social relations such as rationalisation and secularization, a powerful antagonism and most of all inequalities. The advent of the bourgeoisie, and to some extent the political elite, has revealed a new redistribution of power. We will study how the different thinkers analyse and justify the domination of a class over another one, how the legitimization of inequalities is deployed.