Analytic and concrete forms of the autonomy of culture

As the field of sociology renews its interest in culture, the role of cultural analysis in historical explanation has become a growing issue of contention. Traditionally, historical sociologists have fallen into two main theoretical camps when dealing with culture. Cultural reductionists have been instructed by Marx's famous utterance that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (in Tucker 1972, p. 4). Cultural determinists may have interpreted Weber's observation that "ideas have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest" (1958, p. 280) to mean that the ideal realm of social being is determinative in the last instance.