This paper is concerned with the analysis of a rather limited and defined area of the wide-ranging works of both Weber and Marx: that of the role of the market in the construct of the economy as well as the notion of economic rationality. Weber's mature reflections on the sociological aspects of the economy are conveniently located in the Economy and Society, written in the closing years of the second decade of the twentieth century'. By that time, the marginalist revolution in economic theory had left behind-at least in terms of academic fashionability-the disturbing analysis of emergent capitalism by the founders of classical political economy from Smith to Marx. Neo-classical economic theory was well-entrenched and its compla- cency was yet to be rocked by the depressions of the coming decades. Weber's writings display an uneasy tension between the tenets of classical and neo-classical doctrines, but, on the whole, find greater affinty with the latter. At the same time, his work overlaps in time with the writings of his fellow German, Karl