Sociology as a Science of Reality: A Logical Foundation for the System of Sociology

Abstract

The Centre for Fundamental Sociology (HSE University, Moscow) and Vladimir Dal Publishing House (St. Petersburg) have initiated the Russian translation and publication of Sociology as a Science of Reality: A Logical Foundation for the System of Sociology (1930), a key work of the famous German philosopher and sociologist, Hans Freyer. In the early 1920s, Freyer, who became the first full professor of sociology in Germany, published several seminal works covering a wide range of topics in social science and political philosophy. The Introduction to the thinker’s first work on sociology in its proper meaning, published here, has the characteristics of a program manifesto outlining the basic principles for comprehending the discipline and its subject matter as a social and historical phenomenon. Freyer argues that sociology as a scholarly discipline emerges in a society that is being detached from the state; now, instead of an obvious and stable order, an insecure, precarious and unpredictable society arises, becoming a problem for itself. Consequently, alongside the formation of sociology, its object emerges; it is a heterogeneous “society” that has gained autonomy from the state while sharply divergent from that same society regarding the principles of the organization of social life. Meanwhile, the distinctive feature of European sociology is not simply its embeddedness in history, but its immediate substantial connection with the preceding philosophical tradition. This enables Freyer to raise the question of the philosophical basis of sociology as a scientific system. He also formulates the task of defining the forms of this system and outlining its primary lines. The structural and methodological comparison between the European sociology version and the American version of the discipline is particularly interesting from the perspective of the academic history.