After some years of complete silence on the subject, work on the history of Czechoslovak has started again. While past years have seen the publication of several articles dealing with A. Blaha and the Brno the other trend, represented by the group of empirical sociologists, has not hitherto received the same attention. The present article presents the first view of the development of this school to be published in Czechoslovakia. In her interoduction the author delimits and states her objections to the term Prague sociological school, because the group was not a school in the sense of a school of learning, but merely an association of some sociologists led by Prof. Josef Kral around the journal Socialni prob1emy. Alongside the journal and Prof. Kral’s personality, the link was a common interest in sociological methods and empirical sociology. The author employs the term ,.Prague school“ nevertheless, because with its empirical orientation, the group was in a way a complement to the Brno school an the continues to characterise it primarily by its difference from the group of sociologists led by Arnost Blaha in Brno. The leading members of this group were, in addition to Prof. Kral, Otakar Machotka, Jan Mertl, Zdeněk Ullrich, A. Bohac, J. Voracek, Korcak and later Dědek. The main reason for the divergent development of in and Brno is considered by J. Siklova to be that after T. G. Masaryk and E. Benes had left to devote themselves to politics, no dynamic personality equal to that of Blaha appeared in the field of at the Philosophical Faculty and consequently there was a stronger leaning towards western in place of a working out of some specific conception. Prof. Břetislav Foustka, who was T. G. Masaryk’s immediate successor, was not such an outstanding personality and so many gifted young sociologists tended to look abroad for their examples. Josef Kral, who had the capacity to provide an integrating influence, was working at the time in Bratislava. The advantage of this specific development was the increased attention to foreign sources and the transfer of what were then the latest methods of empirical to Czechoslowakia. Following a review of the main writings by members of this group, the author calls attention to their empirical research; she compares the Sociologicka revue and the journal Socialni problemy, pointing to the polemic about objectivism in sociology; in her concluding evaluation she suggests that treatment of these two schools involves not merely a Prague–Brno dispute, but also the conflict between empirical and interpretive (balancing) and that thereby it undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of locality and should not be confined to them. Assessment of the schools can, therefore, be undertaken solely from the points of view of their specific contributions to Czechoslovak in their day and in the present, that is from the standpoint of their historical role in the progress of this branch of Jearning in their country. Bearing in mind that in the past historiography, philosophy, literary studies and several other branches of learning were obliged to fill the breach in other fields of public life, the author considers it to have been an advantage that this group refused the label of Czech sociology and wished to follow the course of empirical, non-interpretive – although this involved errors typical for this trend. Nevertheless, it contributed new findings to Czechoslovak sociology, laying the foundations for the further progress of empirical work in this field.
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Open Access
Dec 1, 2023
Zdeněk R Nešpor 
