Rise of sociology as an intellectual tradition. Classical tradition in sociology of the XIX century — страница 8

(1857-1929), an American sociologist, is considered the founding father of the institutional approach due to his study of social institutions. In his central work, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he defined a social institution as social patterns of human behaviour and habits of thinking. According to him, mankind and human civilization develop as far as social institutions (those of private property, money competition, demonstrative consumption etc.) change. The engine of the society’s development is economy, in particular the development of production that results in change of social institutions and norms of social life; managers and technical intelligentsia play the major role in this development. He also described capitalism as class struggle but not as happening

between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (according to K. Marx and F. Engels), but between businessmen (bankers, lawyers, brokers, managers) and industry (engineers, designers, technicians, and labour); in short, between those who make money and those who produce goods. His Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) further widened his renown. Sociological knowledge grew not only in Western Europe and the USA. On the threshold of the XIX-XX centuries Russian sociological thought was gaining the world level, developing from social philosophy through social theory to sociological theory. In this period fame came to such thinkers as N.K. Michailovski, E.V. de Roberti, M.A. Bakunin, P.A. Sorokin etc. One of the most influential movements in Russia was anarchism. Its founding fathers

were M.A. Bakunin (1814-1876) and P.A. Kropotkin (1842-1921). Anarchism is the political belief that the society should have no government, laws, police, or other authority, but should be a free association of all its members. M.A. Bakunin’s ideas are as follows: Liberty is the only medium in which intelligence, dignity, and the happiness of man can develop; not official “liberty”, licensed, measured and regulated by the state; not individual liberty, selfish, mean and fictitious, which considers the rights of the individual as limited by the rights of the state, and therefore necessarily results in the reduction of the rights of the individual to zero; Liberty has a social character as it recognizes no other restrictions than those which are traced for us by the laws of

our own nature; such laws are immanent in us, inherent, constituting the very basis of our being, material as well as intellectual and moral; instead, finding them a limit, we must consider them as the real conditions and effective reason for our liberty. P.A. Kropotkin went further. He borrowed socialist ideas and developed them in the theory of socialism and federalism. Its major postulates are as follows: Socialism as the social system must be based on individual and collective liberty and activities of free associations; The state must be abolished; The relationships between the subjects of society are built on the principles of federalism, i.e. a free union where the subjects have equal rights. Although the ideas of anarchism (complete individual liberty, rejection of

regulation by the state etc.) were naïve, the ideas of equality, justice, individual liberty, federalism in social life are still followed by. Another famous movement in Russia was narodnik movement, or populism. Its ideologists were P.L. Lavrov (1823-1900) and N.K. Michailovski (1842-1904). Still of importance are thoughts about power and dictatorship expressed by P.L. Lavrov: The possession of great power corrupts the best people, and even the ablest leaders, who meant to benefit the people by decree, failed; Every dictatorship must surround itself by compulsory means of defense which must serve as obedient tools in its hands. Every dictatorship is called upon to suppress not only its reactionary opponents but also those who disagree with its methods and actions. Whenever a

dictatorship succeeded in establishing itself, it had to spend more time and effort in retaining its power and defending it against its rivals than upon realization of its programme, with the aid of that power; A dictatorship can be wrested from the dictators only by a new revolution. While solving the problem of interaction between the individual and the society, they asserted that the major engine of historic development were actions undertaken by critically thinking personalities (as a rule, the vanguard of the intelligentsia). N.K. Michailovski as a founder of the theory of social progress formulated the law of antagonism between the state and personality. Antagonism is given birth because the society develops fast and makes more complex, and man, as a result of social