More intense becomes the process of accumulation of the enormous experimental material which requires a relevant conceptual comprehension. Moreover, the new hypotheses which make a path to new paradigms come forward. On this stage, “methodological anarchism” (the words of P. Feyerabend) prevails in interdisciplinary researches. Following T. Kuhn, we name similarly the crisis state of science which follows the period of evolution and induces the necessity of creation of a new paradigm as the stage of “scientific revolution”. This stage completes, on the one hand, the both main
periods of development of scientific knowledge and, on the second hand, begins a new cycle of genesis of scientific theories.
Forming the methodology of historical sociology on the post-Soviet area occurs during the impetuous, uncoordinated, and sometimes unsufficiently argued discussion between historians and sociologists. The last, in particular, accentuate rather frequently that “history does not have the own methods of analysis of the social as such”1. Such a radical negation of efficiency of the methodological tools of special historical disciplines is, in our opinion, a bright example of agnostic attitude to the possibilities of theoretical history.
At the same time, the importance of establishment of interdisciplinary methodological ties between history and sociology is recognized in the fourvolume edition of Russian scientists “History of theoretical sociology”.
There, the term “historical sociology” means “the application of the historical and social approaches to analysis, respectively, of social aspects of human existence and of historical process”2. That is, conditionally saying, a methodological abyss is preserved between both scientific disciplines. But certain theoretical bridges can be thrown over it, which would generally expand the
exploratory abilities of both sciences.
Generally, the specificity of theoretical and methodological ties between sociology and history is conditioned, first of all, by the peculiarity of the formation of sociology. It arose in the XIXth century due to the attempt of contemporaries to comprehend the western society of those times, which
experienced a complicated and contradictory process of transition from the traditionally estate form to the industrially class one of its existence.
Accordingly, the circle of scientific tasks of sociology was determined by its priority attention to Modern (revolution). In this case, historical genetic ties remained a certain time outside of the limits of really sociological theoretical researches. From this viewpoint, a Polish sociologist P. Sztompka considers historical sociology as a critical reaction to the specific use of history which is
typical of the founders of sociological science3.
It is not strange, because the very natures of historical and sociological researches are different. For example, historians prefer the problem thematic field defined by certain socio-cultural predicates and chronological frames.
But the majority of sociological researches is focused on the determination of sociological regularities by quantitative (mathematical) and qualitative methods. That’s why, the exact statistical data, which are the important foundation for sociological conclusions, acquire a special meaning for these methods. In this case, the really sociological methods to collect information (field researches,
public-opinion poll, mathematical analysis of statistical procedures) are used quite seldom by historians4. In the choice of methodological principles of historical researches, they stop most frequently on the achievements of positivism by preferring the historic-descriptive, historic-comparative, and, sometimes, intuitively logical and empiric-analytic methods.
However, the essential distinctions between the methodological tools of history and sociology as sovereign scientific disciplines of the humanitarian profile terminate to be extremely clear, when one considers the really theoretical level associated with the general conceptualization of researches of
a man and the society. This tendency can be observed most clearly on the classical stage of development of historical sociology which is connected with the creative activity of K. Marx and M. Weber. From this viewpoint, extremely significant are their works “Capital” and “Protestant ethics and spirit of capitalism”.
The class approach to the analysis of social stratification and social structure, which was renewed by neo-Marxists, remains quite popular up to now, first of all in the left professorship environment in the West. In a contemporary scientific discourse, actual are the works of M. Weber as a researcher of
sociological aspects of the history of world religions and history of economies.
Namely he succeeded partially to show a way to solving the scientific problem posed by K. Marx: in which way an idea becomes a material force while capturing masses. Under the present conditions for the formation of a spiritual space of the global civilization, the Weber’s theoretical heritage acquires a special meaning for researches associated with the analysis of historical traditions, social norms, and moral and valuable systems. On the whole, it can be said about the enhancement of a role of historical and sociological works which substantially influence the spiritual characteristics of the epoch.
In the work “Philosophy of history”, G. Hegel noted still long ago that we always attempted to define how to write history rather than to write it5. Because every new generation, is forced actually “to rewrite” the already known history according to its valuable ideas in order to act intelligently, a change of paradigms in historical science as distinctive optical devices, which allow one to study the past, can occur quite frequently. In this case, historical sociology is transformed into the kernel of the theory of social changes 6.
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