№ 5 - 2000
Nikitina A.G.
Historism of a Socio-Political Phenomenon (Relation of Sociology and Historiography in the Light of the Historism Problem)

In this article, the author, in a generalized-analytical manner, examines the situation in methodology of social science in the 19th to 20th centuries, in so far as the said situation was characterized by dichotomy of two trends in the interpretation of historism (both conceiving themselves in terms of mutual exclusion); the author proposes to conditionally style them, respectively, the schematizing one, and the individualizing one. It is further on demonstrated in the article that the two trends established as two differing forms of historism per se, had emerged as a result of comprehension and apology of two distinctively different methods of cognizing socio-political phenomena — and, respective, of two scientific disciplines (sociology and historiography) — underlain by two different forms of scientific thought: nomothetical and idiographical. The article also mentions nomothetical political science and idiographical political science as two qualitatively different and equally indispensable research disciplines; moreover, the results they obtain require subsequent re-joining in a high of synthesis.