KOMUNIKACIJA SOCIOLOGIJE IN ZGODOVINE V ZGODNJI DOBI SOCIOLOŠKE MISLI: V ZNAMENJU METODOLOŠKEGA SPORA. OB 180-LETNICI COMTOVEGA POIMENOVANJA SOCIOLOGIJE ZA»ZNANOST O DRUŽBI«.

The article, in the field of the historical sociology, is substantively and thematically related to the study Understanding Social Change and Social and Historical Development in the "Prehistory" of Sociology, published in Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia (2015, 3, 485-504). The epochal social changes of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have also co-created the objective conditions for the development of the two»social sciences«: sociology (Saint-Simon, A. Comte) and historical materialism (K. Marx). Sociology was expressing the social and political tendencies of the ruling bourgeoisie, while historical materialism was an ideological, theoretical expression of the aspirations of the working class. The latter, as the philosophical and general foundation of scientific socialism, was also the first general theor y of social sciences. Sociology had set itself the fundamental task of resolving, through»scientific approaches«, the unresolved question of a general, global insight into the laws of the functioning and development of human society as a whole. Due to the fact that both the philosophy of history and historiography were directly concerned with these issues, it was necessary to define the relation of sociology to the two mentioned sciences. However, proving distinctiveness did not go in the direction of defending the specific subject area, but rather its own methodology. In these efforts, the new social science (sociology) made no secret of its ambition to become the so-called theoretical/scientific history. Compared to the then dominant methodological tendency - especially in the philosophy of history - according to which the structure of historical development can be determined (a priori) with the conceptual analysis, sociology offered a posteriori (empirical), respectively post factum analysis of historical events. This new direction - positivism - was justified in the social sciences by A. Comte and J. S. Mill. The core of the interpretation model in social science had become the identification of general laws, under which fell all the individual cases of a certain type. This sociological idea was not only different for the rejection of the then metaphysical understanding of the laws as an essential connection of the essence that can be discovered on the basis of thinking, but also for its adoption of the modern natural science concept of the law as an inductive generalization based on obser vation and experiment. In contrast to historiography, where the basic unit of analysis was a specific historical figure, city or a country, sociology as a theoretical history had chosen society - a typical representative of general historical development - for its analytical framework. While historiographers were finding and collecting facts, the „scientific" history searched for and discovered order and laws. Finally, in contrast to historiography at the time, which was only interested in the narrative of the past, new science, through the discovery of historical/social laws, could say a great deal not only about the pr esent but also the futur e. In the role of»scientific/theoretical history«, sociology wanted to place the history (Klio) as a servant, that provides verified facts for its constructions. It is understandable that such an attempt of sociology had met with decisive resistance in both historical and philosophical circles, including many other sociologists. Namely, when sociologists tried to formulate the laws of history, it turned out that in epistemological terms their characteristics do not correspond to the specifics of the laws that natural science deals with. This failure strengthened the positions of the critics of sociology as»scientific history«as well as»theory of history«. This caused a new»crisis«in communication between the two sciences, which lasted from the end of the 19th to the middle of the last century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]