Yelena Yakuba and Tatyana Zaslavska: Two Opinion at the Main Point of Sociology

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problems of the post-Soviet, in particular Ukrainian, sociology development. It is emphasized that modern domestic sociology is in crisis. It is stressed that society uses only its small part of the scientific achievements accumulated. According to the author, this is a consequence of the choice of methodological foundations of sociology development, which took place in the 80-90- ies of the last century. Then, in the post-Soviet space, two variants of the sociological methodology of the study of society were actively used, which can be conventionally called the variants of Professor Yakuba and academician T. I. Zaslavska. The first focused on the study of society as an integral system, the rules of its functioning and development. The second, representing the position of Western sociology, emphasized the study of individual elements, processes, aspects of society’s life. It is emphasized that for the analysis of society as a holistic organism, this variant is completely unsuitable, as the author wrote in 1988. The limitations of Western sociology, from the author’s point of view, were caused by the ideological reasons which forced it to move away from holistic study of society. Due to objective reasons, the development of sociological science in the post-Soviet territories was based on the variant of T. I. Zaslavska. This led to the fact that domestic sociology did not become a science about society, demanded by society itself. The emphasis is placed on the fact that the coming out of Ukrainian sociology from this impasse consists in returning to the Yakuba version of an understanding of sociology, based on the idea of the integrity of the social system and sociology as the science to study it.ф