The author of this book had been dead for six years when it appeared in English. The preface says so on its first line: "Georgy Frantsov (1903–1969) was a leading scientist who specialised in philosophy, history, scientific communism and sociology." It also says what the book is made of: "The bulk of the book consists of his work, The Historical Path of Social Thought, which was first published in 1965", plus articles "mostly written in the last few years of his life", some of them "presented in abridged form".
So the date on the spine is the least informative fact about this volume, and the internal evidence is consistent. The latest Party congress it can cite is the twenty-second, and it cites it through a newspaper: "the eve of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU on October 15, 1961". The twenty-third congress of 1966 and the twenty-fourth of 1971 are absent. The one contemporary event that breaks the 1965 ceiling is Czechoslovakia, which enters through the late articles and only in the official formula — "The attacks by the reactionary forces on Czechoslovakia's socialist gains" — so the newest thought in the book is from 1968 or 1969. Every citation dated after 1969 is a Moscow or Berlin reprint of Marx, Engels, Lenin or Gramsci, swapped in by the translator to whatever English edition Progress had in stock; the freshest is a 1974 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. The extracted front matter carries no copyright year at all, only a Soviet printing code whose final digits read "-77", which does not agree with the catalogue either. Read this as a mid-sixties book with a tail of late-sixties articles, issued in English in the middle of the following decade. Nothing in it was written by a living man after 1969.
Who was he? The preface is unusually candid, and it is worth reading as a job description rather than a eulogy. Frantsov was "Director of the Institute of International Relations, head of the Press Department of the USSR Foreign Ministry, Rector of the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, Editor-in-Chief of World Marxist Review, and Deputy Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the CPSU Central Committee." A footnote adds that "Many of his works were published under various pseudonyms, including Y. P. Frantsov and Yu. Frantsev." This is not a scholar working under constraint. This is a man who trained the trainers, ran the Foreign Ministry's press desk, and edited the world movement's theoretical monthly — one of the small number of people who decided what the constraint was. The book was commissioned as what it looks like: an authoritative survey, for export, of the entire history of social thought from Antiquity to Talcott Parsons, by the man who had run the Academy that taught it.
That matters because of the subject, which in 1975 was live and dangerous in a way an English reader would not guess from the placid title. Sociology in the Soviet Union had been abolished. Denounced as a bourgeois pseudo-science under Stalin, it was reconstituted only from the late 1950s, and reconstituted under a euphemism — "concrete social research" — a formula that let empirical work proceed on condition that it did not claim to be a discipline. To publish a book called Philosophy and Sociology in this decade was to stand on that fault line. The question to put to it is not whether it likes Comte. It is: what is sociology permitted to be here, who is allowed to have founded it, and what is it allowed to count?
The answers are consistent, and they are restrictive.
Sociology, in this book, is essentially a bourgeois word for a bourgeois need. The account of its origin is explicit: as the social sciences accumulated facts in the nineteenth century, "The bourgeoisie was in need of pseudo-scientific schemes, and these soon appeared in the form of 'sociological systems'"; "That is when the term 'sociology' appeared and Comte and Spencer propounded their sociological systems." Frantsov opens his chapter on twentieth-century theory by borrowing a line from Alfred Weber and endorsing it: "Sociology is the daughter of the greatest crisis in the life of the West. That was the view taken of bourgeois sociology by the late West German Professor Alfred Weber. We must agree with him." The phrase "bourgeois sociology" occurs thirty-one times in the book. "Marxist sociology" occurs three times, only once in the body text, and even there it is a synonym rather than a discipline — "Such, in short, are the conclusions drawn by Marxist sociology about historical epochs".
What Marxism has instead is stated plainly, and it is a doctrine of subordination: "Generalisation of all the concrete social sciences is contained in historical materialism which means an application of the principles of dialectical materialism to social phenomena." The concrete social sciences produce material; historical materialism generalises it; and historical materialism is itself an application of a philosophy. On this scheme, sociology has no floor of its own to stand on. Frantsov endorses Gramsci to close the point — "without historical materialism sociology amounts to no more than an 'empirical compilation of practical observations'" — and then draws the moral against "the popularity of 'empirical sociology' among present-day Western scientists."
Who, then, is allowed to have founded the thing? Lenin, and nobody after him. The book's one sustained passage on method takes Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia as the model of grouping and statistical analysis — the attack on peasant "averages" that "obscure the differentiation, and are therefore purely fictitious" is quoted at length and used well — and then turns to "A Great Beginning" of 1919, in which Lenin analysed "press reports from May 17 to June 8, 1919, about the communist subbotniks". That is the second and last canonical instance of Soviet empirical social research offered anywhere in four hundred pages: a study of newspaper coverage of voluntary Saturday work-parties, conducted fifty-six years before the English edition. From it Frantsov draws the general rule: "For every adherent of the scientific method in sociology, Lenin's writings are a model of in-depth research into concrete social phenomena, and the use of the latest mathematical method makes no difference."
That last clause is the hinge of the whole book, and it should be read slowly. It concedes that there are now mathematical methods. It declines to be interested in them. And the sentences that follow explain why nobody needs them: "The CPSU Programme and other Party documents contain an analysis of the most important social processes today. On the basis of a profound sociological analysis, propositions on building communist society in the USSR which are of exceptional practical and theoretical importance have been put forward." The sociology of Soviet society exists, and it is the Party Programme. No living Soviet sociologist is named in this book. No institute, no survey, no sample, no table, no figure about the USSR appears in it. "Public opinion" is invoked eleven times and every single time it is public opinion in the capitalist countries or in the international arena.
Now the absences, which are where a book of this kind does most of its work.
Bukharin. Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (1921) was the book that gave the discipline a Soviet name, was used as a textbook across the Comintern, and was the direct ancestor of exactly the enterprise this volume is titled after. It is not mentioned. Bukharin appears four times: three in a passage where Lenin corrects him on where revolution begins — "This idea of Lenin's was distorted by Bukharin, who declared in The Economics of the Transition Period..." — and once in the name index. He is present as an economist who erred and was refuted, and absent as the sociologist he actually was. Bukharin had been shot in 1938 and would not be rehabilitated until 1988; there was no lawful way to cite him. But it is worth noticing what the prohibition costs. A four-hundred-page history of social thought, published under the title Philosophy and Sociology, cannot mention the most widely read Marxist book ever written with the word sociology in its subtitle.
Plekhanov. Zero occurrences. Not one, in a book with a long, warm chapter on Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov as the Russian precursors of scientific social thought. Herzen "came right up to dialectical materialism, and halted — before historical materialism", Frantsov quotes Lenin as saying; and then the narrative walks straight from the revolutionary democrats to Marx, leaving out the man who carried historical materialism into Russian, whose The Development of the Monist View of History is the founding Russian text of this subject, and whom Progress itself was issuing in five volumes of Selected Philosophical Works over the years immediately either side of this one. There is no obvious political reason for the silence — Plekhanov was citable — which makes it a silence about intellectual paternity rather than about politics.
The purge itself. Deborin: zero. Mitin: zero. Zhdanov: zero. Stalin: zero — in a book about the history of social thought written by a man who was thirty when Hitler took power and forty-nine when Stalin died. There is no 1931, no 1947, no philosophical discussion of the twentieth congress; the congress is cited twice, both times only for the thesis that war is no longer fatally inevitable. The discipline this book is named for was destroyed and rebuilt inside the author's own working lifetime, in institutions he later ran, and the book contains no trace of the event. That is the largest single fact about it.
Trotsky appears four times, three of them in one paragraph reciting Lenin's 1917 verdict — "Trotsky's major mistake is that he ignores the bourgeois character of the revolution and has no clear conception of the transition from this revolution to the socialist revolution" — and once in the index. The theory being attacked is never stated; the reader who wants it can find it in The Permanent Revolution (1930) and in Results and Prospects (1906).
None of that licenses dismissing the book, and section three of this series' brief is not a formality. Where Frantsov works on Western material he is well read, accurate and often generous, and the difference between his handling of the nineteenth century and his handling of Soviet reality is instructive in itself.
The treatment of Durkheim is the best thing in the volume. Frantsov has read The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895, which he calls Method of Sociology), Suicide (1897) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), gets each of them substantially right, and credits them: Durkheim's insistence that the social fact is irreducible to biology or psychology "was the right way to attack"; on the religion book, "That was an achievement" and "Here he has many valuable observations". His criticism — that Durkheim made the division of labour the motor of moral and legal evolution while ignoring classes, so that "the problem of social relations... were problems he could not solve" — is a real criticism, not an incantation. Max Weber gets a serious, unhysterical reconstruction as a neo-Kantian, with the Wissenschaftslehre cited in German and the ideal type explained rather than sneered at. Ogburn's "cultural lag" is discussed as a proposition "which could become a scientific bridge". Even the industrial sociologists who "went off into the plants and factories to give the employers the benefit of their advice" are granted that "some of their specific observations are of some scientific interest." Karl Popper is engaged on social atomism and the reality of collectives — and engaged, as it happens, on very nearly the same ground the Trotskyist philosopher George Novack chose at almost the same moment, of which more below.
The seams show elsewhere. Talcott Parsons, the dominant sociologist alive when this was written, gets two paragraphs and one index entry; C. Wright Mills does not appear at all; the polemical energy goes instead to Toynbee (twenty-four mentions), Rostow (ten) and the cyclical theories of civilisation, which is to say that "bourgeois sociology" here largely means Cold War philosophy of history rather than the sociology anyone was actually practising in 1965. And there is a small revealing slip. Introducing a quotation on the fate of the idea of progress, Frantsov writes "One Soviet scientist says" — and the footnote turns out to be R. Y. Vipper's Social Doctrines and Historical Theories of the 18th and 19th Centuries, Moscow, 1908. The Soviet scientist is a tsarist-era liberal historian quoted from a book published nine years before the revolution. The index names him; the text will not.
The strongest evidence against this book, though, does not come from outside the Soviet Union. It comes from the same publisher's own list, and it runs in two directions.
Backwards: in 1969, Progress published G. V. Osipov's Sociology: Problems of Theory and Method, whose Chapter 1 is titled — exactly — "Philosophy and Sociology". Osipov's book has a Part I headed "Marxist Sociology". It has chapters on "Theoretical and Applied Sociology", on "Social Facts", on "Social Group" and "Personality". It defines a subject matter: "sociologists study the social structure of society (interclass and intraclass relationships, the social institutions that regulate these relationships), the development and interaction of the systems and organisations within society." It builds out branches — the sociology of labour, in which the industrial enterprise is "a complex social system" to be studied by "empirical study" — and it proposes, without flinching, that "Social policy may also serve as the subject of independent social studies. The sociology of policy involves political and social forms and their influence on economic and social development." Where Frantsov cites Plekhanov never, Osipov rests his definition on him: "as Plekhanov wrote, 'sociology becomes a science only to the extent to which it succeeds in understanding the origin of aims of social man (social "teleology") as the necessary effect of the social process conditioned, in the end, by the course of economic development'." Osipov takes Parsons seriously enough to cite him fifteen times.
The two men were not strangers to each other's work. Osipov's bibliography carries an item in Cyrillic which the OCR has badly damaged but which reconstructs, without much doubt, as Fedoseyev and Frantsev, "Bourgeois Sociology at a Dead End", Kommunist, 1959, no. 17 — Frantsov himself, under the pseudonym the preface discloses, co-writing the article that helped set the terms. So the export list contains, six years apart, the man who declared bourgeois sociology bankrupt and the man who was building a Soviet one, and the later book is the more restrictive of the two. A reader who takes the 1975 volume as the state of Soviet sociology in 1975 will have been misinformed by six years and by a whole conception of the subject.
Forwards, and more sharply: in 1975 itself, the same house issued Leonid Gordon and Eduard Klopov's Man After Work, a genuine time-budget study of nine hundred workers in seven factories. It is real social science, and it counts. Its summary table gives housework at 27 hours 20 minutes a week for women against 11 hours 40 for men, and — the row that matters most here — "Daily cultural activity" at 11 hours 50 for women against 19 hours 50 for men. It reports that "Working women devote from 2 to 2.5 times more of their time to housework than do the men"; that for food preparation the disparity is "9 times(!) greater than for working men: 10–11 hours per week as opposed to 1-1.5 hours"; that among young workers in factory dormitories, with no family to serve, women's housework was still "three times greater (about 18 hours)" than men's; and that all this constitutes "a sort of second shift for working women". It even prints the comparison that could only embarrass it, that Soviet and American working women's domestic hours were "almost identical". This is exactly the "latest mathematical method" Frantsov said made no difference, and it made a great deal of difference: it produced facts the state's own propaganda for women could not utter in the same year from the same address.
And yet the two books draw the same line in the same place. Gordon and Klopov's classification lists "Participation in civic and political activity and management" as item III of the mode of life, and then disposes of it in a footnote: those forms of activity and their time expenditures "are not given in detail, since they are not a part of the daily routine". A study of what Soviet workers do after work counts dominoes, lotto, television and amateur choirs, and does not count one hour of a trade-union branch, a Party cell or a soviet. Frantsov draws the identical boundary from the other side. He is perfectly willing to accept figures on political participation — provided they are Western figures about Westerners: "Bourgeois sociologists have written a great many books about the 'depolitisation' of present-day capitalist society, especially in the USA. They give figures to show that citizens stay away from the polling booths, while the public opinion polls show a decline of interest in political affairs. What they fail to say is why this is so." His complaint is not that the figures are false; it is that they are unexplained. Turn to the Soviet side of the ledger and the figures vanish, replaced by assertion: "In the USSR the working man is a good worker in production and is at the same time a public figure, who has a say in society"; "Nor is socio-political activity separated from production or farmed out to a privileged minority: it belongs to the whole people, to the state of the whole people, and to the Communist Party."
One publisher, one year, two books, one boundary — measured on one side of the world, asserted on the other. Neither volume says why.
Frantsov states the underlying premise more baldly than a survey researcher ever could: "There are no privileged social groups in the country."
Against that sentence stands the classic counter-sociology of Soviet society, written in exile in 1936 by a man this book mentions only to record Lenin's disagreement with him in 1917. In chapter 9 of The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky reached the opposite conclusion about the same object: the bureaucracy "is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society." He was equally interested in why the question could not be settled by counting. In chapter 6 he wrote that "It is absolutely impossible to describe the Soviet bureaucracy in accurate figures" — partly because in a state that is the only employer the administrative apparatus has no visible edge, and partly because "upon this question the Soviet statisticians, economists and publicists preserve, as we have said, an especially concentrated silence." In chapter 9 he examined the census categories and found them designed: "the list is constructed with the direct intention of concealing the privileged upper strata, and the more deprived lower depths." And in chapter 10 he isolated the syllogism that Frantsov's book still runs on forty years later, in Stalin's own version of it: "For where there are no classes, there is in general no place for politics." That is precisely the logic by which political life becomes unmeasurable — not secret, but definitionally uninteresting, because the answer is known in advance.
Trotsky's methodological remark in that same chapter is the more useful reply, because it is addressed to people doing the work rather than to the regime: "Sociological problems would certainly be simpler, if social phenomena had always a finished character. There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may wholly overturn it."
The reply on the discipline itself is George Novack's, and it is the closest thing the anti-Stalinist tradition produced to a direct answer to this book. In "Sociology and Historical Materialism" and "Positivism and Marxism in Sociology" — chapters of Understanding History — Novack grants sociology exactly what Frantsov withholds: a name, a subject and a place among the sciences. "Sociology is that branch of scientific knowledge which investigates the evolution of society in its entirety and the content of social life in its fullness." He does not treat the word as an enemy's property: "It was given its own name over 150 years ago by August Comte." And the formulation that Frantsov's scheme cannot produce: "Historical materialism is a particular type of sociological theory. It is the sociological method of Marxism. It investigates the same phenomena as rival schools of sociology but in a more probing, many-sided, rigorously scientific way." The authority he cites for it is the one Frantsov's book does not name once — "The Russian Marxist Plekhanov, more correctly stated that it had an all-embracing universal jurisdiction" — and the three-part division Novack takes from Plekhanov assigns each part a discipline: "dialectical materialism is a school of philosophy, logic and theory of knowledge; historical materialism, of sociology; and scientific socialism, of political economy and revolutionary practice." Historical materialism is a sociology, not the thing that replaces sociology. That single preposition is the whole difference between the two books.
Novack's companion chapter takes up Popper, as Frantsov does, and on the same charge — that Popper's insistence on unique, non-repetitive events dissolves social science altogether. It is worth reading the two demolitions side by side. They agree substantially. But Novack argues his case out of archaeology, technology and the history of monarchy, and Frantsov argues his out of the requirements of the Party's line, and the reader can tell which is which. Novack's nine 1942 lectures, revised and published as An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., Pathfinder, 1971), are the fuller statement of his method; in Lecture II he quotes Trotsky on the point at issue here, that "To determine at the right moment the critical point where quantity changes into quality is one of the most important and difficult tasks in all the spheres of knowledge including sociology" — a task, note, requiring measurement.
One more, from the tradition's own file on the misuse of the word. In chapter 8 of The Third International After Lenin (1928), Trotsky mocked a Comintern draft for demanding that the colonial bourgeoisie's capacity to fight be proved "in a rigorous 'sociological' manner, that is by a thousand and one scholastic schemes adapted to opportunist purposes." He was writing about Bukharin. The scare quotes had been earned early.
A last word about what could not be found. Frantsov and Osipov are absent — entirely absent — from every reply corpus available here: 763 issues of Intercontinental Press searched page by page, the complete English Trotsky, the ETOL run of Fourth International, the English Biulleten' Oppozitsii, Novack's collected articles, the International Viewpoint and Inprecor scans. So does the phrase "Soviet sociology". The Fourth International tracked the Moscow Trials, Lysenko, the purge of Soviet culture and Zhdanov's 1947 intervention in philosophy, and it did not track this. The finding is worth stating rather than concealing: the tradition answered the doctrine and ignored the discipline, and a Western reader who wanted to know in 1975 what Soviet sociologists were finding out about Soviet life had to read Progress Publishers to learn it — which, in the case of Man After Work, actually worked.
Read Philosophy and Sociology, then, as the ceiling rather than the floor. It is a competent, sometimes distinguished history of European social thought written by a very senior official who had spent his career deciding what could be said, published after his death, in a decade whose own sociologists had already gone further than he permitted. Its scholarship on Durkheim and Weber can be trusted. Its silence about Bukharin was compulsory; its silence about Plekhanov was not. And its central proposition about the society that produced it — that there are no privileged social groups in the country — is not a finding at all. It is the premise that made the finding unnecessary, and it is the reason that the one Soviet study of the period which did count the hours was careful, in a footnote, not to count the hours that would have tested it.