Subjective Method in Sociology

Origin of the method

The subjective method was the methodology of the ethical-subjective school, or subjective school, which briefly dominated Russian sociology in the late nineteenth century and sought to grasp social reality through an ethical ideal. Its starting point was a reaction against Auguste Comte. Pyotr Lavrov, a leading theoretician of the Narodniks, first used the term in an article published in 1868 in the journal Sovremennoye obozreniye, dissatisfied that Comte's sociology stopped at the classification and genealogy of facts and left no room for evaluation. His Historical Letters (1868–1869), written during the years of his exile in Vologda province, called on a new generation to awaken, recognize the people's suffering and join in the making of history.

Formation of the theory

Lavrov held that the subjective method could be legitimately introduced into positivism, and from 1875–1876 spread this position through the emigre journal Vperyod. A civilization-critical socialist, he stressed the intelligentsia's sense of debt to the people. He set out four criteria of subjective evaluation: pleasure and truth as personal criteria, mutual benefit as social, and justice as the highest; from the standpoint of justice, criticism of any social institution becomes its unconditional measure.

Mikhailovsky's synthesis

Nikolai Mikhailovsky sided with Lavrov in the 1869 article "What Is Progress?" and offered his own understanding of the method. No researcher, he held, can discard a preconceived opinion. The point was to make that opinion conscious and give it the character of a rational theory; to give up one's intellectual and moral capital was in effect impossible. Mikhailovsky's method rests on sympathetic experience. By his definition the subjective method is the observer mentally placing himself in the position of the observed, which fixes the method's proper sphere: in explaining people's actions we must reconstruct their thoughts and feelings as our own, and in that field the subjective method is legitimate and unavoidable. For Mikhailovsky man is a being who sets goals and pursues an ideal, and sociology had to seek the conditions under which individual development and social progress coincide.

Spread and polemic

The method won adherents represented by Sergei Yuzhakov, who in "Sociological Etudes" (journal Znaniye, 1872–1873) defined it as evaluating the relative importance of phenomena on the basis of the researcher's moral outlook, or ideal, and building theory by that criterion. Yuzhakov thought the name unsuitable, arguing the method should rather be called "objective", which provoked his later polemic with Mikhailovsky.

Methodological significance and limits

The methodology was never a settled system. Both Lavrov and Mikhailovsky made the systematization of the moral ideal a research task, and for Mikhailovsky the slogan of a pure objectivity purged of subjective elements was an illusion. Yet the two collided with the scholarly conventions of a sociology that demanded objectivity, and the dispute over the very concept of the method persisted within the school.

Confrontation with Marxism

Lenin attacked Mikhailovsky, along with other liberal Narodniks, in his 1894 work What the "Friends of the People" Are. In the debate over reading Capital, Mikhailovsky was faulted for praising Marx while failing to read him closely; what Lenin chiefly disputed was an attitude that rejected viewing social development as a natural-historical process and weighed only the feasibility of ideals.

Legacy

After 1917 the subjective school was displaced in the history of sociology and Mikhailovsky's fame shrank sharply. The term survives today in the historiography of Russian sociology as a historical concept denoting the methodology of the "ethical-subjective school".