The author had been dead for six years when this appeared in English, and the preface says so on its first line.
Georgy Frantsov (1903-1969) was not a scholar working under constraint. He was one of the people who decided what the constraint was. The preface lists the offices: 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 Central Committee, Editor-in-Chief of World Marxist Review, and Deputy Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. A footnote adds that much of his work appeared under pseudonyms. This is a man who trained the trainers, ran the Foreign Ministry's press desk and edited the world movement's theoretical monthly.
The bulk of the volume is his 1965 study of the historical path of social thought - a survey running from antiquity through the Enlightenment and the nineteenth-century founders to Talcott Parsons - with a tail of articles from the last years of his life.
Its subject was live and dangerous in a way the placid title conceals. 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 then under a euphemism - concrete social research - a formula permitting empirical work on condition it did not claim to be a discipline. To publish a book with this title was to stand on that fault line, and what it permits sociology to be, and who it allows to have founded it, is the most revealing thing in it.
Read it as a mid-sixties book with late-sixties articles attached; nothing in it was written after 1969.
New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.
