Alexander Hirner - historik slovenskej sociológie
Alexander Hirner - A Historian of Slovak Sociology

Summary/Abstract: Alexander Hirner – A Historian of Slovak Sociology. The paper focuses descriptively and analytically on the historiographical works of Alexander Hirner. The emphasis is on his works from the history of sociology in Slovakia. The paper divides the historiographical work of Alexander Hirner into three chronological chapters and one analytical chapter. The first chapter deals with Hirner's work in the 40s and, particularly, with his concept of the autonomy of Slovak history that was inspired by philosophy of vitalism. The second chapter aims at the description and the analytical evaluation of that period contest with the official Marxist historiography, that Hirner leaded in the 50s. Hirner did not agree with the Marxist simplifying concept of history that reduced the history to the monolinear change of social-economic formations. In contrary, Hirner advocated a more complex and less ideological study of the history. The third chapter mainly analyses Hirner's crucial work from the domain of the sociological history - the monograph “Czechoslovak Sociology till the 1948”. In this work, Hirner elaborated an original theoretical model for the historiographical study of sociology that can be universally applied as the basic framework for the analysis of the history of sociology. The last chapter of the paper analyses Hirner's concept of the meaning of the history. It suggests that Hirner perceived the meaning and progress of history, first of all, in the gradual national emancipation that should be interrelated with humanism, freedom and democracy. In the history of sociology, he considers a continually increasing unity of theory and empirical research to be the essential indicator of its scientific progress. Sociológia 2000 Vol 32 (No. 6: 555-576)

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