Sociology of/as Culture
The Unfinished Methodology of Florian Znaniecki
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University of Illinois and the University of Du¨sseldorf.
Publication date: 2007-09-21
Polish Sociological Review 2007;158(2):209-222
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ABSTRACT
While Florian Znaniecki’s work is best known through his joint work with William I. Thomas
on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, his most important work deals with the methodology and
substance of sociology of culture, based on three origins: systems theory, the identification of cultural
science along the Vico-Axiom (his culturalism), and his cultural realism. Of the major sources of specific
sociology of culture, he analyses in The Method of Sociology (1934) as a system approach, types of cultural
and sociological data, existing methodological tendencies and the development of analytic induction which
means a conglomerate of logic principles and a principle based on exception rather than the rule of insight.
His final work Cultural Sciences (1952) is an attempt to include data and their interpretation from a set of
cultural sciences, whereby the functionality of sociology as a cultural specialty is increasing the sociologists
specialize in the comparative studies of other cultural sciences.