Towards a New Sociology: Values and the Sacred

Abstract

The article claims the need for a radical methodological renewal of social sciences in connection with the need to expand their subject beyond the empirical data. This task is generated by the world civilization crisis and the related problem of value foundations of social life. The dominance of the positivist tradition and the gradual displacement of non-empirical objects from the field of science has led to the inability of empirically oriented social sciences to work with the key factor of long-term regulation of social life – values belonging to the sphere of the sacred, i.e. going beyond the rational and measurable. It is necessary to turn to the unclaimed legacy of the founders of modern sociology – M. Weber, E. Durheim and P. Sorokin – and return the sacred to the field of science, recognizing it as a phenomenologically significant part of social life and relying on overcoming the limitations of positivist science instead of refusing to study inconvenient objects or replacing them with surrogate empirical forms.