From a Methodology of History to a Historical Metasociology: A. Lappo-Danilevsky’s Lessons

Abstract

This article introduces the work of Alexander Lappo-Danilevsky (1863–1919), an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who combined the creative intuition of a historian, social philosopher, and sociologist. His contribution to the development of social sciences and humanities in Russia in the early twentieth century consisted primarily in the elaboration of archeography, methodology of history and historical sociology. He was an initiator and the first chairman of Maxim Kovalevsky's Russian Sociological Society (1916), and an active supporter of the establishment of the Institute of Social Sciences (1918)