ABSTRACT
Today, all agree, confusion and polemics mark scholarly discussion of ideology. This is as true of writings on one society, like the Soviet Union, as it is of any other. The early history of the "new sociology" in the Soviet Union is well known. Groups of Soviet scholars began to take part in international congresses of sociology. In comparison with economics, the "new sociology" lags a good deal in its "secularization"–that is, in the degree to which a field moves from sacred to profane ways of thinking. Late in 1965 a trial issue of the first Soviet journal in sociology was printed; its name is Social Research. The findings of the Novosibirsk study were highlighted in a 1965 essay by Shubkin which appeared in the leading Soviet journal of philosophy and sociology. In the field of Marxist social philosophy, a few young scholars made plans to add "concrete" quantitative research to the deductive Soviet forms of social analysis.
