ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to analyse books on general history of sociological thought written in two neighbouring countries, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Polish and Czech general histories of sociological thought dealt with exactly the same concepts and theories as other books of this kind published at the same time elsewhere. Moreover, a glance at narrations on the history of sociological thought reveals that they indeed involve two different styles of describing past phenomena, which resemble Jan Assmann's communicative and cultural social memory. In a series of papers, including 'On the Theory and Systematics of Sociological Theory' published in 1967, Robert K. Merton noted that most sociologists writing on the history of sociology confuse it with the systematics of sociological theory. Raewynn Connell attributed the transformation of the attitude towards the past and the style of description to the scientific revolution that changed the leading paradigm and/or the geography of post-war sociology.
