ABSTRACT
Thomas Masaryk's catholicity has no doubt contributed to his current status as one of the distinguished but forgotten European founders of sociology. Masaryk's public life was dauntless and his private life impeccable, both ensured by militant ideals of rectitude and mindfulness that defined his character. The source of Masaryk's greatness may be located in his consistent, unapologetic defense of the spiritual discipline that Cooley considered inseparable from all "higher" culture. Masaryk aimed to extend and deepen sociological theory by studying the relationship between the psyche and society. Masaryk engaged in his own self-chosen symbolic struggles not with two titans of subjectivism but with two titans of objectivism—Comte and Marx. Masaryk consistently evaluated the forces of social order in terms of the moral and spiritual life of the soul or psyche of society's individuals. The heart of Masaryk's critique of Marx identifies the "exaggerated, uncritical historicism" that he inherited from Hegel as his fatal weakness.
