ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tangled relationship between advocacy and scholarship in Russian sociology. It draws attention to the virulent brand of patriotic social science that threatens to reduce the discipline to the subservient role it played in the Soviet Union. The controversy over the proliferation of paradigms in sociology and the threat it poses to the theoretical unity of the discipline is an old one. According to Robert Merton, the "debate between theoretical pluralism and theoretical monism" reemerges at strategic junctions in the discipline's history when sociologists committed to "an overarching theoretical system" clash with those favoring "a multiplicity of occasionally consolidated paradigms." Sociologists committed to the notion that Russia has unique historical destiny mistrust paradigm pluralism and insists on developing distinctively Russian theories and social remedies. Paradigm pluralism flourished after perestroika as Russian sociologists translated Western treatises and published long suppressed works of Russian thinkers.
