Čeští sociologové v počátcích slovenské sociologie

Czech Sociologists in the Beginnings of Slovak Sociology. The author analyses institutional beginning of Slovak sociology, which was very much influenced by Czech scholars. Earlier, somewhat amateur attempts at establishing a particular Slovak sociological tradition, associated mainly with Ján Lajčiak, were singularly unsuccessful, while members of the so-called Hlas movement (“Hlasists”), who followed Masaryk in the pre-First World War period, preferred politics to academic sociology in the interwar years. Slovak sociology was thus initially represented by Czech scholars employed in Bratislava (Josef Král, Otakar Machotka and Bedřich Vašek) who taught the first Slovak sociologists Peter Gula and Alexander Hirner until the split of Czechoslovakia in 1939. A new Slovak sociological tradition (sociography) was established by former politician with sociological interests Anton Štefánek in the late 1930s and 1940s at which time he remained the only professor of sociology in the Slovak Republic. Although Gula and Hirner were closer to the Prague sociological school and the older Štefánek to the Brno sociological school, there were no significant clashes between these Slovak sociologists and they eventually created their own sociological tradition, separate from Czech sociology, during the 1940s. It had two centres, which differed theoretically and methodologically, one in Bratislava (Štefánek and his followers including Ignác Gašparec) and another in Martin (Peter Gula, Alexander Hirner).