Institutionalization of Sociology in Brno: Favorable Political Momentum, Hostile Academics

This is a case study of the institutionalization of sociology in one of the semiperipheral countries of Europe in the interwar period. The Seminar of Sociology at the university in Brno was among the most dynamic of the newly established sociological units in Central Europe. Under the leadership of Inocenc Arnošt Bláha it rose to rival Prague as the main center of academic sociology in Czechoslovakia. Bláha and his associates controlled the Czechoslovak sociological association and edited the first national journal of sociology, Sociologická Revue. In the 1930s the Brno group began to conduct increasingly ambitious empirical research projects. Bláha and his associates self-consciously cultivated a large network of contacts in the international sociology of their time, including such figures as Pitirim Sorokin, Earle Eubank or Louis Wirth. But the ambition of sociology to be recognized as an academic discipline had to be asserted against the opposition that existed within the state administration, among an influential portion of the national intelligentsia and among the professors from the humanities and law faculties at the university of Brno. The success would be hardly possible had Bláha not aligned himself and his discipline with the central political objectives of the Czechoslovak Republic (social equalization, land reform, secularism, Czechoslovakism). This despite the fact that he remained a political outsider and his own political activities were a failure. On the other hand, of no small weight was his public persona owed to the role he had as popular educator and media presence. The Second World War and the subsequent Communist dictatorship put an end to the promising growth of the Brno School of Sociology. But the legacy persisted and was revived in the 1960s when sociology was reinstitutionalized in the form of a Department at Brno University which has been in continuous existence until today.