Mikhail Khvostov: In search of a new image of historical science

In 2022, the 150th anniversary of the birth of the famous Russian historian, professor of the Imperial Kazan University Mikhail Mikhailovich Khvostov was celebrated. His life was tragically cut short in Tomsk, where the scientist came to live during the Civil War. His premature death did not allow him to complete the comprehension of ideas about a new "type" of history, in which the traditional philosophical foundations of historiography were revised and adjustments were made in the strategy of achieving scientific truth by historians. The article analyzes the culture of Khvostov's science-making, his contribution to the creation of a new (for the turn of the 20th century) image of explanatory - sociological - history that integrates the epistemology of generalizing sociology and individualizes history in the study of the causes of changes in the integral social reality. The focus is on the philosophical and historical aspect of Khvostov's concept of sociological history, the main approaches to verifying its disciplinary status: the subject of research, theoretical and methodological foundations, principles of cognition and the achievement of objective truth, place in the system of socio-humanitarian knowledge. The theory of the "forces" (factors) of the unfolding of the historical process among the peoples of the ancient world - the core of the concept of sociological history, reflecting the ideas of determinism and causality of social evolution, - is described in the most detail. The scientist claimed the equivalence of all factors of historical development: natural, demographic, socio-economic, socio-political, socio-psychological. However, he dedicated his research mainly to the analysis of "economic life" and, mainly, to changes in the ways of exchanging material values, thereby sharing the stadial theories of economic transformation processes developed in German political economy. In addition, unlike the supporters of Marxism, Khvostov considered economics to be a "psychological phenomenon". Despite a number of erroneous conclusions from a modern point of view, the factor theory became an important tool for him in understanding the fundamental causes of continuous historical changes among the peoples of the ancient world. It proved the interdependence of all social conditions, conveyed the idea of the predetermined route of the historical development of ancient civilizations. Along with the novelty of Khvostov's sociological discourse, the article reveals the vulnerability of a number of provisions of his conception. He relied more than his contemporaries on the basic philosophical and methodological postulates of positivism and at the same time "renewed" positive nomothetic knowledge with neo-Kantian ideas and a psychological approach to the study of historical processes among the peoples of the ancient world.