Historiography of Alexander Bogdanov's scientific works

This article contains analysis of Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov's (1873-1928) scientific works historiography and allocates the main directions of his scientific heritage study. The first stage of this study, the period of the 1930s-1950s, is characterized with the Marxist-Leninist ideology domination. Back then Bogdanov's works were interpreted only according to Georgy Plekhanov's and Vladimir Lenin's polemical texts, and it was the reason why the tectological system analysis method created by Bogdanov was defined only as an anti-Marxist philosophical doctrine. Some changes took place in the 1960s-1990s, when the main attention of historians was focused on Bogdanov's practical research in the sphere of medicine and system analysis. The main methodological features of the latest historical research are also characterized in this article: 1) the field of research is consciously narrowed to one-two aspects of Bogdanov's activity, which are studied in a profound detail; 2) the analysis of Bogdanov's works is rigidly associated with a specific area of knowledge: economics, sociology, political science, medicine, public administration, etc., and his tectological system analysis method is groundlessly attributed to philosophy; 3) scientific works of Bogdanov are corresponded with the modern situation in the respective areas of theoretical and practical knowledge, and are analyzed without any connection with the real level of science development in the time of Bogdanov's life. It should be especially noted that historians in the 2000s-2010s preserved the aspiration to interpret Bogdanov's developments as philosophical "discourse" only; it is also necessary to estimate the heuristic potential of a similar interpretation as low because it leads to the replacement of Bogdanov's system research analysis by a significantly less productive procedure of comparison of Bogdanov's opinion with opinions of other historical persons who lived at the turn of the 20th century. An alternative for a "discursive" interpretation of Bogdanov's scientific heritage is the integration of the tectological system analysis method with the research of the historical process and, respectively, the correlation of all "discursive" interpretations not only with each other but with the main forms of social, economic, political and scientific practice reconstructed according to primary sources, too. This methodological approach will allow to disprove a widespread conception of history as a "collection of subjective judgments about events of the Past" and will allow to restore the status of historical science as exact knowledge about the system of cause-effect relations between accurately established facts.

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