p Besides historical materialism, many general laws of social life are studied by specific social sciences such as linguistics, the legal sciences, ethics, aesthetics, political economy and the historical science. So the question inevitably arises as to what distinguishes the subject-matter of historical materialism from that of specific social sciences and how it interrelates with them.

p As a rule, specific social sciences study certain individual aspects of society, the laws governing the functioning and development of various spheres of social life. Linguistics, for example, studies the laws governing the functioning and development of language, the legal sciences deal with the law, ethics studies the laws of the rise and development of moral norms and views, political economy investigates the laws of society’s economic life at various stages of development, etc. Unlike these sciences, historical materialism studies not separate spheres ot social lite but 288 society as an integral organism, as a special, relatively stable system of the motion of matter, in which all aspects ot social lite are organically interrelated and interdependent. Thus, it is the laws of the interrelationship and interdependence of all aspects and links of a social organism that are studied by historical materialism.

p Besides the specific social sciences already mentioned, there is another social science that studies society as historical materialism does, as a whole, not as individual aspects of its social life. This is general history. So, how to differentiate between the subject-matter of historical materialism and that oF historical science?

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p Historical materialism studies specific historical events with a view to discovering, on their basis, the general laws governing the functioning and development of society, while historical science aims at explaining specific events, proceeding from the relevant laws of social development. In other words, historical materialism, by studying specific social phenomena, strives to reveal the general, inherent in any society at a given stage of development, while historical science, looking at the same events, strives to detect the particular and explain it proceeding from the relevant general laws of historical materialism.

Thus, though historical materalism and historical science deal with the same subject-society as a whole-their subject-matter differs.