p The most characteristic feature of contemporary bourgeois sociology is the rejection of the objective laws of social development. This rejection assumes the most diverse forms in different sociological trends.

p The group of undisguised idealists says outright that no historical laws exist, that history is an unknowable realm of chaos and chance.

p Proponents of the psychological school see the basis of social development in psychological factors—the wishes, will and instincts of man. In their opinion, the cause of social disorder and the suffering of the working people in capitalist society is rooted in the imperfection of the worker’s mentality and not in the objective laws of capitalism, not in private capitalist ownership. Perfection of mentality is the remedy offered by psycho-sociologists for curing major social ills.

p The biological school favours scientific sociology in words, but .in fact substitutes biological laws for the genuine laws of social development and places man on a level with animals blindly fighting for existence. This is an attempt to “justify”, by allegedly natural laws, exploitation, predatory wars, colonialism, racialism and other ugly features of capitalism.

p Bio-sociologists refuse to concede that it is scientifically untenable to reduce the laws of social development to biological laws because society develops according to its own specific laws, which qualitatively differ from the laws of 189 development of animals and plants.

p Rejection of the major laws of social development is also typical of micro-sociology, or, as it is also called, empirical sociology. Micro-sociologists do not openly reject knowledge of social life, but in the intricate chain of social phenomena they study only petty facts of capitalist reality, do not examine them in their interconnection, not wishing to see behind them the internal laws of society’s development. This, in effect, signifies renunciation of consistent scientific analysis and the need to raise and solve the basic social problems of our time.

p Refusal to recognise the laws of social development is nothing but an attempt to clear the way in social life for religious faith. There is nothing accidental in the fact that many bourgeois sociologists maintain that the historical process is predestined by God. For example, the English historian Arnold Toynbee insists that the aim of history is to set up the kingdom of God and history is God revealing himself.

By rejecting the law-governed character of social development, many bourgeois ideologists thereby distort the real course of history, embellish capitalism and attempt to justify its reactionary domestic and foreign policies.