The view that Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the founder of the Czechoslovak Republic, was a philosopher and indeed, after becoming President, the most unusual embodiment of the Platonic "philosopher-king" is widespread and in many respects fully justified. But the conventional, somewhat narrow interpretation of the term philosopher in this connection does injustice to an important component of Masaryk's scholarly activity and obscures the fact that it was sociology which was really Masaryk's scientia amabilis.'
Sociology it was to which Masaryk devoted some of his most vahable and original contributions and in which he sought an antidote to the sheer speculativeness of so much of the philosophic thinking of his time. We have Masaryk's own testimony to this effect.
"In philosophy I strove to attain scientific precision, concreteness and realism. The philosophy of the schools estranged me ("bh.1 jsem se filosofie pfilis Skolskd"), for it was a survival and continuation of medieval Scholasticism. Metaphysics I did not like, for I found no satisfaction therein. I n my eyes, philosophy was, above all, ethics, sociology, and politics".2
In the lectures given by him as a Privatdocent at Vienna (1879-1881) sociological topics pred~minate.~ His were among the first sociological courses offered at any university, European or American. After coming to Prague in 1882, Masaryk's professorial chair at the Charles University there was, in fact, that of both philosophy and sociology. His most famous and widely influential university lectures "on practical philosophy" which he gave for over twenty semesters were essentially sociological in character and were originally labeled as such in the university catalog~e.~ Masaryk's first major work, Suicide (1881), containing many of the themes which he was to develop later, is a sociological monograph par excellence.6 Discussion of logical and methodological issues of sociology forms a substantial part *Paper read at the Second Conference of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences held at Columbia University, New York, September, 1964.
'This curious lack of appreciation of Masaryk's sociological contribution should not be understood to mean complete absence of works dealing with various aspects of Masaryk's sociology. Many thoughtful assessments have been written, especially by zech disciples of Masar k and by other