The research method of Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky: conceptual and methodological aspects

This article is devoted to the conceptual and methodological foundations of the works by the prominent historian from the Ukrainian diaspora Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky. The author's starting point is that Lysiak-Rudnytsky made a significant impact on historical scholarship in independent Ukraine, in particular on the studies of nation-building processes and the development of political thought, but the works on his own research methods are practically absent. The article demonstrates that he first defined his field as the History of Ideas, but later started using the definition “Intellectual History,” which presupposes the study of ideas in a wider cultural context and in their interaction with social processes. Such an understanding of the Ukrainian past can be explained by the influence of early-twentieth-century French sociology (through the mediation of Viacheslav Lypynsky) and Max Weber. As far as the methodological foundations of Lysiak-Rudnytsky's oeuvre are concerned, particularly typical for it were the comparative method and the microhistorical method of “case studies”. The scholar widely used the method of comparing the Ukrainian ideological trends with the European ones, as well as the comparison of cultural processes in Ukraine's different regions and that of Ukrainian thinkers from the opposite poles of political spectrum. The method of an in-depth example or case study served as a productive addition to this; it was usually applied to a certain episode from intellectual history or a biography of a little-known political or cultural figure. Lysiak-Rudnytsky's conceptual and methodological tools deserve to be applied wider in present-day Ukrainian scholarship.