This study stakes stock of the work of the Czech journal Sociologický časopis and the Slovak journal Sociológia in the post-1989 state of development of Czech and Slovak society. It conducts a synchronous and a diachronic comparison for this purpose. It presents the structure of authors and themes in Sociologický časopis and Sociológia both in a temporal perspective, covering the years from 1989 to 2013, and in relation to journals published in the interwar and post-war periods. Probably the most interesting trend observed in the Slovak journal is the increase in the number of Czech authors and decrease in the number of Slovak authors. In relation to the interwar journals, most notable are the metarefl ection of sociology itself and of some nationally-specifi c themes.

The following text offers a comparison of Czech and Polish sociological journals of the interwar era related to the problems of the nation and the nation state. A combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis is used for comparing formal characteristics (institutionalization, periodicity, types, number and size of articles), and thematic structure. Czech sociology had a closer relationship to nation-state politics, which was shown at the level of institutional (in)stability of the journals, at the level of personal involvement of journals' leading figures in politics as well as at the level of discourse, where different relevance and content were attached to the subject of nation in each country. Regarding this issue Czech sociology (represented in journals in the 1930s) was closer to public sociology while the Polish discourse to policy sociology.

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This paper develops the sociological conception of subjectivity, which recognizes the key role of cultural and linguistic meanings in social life. J. Šubrt’s concept of “duplex” could help to overcome the theoretical dilemma between individualism (subjectivism) and holism (objectivism) in sociology. This concept is inspired by the critical realism of I. A. Bláha and takes into account perspectives from the philosophy of language, phenomenology, the classical sociology of G. H. Mead, and the contemporary critical realism of M. Archer. The focus of the duplex concept is the interactive and procedural nature of meanings (mental representations). The argument in favour of the interactive and pluralistic conception of the subject of social events derives from this attribute of meaning.

This article deals with the social introspection approach of the Czech sociologist I. A. Bláha. Its aim is not only to introduce the method but also to explore the potentials and the limits of this approach in understanding social reality. The author looks at Wittgenstein's argument against a private language as a critique of the introspective method and briefly analyses the phenomenological approach in sociology to asses the boundaries of the introspective approach. Theoretical conclusions on the application of the introspection method in sociology are drawn at the end of the article, allowing the author to assess the applicability of Blaha's method.