The article features an analysis of the ideas of Yurij Levada, an eminent Russian academic, sociologist dealing both with theory and with practice of sociology, a founder of a research institution inMoscow known as Levada-Centre. Levada gave a special place to culture within sociology and he himself called his project on theoretical sociology an “attempt at culturally justified sociology” (grounded in a perspective orientated to culture). The project was based on structurally complex, culturally conditioned and symbolically indirect social actions. In his opinion, such knowledge of culture required to be looked at retrospectively, which provides for tackling the issue of social system reproduction while enabling to understand contemporary culture at the same time. This way of thinking was a basis for Levada’s analyses of the surrounding social reality, e.g. his analyses of intelligence or the concept of “simple Soviet man”.

The author of this essay deals with the specificity of sociology in Poland, reaching for the book of Antoni Sułek A Mirror on the High Road. Chapters from the History of Social Research in Poland (2019). Chapters of this book taken as a set constitute a review of the key issues that Polish sociologists strived to tackle in the 20th century. For approximately half of the book (6 chapters) Sułek focuses on issues of Polish sociology from the mid-1950s to the turn of the 1990s: the first is the change of theoretical and methodological paradigms in Polish sociology in the second half of the 20th century; the second is the successes of Polish sociology, but also its weaknesses—the author devoted much space to the theoretical limitations that prevented sociologists from predicting the formation of Solidarity in 1980. The third topic is the historical analysis of surveys conducted in the last decade of communism—their reliability as well as social and political functions. Finally, Sułek’s vision of socially-involved sociology appears. The strength of such sociology lies in its methodology, with which specific phenomena can be correctly defined, impartially analysed, and systematically investigated. And this in turn enables evidence-based debate and policy.