Milan Scholz, Czech comparative historian (2009 PhDr., 2017 Ph.D., Charles University, Prague, specialization in general and comparative history), independent analyst, interdisciplinary researcher in the field of social sciences and humanities.
Milan Scholz’s field of interest have been the theory and methodology of comparative approach, history of ideas, philosophy of history, questions of the search for identities, geographical frameworks of socioeconomic and historical processes. He repeatedly returns to questions of centrality and peripherality, marginality and otherness which he views by historical and philosophical optics. In this methodological framework, the thinking of the philosopher, social scientist and the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (studied in a comparative perspective) became a prominent theme of his publications.
Milan Scholz is a theorist who considers theory to be a useful practice of its kind, a real world with its own attributes. Together with T. G. Masaryk, he shares the view that “a sword without theory is not a weapon, but remains only a piece of iron”. From the childhood, he was a connoisseur and lover of maps. Nevertheless, he didn’t find a similarly warm relationship to travel to faraway lands and countries. He preferred systematic exploration and observation to immediate and exciting experiences. Such an approach was considered by him to be a less impressive and spectacular, but a deeper way of penetrating to the core of problems. Over the years, he systematically learnt eleven foreign languages. He uses eight foreign languages in his work and texts written in these languages are quoted in his publications. Like the historian Fernand Braudel, he holds the view that not only the language itself, but also civilizations are structured and defined by their grammar. Together with the sociologist Thomas Luckmann, he believes that language represents a “cultural apriori” – what cannot be expressed by it, cannot even be grasped by thought. Therefore, one of the main keys to comparing conceptual and mental worlds is hidden in the language.
He is a proponent of methodological and professional individualism, which is not bound by predefined streams of thought or by established categorizations of problems. The autodidactic approach has always played an important role in his approach to knowledge.
Milan Scholz compensates for the long hours spent between books and at his desk by cycling (both in sport and in hiking form) and by gardening, which was one of his life’s activities from an early age. The landscape of distant horizons, high cloudy skies overhead and mechanical movement across the landscape facilitate him in all weathers and seasons intellectual catharsis because they provide inspiration and improve the gloomy mood.