The very rapid growth of factual knowledge that characterizes contemporary scholarship has confronted research with the task of synthesizing this knowledge and of employing it to develop integrated ideas about the subjects studied. This task is not confined to the field of natural science, but confronts historical scholarship, too, in all its complexity. Thus, in recent years, the question of the possibilities for and methods of applying systems and structural analysis to the social sciences, particularly history, has been attracting increasing attention, because that analysis presumes an integrated approach to the subjects studied. It is a reality that the vast mass of facts gathered and analyzed in specialized, narrow studies, and from which general conclusions have been drawn on the empirical level, in their aspect as isolated problems and periods in the history of individual countries, demands further generalization, going beyond these narrow confines. But this requires the development of principles of typology for particular social entities - whose absence is constantly felt in arguments over which social system a given society belongs to (this holds particularly for precapitalist societies, both contemporary and in antiquity) - their place in world history, the paths being followed in their development, the features of transition to other modes of production or, what amounts to the same thing, the general and special regularities operative in them. All these questions have become particularly urgent recently in connection with the discussions on the paths to be followed in the further development of countries and peoples liberated from colonial dependence. The complex of problems we have listed is directly associated with the complexity of historical explanation and interpretation of facts, and the identification of laws and regularities operative over the entire course of human history, but modified at particular stages or to be seen only under given circumstances.