Based on the manuscript of A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky “Scientific foundations of sociology in their historical development” (1911), the author analyzes hisanalysis of the materialist trend in sociology – Marxist sociology. He considered Marxism as a kind of “nomotetic approach” in the social Sciences and believed that historical materialism in its dogmatic version had exhausted the possibilities of development. He saw the prospect of this ideological direction in the transformation of the materialistic approach based on the recognition of the role of ideas in history, taking into account psychological and epistemological analysis.