S. was a convinced humanist, and as such conducted his theatre along the road to socialism.
— Bertolt Brecht, 1952
David Mamet has said that Stanislavski’s humanism is evidenced by his recognition that on the stage as in life human beings must concern themselves with the truth of the individual moment.
For Brecht, humanism was inextricably connected to socialism and ‘realistic’ meant "laying bare society’s causal network." And Stanislavski included "legal and social conditions" among the elements that an actor should consider when using the if to bridge the gap between actor and character.
One example of this can be found in the discussion of dramatizing Chekhov’s story about a farmer who innocently unscrewed a nut off a railroad track to use for a fishing line. "... [F]or most people it will remain a funny story," Stanislavski wrote. "They will never even glimpse the tragedy of the legal and social conditions hidden behind the laughter.... To achieve this kinship between the actor and the person he is portraying add some concrete detail which will fill out the play, giving it point and absorbing action."
In the last of the five rehearsals for Massenet’s opera Werther, which are outlined in the posthumously published volume On the Art of the Stage, Stanislavski urged the actor playing Werther to behave "so that it shall not appear to the people of that time, that class ... that you are an abnormal young man. What sort of people are they? They are highly respectable people, serious, brought up with the prejudiced notions of a small provincial German town."
In his study of the first scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus Brecht wrote:
Think how reluctantly men decide to revolt.... Neither we nor the audience must be allowed to overlook the contradictions that are bridged over, suppressed, ruled out, now that sheer hunger makes a confrontation with the patricians unavoidable.
We can apply a sociological method in our work without necessarily accepting every detail of Brecht’s political views. In fact, we do so whenever we consider the economic, political and cultural elements in the "given circumstances" of a play or scene.