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The new postindustrial epoch has given birth to its own ideology – post-modernism. This term was introduced at the beginning of the 1980s by the French philosopher J.-F. Lyotard for the formalization of the phenomenon of skepticism relative to the rationalist tendencies of Enlightenment. The «generic features» of post-modernism are: agnosticism, pragmatism, eclecticism, and anarchodemocratism5.
post-modernism is the phenomenon of wide character, including all spheres of intellectual activity. It is based on egalitarian tendencies, contraposed to any hierarchic constructions6.
The emergence of post-modernism on the horizon of social development stimulated the need in development of new paradigms, since post-modernism denies the very possibility of the social theory. Particularly, it concerns the problem of forecasting the social development.
The history is permanently demolishing prognostic scenarios, however it has its own logic. What was considered sane, was not historical, what was considered historical, was not sane7. This can be reproduced by the social theory, that, of course, does not give exhaustive knowledge of objective reality but allows us to distance ourselves from the absolute relativism.
The end of the millennium, the formal beginning of the new historical epoch, stimulates the imperative need of a substantially new paradigm of the social theory. The history, being the existence in action, always goes beyond the narrow frame of temporal conceptual constructions in reality and, at the same time, often denies socio-philosophical prognoses. That is why, the revision of existing concepts and prognoses of social development offered before becomes actual. As known, futurological constructions are formed, as a rule, at a definite moment. With a change of the situation, rendering a substantial influence on the foreseen tendencies, the gap between the foreseen and the real is widening. That is why, the noncomprehension of a new social-political topology of the world becomes a source of faults and mistakes, a corollary of the absence of a future «far-horizon» project8.
In this context, significant is the discussion on the role of the social science in the contemporary world between former Presidents of the International Association of Sociologists I. Wallerstein and M. Archer. Whereas Wallerstein poses a new global problem of highlighting the fact of the end of one epoch and the beginning of another one as well as various forms of the transition to the latter, M. Archer accentuates the fact that the social science cannot play the role of radical transformer9.
At the same time, the discussion of the correlation of Belief and Knowledge is becoming actual for the western science. «There is no conflict between the religion and science in the East, since science is not based on the predilection to facts, and religion – only on the belief; there exist the religious cognition and cognitive religion» – states Carl-Gustav Jung10.
We emphasize the point that the society «goes through» radical social transformations in the transitional phase of development – the reform of social structures, relations and correlations, hierarchy of factors, etc. which take an important part in the system of the reproduction of social life. The processes of transitional conditions of social systems are followed by a sharp weakening of the influence of cause-effect relations which form the basis of the rational method in science. From our point of view, the realization of this fact explains a drop in efficiency and, in some cases, unsoundness of both scientific (rational) knowledge and the method of solving the task of overcoming the social crisis. Those are transitional periods (the times of «disturbance» and crises) when one can observe the growing importance of the traditional knowledge and practices backing on the intuition, popular orientations and methods, coming from ancient times, for solving vital tasks and for prognoses of the future.
It is obvious that the investigation of social development should be carried out on the principles of integration of the ancient and temporary, traditional and innovative knowledge and methods, which only together are able to give the adequate results under conditions of the transitional period of social development on the boundary of millennia.
The main scientific problem of the present research is the social development in the spatio-temporal continuum.
As the object of our analysis, we take the life cycle of the society as a subject of the historical process. We also shall investigate the genesis of societal processes, their characteristics and conditions.
We note that the analogous trend in social philosophy gives no any distinctive criteria for the rational construction of a system of classification and periodization as integral elements of a scientifically grounded foresight. In this connection, a new wave of the «traditional» discussion about progress is very significant. For example, A. Nazaratyan separates five through tendencies (vectors) of changes (on sufficiently large temporal intervals):
1) rise of technologic power;
2) demographic growth;
3) intellectual development;
4) growth of organizational complexity;
5) enhancement of tolerance.
Such an approach to the progress is criticized by A. Korotaev. He states that we do not know whether the humanity is approaching its apotheosis or abyss11. Indeed, the utilitarian ideal of progress formulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) is as follows: the sum of individual profits gives the overall profit – «the biggest happiness for the largest number of people» 12. But it still remains just a philosophical utopia for the largest part of the population over the world.
The theoretical constructions continue to be created at the corresponding levels of abstraction upon the analysis of objects of various scales. It is necessary to remove the contradiction between the forms of development on the basis of the formulated universal laws and all the variety of achievements of natural sciences. The question is the social science striving to become an exact science normative for the political sphere, especially in the context of social engineering.
The solution of this main task should promote the attainment of the main objective of this research – creation of a universal and, at the same time, applied model of epochal historical cycle as the unit of analysis and the means of prognostics at the level of the specific countries, regions, and civilizations.
The research has a polydisciplinary character, which is related to the development of the main concept of cyclicity of social development in the historical context.
The expected results, which are of hypothetical character prior to a receipt of empiric data, may become a subject for further specific researches in the sphere of the sociology of history, social philosophy, politology, psychology, right, geopolicy, philology, etc.
Thus, the contemporary macrosocial situation and the condition of theoretical developments stimulate the formation of a new research paradigm of the social science on the basis of integral societal indices. Of course, unless the corresponding empirical information is received, the offered concept is a hypothesis.
CHAPTER 2
Problem of historical-
sociological reflection
A historical-sociological conception is represented as a synthesis simultaneously containing the analysis of the most important tendencies of development of specific countries and regions, interpretation of the contemporary epoch, and forecast of long-term historical development. As is well known, the history of sociological science includes similar theories. In the period of the transition from a traditional to industrial society, this problem was solved by the conceptions of O. Comte, E. Durkheim, and K.. Marx. A detailed characteristic of the industrial society was given by M.. Weber13, and that of the post-industrial society by D. Bell, A. Toffler, and others.
We have already noted that, on the boundary of the third millennium, the global transformation stimulates changes in the spiritual sphere, and actual problems become sharper due to a greater nonpredictability of behaviour of subjects of the historical process. Similar social phenomena stimulate the necessity of harmonization of interdisciplinary scientific studies, new theoretical approaches, adequate methodologies for analysis and forecast which would be relevant to the historical challenge.
Since the history of sociological thoughts is a pure source of principal ideas of the sociology of history, we turn to the analysis of the state of scientific interpretation of the problem of social development.
This problem can be solved by considering the main conceptions of social development in the historical context through the prism of problematic-chronological discourse, which allows one to show the self-identification of the main doctrines and a scientific-critical dialog between them.
On the theoretical level, the basic contraversivity was already considered in the doctrines of O. Comte (1798-1857) and Ch. L. Montesquieu (1689-1775). The latter, as distinct from O. Comte, did not trust in the idea of progress14. At the same time, Ch. L. Montesquieu advanced a fruitful idea on the influence of geographical environment on the social development and definition of a historical situation. Here, we can find the origin of geopolicy and geoeconomy which, in the period of globalization, render a growing effect on the historical situation not only in specific countries and regions but on development of the whole civilization.
As distinct from Ch. L. Montesquieu, O. Comte was a supporter of the idea of unity of the whole history of the mankind, because the single intention of the history consists in the progress of human intellect15. Therefore, sociology should be a system of positive knowledge on the society. One of the moving forces of the history was a disorder of thinking at every individual historical stage. The process of development was described by O. Comte in terms of «statics» and «dynamics». The last is characterized as a sequential change of the necessary stages of establishment of the human intellect and society for attainment of a static state, i.e., social order. Therefore, progress is comprehended as a development of the rational in persons. As for the progress of a society, O. Comte connected it with the evolution of social (human) consciousness, the sequential change of three dominating types of outlook:
1) theological one, when the leading tendency of social development is the competitiveness between religious ideas and an originating scientific knowledge;
2) metaphysical one, which characterizes speculative-philosophical consciousness;
3) eventually at the highest stage, the scientific positive consciousness and positive style of thinking are established. This is related with the well-known optimistic aphorism of O. Comte about the creative role of science: «To know in order to foresee, and to foresee in order to be able» 16. The positivistic tradition, beginning from O. Comte, is connected with ideas of social engineering, i.e., a more or less conscious definition of the vector of social development.
The all-embracing conceptualization of the history was developed by Hegel who considered the historical process as that of establishment of the notion of freedom.
The most characteristic doctrine during establishment of the evolutionary-materialistic approach to the history was that of K. Marx (1818-1883). In the marxist conception, the history is considered as a progressive natural-historical process of variations in and change of social-historical formations. This mechanism was formulated as follows: «Every social formation does not die until all productive forces, for which it presents a sufficient place, will have developed, and no new higher production relations appear until the material conditions for their existence in the midst of the very old society will have ripened» 17. Such an evolutionary approach became a theoretical foundation of the activity of social democracy.
On the other hand, we recall that Marx inferred in the work «Lui Bonaparte’s brumaire, 18»: all previous revolutions improved the state apparatus, but it should be broken for the sake of establishment of the dictatorship of proletariat. Class struggle is already represented as a moving force of the history. Such a revolutionary marxism became a practical guide to action in countries with outdated rhythm of industrialization. However, the appearance of the socialist system after the II World war, which included the USSR and its satellites, did not become «the end of the pre-history». At the same time, the dogmatization of the social-philosophical theory of marxism dealed a fatal blow at it. On the other hand, the new phase in development of the industrial society, which was related with marginalization of the class structure where the proletariat formally represented a major part, has transformed the social structure of countries being in the advance-guard of the historical process.
The comprador capitalism in developing countries did not create a proletariat in the classical marxist sense of this term. Similar tendencies limited the creative potential of marxism, though impetuous events in the second half of the XX century (for example, youth riots in the Western Europe in 1968) allowed one to say about neo-marxism for some time18. In the former USSR up to the period of «perestroika» (1985-1991), the severe ideological control gave no possibility to freely develop even for a nonorthodoxal marxist thinking. The flow of denunciatory literature did not allow one to separate cereals from weeds. In fact, neo-marxist theoretical investigations were terminated without any real start. One of the last attempts was the book of S. Platonov, where the author comprehends the notion of communism and seeks for an answer to the rhetorical question about what can occur after communism. He analyzes the development of the mankind from the pre-history, i.e., the epoch of estrangement, through the epoch of destruction of private property, every of the production means of which is a stage of withdrawal of one of the layers of estrangement, to the epoch of «positive humanism», a free association of universally developing individuals19.
The notion of historical process in the materialist tradition is based on the stadial interpretation of the human history as a unit global process of development and change of formations. In the marxist paradigm, there were yet no attempts to theoretically explain the contemporary social situation of breaking the soviet model of socialism. This testifies to that marxism remains on pages of the history but on the periphery of an actual scientific discourse related with the positivistic solution of the problem of social engineering.
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