Categories and methods of civilizational approach in modern philosophical and historical discourse

Abstract

The diverse contradictions of the modern world, social and international conflicts, the growing trends of both globalization and national isolation, the rapid development of communication technologies against the background of growing gap between poverty and wealth of the countries and within them are evidence of another crisis in the system of international relations, of the entire world order. The growth of entropy has once again raised the question of the lack of a holistic and systematic understanding of the processes of socio-historical development, and actualizes the need to analyze theories that consider the development of large socio-cultural communities. In this regard, it is important to study socio-philosophical and philosophical-historical theories and views, united in a civilizational approach. The dominance of the formational approach in Soviet historical science ended in the late 1980s. And in 1995 the Russian Academy of Sciences recognized that civilizational theory can serve as one of the conceptual principles for analyzing and describing the historical process in textbooks for schools and universities. The object of our article is the essence of the civilizational philosophical and historical concept. The subject is the discourse, in the space of which there is developed a methodology, and are analyzed the categories of the civilizational approach to history. We apply general theoretical research methods: analysis, synthesis, comparison, interpretation. It is shown that within the framework of the theory under consideration methodological differences are significant, so several theoretical varieties are identified and the key categories of the civilizational concept in them are interpreted differently.