Historical Horizons of the Modern Culture: A Mediterranean Context

Abstract

The article introduces the range of questions that are discussed in the part of the present issue of the journal dedicated to the historical horizon of modern civilization. In Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the most important ideas for modern civilization were formulated. Scientific, legal and social ideas that arose in the distant past created the horizon of modern culture, which begins to take on more or less distinct contours now. The development of this topic by the scholars, which were invited to collaborate in the issue, has produced an interesting additional result: it became clear that purely historical themes can be comprehended in terms of the theory of Human Capital. Moreover, the authors have focused on the socio-anthropological aspect of the problem, which allows us to see in the practices and activities of people those ways of thinking, mental paradigms, forms of knowledge and social strategies that constituted structural elements of their culture, which were formed in the deep Past.