Institution-formation theory and principles of its construction. Globalization and the main mechanisms of the development of society. A. L. Safonov

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      This concept explains the fact that sociocultural unification and the convergence of local societies present a threat because they reduce the viability and development potential of humanity. The answer to this challenge is the establishment of “fourth-generation” civilizations. This theory, which is based on the idea of a historically evolving structure of local civilizations, including the change of civilizational leadership, is developed in detail in various works30,31. This concept substantiates the fact that the tendency towards socio-cultural unification of local civilizations currently plays a major role. In other words, the convergence of local civilizations is heading towards a global one. This theory takes the neoliberal model of global convergence (“westernization”, according to A. Zinoviev’s terminology32) as the basis, without seeing or proposing any alternative models of development or subjects interested in alternative development.

      Meanwhile, global unification is impossible at the very least because there is a struggle of peripheral local civilizations against the currently dominant civilization of the West. This struggle will inevitably produce fundamentally different kinds of social life and fundamentally different social norms and rules, alternative values, and models of social life.

      Having absorbed the whole world, the global civilization will inevitably generate new ways of forming groups and structures.

      However, Y.V. Yakovets’s rejection of the formation-based approach leads to the rejection of his main achievement – the notion of conflict and group interests as the driving forces of social and historical development. It also leads to the rejection of the achievements and possibilities of sociological structuralism, which sees society as a system of objectively existing social groups and structures that include, in particular, class and ethnocultural communities.

      E.A. Azroyants33 develops his original model of globalization as the concept of historical cycles and distinguishes three main cycles in human evolution: the emergence of humans; the establishment and development of the social community; and, ultimately, the establishment of a global megasociety as the highest “spiritual and moral” form of human existence.

      Development cycles are connected with transitional periods, which contain situations where it is possible to make a history-defining choice of the future path, the crossroads, from which different historical development paths branch out. Each cycle is seen as an evolutionary niche, a transition in the course of which there is a choice of a probable way of developing the local or global society. At the same time, the current situation, which is characterized by the global crisis, does not exclude the possibility of a fatal outcome for local civilizations and humanity as a whole as one of these options.

      E.A. Azroyants rightly believes that humanity is experiencing a civilizational crisis corresponding to the transition from the second cycle, i.e. the establishment of a community, to the third, the establishment of a “megasociety”. Accordingly, the current liberal model of globalization (globalization of TNCs and financial capital) does not allow a new level of development to be reached, which requires the development of a qualitatively new, “humanistic” model of global development. However, according to the author, the modern world has not formed social actors that are capable of, and interested in, “resisting TNCs and managing globalization in the interests of the entire humankind”.

      At the same time, E.A. Azroyants believes that the spiritual and technological types of development of society have different goals. As a result, technological development under certain conditions objectively generates social regression, which manifests itself in the sphere of social relations. Under the conditions of neoliberal globalization, there is both cultural and civilizational unification and general degradation of culture.

      However, the appeal to “network structures” with their amorphousness and lack of explicit control centres – the appeal that is popular today, in the age of artificial “social networks” – only highlights that the concept is subject-less. It has no place for real political actors and their interests.

      In general, these theoretical constructions are limited to a statement regarding the factual side of globalization. They emphasize its inherent system of growing internal contradictions, but are limited to the moral condemnation of the “new world order”. In this case, declaring the civilizational approach as a methodological basis, E.A. Azroyants, under the name of “historical cycles”, de facto offers his version of the formation-based approach. He repeats the main postulate of economic reductionism (and liberal fundamentalism as its variety) about the fatal inevitability of the merger of cultures and civilizations as the global economy is being established.

      Thus, the works of Y.V. Yakovets and E.A. Azroyants are typical contemporary works on the sociology and culturology of civilizations. They project and theorize the passive reflection of local social groups (including local civilizations), which are pushed by globalization to the periphery of social life together with their system of interests. Notably, the civilizational approach in these situations proceeds from a convergent and essentially staged model of development of social communities. In these concepts, the development of society is assumed to progress by merging the preceding communities until a global culturally homogeneous society (megasociety, “global humanity”, etc.) emerges. This concept ignores the obvious tendencies of modernity toward ethnocultural divergence, fragmentation, and the reinvigorated importance of ethnicity and religion.

      S. Pivovarov34 raises the question of the current state of the formation-based and civilizational approaches as complementary. He notes, in particular, that the formation-based approach borrows key ideas from Christian thought, including the universality of history, its regularity, and the possibility of periodization.

      A.I. Fursov stands out among the proponents of the formation-based approach, as he considers history to be more than a struggle of classes, social groups, and state bodies within a particular social formation35. He believes that societal development is characterized by long cycles of confrontation between the elites and the grass-roots movements. They can expand so far as to reach the global level in the last cycle of history. According to A.I. Fursov, the present moment is characterized by global revenge of the elites and, as a consequence, by a global collapse of the social gains of the majority.

      A.I. Fursov sees the mutual need for social cooperation, which requires СКАЧАТЬ