Braslavskiy R. (2022) Evolyutsiya kontseptsii tsivilizatsii v sotsioistoricheskoy nauke v kontse XVIII — nachale XX veka [The evolution of the concept of civilization in the socio-historical science in the late XVIII — early XX centuries]. Zhurnal sotsiologii i sotsialnoy antropologii [The Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology], 25(2): 49–79 (in Russian). https: ...

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Abstract

The article traces the emergence of the concept of civilization in the discourse of late Enlightenment and his later reception in social and historical science of the XIXbeginning of XX centuries. The main conceptual innovation associated with the formation of the concept of “civilization” was the opening of the cultural and historical dimension in the human mode of existence, defined through the concept of reason. Universal history of civilization developed by the Enlightenment’s thinkers was the first program of civilizational studies. In sociology the concept of civilization was gradually superseded by the concept of society that gave a different interpretation of “social”, “cultural”, “political” and their relationships, as well as different understanding of human agency. Each of these two concepts sought to be comprehensive and covered himself all spheres of human activity. Both of them restricted the sphere of “political”, subjecting it to nonpolitical factors. But between them was a fundamental difference. If the concept “civilization” focused on culture, products of human activity, the concept “society” did on the social structure and social forms of human interaction. In the first case, the human beings endowed with the qualities of the creators of culture and the subjects of history; in the latter, they were seen as products of social relations, the objects determined by social structure. The key principle of “autonomy of the human reason” pronounced by Enlightenment’s thinkers was replaced by an assumption of “autonomy of the social structure” in sociology.