14.4. Historical Periodization of Social Development

A thought that history needs a sort of alternatives is quite popular in the present day philosophy. The idea of diversity of social and historic paths of humanity contains quite a few productive and valuable moves of thought. The modern world is moving towards informational civilization. But how will it look like? Won’t there be any other “designs” of future? Will all the countries get involved in this process? These questions bother many if not all modern philosophers.

In the historical periodization of the social process there are several approaches: formational, civilization, wave, informational and axial ones.

The formational approach is intrinsic to linear and progressive conceptions of studying history as an integral process of mankind’s progressive development with the unity of interdependent stages of social and cultural development. According to K. Marx, history is a natural-historical process of law-governed changes of socio-economic formations consistent of three basic elements: productive forces, production relations and superstructure. There are five formations: primitive-communal, slave-owing, feudal, capitalist and communist. Marx also had a category of “Asian mode of production” but it was never developed. The laws of development and changes of the formations is a social manifestation of the general laws of materialistic dialectics in a human activity of particular classes in the sphere of material production, distribution, exchange and assumption of material wealth. History is a continuous process of class struggle, the implementation of class struggle law.

The civilization approach states the existence of self-sufficient historical formations with their own history. The English philosopher J. Toynbee considered that in the world history there were 21 civilizations, 13 of them were the most significant. At the present time only five civilizations remained: Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Russian and the West. Each civilization passes five stages of its development: 1) rise, 2) growing, 3) fracture, 4) decay and 5) destruction. The motive force of civilization development is the minority of creative people, who are the bearers of the creative impulse and who lead the whole society. O. Spengler regarded civilization as the death of culture, the way of history existence which is different from that of natural causality. Real history for Spengler does not have any laws.

Other conceptions that help to highlight certain points and stages in a historical process are also discussed in the modern day philosophy. American sociologist Daniel Bell admitted that he had agreed with the main principles of Marxist division of history into formations, with each of them being characterized by its own mode of production, production relations form, etc. But he also wondered if it was the only division of the world’s history. He supported the model of the evolutional development of the mankind’s history: beginning with a traditional society that is primitive-communal and agrarian, then through machine-industrial stage to the modern – postindustrial, or technological society. D. Bell initiated the term of a postindustrial society, while other philosophers consider it informational, cybernetic or the society of governing. Bell divides society into three spheres: social structure, politics and culture. Social structure includes economic, technology and professional system. Politics regulates the division of power. Culture accumulates spiritual wealth. The conception of a postindustrial society is characterized first of all by changes in social structure, economic, professional sphere and in information. The basic attributes of the postindustrial society as Bell stated are as follows: 1) the creation of a social services economy, 2) the predominance of technical specialists and people of “free professions”, 3) the dominant role of theoretical knowledge as a source of innovations and political decisions, 4) the postindustrial society seems to be capable to reach a new stage in the social progress, planning and control over technical development, 5) the creation of an ultimately new kind of intellectual technique.

Waves of history

The given scheme of a historical progress, including the theory of post-industrial society, was supported and developed by another American sociologist Elvin Toffler (born 1928). He also underlined the direct connection between the change of technology and way of life. Technology, as he said, stipulates for the type of a society and culture. The influence of technology has a wave-like character.

The first agricultural wave lasted for centuries. It corresponds to a traditional society according to Bell's scheme, in which the open and closed, traditional and contemporary societies are compared. Toffler notes, that from China and India to Benin and Mexico, from Greece to Rome there appeared and went into decay different civilizations. Everywhere the land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure and politics. About 300 years ago the industrial revolution began and its shock-waves destroyed the ancient societies and gave birth to a new civilization.

The main content of the second wave was industrial production. It is a reign of power machinery. It resembles the muscle work of a human and its working sequence is broken into separate monotonous operations. People's way of life corresponds to the given image of machinery and work – it is characterized by centralization, gigantism and uniformity. Life in such a society is accompanied by oppression, poverty and ecological decadence.

A current wave, the third one, is associated with "an information society". It is triggered by the universal spread of computers, jet aviation, and flexible technologies. Informational society is home for new types of family, new styles of work, living and forms of politics, economy and consciousness. The World does not look like a machine any longer; it is filled with innovation, for the comprehension of which one needs constant development of cognition ability. The symbols of the third wave are integrity, individuality, and a pure humane technology. Services, science and education take the leading part in such a society. Corporations have to give way to universities and businessmen – to scientists. Bell thought that in a traditional society life was a game between man and nature, where humans interacted with natural habitat – land, water, forests while working in small groups. In an industrial society work is the game that goes on between man and artificial habitat, where humans are repressed by machines that manufacture goods. In an informational society work becomes the game between man and man (an official and a visitor, a doctor and a patient, a teacher and a student). So, nature is excluded from the frame of working and everyday life. People learn to live beside each other. Bell believed that this was a new thing to the history of a society – a thing with no parallel positions. So, the social structure is represented by four big spheres: cultural, political, social and economic. Every sphere is a mandatory, permanent part of social life. Some factors may be determinative in social development. Knowledge and technology are obviously claimed to be such factors in the modern society. But a society may only develop successfully if all the spheres and factors are developed simultaneously and effectively. Otherwise its development becomes one-sided, slows down, or even stops entirely.

Bell thought that social institutes and relations, spiritual processes are not determined by a single factor, for instance economy, as it was thought by Marx. Bell introduced a new category into social science –"the axial principle". He said that some social processes are situated along one axis, some other processes – along another one. Everything in a society depends on the chosen axial principle.

Bell had noted that feudalism, capitalism and socialism were forming a series of schemes in the Marxist system, which was based upon the axis of property relations. Bell thinks that nowadays the social development is not determined by the way of production properly, but only by science and technology. If this axial principle is recognized, the history of humanity will be composed of only three stages – traditional, industrial and post-industrial. Bell believed that a cardinal part of the postindustrial society was the central position of theoretical knowledge, as an axis around which the new technology, economic grows and the exfoliation of the society is organized.

Since 1970 a lot of philosophers followed in Bell’s footsteps and created similar theories. J. Naisbitt introduced the concept of megatrends: powerful, global trends that are changing societies on the worldwide scale. Among the megatrends that he mentioned was the process of globalization. Another important megatrend was the increase in performance of computers and the development of the World Wide Web. M. McLuhan introduced the concept of the global village (The Gutenberg Galaxy), and this term was soon adopted by the researchers of globalization and the Internet. J. Naisbitt and many other proponents of the theory of postindustrial societies argues that those megatrends lead to decentralization, weakening of the central government, increasing importance of local initiatives and direct democracy, changes in the hierarchy of the traditional social classes, development of new social movements and increased powers of consumers and number of choices available to them (A.Toffler even used the term of “overchoice”)

Some of more extreme visions of the postindustrial society are those related to the theory of the technological singularity. This theory refers to a predict point or period in the development of a civilization at which due to acceleration of technological progress, the social, scientific and economic change is so rapid than nothing beyond that time can be reliably comprehended, understood or predicted by the pre-singularity humans.

Critics of the postindustrial society theory point out that it is very vague and as any prediction, there is no guarantee that any of the trends visible today will in fact exist in the future or develop in the directions predicted by contemporary researchers. However, no serious scientist would argue it is possible to predict the future, but only such theories allow us to gain a better understanding of the changes taking place in the modernized word.

The direction of cultural-historical process always has a number of alternative possibilities. It depends on many factors which of possibilities will be realized. The human creative activity both conscious and unconscious and even unrealized, their goals and spontaneous freedom stimulate the development of the world history.