Civilizational Approach — a View from the Standpoint of Idealism

The article examines the genesis and development of the civilizational approach. The author concludes that civilizational theory is becoming dominant in political, philosophical, cultural and historical discourses. At the same time, the modern civilizational approach is Eurocentric, impoverishes human creativity, dooming all non-Western paths of development to extinction. Considering the civilizational ideas of O. Spengler, A. Toynbee, F. Braudel, P. Sorokin, K. Jaspers, S. Huntington and others, the author comes to the conclusion that none of these approaches provides a convincing explanation for the reasons for the emergence of civilizations, and cannot fully explain their development, since they do not take into account man as a subject of their creation and development. The idealistic approach to history solves the problem of civilizations in a radically different way, believing that civilizations are created by specific people based on the ideas that underline their historical actions and creativity. Civilizations are considered by the author as a subjective-objective reality created by people based on different worldviews, as systems of hierarchically organized ideas. From the standpoint of the idealistic approach, Russian civilization is not a single socio-cultural formation. In its development, it consistently passes through four ideological forms: pagan, Orthodox, communist, liberal.