Civilization in the Face of Sociology

The article is a brief overview of the concepts that exist in sociological science from the moment of its inception to the present and related to civilizational issues. The peculiarities of this branch of knowledge, which arose during the Great Industrial Revolution, in the era of the formation of nation-states, led to the fact that for a long time sociologists did not use a civilizational approach, the idea of civilization prevailed as a certain stage in the development of society, opposing “barbarism”, in the age of Enlightenment (F. Guizot), and in the twentieth century (N. Elias). At the same time, it is possible to identify a certain attitude to civilizational issues in Marxism, and in an alternative approach to it, which the author calls technological (D. Bell, O. Tofler with J. Gelbraith adjacent to them), and in the concept of the “world-system” by I. Wallerstein, and in geoeconomics by F. Braudel. The article analyzes the contribution to the sociology of civilizations of the classics of the civilizational approach (N.Y. Danilevsky, O. Spengler, A. Toynbee, P. Sorokin). Special attention is paid to the “civilizational turn” in sociology in the 1970s, primarily related to the works of Sh. Eisenstadt and continued at the beginning of the XXI century by Aronson, as well as the concept of Russian civilization in the works of sociologists D. Nielsen and I. Yakovenko. The article raises theoretical questions about the civilizational approach from a sociological perspective, first of all, the scientific possibilities to identify specifically cultural and value cores of various civilizations, including Russian, to define Russian civilization in relation to the concepts of Eastern Christian civilization and Soviet civilization, as well as the degree of its universalism and autarkism.