Civilization and society as categories of social philosophy

Abstract

The topical issue of the relationship between civilization and society as basic concepts of social philosophy is discussed in the article. In modern literature, there are great disagree­ments and ambiguities here, due, first of all, to the broad interpretation of civilization by the majority of authors, the interpretation in many cases actually coinciding with the meaning of the concept of society. The article proposes a solution to the issue proceeding from a social-philosophical consideration of four different meanings of the word society: society in general, society as a specific historical type of society, a specific separate soci­ety (socior, in the terminology of Yu.I. Semenov) and humanity as an internally differen­tiated integrity, as a modern human society. One can assume that civilization acts as a characteristic of both the state and the process of development of society in each of its meanings, a characteristic in terms of the correspondence of a particular society to a soci­ological (stage-formation) project. By defining society as an integral social system, a so­ciological theory as a scientific one gives an answer to the question of what exists (what kind of community of people is in structure, functions, subjects and social relations), and with the help of the concept of civilization – how does this society really reproduce itself, how do regulatory mechanisms that determine the actions and deeds of people. Civiliza­tion deals with the present, with the activities of people who change this present, and so­ciety, in the philosophical sense, and not in the sociological one, is the desired future, those distant mountain peaks, that transcendental reality to which the acting person rushes. When it is said today that Russia is returning to itself, that it must make a civiliza­tional choice, it is important to emphasize in every possible way that the choice of a civi­lizational identity, by definition, is unthinkable without a project. A sociological project as a scientific project is directed to the future, outlines the contours of the future, and therefore only project thinking is able to give an opportunity to make the right civiliza­tional choice.