Traditional society (pre-industrial society, primitive society). Typology of society What is it

Some sociologists, when describing the periodization of the development of human societies from lower to higher, use the term "civilization", arguing about "traditional civilization", "industrial civilization", "post-industrial civilization". It is not by chance that we avoid this concept here and use the generalized term "society". The point is that this is dictated by the completeness of the picture of social dynamics that we have set. The concept of "civilization", by definition, is inapplicable to primitive societies, since there is no written language (it is no coincidence that the term "preliterate societies" is sometimes used in relation to them).

Let us once again turn to the scheme of progressive development of human societies (see Fig. 21), in order to constantly keep in mind that the transition from one type of society to another occurs as a result of a certain global revolution. Comparing the transformations that take place during the transition from one type of society to another, we could consistently identify those social changes that are the result of this revolution. A primitive society is transformed into a traditional one in the course of the development of the agrarian revolution, and the social changes that it brings to life form the common specificity of all traditional societies. We will try to describe these social changes in this section.

The nature of the social structure. So, the transformation of primitive communities into a traditional society takes place in the course of the agrarian revolution, which caused huge social changes not only in the economy and technology, but in all spheres of social life without exception. The emergence of a surplus product, and with the development of private property - and surplus - product means the emergence of material grounds for the formation of a qualitatively new form of social structure - the state.

There is reason to believe that the institution of the state is more likely to arise among agricultural peoples. The fact is that farming requires a lot of labor and, because of this, practically does not leave those who are involved in it, time for military (or hunting) exercises. Labor costs in cattle breeding are much less, which is probably why every adult nomad is a warrior at the same time. Agricultural communities in to a greater extent need professional military protection of their territorial borders: because of this, they have an earlier and more distinct objective need for separate armed detachments that make up the backbone of the state.

The emergence of the state is closely related to the emergence of first a surplus, and then a surplus product, which means private property and the possibility of alienating this product from its producer. Moreover, alienation occurs not only through the sale and purchase, but also through the withdrawal of a certain part of the product in the form of tribute and taxes. This part of the surplus product goes to the maintenance of the professional administrative apparatus, the army and the coercive forces that ensure the ordering of social life.

Due to the emergence of the possibility of creating a surplus product and its alienation in favor of the state, a layer of people is gradually forming in society who are not employed in the productive process, and therefore have a sufficiently large amount of free time necessary for intellectual pursuits. This is an elite not only in the social, managerial, but also in the intellectual sense. Let us pay attention to the fact that a certain part of its representatives are professionally engaged in management, which means that they are sufficiently constant and long-term processing of information required for making management decisions. The institution of the state begins to demand more and more professionally trained officials to serve its needs, thus giving rise to the institution of education. The state is also very closely connected with the development of the institution of law.

Gradually, in each of the traditional states, special, as a rule, also armed groups are created and grow, which are entrusted with the functions of coercive social control, regardless of what they are called - the police, city guards or something else. These organized civilian forces carry out the tasks of "internal" protection of the existing law and order and property. Although professional police formally appear in most societies in the later, rather industrial era, they have been present in one form or another throughout the existence of traditional societies.

The forms of government in most traditional states, with very few exceptions, are purely authoritarian in nature. This is the power of one ruler or a very narrow elite circle - a dictatorship, monarchy or oligarchy. Of course, the monarchy had the oldest and strongest traditions, and most often it all came down to it; even dictators who seized power personally and did not have the formal title of monarch, ultimately sought to legitimize their power precisely in the form of a monarchy. The tendencies in the development of monarchies in mature traditional societies, approaching the industrial revolution, are such that, as a rule, they eventually develop a strong centralized state - most often in one form or another of an absolute monarchy. This is one of the important prerequisites for the success of the subsequent industrialization process.

¦ The level and scope of education: the nature of the development of the institution of education (primarily formal) and its impact on the nature and pace of social change.

¦ The nature and level of development of scientific knowledge: the development of science as an independent social institution and its connection with other institutions of society.

Of course, in carrying out a more detailed study of the social changes that occur during the transition of societies from one type of civilization to another, we would need to consider a much larger number of characteristics. For example, add to those already listed above the principles of social structuring, the nature of interaction with the natural environment, the role and place of religion in social life, the institution of marriage and family, etc. given above.

What types of societies do we distinguish? The answer to this question can be found in the diagram of the transition from one type of society to another as a result of one or another global revolution (see Fig. 21). Thanks to the work of Walt Rostow in sociology, it is generally accepted to divide societies into traditional and modern. However, in modern sociological research, "modern" societies are often further subdivided into "industrial" and "post-industrial". At the same time, VL Inozemtsev, analyzing the views of generally recognized theorists of postindustrial society, rightly points out that "none of them studied in any detail the economic problems of preindustrial societies, only occasionally mentioning their individual aspects in their works." Meanwhile, it is possible to understand the true significance of modern trends in the development of human society only in the context of historical development. Extrapolation of the future is possible along at least three points - from the past through the present to the future. It seems to us that such a scheme is not complete enough, since, while studying the dynamics of the development of human society as a whole, it is hardly legitimate to exclude pre-traditional, that is, primitive societies from the analysis. We will try to fill in these gaps to a certain extent.

§ 1. Primitive society

It should be admitted that in sociology the term "primitive society" itself is not used very often. This concept came rather from evolutionary anthropology, where it is used to designate societies that represent a certain initial stage from which the development of more complex societies is counted. This concept implies that modern man is more intelligent than his wild, irrational ancestors. Outside of this implied meaning, primitive society is viewed simply as small-scale communities, illiterate, technologically simple and based on extremely simplified social relations, although it is recognized that these relations have already gone beyond the purely gregarian, i.e. herd. interactions based on instincts and conditioned reflexes developed by the conditions of the herd existence of even higher animals.

However, some sociologists have paid rather close attention to primitive society, since it is in it that most of those social institutions that form the framework of the social system at later stages of evolutionary development are born. Let us recall that it was the study of the elementary forms of religious life in this type of society that allowed Durkheim to develop a generalized sociological concept of religion, applicable to higher levels of social development. We must not forget that no less than nine-tenths of the entire period of time during which the evolution of society took place falls on primitive societies, and in some remote corners of the planet such forms of societal organization are still preserved.

The poorly developed sociological concepts of primitive societies are primarily due to the lack of reliable information about the nature of social relations in them, since they lack written language. Recall that the intellectual and social life of all stages of primitive societies, described by G. Morgan as savagery and barbarism, is based on oral tradition - legends, myths, consideration and observance of kinship systems, the dominance of customs, rituals, etc. Some theorists (for example, L. Levy-Bruhl) assumed that these societies are dominated (from the French. Prelogique - prelogical) "prelogical" forms of primitive mentality, which are associated with similar forms of technological and social organization.

Nevertheless, one should not forget that at this simplest (but already significantly superior to that characteristic of animals) level of development, we are dealing with human society. And this means that primitive communities should also be the object of sociological analysis, and as a tool for such analysis, the eight parameters of social institutions we have defined above may well be applicable.

In a primitive society, the entire social organization is based on the tribal community. Recall that due to the prevailing maternal law during this period, the concept of "genus" denotes a circle of maternal relatives (who have a common ancestor) who are forbidden to enter into marital relations with each other. Probably, it is precisely the need to search for marriage partners outside their own kind that determines the need for constant interaction of several genera located in greater or lesser territorial proximity. The system of such interactions forms a tribe

1. (Of course, this scheme is somewhat simplified, since there is an intermediate structural unit between the gens and the tribe - the phratry.) The need to maintain constant contact affects the common language. A certain level of economic ties is also gradually taking shape. Nevertheless, the social organization of primitive societies does not rise above the level of tribal alliances, formed mainly to fight some common enemy and disintegrate after the danger has passed. There is simply no need for more complex types of social organization: neither the size of the population, nor the level of division of labor, nor the regulation of economic ties require this.

The nature of the participation of members of society in the management of its affairs. This character is largely determined by the small size of the primitive community. Studies by anthropologists and ethnographers show that the participation of members of a primitive society in the management of its affairs is relatively direct, although poorly organized, disordered, spontaneous. This is largely due to the fact that management functions fall into the hands of individual community members (leaders, elders, leaders) on the basis of random factors and are performed unprofessionally, most often, so to speak, "on a voluntary basis." The generally recognized and permanent mechanisms for the selection of the “elite” have not yet taken shape. In some cases, it all depends on physical strength; in others, age and related life experience; sometimes - external data, gender, or psychological (for example, volitional) traits. Cases of physical destruction of a leader after the expiration of some pre-agreed and custom-sanctified period are also described. One thing is clear: members of a tribal community are much more informed than ever later about the general state of affairs in the community, already due to its relatively small size, and each of them can make a more significant and real contribution to managerial decision-making than by their distant descendants.

It is clear that the power of the elders - that is, the most wise by experience and the most respected members of the clan - could not be inherited. Engels, describing the system of power among the Iroquois, points to such a very characteristic moment: "The son of the previous sachem was never elected as a Sachem, since maternal rights prevailed among the Iroquois, and the son, therefore, belonged to a different clan." By the way, the election of a sachem was a collegial act, not only because it was performed by all members of the clan, but also because it was subject to approval by the other seven clans that made up the Iroquois tribe, and the newly elected sachem was solemnly inducted into the general council of the tribe.

Elder status was not ascriptive, but attainable by definition. To acquire this status, it was necessary not only to live up to a certain age, but also to accumulate such experience, knowledge, skills and abilities that could be useful not only to their owner, but also to all other members of the community. With the demographic growth, as well as the development and complication of social relations, the stratification of society gradually intensified, since at the same time the number of power strata increased and the concentration of power in them increased. "The political cone began to grow, but not level out in any way."

The dominant nature of economic relations. In primitive societies, one can hardly speak of any significant development of the economy as such. Until the agrarian revolution, the level to which the tools of labor and technology are developing does not allow production on a noticeable scale, that is, the processing of natural products into labor products suitable for further direct use. Production (apart from the heat treatment of food) is limited here to the manufacture of the simplest tools for catching and fishing, as well as clothing - almost exclusively for personal use. The absence of a surplus product, and as a result of this, the impossibility of the emergence of private property and commodity exchange, does not necessitate the development of more complex production relations, making them simply meaningless. The economy of this period is in the full sense of the word natural, when everything that is produced is consumed without a trace by the producer himself and his family members.

The general nature of the organizational and technological level. The life of a primitive society up to the agrarian revolution is the constant obtaining of livelihoods, moreover, directly from nature. The main occupations of the members of the community are the gathering of edible plants, fruits and roots, as well as hunting and fishing. Therefore, the main products of labor are the tools used in these trades. However, these tools, as well as the tools for their manufacture, are as primitive as the whole life of society.

Cooperation of members of society is manifested mainly in joint actions, most often in the form of a simple addition of physical forces, in extreme cases - in an elementary distribution of responsibilities (for example, in driven hunting). In one of the footnotes in Capital, there is a reference to the French historian and economist Simon Lenge, who calls hunting the first form of cooperation, and the hunting of people (war) one of the first forms of hunting. At the same time, as Marx states, “the form of cooperation in the labor process that we find at the initial stages of human culture, for example, among the hunting peoples or in the agricultural communities of India, rests, on the one hand, on public ownership of the conditions of production, on the other the other side is that an individual is still as firmly attached to a clan or community as an individual bee is to a bee hive. "

Employment structure... Primitive society is characterized by an elementary age and sex division of labor. Most of the men - members of primitive communities, depending on the natural conditions of their habitat, are engaged in some kind of one of the trades - either hunting, or fishing, or gathering. There is no need to talk about any deep specialization of community members by type of employment, both because of their small number and because of the low level of development of the productive forces. The virtual absence of a surplus product is the most serious barrier to the social division of labor. People of a primitive society are universal and comprehensive to the extent of the knowledge, skills and abilities accumulated in the community and due to the need to maintain the conditions of their existence, which takes almost all the time, which is not left for anything else. At the border separating primitive society from the traditional one, the first major social division of labor takes place - the separation of the shepherd tribes from the rest of the barbarians. This means that the first sector of employment appears - the agricultural sector, which for a long time retains a leading position among the rest.

The nature of the settlements. The nature of the settlements. The nature of the settlements. The nature of the settlements. The nature of the settlements. During the enormous duration of the existence of a primitive society, most clans and tribes lead a nomadic lifestyle, moving after migrating food sources - fish and game. The first rudiments of localized settlements, that is, villages, Morgan, and then Engels, are attributed to an even higher stage of savagery. The first urban settlements appear only at the end of barbarism and at the dawn of civilization (in the Morganian sense), that is, with the transition to a traditional society.

In a primitive society, the formation of social and individual intelligence (more precisely, its prerequisites) was accompanied by a number of important specific features. The accumulation of knowledge and its transfer to subsequent generations was carried out orally and individually. In this process, a special role belonged to the elderly, who in this society acted as guardians, overseers and even, if necessary, reformers of the established morals, customs and the entire complex of knowledge that constituted the essence of material and spiritual life. Old people were the "accumulators" of social intelligence and to some extent were considered its embodiment. Thus, the respect that the rest of society had for them was not so much moral as largely rational. As A. Huseynov notes, they, “old people, acted as carriers of labor skills, mastering of which required many years of exercise and therefore was accessible only to people of their age. The old people personified in themselves the collective will of the clan or tribe, as well as the scholarship of that time. During their life, they mastered several dialects necessary for communication with other consanguineous associations; knew those rituals and traditions filled with a mysterious meaning, which were to be kept in deep secret... They regulated the exercise of blood feud, they had the honorable duty of naming them by name, etc. Therefore, the extraordinary honor and respect shown to the elderly in the primitive era should in no case be interpreted as a kind of social philanthropy, charity. "

If we take into account the average life expectancy, which in primitive society was half or even three times less than in modern societies, it becomes clear that the proportion of old people in the population was much lower at that time than it is now. Although it should be noted that even in today's primitive tribes (for example, the Australian aborigines), as noted by the same A. Huseynov, a distinction is made between simply decrepit old people and those old people (elders) who continue to take an active and creative part in the life of the community.

The nature of the development of scientific knowledge... As mentioned above, in a primitive society, the accumulation of knowledge and its transfer to subsequent generations was carried out orally and individually. In such conditions, the accumulation and systematization of accumulated knowledge, which, in fact, constitutes a necessary condition for the development of science, does not occur. Of the four types of knowledge that we singled out in the first chapter, the stock of information of a primitive society about the world around it is limited only by knowledge of common sense, mythology and ideology, and at the elementary level - to the extent that Durkheim's mechanical solidarity manifests itself in oppositions such as “our -stranger".

The process of transition from a tribal to a new type of social structure - state - is usually characterized by the formation of so-called chiefdoms, which are formed in fairly large associations of people, as a rule, no less than a tribe. Chiefdom is a special form of centralized social organization, based initially on devotion (loyalty), and not on formal institutions of coercion. Chiefdoms are already characterized by the emergence of certain patterns of social stratification and economic system, as well as the redistribution of material wealth.

The chiefdom is seen as a proto-state organization. This is a hierarchically organized system, in which there is still no ramified professional administrative apparatus, which is an integral feature of a mature state. But its main characteristic features already exist in their embryonic form - such, for example, as separate detachments of soldiers, subordinate only to the leader and recognizing in him the only source of power, as well as a certain pyramid of power. The number of control levels here ranges from two to ten. Of course, this is incomparable with complex societies, but it already represents a serious step in this direction.

§ 2. Traditional society

There is reason to believe that the institution of the state is more likely to arise among agricultural peoples. The fact is that farming requires a lot of labor and, because of this, practically does not leave those who are involved in it, time for military (or hunting) exercises. Labor costs in cattle breeding are much less, which is probably why every adult nomad is a warrior at the same time. Agricultural communities are more in need of professional military protection of their territorial borders: due to this, an objective need for separate armed detachments that make up the backbone of the state is formed earlier and more clearly.

Above, we briefly described the mechanisms of social change in traditional society associated with the development of professionalism in the management sphere. This professionalization, combined with the formation of the institution of the monogamous family and inheritance, leads to the emergence of an elite isolated from the rest of society. The emergence of the institution of state and law simultaneously determines the emergence of politics as such and the development of the political sphere of life. This area, like all others, is closely woven into the entire system of social relations. How is this expressed?

In particular, in the fact that in Europe, for example, until the twentieth century, the absolute majority of adults (including almost all women) were economically and legally dependent on the head of the family to which they belonged, since it was the family that constituted the main a production unit in both agricultural and craft production. And only the heads of these families could be considered as full-fledged participants in the system of relationships of local (community) self-government. The level government controlled it could not be taken into account at all, since it was entirely within the competence of those who belonged to the minority of the ruling elite. All other members of society, even being formally free, occupied a third-rate position in the community, and possibly even lower.

Aloofness from participation in government of the overwhelming majority of the population is characteristic not only of monarchical states, but also of ancient and medieval democracies. Suffice it to recall, for example, the classical Athenian democracy. What was the Athenian demos, which we used to translate as "people"? This concept here denoted the free population of a state or city-polis, which had civil rights (as opposed to meteks, perieks, slaves, etc.). And not the entire free population: only the male part of the adult free population, and exclusively urban, belonged to the demos of the city-state of Athens. At the time of the highest prosperity of Athens, the total number of free citizens, including women and children, was approximately 90 thousand people, and there were 365 thousand slaves of both sexes, and 45 thousand foreigners and freedmen under the patronage. “For every adult male citizen - Concludes Engels, - there were, thus, at least 18 slaves and more than two were under the auspices. " In other words, in fact, the Athenian demos made up less than 5% of the total population of the polis.

The dominant nature of economic relations. Traditional society takes shape simultaneously with the emergence of a surplus product, and, consequently, with the emergence of private property and commodity exchange. Private property remains dominant throughout the entire period of development of traditional and then industrial societies. We can only talk about a change in its main object in different periods. In the slave formation, the main object of private property is people, in the feudal formation, land, and in the capitalist formation, capital.

Due to the relatively low level of development of productive forces in various production sectors of traditional societies, the so-called subsistence economy prevails. The subsistence economy, also referred to as the "self-sufficient" or "natural" economy, is characterized by the following features.

1. An economic unit produces a product mainly for its own direct consumption (and the most common production unit in traditional society is the peasant family; to a lesser extent this applies to the artisan workshop, although it is also usually organized within the family.

2. This unit in its consumption is rather weakly dependent on the market; in any case, only a small part of the product produced goes directly to the market.

3. An extremely weak specialization or division of labor develops in an economic unit. This is no longer quite a subsistence economy, but nevertheless it is closer to it than to commercialized production.

The subsistence economy is considered typical of the pre-capitalist period of development. It is determined by the weak development of economic exchange. Of course, all these so-called self-sufficient farms actually buy and sell the product they produce on the market. So we are talking only about the relative share of the surplus product intended for sale or exchange of goods. And yet the peasant family is extremely weakly dependent on the market and its conjuncture.

A characteristic feature of all traditional societies is a sharp inequality in the distribution of goods produced (a sharpened profile of stratification). With the transition from the clan system to the state system, this inequality sharply aggravates. Engels, describing the emergence of the Athenian state, points out that "the peasant could be content if he was allowed to stay on the site as a tenant and live on a sixth of the product of his labor, paying the remaining five-sixths to the new owner in the form of rent." It is economic inequality that forms the basis of all other types of main stratification. traditional society- political and professional.

Undoubtedly, the variety of tools in traditional societies, especially at fairly mature stages of development, is immeasurably wider, and the level of technology is immeasurably higher. The art of artisans here is sometimes distinguished by such achievements that it is not always possible to repeat even with the help of modern technical means. However, as we have already said, sociology, being a "generalizing" science, shows interest primarily in the general features characteristic of any era as a whole. Considering traditional society, two such common features should be noted.

Firstly, one of the reasons for the existence of limits for the increase in production per capita in a traditional society is the use in the productive process as a source of energy exclusively or mainly of the muscular strength of humans and animals. You can literally list on your fingers those areas where inanimate energy sources are used: the energy of falling water (for the rotation of a mill wheel) and wind (the movement of sailing ships or the rotation of the same mill shaft).

Secondly, as we have already mentioned, the family, the home enterprise, act as the main economic unit throughout the traditional era. In feudal agricultural production, a group of households is headed by a landowner, his relations with domestic servants and peasants are based on the principles of paternalism, according to the patriarchal model. Next in the hierarchy are the members of his family, who manage the farm, servants, and then the peasants. The most common primary unit of production is the peasant family, headed by the peasant and consisting of his children and household members, who, as already mentioned, were in varying degrees of dependence on the head of the family, and all families of the community - on the landowner, owner of land and agricultural land ... At the same time, their field of activity (in the literal sense) is in the immediate vicinity of the dwelling.

And in handicraft production, the workshop is headed by a master craftsman; direct workers are, as a rule, members of his family - his wife and children, unmarried apprentices and apprentices, civilian (also most often unmarried) artisans. Usually, almost all of them live under one roof - as a rule, the same one under which they work, and it is with the rights of family members - for shelter, table and clothes. You can literally count on one hand the professions whose representatives worked away from home - sailors, fishermen, miners, cabbies.

Employment structure. The structure of employment in a traditional society is formed during the agrarian revolution. It is determined by a gradual increase in the level of productivity and the share of surplus labor in the total volume of labor. Most likely, in the early stages of development, the division of labor here is still not very significant. Initially, there is "the second major division of labor - the craft was separated from agriculture." This means the emergence of a second sector of employment - handicraft, which will not soon develop into an industrial (or industrial) one. Then there is "production directly for exchange" - commodity production, and with it trade, and not only within the tribe, but also with overseas countries, this lays the foundation for the future service sector of employment. Finally, managerial activity is professionalized, followed by the activity of religious worship; both belong to the information sector, which combines all professional activities related to the processing and accumulation of social information. Hereinafter, we include all those “who produce, process and distribute information as their main occupation, as well as who create and maintain the functioning of the information infrastructure” to the information sector.

It is likely that the nature of the distribution of members of a traditional society in different sectors of employment that develops in the long run may differ significantly from one particular society to another, depending on the general level of development, ethnic, cultural, geographical and other conditions, but there are also general patterns here.

First, due to a certain variety of social needs (which, of course, increases with the development of society), all four main sectors are gradually filled.

Secondly, the overwhelming share of members of society is employed in the agricultural sector, which must "feed", that is, provide with produced food not only its own workers, but also representatives of other sectors. Given the extremely low productivity of agricultural labor in these eras, it should be assumed that more than half of the able-bodied members of traditional societies belonged to the agricultural sector.

The nature of the settlements. One of the most important characteristics of the development of traditional societies, starting from the earliest stages, should be considered the emergence of fundamentally new types of settlements - cities.

"The city, which surrounds stone or brick houses with its stone walls, towers and jagged parapets, has become the focus of a tribe or alliance of tribes - an indicator of tremendous progress in the art of building, but at the same time a sign of increasing danger and need for protection."

Cities become centers of residence for members of society belonging to the second and third sectors of employment - traders and artisans, and after that - for representatives of the fourth sector, the information sector. Stone walls, the protective power of which becomes a factor attracting many of the representatives of these estates, surround not only the houses of the leaders of tribal unions (and then states), but also monasteries. Therefore, the entire political, industrial (more precisely, handicraft) and intellectual life of traditional societies is concentrated here. However, as already mentioned, throughout the traditional era, the overwhelming majority of members of society are rural residents. This follows already from the above-described structure of employment in traditional societies, where the basis of the economy is the agricultural sector, which absorbs a huge part of the able-bodied population.

The level and scope of education. The emergence of education as a special social institution belongs to the traditional era. In the previous period, the absence of material carriers of information did not allow to reliably preserve, accumulate and systematize knowledge, as well as to avoid numerous, as with a “damaged telephone”, distortions (including the inevitable normative and value coloring) in the process of their oral transmission. At the same time, in all traditional societies, education is the privilege of a rather thin social stratum. And it's not just a shortage of trained teachers. One of the main reasons is the extreme high cost of books for which it was possible to receive training.

The material prerequisites for the growth of mass literacy arise only towards the end of the traditional era, after the invention of printing. Nevertheless, printed books and periodicals that appeared later, especially of secular content, for a fairly long time remain the property of only the elite part of society. In part, this is probably due to the high price of printed publications, due to their small circulation. Prosper Merimee, in his short story "Tamango", mentions a curious fact from the life of one of her heroes - Ledoux - when he was an assistant captain on a privateer ship: navigation ". But this is already the era of the Napoleonic wars - in fact, the beginning of the industrial revolution in France.

However, the main obstacle to the growth of the number of educated people is the lack of needs and serious incentives for the overwhelming majority of members of society to receive any kind of education: their daily work activity most often does not require any new information, no new knowledge beyond what was received from the first mentors and gained with experience; in addition, the work itself, exhausting and lasting half a day or more, leaves almost no time or energy for additional intellectual pursuits. Moving up the social ladder in a society divided by rather strong class barriers (and this is precisely the social structure of most traditional societies) is also practically not associated with education.

The foregoing applies to three of the four sectors of employment we identified above, with the exception of the information sector, where even at that time the very content of labor required a relatively large amount of knowledge, which can only be obtained through systematic education. However, in a traditional society, the proportion of people employed in this sector is still negligible compared to all other sectors and cannot have a serious impact on increasing the role of education for successful professional activity and on the emergence of a corresponding need on a massive scale.

The nature of the development of scientific knowledge. With the advent of writing, there is a potential for the formation of scientific knowledge. Its development, especially at the initial stages, is significantly hampered by the dominance of three other types of knowledge in the public consciousness. Nevertheless, as history shows, in traditional societies, the development of science, of course, does not stand still.

Thinkers of the pre-industrial era made many important discoveries in almost all areas of scientific knowledge. Precisely due to the fact that by the beginning of the industrial revolution the foundation was laid in almost all branches of scientific knowledge, and above all in the natural sciences, it was possible to relatively quickly and effectively create a very ramified system of applied and technical sciences, which began to be used in technological production processes since the purpose of increasing their efficiency.

However, as D. Bell, one of the founders of the concept of post-industrial society, notes, science and technology developed in traditional society autonomously, practically independently of production. People who were engaged in science often enough (if not in the vast majority) did it almost unselfishly, in order to satisfy their own intellectual needs. This, on the one hand, ensured their great dedication. However, on the other hand, the overall, total efficiency of such activities, not "propped up" by the needs of the economy, could not be too high. Therefore, the increment of scientific knowledge proceeded gradually, relatively slowly, was rather linear, and required considerable time for its accumulation.

§ 3. Industrial society

In the previous chapter, we described the conditions for the emergence and course of development of the industrial revolution - a process also called industrialization. Let us recall that the industrial revolution sets in motion three socio-economic laws - the law of saving time, the law of increasing needs and the law of changing labor, the influence of which in the previous traditional era was weakly noticeable, was of a latent nature. As a result, the law of acceleration of history enters the phase of explicit manifestation (see Fig. 19, Chapter 10). It is obvious that in the quarter of a millennium that has been the era of industrialization, the total volume of social changes - both quantitatively and qualitatively - turned out to be actually much larger than in the previous hundred thousand years of development of society as a whole.

There is a certain logic of industrialization, according to which countries and peoples, approaching this stage of development, regardless of the initial historical, ethnic, cultural and religious-ideological foundation, from the socio-political structure, inevitably acquire similar characteristics.

In other words, the more industrialized societies are, the more they gravitate towards a uniform social order.

This thesis, called the convergence thesis in sociology, argues that the process of industrialization produces general and uniform political and cultural characteristics of societies, which before industrialization may have had very different origins and social structures. All societies are ultimately moving towards a general level of development, since industrialization for its successful implementation requires the fulfillment of certain, and the same conditions. These required conditions include:

¦ deep social and technical division of labor;

¦ separation of the family from the enterprise and the workplace;

¦ formation of a mobile, disciplined workforce;

¦ a certain form of rational organization of economic calculations, planning and investment;

¦ tendency towards secularization, urbanization, increased social mobility and democracy.

Throughout the twentieth century, especially in the second half of it, we can observe how the industrial order of organizing industrial and agricultural production, which has developed in Western societies, is rapidly spreading and being introduced into the fabric of the social life of many societies that have had fundamentally different structures from time immemorial. On the examples of the most advanced societies in Asia and Africa, one can be convinced of the validity of many provisions of the convergence thesis: the new order produces social changes not only in the economy, technology and organization of production, but also entails changes in most other areas, giving them a qualitative distinctiveness inherent in West. Leisure activities, style of dress, forms of service, demeanor, rational architecture of business buildings - all this, one way or another, is built according to Western models, creating a basis for mutual understanding and recognition and refuting the famous phrase of the English poet of the times of militant colonialism. Even the dominant "social unit", the nuclear family - both as a social type and as a collection of certain values - has become, according to a number of researchers, "one of the most successful exports from the Western world.

It quickly moved into Asia and Africa and is becoming a universal phenomenon today. "

Let us try to briefly trace what expression these social changes have found in industrial societies for each of the system-forming characteristics we have chosen.

The nature of the social structure. In an industrial society, in the period of overcoming feudal fragmentation, on the basis of capitalist economic ties, the formation of internal markets, nations are formed from various tribes and nationalities.

A nation is the highest level of historical communities of people known to us today; it is characterized by the unity of the language (at least literary and on the basis of it - the official state), the common territory of habitation, economic ties, culture. The emergence of clearly delineated geographical boundaries is dictated by the requirements of protectionism, the protection of national entrepreneurship from outside intervention. Recent history records many diplomatic, military and other actions on the part of all states aimed at consolidating the territorial outlines of the state, their recognition by external partners, and reliable protection.

Thus, one of the main social changes in the field of social structure during the transition from a traditional society to an industrial one is the formation of nation states with clearly defined territorial boundaries. Within these boundaries, there is a tendency for the emergence of approximately the same claims of the entire population on the territorial space inhabited by them at a given time. This is reflected in the fact that the territorial claims of the state tend to correspond to cultural, linguistic and ethnic divisions.

The certainty and stability of state borders to some extent testifies to the proximity to the completion of the territorial division of the world. On the whole, this is probably the case. Most of the wars that were fought in the era of industrialization were associated - at least formally - not so much with territorial as with economic and political reasons. In the course of the industrial revolution, as the industrial societies mature, a system of national communities is gradually taking shape, that is, the territorial division of the world in the form of a kind of "network of national political communities" that displaces both the former simpler traditional societies and the system of former absolutist empires.

The vital activity of traditional states was permeated with religious influence. Almost all modern industrial states have a distinctly secular character. In each of them, the industrial revolution sooner or later leads to secularization - a process during which religious ideas and organizations lose their influence due to the growing importance of science and other forms of knowledge. Formally, this can be expressed in legal acts on the separation of the state from the church and the church from the school, as well as on freedom of conscience, that is, the right of citizens to profess any religion or not to profess any.

The nature of the participation of members of society in the management of its affairs. The industrial society, as most historians and philosophers unanimously note, for its free development needs the maximum development of democracy: it is this form of state structure that makes it possible to most reliably make timely and relatively painless for the economy adjustment of the legal and political space in accordance with the rapidly changing requirements of the economy.

Along with the development of the industrial revolution, gradually, throughout the 19th and then the 20th centuries, there is a transformation of the civil rights of all members of the industrial society. This process, although quite rapid by historical standards, nevertheless takes the life of more than one generation. In any case, universal suffrage (as the right of all, regardless of gender and social origin, adults who have reached the age of 21, to elect and be elected to the representative bodies of at least local self-government) was introduced in England only after the First World War. But, one way or another, the proportion of members of society who have gained access, if not to management, then at least to minimal participation in political life, along with the successes of the industrial revolution, increases significantly - mainly due to women, as well as younger and less economically independent members. society.

The implementation of democracy always requires more or less active participation of members of the demos in political life, primarily in the electoral process. We will not touch upon the possibilities of manipulating public opinion, pressure, in one form or another, exerted by the opposing parties in the pre-election struggle on its formation. It is clear, however, that it is one thing when the entire demos (or, in modern terms, the electorate) consists of several tens of thousands of people, and quite another thing when it includes hundreds of thousands or even millions. Namely, such a situation develops in the course of the first of the industrialization processes we are considering - the formation of large national states. For an effective struggle for power, it is already necessary:

¦ firstly, the involvement of mass media (which have to be created and thoroughly developed), since without their use it is virtually impossible to constantly and massively influence public opinion;

¦ secondly, the involvement of a tool for organizational support of the pre-election struggle; such a tool are mass political parties

One of the characteristic features of industrial societies, which was pointed out by R. Aron, is the institutionalization of political life around mass parties. The formation of stable political orientations, attitudes, likes and dislikes among citizens presupposes a fairly long and stable assimilation by them of a whole complex of both elementary and more complex knowledge, which allows them to: determine their intentions; understand the alignment of various political forces and their real capabilities; be aware of their interests and preferences; understand the mechanisms of their own participation in the election campaign, etc.

The assimilation of this kind of knowledge is growing gradually, as it were, active participants in the political struggle do not spare funds for the development of a kind of system of "political education", which is organically woven into the fabric of the social process of industrialization. The famous Lenin's phrase about the fact that an illiterate person is outside of politics only summarizes the many years of painstaking and long-term work of many different parties to win over the political sympathies of as many of the population as possible. And this involvement of an increasing part of the population, sometimes against their own will and desire, in political games, even as passive participants, a kind of "weighting background", undoubtedly, has an impact on raising the general intellectual level of society.

In the economic sphere, one of the most characteristic features of an industrial society is the almost complete commercialization of production. The essence of commercialization, especially at the initial stages of the development of the industrial revolution, is expressed as succinctly as possible in the simplest slogan: "Everything is for sale!" This means almost complete dominance of the market. While in traditional society a relatively small share of the product produced enters the market, and the rest is consumed by the producers themselves, the absolute majority of economic units of industrial society produce the lion's share of their product, if not all of its volume, for the market; and on the market they acquire everything that they need both for the productive process and for personal consumption. Thus, in the course of the industrial revolution, the subsistence economy disappears or remains for some time only in peripheral regions where capitalism has not yet penetrated.

Private ownership of capital, which Marx defined as "self-increasing value", becomes the pivotal basis of all production and non-production relations in industrial society. The colossal growth in turnover naturally presupposes the presence of a highly developed and reliable financial, credit and monetary system. And the formation of such a system, and the maintenance of uninterrupted functioning, and even more so its development, presuppose the presence of a sufficiently large and increasing number of specially trained people employed in it. Such preparation leads to the growth of both social and individual intelligences, as well as to a general rationalization of all social life. In the general culture of industrial society, muscular labor is less and less appreciated. In almost any production, not the quantity, but the quality of workers, which depends on the education they receive, begins to play a more important role.

The rate of economic growth is more and more confidently outstripping the rate of demographic growth: the increase in population at first rapidly accelerates, then gradually decreases, and in some places it completely stops. Fertility loses its former value. Parents no longer see their children as those who will ensure their peaceful old age, and the authorities no longer see fertility as a source of economic or defense potential. “Producing offspring is expensive and has to compete with other demands and forms of self-satisfaction and self-fulfillment.”

The economic well-being of almost all members of society is also changing. One of the components of the industrial revolution is the revolution in labor productivity, which in the 75-80 years of the twentieth century actually turned the proletarian into a representative of the middle class with an income gradually approaching the level of the upper class. Additional productivity is embodied in an increase in the purchasing power of the population, in other words, it leads to an increase in living standards.

The increase in productivity is also realized in the increase in the duration of the free time of workers.

Continuous and sustainable economic growth, the development of mass production lead to the fact that the main criterion for assessing the effectiveness of society is not just the feeling of its members of a state of well-being (which, in principle, is possible with a relatively low standard of living in combination with equally low demands), but steady growth of real economic well-being. This leads to a gradual flattening (flattening) of the profile of economic stratification and a decrease in its height. Differences between economic statuses existing in an industrial society are distributed along the inequality scale more and more evenly and smoothly in comparison with traditional society.

The general nature of the organizational and technological level. The industrial revolution sets in motion two interrelated factors that determine the level of development of both technologies and the organization of production.

The first factor is the dominance of machine production based on mechanization. First of all, the application of inanimate energy sources to the mechanization of production is increasing - steam engines at the first stages of industrialization, electricity and internal combustion engines at the subsequent ones. At the same time, the possibilities for increasing capacity are practically unlimited.

In addition, the industrialization process turns out to be closely related to the constant introduction of technical and technological innovations into production, as well as the rapid obsolescence (which is increasingly ahead of purely physical wear and tear) of existing machines, mechanisms, equipment and production technologies.

As a result, all participants in the productive process, regardless of their desire, must constantly master more and more new types of equipment and technologies - this is how the above-mentioned law of labor change manifests itself. This, in turn, forces people to constantly improve their intellectual level, and many - to engage in technical creativity.

The second factor is the reorganization of production on a factory basis. It is closely related to the general process of increasing concentration of capital and reflects it. The family is losing its former role as the main economic unit. A lot of people, machines and mechanisms concentrate on spatially limited areas. There is a density of contacts and an exchange of information (and information of a special, largely scientific and technical nature), which was impossible in a traditional society with its predominantly agricultural and handicraft production, characterized by intra-family or intra-workshop isolation.

A sharp decline in the production of goods and services of the role of the so-called "small family business" leads to the fact that only a very narrow range of professions allows a person to earn a livelihood while remaining within their home. The place of work of the absolute majority of members of society is located at a greater or lesser distance from their homes, since the nature of modern production requires the concentration of technology and labor in a special localized space. Even the work of scientists is impossible outside of libraries and technically equipped laboratories concentrated in universities and research centers.

All these changed social conditions in a colossal volume increase the density of professional and personal contacts and direct interactions, which people now have to enter into with each other during the working day and throughout their life. Moreover, these contacts in the absolute majority are by no means related. According to some data, the total number of such contacts per one "average" member of society in one calendar year today is approximately equal to their volume in a lifetime a hundred years ago. As a result, the total volume of information circulating in society, including (and maybe even in a special way) of a scientific nature, also increases accordingly.

Employment structure. A characteristic feature of industrial societies is a decline in the share of the population employed in agricultural production, and, accordingly, an increase in the share of workers employed in the industrial sector. The beginning of this process in England, home of the industrial revolution, was very dramatic and closely associated with the so-called policy of "fencing". Starting back in the 15th century, this policy acquired an all-encompassing character in connection with the outbreak of the industrial revolution. As a result of an avalanche-like increase in production in the textile industry, prices for its raw material, wool, have skyrocketed. Landowners - landlords and squires - feverishly threw themselves into sheep breeding, which promised unprecedented opportunities for rapid enrichment. The tenants were driven away, and they, deprived of the main means of production - land, turned mostly into vagabonds and beggars (according to the expression that was widespread at that time - “the sheep ate people”). Attacks called parliamentary (ie, permitted by legislative acts) "fencing" led in England to the virtual disappearance of the peasantry as a class.

Where did all this disadvantaged mass go in search of a means of livelihood? Of course, in the cities where there was a real economic boom at that time. The newly created factories and plants had an almost unlimited capacity of the labor market for their time. The simplification of the labor process, sometimes reduced to a few simple manipulations with the machine, did not require special special training, which could take years with the previous craft production. They paid pennies for work, actively used child labor, entrepreneurs did not bear practically any costs for the social sphere. However, there was nothing to choose from. Several processes merged here, in particular, the growth of cities and the restructuring of the employment system, which found its expression primarily in an increase in the number of people employed in industry and a decrease in the share of those employed in agriculture.

In 1800, 73% of the working population was employed in agriculture in the United States, in 1960 this share fell to 6.3%, and in the 1980s it more than halved. In general, this indicator - the share of the population employed in agriculture - serves for many researchers as an important indicator of the level of industrial development of society. For example, the American sociologist R. Bendix considers modern a society where less than half of the current population is employed in agricultural labor; at the same time, industrial societies that are classified as "modern" can differ quite significantly according to this criterion. So, if by the beginning of the 70s of this century, about 5% of the population was employed in the agricultural sector of the UK economy, the United States - less than 6%, then for the USSR and Japan these figures were 45 and 49%, respectively.

The nature of the settlements. With the beginning of the industrial era, a process called urbanization is rapidly developing - a significant increase in the role of large urban settlements in the life of society. This is a natural consequence of a number of different aspects of industrialization discussed above.

The growth of urban settlements in the 19th century and the replenishment of the three non-agricultural employment sectors were largely driven by rural migration. Cities provided livelihoods for millions of people who could simply die or never be born if they (or their parents) did not migrate to the cities. Those who moved to these cities or to their outskirts were most often driven there by need. Usually the reason for the move was not at all the benevolent advice of wealthier village neighbors and not the imaginary charity of some townspeople who provide jobs for those who wanted to earn their living. As a rule, rumors of poor people who had saved themselves by moving to sprawling cities, from which there came information about the availability of well-paid jobs, served as an immediate incentive for the move.

In 1800, 29.3 million people (3% of the world's population) lived in the cities of the world, by 1900 - 224.4 million (13.6%), and by 1950 - 706.4 million (38.6%). In industrialized Western societies, the process of urbanization during the 19th century was especially rapid: for example, in Great Britain, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, in 1800 there were about 24% of the urban population, and in 1900, 77% of the British lived in cities.

If we assume that urbanization is not just an increase in the proportion of the urban population, but the population of super-large cities, those that are called megacities, then one could turn to the data on the pace of urbanization, which is given in his work "Futuroshock" by Alvin Toffler: "In 1850 only 4 cities had a population of more than 1 million people, in 1900 - 19, in 1960 - 141 ... In 1970, the growth of the urban population was 6.5% ”.

Speaking about a specific urban way of life, we mean by it, first of all, a complex of cultural and educational institutions, as well as household amenities, which the absolute majority of rural residents lack. Indeed, it is in the cities where theaters, libraries, museums, universities and colleges are concentrated. There is a network of catering establishments here. Urban housing is equipped with running water, external heat sources, and sewerage. Good roads and smoothly working city transport ensure fast travel to any desired point in the city. The telephone provides reliable communication at any time of the day. A city dweller, as a rule, has more opportunities to access various government agencies to solve their current problems.

At the same time, one cannot fail to notice some specific aspects of the existence of the inhabitants of urban settlements, which are, if not negative, then by no means indisputably positive. Citizens rarely own dwellings located in the immediate vicinity of their place of work. The share of the so-called "pendulum migration", defined by the movement of people in the morning from home to work, and in the evening back, is from 30 to 60% of the population of large cities. This dictates serious requirements for public transport and determines the importance of its place in urban infrastructure. And the massive transition to the use of personal vehicles practically everywhere reveals the unpreparedness of the infrastructure of large cities for this: hours of traffic jams, smogs and an increase in the number of road accidents are far from an exhaustive list of problems of this kind.

And what happens in an industrial society with a rural way of life? Over the long period of the industrial revolution, even with the invasion of industrial methods into agricultural production, patriarchal customs and the general conservatism inherent in the countryside change very slowly. Perhaps this is due to the low population of rural settlements, as well as to the homogeneity of the occupation, to the fact that here the field of work is still located in the immediate vicinity of dwellings. In other words, with the fact that the village will never experience those three factors that L. Wirth considered determinative for the urban way of life - the size, density and heterogeneity of the population. One way or another, the rural way of life is perceived by the majority of members of society (including the villagers themselves) as a second-rate, "backward" lifestyle. Perhaps, the concept of "redneck" appears in almost all societies that have embarked on the path of industrialization, and everywhere it has approximately the same normative and evaluative meaning.

However, it should be noted that, oddly enough, in the system of values of a city dweller, this contempt for the rural way of life most often coexists with envy of him. Clean air, fresh natural food, a measured rhythm of life, silence - all this cannot but attract a city dweller, torn apart by constant bustle and haste, the roar of vehicles passing under the windows, the stench and soot of factory smoke, canned food, anonymity of relations when the majority of urban residents neighborhoods are unfamiliar even with neighbors at the entrance. Indeed, the experiments conducted by sociologists and psychologists many times demonstrate the amazing callousness and indifference of city dwellers in relation to those around them. Performing fainting or harassment of a girl by hooligans on busy streets, the researchers filmed the reactions of numerous passers-by with a hidden camera. More precisely, the complete absence of such a reaction. The vast majority continue to habitually rush on business, quietly moving away from the scene of the incident. This, of course, would have been impossible on any village street.

The level and scope of education. Mass literacy is becoming one of the most characteristic features of an industrial society. This is influenced by a number of factors.

First, the increasing sophistication of technology and technology creates an increase in incentives to obtain education for both workers and employers who hire them - in full accordance with the law of change in labor. Professional development as a condition for obtaining a higher income and social status is increasingly dependent on the level of education received. Although in real practice, at least at the micro level, this connection is not so unambiguous and straightforward. Nevertheless, obtaining primary and then secondary education is increasingly becoming a constant and necessary requirement, even for unskilled workers.

Secondly, publishing, like all other industries that have reached the level of industrial production, is experiencing the influence of the law of saving time: the market is increasingly filled with huge volumes of relatively inexpensive printed products.

As a result of the emerging social need for mass literacy, a corresponding proposal is born - in all developed societies, the institution of education is radically transformed. Vast and ramified education systems are being created, a huge number of schools, colleges and universities are being established. Their founders and founders are both the state and private individuals. Many industrialists establish vocational schools for the training of specialists for their enterprises. The number of members of society who have received formal education and continue it throughout almost their entire professional life, as well as schoolchildren and students, has increased many times over a very short historical period and continues to grow. According to Randall Collins, in the United States, the number of high school graduates, reduced to the total population under the age of 17, increased 38 times between 1869 and 1963, and a similar ratio for graduates of local colleges (which, like our technical schools, in to a large extent take on the functions of training mid-level technical specialists) - more than 22 times. The number of bachelors, masters and doctors of sciences has also increased significantly, although not to the same extent.

The nature of the development of scientific knowledge. Changing economic, organizational and technological conditions turns the introduction of innovations into the production process into the most powerful weapon the aggravated competition with the beginning of industrialization. If earlier, in traditional societies, laboratory experiments of researchers found it difficult to find sponsors - mainly from among the enlightened monarchs and representatives of the aristocracy (although their interest could not be entirely disinterested - as was the case with alchemy), now the main source of funding research works the most far-sighted entrepreneurs are becoming. Quite often a researcher and a successful entrepreneur are united, so to speak, in one person. A whole galaxy of outstanding inventors who worked at the dawn of the industrial revolution, founded (and not without success!) Their own enterprises. These include the great social experimenter Robert Owen, who, being a talented and successful entrepreneur, concentrated a solid fortune in his hands, although he spent the lion's share of it on the founding of several utopian colonies, including New Harmony. An outstanding businessman and manager was also one of the first heroes of the industrial revolution, James Watt, who, together with his partner R. Bolton, founded the first enterprise for the mass production of steam engines (of which he himself was the inventor).

For no more than a century, applied research, that is, the search for specific practical application and use for direct production purposes of certain laws and patterns discovered by fundamental science, have become almost the predominant form of scientific research. In any case, investments in this industry in total terms at the initial, and especially at subsequent stages, significantly exceed the funds allocated for fundamental research. At the same time, the development of applied research technology, and the industry itself as a whole, simultaneously with the general growth of gross national income, leads to an unprecedented expansion of opportunities basic research... Over the course of just two hundred years, science has been making a giant leap, absolutely incomparable with the increase in scientific and technical knowledge that has taken place over the previous millennia. It becomes a truly productive force and a practically independent branch of the national economy. Studies in science, as well as the development and implementation of technological innovations are turning into a professional sphere, attracting more and more capable people. This, in turn, increases the "gross" volume of intellectual products produced by the society.

§ 4. Post-industrial society

The sequential development of the system of ideas of industrial society was the theory of post-industrial society. This concept was formulated in 1962 by the American sociologist Daniel Bell, who later developed and summarized this concept in his 1974 work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. The most brief characteristic of this type of civilization could be the idea of an information society, because its core is the extremely rapid development of information technologies. If an industrial society is the result of an industrial revolution, then a post-industrial society is a product of an information revolution.

D. Bell proceeds from the fact that if in pre-industrial and industrial societies the axial principle around which all social relations are built is ownership of the means of production, then in modern societies dominating in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the place of such an axial principle increasingly begins to take information, or rather, its totality - the knowledge accumulated up to this moment. This knowledge is a source of technical and economic innovation and at the same time becomes the starting point for policy-making. In the economy, this is reflected in the fact that the share and importance of industrial production itself as the main form of economic activity is significantly reduced. It is being supplanted by service and information production.

The service sector in the most advanced societies comprises more than half of the employed population. The information sector, which includes “all those who produce, process and distribute information as their main occupation, as well as who create and maintain the functioning of the information infrastructure,” is also rapidly growing - both in size and in the growth of social influence.

Of course, the sphere of material production - neither in the agrarian nor in the industrial sector - cannot lose its important importance in the life of society. Ultimately, the same scientific and information activities in general require an ever-increasing amount of equipment, and people employed in it must eat every day. We are talking only about the ratio of the number of people employed in a particular sector, as well as the ratio of the share of value in the total volume of the gross national product.

Thus, in a civilization of a post-industrial type, the main wealth is not land (as in a traditional, agrarian society), not even capital (as in an industrial civilization), but information. Moreover, its features, in contrast to land and capital, are such that it is not limited, in principle it becomes more and more accessible to everyone and does not decrease in the process of its consumption. In addition, it is relatively inexpensive (for it is immaterial), and the means of its storage and processing are becoming cheaper in production, which increases its efficiency.

The technical basis of the information society is the development of computer technologies and means of communication. Modern means of storing, processing and transmitting information allow a person to receive the required information almost instantly at any time from anywhere in the world. The huge volume of information accumulated by mankind and continues to grow like an avalanche circulates in modern society and for the first time in history begins to act not just as a social memory (for example, in books), but already as an active tool, as a means of decision-making, and more and more often - without direct human participation.

And now let's consider what social changes the information revolution causes according to the parameters we have chosen in those societies where it manifested itself most clearly. At the same time, one should not forget that none of the societies existing today, including the most advanced ones, can be considered completely post-industrial. We are talking only about the tendencies that in some general society of the "third wave" will be built on the basis of three key principles.

1. The minority principle, which is intended to replace the previous majority principle. Instead of the previous political stratification, in which several large blocs formed the majority, a "configurative society is emerging in which thousands of minorities, many of which are temporary, are in a continuous cycle, forming completely new transitional forms."

2. The principle of "half-direct" democracy, which means, in essence, the rejection of representative democracy. Today, parliamentarians actually proceed primarily from their own views, at best - they listen to the opinion of a few experts. Raising the educational level and improving communication technologies will enable citizens to independently develop their own options for many political decisions. In other words, opinions that are formed outside the legislature will increasingly acquire legal force.

3. The principle of "division of responsibility in decision-making", which will help to eliminate the overload that often blocks the activities of government institutions. To this day, too many decisions are made at the national level and too few at the local (municipal) and international level. At the transnational level, it is necessary to delegate the decision-making rights on the problems of the functioning of international corporations, the arms and drug trade, the fight against international terrorism, etc.

The dominant nature of economic relations. In postindustrial society, the dominant role is increasingly played not so much by private as by corporate and institutional ownership of the means of production. Incorporation of the majority of any large enterprises, the trend towards which was outlined in the days of Marx, in a mature industrial society acquires decisive importance. Shares symbolizing property relations, becoming securities, significantly intensify the general process of capital circulation.

However, the main feature of postindustrial society, its theorists consider the shift of the center of gravity from property relations as the core around which all social relations were formed in previous epochs, to knowledge and information.

For example, Alvin Toffler sees here the main difference from the economic system that prevailed in industrial society, in the way of creating social wealth. "The new method is fundamentally different from all the previous ones and in this sense is a turning point in social life." At the same time, a supersymbolic system for creating social wealth is emerging, based on the use of information technologies, that is, on the use of a person's intellectual abilities, and not his physical strength. Obviously, in such an economic system, the mode of production must be based primarily on knowledge.

As the service and information sectors of the economy develop, wealth loses the material embodiment that land gave it in the agrarian civilization, and capital in the industrial one. It is interesting that, according to the same Toffler, the emergence of a new - symbolic - form of capital in post-industrial civilization "confirms the ideas of Marx and classical political economy, which foreshadowed the end of traditional capital."

The main unit of exchange is not only and not so much money - metal or paper, cash or non-cash - but information. “Paper money,” says Toffler, “this artifact of the industrial age, is out of date, being replaced by credit cards. Once a symbol of the emerging middle class, credit cards are now ubiquitous. Today (the beginning of the 90s - V. A, A. K.) there are about 187 million of their owners in the world ”. If you think about it, then electronic money, expressed by a credit card, is information (about the degree of solvency of the owner of this card) in almost pure form. The expansion of electronic money in the global economy is beginning to have a serious impact on long-standing relationships. In a competitive environment, private finance companies that provide credit services are beginning to squeeze the previously unshakable power of banks.

The general nature of the organizational and technological level. Most theorists of postindustrial society - D. Bell, Z. Brzezinski and others - consider a sharp decline in the number of "blue" and an increase in the number of "white" collars as a sign of the new system. However, Toffler argues that the expansion of the scope of office activity is nothing more than a direct continuation of the same industrialism. "Offices function like factories, with a great deal of division of labor that is monotonous, deafening and degrading." In a postindustrial society, on the contrary, there is an increase in the number and variety of organizational forms of production management. Cumbersome and cumbersome bureaucratic structures are increasingly being replaced by small, mobile and temporary hierarchical alliances. Information technology is destroying the old principles of the division of labor and creating new alliances of owners of common information.

One example of such flexible forms is the return to a new round of the "spiral" of progress of small family businesses. "Decentralization and de-urbanization of production, changing the nature of work allow a return to the home industry based on modern electronic technology." Toffler believes, for example, that the "electronic cottage" - by which he means home-based work using computer technology, multimedia and telecommunication systems - will play a leading role in the labor process of a post-industrial society. He also argues that domestic work in modern conditions has the following advantages.

¦ Economic: stimulating the development of some industries (electronics, communications) and reducing others (oil, paper); savings in transportation costs, the cost of which today exceeds the cost of installing telecommunications at home.

¦ Socio-political: strengthening of stability in society; reduction of forced geographic mobility; strengthening the family and neighborhood community (neighborhood); enhancing people's participation in public life.

¦ Environmental: creating incentives to save energy and use cheap alternative sources of it.

¦ Psychological: overcoming monotonous, overly specialized work; increasing personal moments in the work process.

Employment structure. Today, in the most advanced countries - where the tendencies of the post-industrial society are most clearly manifested - one worker directly employed in agriculture is able to provide food for up to 50 or more people employed in other sectors. (Although, of course, such efficiency cannot be achieved by the efforts of the agrarians alone, each of whom employs, in fact, several people in other sectors of the economy, providing him with machines, energy, fertilizers, advanced agronomic technologies, receiving raw agricultural products from him and converting it into a ready-to-eat product.)

We presented the general trends in the restructuring of the employment system in three types of societies in the diagram (Fig. 22). If we try to trace the trends of changes along the Z axis, which reflect on this diagram a sequential increase in the levels of development of society, then it is easy to be convinced of the following. During the transition from one civilization to another, there is a consistent and very significant outflow of employed people from the agricultural sector, which, of course, are redistributed to other sectors. (Today, in developing societies, these processes are probably still less dramatic and painful than in Europe at the dawn of the industrial revolution.) In addition, there is an equally consistent and steady growth in sectors such as services and information. And only the industrial sector, which peaked in developed countries by the 50s of the twentieth century, is noticeably shrinking in the post-industrial society.

The nature of the settlements. The urbanization trend, which is so characteristic of industrial societies, is undergoing major changes in the transition to a post-industrial society. In almost all advanced societies, the development of urbanization followed an S-shaped curve, creating very slowly, spreading very quickly, then slowing down, and subsequently smoothly moving (sometimes even more intensively than the previous period of urbanization) in the opposite direction.

Rice. 22. Restructuring employment in societies of various types. A hypothetical diagram constructed by the authors based on data gleaned from various sources (including those sounded in the lectures of some specialists)

n direction - suburban (ie suburban) development (Suburban way of life - "suburban way of life" (...).

The computerization and development of telecommunications, as well as the widespread introduction of computer networks, enable an increasing number of people employed in industries related to the production and processing of information to "go to work without leaving their homes." They can communicate with their employers (receiving assignments, reporting on their implementation and even making payments for the work performed) and clients over computer networks. The American textbook "The Office: Procedures and Technology" describes a rather typical situation for a post-industrial society: "A young man is hired to work in a large company located in a large city, but he would like to live in terrain 45 miles from the city. He is hired as a word processing specialist and can carry out office assignments from the comfort of his home. The company provides it with the equipment necessary for its operation, including that which is required for the electronic transfer of finished products to the company's office. The young worker now performs his job in his home office, admiring the view from the window of the herds peacefully grazing in the picturesque valley. Letters and reports prepared by him in this secluded village are immediately received by those to whom they are intended, wherever they are in the world. "

Note that such a way of life is probably available only to those members of society whose professional activities are of an intellectual nature. However, we have repeatedly noted above that the proportion of this category of the population in postindustrial societies is steadily increasing.

The level and scope of education. Most advanced societies are beginning to value more and more getting a reasonably high level of education. For example, the proportion of American men who attended at least four years of college rose from 20% in 1980 to 25% in 1994, the proportion of women from 13% to 20%, respectively. Among applicants, the rivalry in admission to universities and institutes that are considered the best (prestigious) has sharply increased. Thus, in 1995, Harvard University received 18,190 applications for admission to 2,000 places, which indicates a competition of 11 people for each place. Five years earlier, the ratio was 8 people per seat.

However, paradoxical as it may sound, at the turn of the millennium in full height a fundamentally new problem arises: the fight against functional illiteracy. Moreover, it arises primarily in the most advanced societies, where, it would seem, the level of elementary literacy is much higher than anywhere else in the world. According to UNESCO, functional illiteracy is, firstly, a practical loss of reading, writing and elementary calculation skills; secondly, such a level of general educational knowledge that does not allow full-fledged "functioning" in a modern, continuously growing complex society. Information, in contrast to material goods, cannot be appropriated, but must be mastered (that is, understood, comprehended from the standpoint of the general information system already available in the thesaurus of a person; placed in the right place in the storeroom of his memory; in addition, it must be ready to be retrieved and applied at the right time and in the right place). And what about the “reader” who, after reading a small and quite simple text, turns out to be unable to answer a single question about its content? Only one thing: he cannot read (despite all his certificates and diplomas). This is one of the most important manifestations of functional illiteracy.

Alas, Russia has not yet fully realized the enormity of this problem, probably due to the fact that we have not really reached the frontiers of highly developed societies. Perhaps, it is for this reason that research on the level of functional illiteracy in Russia has not been carried out either on a national or even regional scale.

It should be noted that in most developed countries, information about the total growth of functional illiteracy caused not only discouragement, but also an adequate reaction in political circles. Based on the findings and conclusions of the aforementioned National Commission report, then-US President Ronald Reagan demanded that Congress make a substantial commitment to a campaign to combat functional illiteracy. His successor, George W. Bush, pledged to become the "president of education" during his election campaign. At the third meeting of the president with all state governors in the history of the United States (September 1989), a statement was made calling for the promotion of goals in the field of education that "will make us competitive."

The nature of the development of scientific knowledge. The most important driving force behind the change in the post-industrial society is the automation and computerization of production processes and the so-called “high technologies”. The acceleration of change in the second half of the twentieth century is generally closely related to the rapid improvement technological processes... The time interval between three cycles of technological renewal has been significantly reduced: 1) the emergence of a creative idea, 2) its practical implementation, and 3) introduction into social production. In the third cycle, the first cycle of the next circle is born: "new machines and equipment become not only products, but also a source of fresh ideas."

New technology also offers new solutions to social, philosophical, and even personal problems. “It affects the entire intellectual environment of a person - his way of thinking and view of the world,” says Alvin Toffler. Knowledge is the core of technology improvement. Paraphrasing F. Bacon's dictum "knowledge is power", Toffler argues that in modern world“Knowledge is change”, in other words, the accelerated acquisition of knowledge that feeds the development of technology also means the acceleration of change.

In social development as a whole, a similar chain can be traced: discovery - application - impact - discovery. The speed of transition from one link to another is also significantly increased. Psychologically, people find it difficult to adapt to the many changes that occur in the shortest possible time. Toffler characterizes the acceleration of change as a social and psychological force - “external acceleration is transformed into internal”. The statement about the acceleration of changes and their social and psychological role serves as a rationale for the transition to a kind of "super-industrial" society. It seems to us that the most apt name for such a society should be “information society”.

1. Comparative analysis different types of human societies, differing in the level of their development, it is advisable to carry out, comparing among themselves the typical parameters that are similar for different countries and peoples at the same level of social development, and differing in their content for societies at different levels of development. There are eight such parameters: 1) the nature of the social structure; 2) the nature of the participation of members of the society in the management of its affairs; 3) the dominant nature of economic relations; 4) the general nature of the organizational and technological level; 5) the structure of employment; 6) the nature of the settlements; (7) the level and scope of education; (8) the nature and level of development of scientific knowledge.

2. A primitive society, in accordance with the indicated eight parameters, can be described as follows. The dominant type of social structure here is tribalism - a tribal structure. Most members of society are directly involved in governance, but in a chaotic, disordered manner. "Economics" (for a primitive society this concept is very conditional) is based on subsistence farming; communal ownership of the means of production prevails; there is a random nature of the relationship of commodity exchange. These societies are characterized by the primitive processing of fishing tools (gathering, hunting, fishing), as well as an elementary gender and age division of labor, since most of the community members are engaged in the same industry. The habitat of members of primitive societies is small temporary settlements (parking lots, encampments). The accumulated knowledge is not systematized, and its transfer to subsequent generations is carried out orally and individually.

3. Traditional society, in comparison with the primitive one, is undergoing serious social changes. At the initial stages, the main type of social structure here becomes a weakly centralized state, which, as it develops, acquires more and more clearly expressed tendencies towards absolutism. Politics here is the business of a narrow layer of the elite, and the absolute majority of members of society are excluded from participation in government. Private ownership of the means of production lies at the foundation of economic life. In traditional societies, there is a predominance of the subsistence economy. Here, the variety of tools of labor is growing more and more consistently, but mainly on the basis of the muscular energy of humans and animals. The main organizational and economic unit is the family. In urban settlements, there is an increasing development of the handicraft and service sectors, but the vast majority of the population is employed in the agricultural sector. This majority lives in rural areas. Cities are gaining more and more influence as centers of political, industrial and spiritual life. Education, like politics, is the lot of a thin layer of the elite. Science and production are autonomous, loosely connected spheres of the life of society.

4. Industrial society in the course of the industrialization process acquires, according to R. Aron, the following typical features. National states with clearly delineated territorial boundaries are becoming the main type of social structure; these states are formed around common forms of economy, language and culture. The population is given universal suffrage, as a result of which there is a consistent institutionalization of political activity around mass parties. The economy is acquiring more and more clearly expressed market relations, which means an almost complete commercialization of production and the disappearance of the subsistence economy. Private ownership of capital becomes the pivotal foundation of the economy. The dominant technology is the dominance of machine production. It should be noted that the share of workers employed in agricultural production has fallen, and the share of the industrial proletariat has increased. Production is reorganized on a factory basis. An important sign of industrialization is the urbanization of society. Strengthening the operation of the law of change of labor leads to an increase in mass literacy. From the very beginning of the industrial revolution, science has been applied at an accelerating pace to all spheres of life, especially to industrial production, as well as a consistent rationalization of all social life.

5. The development of the information revolution leads to the gradual formation of a post-industrial society. Judging by the trends observed today in the most advanced societies, it will have the following characteristics. The most important social change in the system of social construction should be considered an increase in the transparency of national borders and the influence of supranational communities. Economic life is increasingly characterized by the growing role of information and the possession of it, the growing importance of intellectual property, the emergence of electronic money and the transformation of information into the main medium of exchange. In the technological field, the development of "high technologies", as well as the automation and computerization of production processes, is becoming increasingly important. It should be noted that there is a clearly pronounced downward trend in the share of workers employed in the industry, with a simultaneous increase in the share of those employed in the information and, especially, in the service sectors. Industrial urbanization is giving way to a trend towards suburbanization. A manifestation of the crisis of social institutions of education is the awareness of the problem of functional illiteracy. Science becomes a directly productive sphere.

In fact, this summary is summarized in a single matrix called "Types of Societies and the Criteria for Their Difference". This matrix can be analyzed in two ways:

¦ line by line: then we see exactly what social changes are taking place in a given sphere of public life, or (which is the same thing) what changes in this sphere are caused by this or that global revolution;

¦ by columns: as a result, we get a complex description of each of the four types of societies (which is reflected in the summary for chapter 12).

Control questions

1. List eight defining parameters that can be used to compare social change in different types of societies.

2. What does the concept of "tribalism" mean?

3. What is meant by “demos”?

4. What is the essence of the "food economy"?

5. What are the main reasons for the lack of mass spread of literacy in traditional society?

6. What is the main reason for the limit ("ceiling") of growth in labor productivity in a traditional society?

Table 12

Types of societies and criteria for their distinction

7. What is the essence of the convergence thesis?

8. What does such a characteristic feature of industrial society, noted by R. Aron, as “institutionalization of political life around mass parties” mean?

9. What is the essence of the commercialization of production in an industrial society?

10. What are the main trends in the restructuring of employment in different types of societies?

1. Bendix R. Modern society // American sociology. - M., 1972

2. Gauzner N. Theory of "information society" and the reality of capitalism // World economy and international relations. - 1985. No. 10.

3. Huseynov A. Golden rule of morality. - M., 1988.

4. Galbraith D. New industrial society. - M., 1969.

5. Drucker P. Post-capitalist society // New post-industrial wave in the West. - M., 1999.

6. Inozemtsev VL Postindustrial economy and "postindustrial" society // Social sciences and modernity. - 2001. No. 3.

7. Lukin VM Models of industrial and post-industrial civilization in Western futurology // Bulletin of St. Petersburg University. Ser. 6. - 1993, no. 1 (No. 6).

8. Otunbaeva R., Tangyan S. In the world of the illiterate // New time. - 1991. No. 17.

9. Sorokin PA Social and cultural mobility // Man. Civilization. Society. M., 1992.

10. Tangyan SA The priority of education today is the priority of the XXI century // Soviet pedagogy. - 1991. No. 6.

11. Chudinova VP Functional illiteracy - the problem of developed countries // Sociological studies. - 1994. No. 3.

12. Engels F. The origin of the family, private property and the state // Marx K, Engels F. Sobr. cit., 2nd ed. T. 21.

In the modern world, there are various types of societies that differ from each other in many ways, both explicit (language of communication, culture, geographic location, size, etc.) and hidden (degree of social integration, level of stability, etc.). Scientific classification involves the selection of the most essential, typical features that distinguish some features from others and unite societies of the same group. The complexity of social systems, called societies, determines both the variety of their specific manifestations and the absence of a single universal criterion on the basis of which they could be classified.

In the middle of the 19th century, K. Marx proposed a typology of societies, which was based on the mode of production of material goods and production relations - primarily property relations. He divided all societies into 5 main types (according to the type of socio-economic formations): primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist and communist (the initial phase is a socialist society).

Another typology divides all societies into simple and complex. The criterion is the number of management levels and the degree of social differentiation (stratification). Simple society - it is a society in which the constituent parts are homogeneous, there are no rich and poor, leaders and subordinates, the structure and functions are poorly differentiated and can easily be interchanged. Such are the primitive tribes that have survived in some places to this day.

Complex society - a society with highly differentiated structures and functions, interrelated and interdependent from each other, which necessitates their coordination.

TO. Popper distinguishes between two types of societies: closed and open. The differences between them are based on a number of factors, and, above all, the relationship between social control and individual freedom. For closed society characterized by a static social structure, limited mobility, immunity to innovations, traditionalism, dogmatic authoritarian ideology, collectivism. To this type of society K. Popper attributed Sparta, Prussia, tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union of the Stalin era. Open society characterized by a dynamic social structure, high mobility, ability to innovate, criticism, individualism and democratic pluralistic ideology. K. Popper considered ancient Athens and modern Western democracies to be examples of open societies.

The division of societies into traditional, industrial and post-industrial ones, proposed by the American sociologist D. Bell on the basis of a change in the technological basis - the improvement of the means of production and knowledge, is stable and widespread.

Traditional (pre-industrial) society - a society with an agrarian way of life, with a predominance of natural economy, class hierarchy, sedentary structures and a method of socio-cultural regulation based on tradition. It is characterized by manual labor, extremely low rates of development of production, which can satisfy the needs of people only at a minimum level. It is extremely inertial, therefore it is not receptive to innovations. The behavior of individuals in such a society is regulated by customs, norms, and social institutions. Customs, norms, institutions, consecrated by traditions, are considered unshakable, not allowing even the thought of changing them. Carrying out their integrative function, culture and social institutions suppress any manifestation of individual freedom, which is a necessary condition for the gradual renewal of society.

The term industrial society was introduced by A. Saint-Simon, emphasizing its new technical basis. Industrial society -(in modern terms) is a complex society, with an industry-based way of managing, with flexible, dynamic and modifying structures, a way of socio-cultural regulation based on a combination of individual freedom and the interests of society. These societies are characterized by a developed division of labor, the development of mass media, urbanization, etc.

Post-industrial society(sometimes it is called informational) - a society developed on an information basis: the extraction (in traditional societies) and processing (in industrial societies) of natural products are replaced by the acquisition and processing of information, as well as preferential development (instead of agriculture in traditional societies and industry in industrial ) the service sector. As a result, the structure of employment and the ratio of various professional and qualification groups are changing. According to forecasts, already at the beginning of the 21st century in advanced countries, half of the workforce will be employed in the field of information, a quarter - in the field of material production, and a quarter - in the production of services, including information.

The change in the technological basis also affects the organization of the entire system of social ties and relations. If in an industrial society the mass class was made up of workers, then in a postindustrial society it was white-collar workers and managers. At the same time, the significance of class differentiation is weakening, instead of a status ("grainy") social structure, a functional ("ready-made") structure is being formed. Instead of leadership, the principle of governance is being replaced by coordination, and representative democracy is being replaced by direct democracy and self-government. As a result, instead of a hierarchy of structures, a new type of network organization is created, focused on rapid change depending on the situation.

True, at the same time, some sociologists pay attention to the contradictory possibilities, on the one hand, to ensure a higher level of individual freedom in the information society, and on the other, to the emergence of new, more hidden and therefore more dangerous forms of social control over it.

In conclusion, we note that, in addition to those considered, there are other classifications of societies in modern sociology. It all depends on what criterion will be used as the basis for this classification.

Social structure of society "

Completed: 3rd year student

evening department

Zakhvatova G.I.

Teacher: Vukolova T.S.

1. Introduction …………………………………………………… 3

2. The concept of the social structure of society ………………. 4

3. Social stratification ……………………………… ..6

4. Social mobility: ……………………………… 11

4.1. Group mobility ……………………………… .11

4.2. Individual mobility ……………………… ..13

5. Features of social stratification in Russia …… ..15

5.1. Prospects for the formation of a middle class ... ... ... 15

6. Conclusion ………………………………………………… 19

7. List of used literature ……………………… ..21

1. Introduction.

In studying social phenomena and processes sociology is based on the principles of historicism. This means that, firstly, all social phenomena and processes are considered as systems with a certain internal structure; secondly, the process of their functioning and development is being studied; thirdly, specific changes and patterns of their transition from one qualitative state to another are revealed. The most general and complex social system is society. Society is a relatively stable system of connections and relations between people, formed in the process of the historical development of mankind, supported by customs, traditions and laws, based on a certain method of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material and spiritual goods. The elements of such a complex social system are people whose social activity is determined by a certain social status that they occupy, the social functions (roles) they perform, social norms and values adopted in this system, as well as individual qualities (social qualities of a person, motives , value orientations, interests, etc.).

Social structure means the objective division of society into separate strata, groups, different in their social status.

Any society strives to preserve inequality, seeing in it an ordering principle, without which the reproduction of social ties and the integration of the new are impossible. The same property is inherent in society as a whole. The theory of stratification is called upon to reveal the basic principles of the hierarchical structure of society.

The inviolability of the hierarchical structure of society does not mean that changes do not occur within it. At different stages, growth of one layer and contraction of another layer is possible. These changes cannot be explained by natural population growth. There is either a rise or fall of significant groups. And even the relative stability of social strata does not exclude the vertical migration of individual individuals. We will consider these vertical movements, while maintaining the very stratification structure, as social mobility.

2.The concept of the social structure of society

Interaction in society usually leads to the formation of new social relationships. The latter can be thought of as relatively stable and independent ties between individuals and social groups.

In sociology, the concepts of "social structure" and "social system" are closely related. A social system is a set of social phenomena and processes that are in relationships and connections with each other and form a kind of integral social object. Individual phenomena and processes act as elements of the system. The concept of "social structure of society" is part of the concept of a social system and combines two components - social composition and social ties. Social composition is a set of elements that make up a given structure. The second component is a set of links between these elements. Thus, the concept of social structure includes, on the one hand, the social composition, or a set of different types of social communities as system-forming social elements of society, on the other, the social connections of the constituent elements that differ in the breadth of their action, in their significance in the characteristics of social structure of society at a certain stage of development.

The social structure of society means the objective division of society into separate strata, groups, different in their social status, in their relation to the mode of production. It is a stable connection of elements in a social system. The main elements of the social structure are such social communities as classes and class-like groups, ethnic, professional, socio-demographic groups, socio-territorial communities (city, village, region). Each of these elements, in turn, is a complex social system with its own subsystems and connections. The social structure of society reflects the peculiarities of social relations of classes, professional, cultural, national-ethnic and demographic groups, which are determined by the place and role of each of them in the system of economic relations. The social aspect of any community is concentrated in its connections and mediations with production and class relations in society.

Social structure as a kind of framework for the entire system of social relations, that is, as a set of economic, social and political institutions that organize social life. On the one hand, these institutions set a certain network of role positions and regulatory requirements in relation to specific members of society. On the other hand, they represent certain rather stable ways of socialization of individuals.

The main principle for determining the social structure of society should be the search for real subjects of social processes.

Subjects can be both individual individuals and social groups of various sizes, distinguished for different reasons: young people, the working class, a religious sect, and so on.

From this point of view social structure society can be represented as a more or less stable ratio of social strata and groups. The theory of social stratification is called upon to study the diversity of hierarchically located social strata.

Initially, the idea of a stratum representation of social structure had a pronounced ideological connotation and was intended to neutralize Marx's idea of the class idea of society and the dominance of class contradictions in history. But gradually the idea of isolating social strata as elements of society was established in social science, because it really reflected the objective differences between different groups of the population within a particular class.

Theories of social stratification arose in opposition to the Marxist-Leninist theory of classes and class struggle.

3 social stratification

The term "stratification" comes from the Latin stratum - layer, layer and facere - to do. Thus, social stratification is the determination of the vertical sequence of the position of social strata, strata in society, and their hierarchy. Social stratification is "the differentiating ranking of individuals of a given social system", it is "a way of considering individuals as occupying a lower or higher social place relative to each other in some socially important aspects." Thus, the social structure arises about the social division of labor, and social stratification - about the social distribution of the results of labor, that is, social benefits.

Sociologists are unanimous in the opinion that the basis of the stratification structure is the natural and social inequality of people. However, the way inequality was organized could be different. It was necessary to isolate those foundations that would determine the appearance of the vertical structure of society.

So, for example, K. Marx introduced the only basis for the vertical stratification of society - the possession of property. Therefore, its stratification structure was actually reduced to two levels: the class of owners (slave owners, feudal lords, the bourgeoisie) and a class deprived of ownership of the means of production (slaves, proletarians) or having very limited rights (peasants). Attempts to present the intelligentsia and some other social groups as intermediate layers between the main classes left the impression of an ill-conceived general scheme of the social hierarchy of the population.

M. Weber increases the number of criteria that determine belonging to a particular stratum. In addition to economic - the attitude towards property and the level of income - he introduces criteria such as social prestige and belonging to certain political circles (parties). Prestige was understood as the acquisition by an individual from birth or due to personal qualities of such a social status that allowed him to take a certain place in the social hierarchy.

The role of status in the hierarchical structure of society is determined by such an important feature of social life as its normative value regulation. Thanks to the latter, only those whose status corresponds to the ideas of the importance of his title, profession, as well as norms and laws functioning in society, always rise to the "upper rungs" of the social ladder.

The allocation of political criteria of stratification by M. Weber still looks insufficiently reasoned. P. Sorokin speaks about this more clearly. He unambiguously points out the impossibility of giving a single set of criteria for belonging to any stratum and notes the presence in society of three stratification structures: economic, professional and political.

In the 1930s and 1940s, American sociology attempted to overcome the multidimensionality of stratification by asking individuals to determine their own place in the social structure. But this kind of research yielded a different result: they showed that, consciously or intuitively, people feel, realize the hierarchy of society, feel the main parameters, principles that determine a person's position in society.

So, society reproduces, organizes inequality according to several criteria: according to the level of wealth and income, according to the level of social prestige, according to the level of possession of political power, and also according to some other criteria. It can be argued that all these types of hierarchy are significant for society, since they allow regulating both the reproduction of social ties and directing personal aspirations and ambitions of people to acquire statuses that are significant for society.

The introduction of such a criterion as the level of income led to the fact that, in accordance with it, it was possible to distinguish formally an infinite number of strata of the population with different levels of well-being. And the appeal to the problem of social and professional prestige gave grounds to make the stratification structure very similar to the social and professional one. This is how the division into: 1) the upper class - professionals, administrators; 2) mid-level technical specialists; 3) commercial class; 4) the petty bourgeoisie; 5) technicians and workers performing management functions; 6) skilled workers; 7) unskilled workers. And this is not the longest list of the main social strata of society. There was a danger of losing a holistic vision of the stratification structure, which was increasingly replaced by the desire of researchers to distribute individuals on the "levels" of the social hierarchy.

In our opinion, in developing the most general idea of the social hierarchy of society, it is sufficient to single out three main levels: higher, middle, and lower. The distribution of the population by these levels is possible on all grounds of stratification, and the significance of each of them will be determined by the values and norms prevailing in society, social institutions and ideological attitudes. In modern Western society, which values freedom, the degree of which is determined, alas, not only by political and legal acts, but also by the thickness of the wallet, which provides wider access, for example, to education and, therefore, to a prestigious status group, the criteria are highlighted, ensuring this freedom: material independence, high income, etc.

As noted above, the primary cause of the hierarchical structure of society is social inequality generated by the objective conditions of the life of individuals. But each society seeks to organize its inequality, otherwise people, driven by a sense of injustice, will destroy in righteous anger everything that in their minds is associated with infringement of their interests.

The hierarchical system of modern society is devoid of its former rigidity. Formally, all citizens have equal rights, including the right to occupy any place in the social structure, rise to the top rungs of the social ladder, or be “below”. The sharply increased social mobility, nevertheless, did not lead to the "erosion" of the hierarchical system. Society still maintains and protects its hierarchy.

It has been observed that the profile of the vertical slice of society is not constant. Karl Marx once suggested that its configuration would gradually change due to the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few and significant impoverishment of the bulk of the population. The result of this tendency will be the emergence of serious tension between the upper and lower layers of the social hierarchy, which will inevitably result in a struggle for the redistribution of the national income. But the growth of wealth and power at the top is not unlimited. There is a saturation point beyond which society cannot move without the risk of a major catastrophe. As we approach this point in society, processes begin to curb the pernicious tendency, either reforms are carried out to redistribute wealth through the tax system, or deep revolutionary processes begin, in which broad social strata are involved.

The stability of society is associated with the profile of social stratification. Excessive "stretching" of the latter is fraught with serious social cataclysms, uprisings, bringing chaos, violence, hindering the development of society. Thickening of the stratification profile, primarily due to the "truncation" of the top of the cone, is a recurring phenomenon in the history of all societies. And it is important that it is carried out not through uncontrolled spontaneous processes, but through a consciously pursued state policy.

The described process also has a downside. The compaction of the stratification profile should not be excessive. Inequality is not only an objective fact of social life, but also an important source of social development. Equation in income in relation to property. Power deprives individuals of an important internal stimulus to action, to self-realization, self-affirmation, and society - the only energetic source of development.

The idea that the stability of the hierarchical structure of society depends on the proportion and role of the middle stratum or class seems fruitful. Occupying an intermediate position, the middle class performs a kind of connecting role between the two poles of the social hierarchy, reducing their opposition. The more (in quantitative terms) the middle class, the more chances it has to influence the policy of the state, the process of shaping the fundamental values of society, the worldview of citizens, while avoiding the extremes inherent in opposite forces.

4.Social mobility

Social mobility is a mechanism of social stratification, which is associated with a change in a person's position in the system of social statuses. If a person's status is changed to a more prestigious, better one, then we can say that there was upward mobility. However, a person as a result of job loss, illness, etc. can also move to a lower status group - in this case, downward mobility is triggered. In addition to vertical movements (downward and upward mobility), there are horizontal movements, which consist of natural mobility (moving from one job to another without changing status) and territorial mobility (moving from city to city).

4.1. Group mobility

Group mobility introduces large changes in the stratification structure, often affects the ratio of the main social strata and, as a rule, is associated with the emergence of new groups, whose status ceases to correspond to the existing hierarchy system. For example: by the middle of the twentieth century, managers of large enterprises had become such a group. It is no coincidence that on the basis of generalization of the changed role of managers in Western sociology, the concept of a "revolution of managers" is emerging, according to which the administrative stratum begins to play a decisive role not only in the economy, but also in social life, supplementing and even supplanting the class of owners.

Group movements along the vertical are especially intensive in times of economic restructuring. The emergence of new prestigious, highly paid professional groups promotes mass movement up the hierarchical ladder. The decline in the social status of the profession, the disappearance of some of them provoke not only a downward movement, but also the emergence of marginal strata that unite people who are losing their usual position in society, losing the achieved level of consumption. There is a "erosion" of socio-cultural values and norms that previously united them and predetermined their stable place in the social hierarchy. In periods of acute social cataclysms, radical changes in socio-political structures, an almost complete renewal of the highest echelons of society can occur.

Economic crises, accompanied by a massive drop in the level of material well-being, an increase in unemployment, and a sharp increase in the income gap, become the primary cause of the numerical growth of the most disadvantaged part of the population, which always forms the basis of the pyramid of the social hierarchy. In such conditions, movement along the downward line does not cover individuals, but entire groups. The fall of a social group can be temporary, or it can become sustainable. In the first case, the position of the social group is "straightened out", it returns to its usual place as it overcomes economic difficulties. In the second, the descent is final. The group changes its social status and begins a difficult period of its adaptation to a new place in the social hierarchy.

So, mass group movements along the vertical are associated, firstly, with profound serious changes in the socio-economic structure of society, causing the emergence of new classes, social groups striving to conquer a place in the social hierarchy corresponding to their strength and influence. Secondly, with a change in ideological guidelines, a system of values and norms, and political priorities. In this case, there is a movement "upward" of those political forces that were able to grasp the changes in the mentality, orientations and ideals of the population.

4.2 Individual social mobility.

In a steadily developing society, vertical movements are not of a group, but of an individual character. That is, it is not economic, political or professional groups that go up and down the steps of the social ladder, but their individual representatives, more or less successful, striving to overcome the attraction of the familiar sociocultural environment. The fact is that an individual who has set off on the difficult path "upward" goes independently. And if successful, it will not only change its position in the vertical hierarchy, but also change its social professional group. A circle of professions with a vertical structure, such as in the artistic world - stars with millions of states, and artists, interrupted by odd jobs; limited and not of fundamental importance for society as a whole. A worker who has successfully shown himself in the political field and has made a career, reaching the ministerial portfolio, breaks with his place in the social hierarchy and with his professional group. A bankrupt entrepreneur falls "down", losing not only a prestigious place in society, but also the opportunity to do his usual business.

In society, social institutions regulate the vertical movement, the originality of culture, the way of life of each stratum, allow testing each nominee "for strength", for compliance with the norms and principles of the stratum in which he falls. So, the education system provides not only the socialization of the individual, her education, but also plays the role of a kind of "social lift", which allows the most capable and gifted to rise to the "higher floors" of the social hierarchy. Political parties and organizations form the political elite, the institution of property and inheritance strengthens the class of owners, the institution of marriage allows movement even in the absence of outstanding intellectual abilities.

However, the use of the driving force of any social institution to ascend “upward” is not always enough. To gain a foothold in a new stratum, it is necessary to accept its way of life, organically fit into its socio-cultural environment, and build one's behavior in accordance with the accepted norms and rules. A person is often forced to say goodbye to old habits, to revise his entire system of values, at first to control his every action. Adaptation to a new socio-cultural environment requires high psychological stress, which is fraught with the loss of connection with their previous social environment. A person can forever turn out to be an outcast in the social stratum where he aspired, or in which he found himself by the will of fate, if we are talking about a downward movement.

The phenomenon of finding a person, as it were, between two cultures, associated with his movement in social space, is called marginality in sociology.

A marginal person, a marginal person, is an individual who has lost his former social status, deprived of the opportunity to engage in his usual activities, and, moreover, found himself unable to adapt to the new socio-cultural environment of the stratum within which he formally exists. His individual value system, formed in a different cultural environment, turned out to be so stable that it does not lend itself to being replaced by new norms, principles, and rules.

In the minds of many people, success in life is associated with reaching the heights of the social hierarchy.

5. Features of social stratification in Russia.

The "erosion" of the middle stratum, which is possible during periods of economic crises, is fraught with serious shocks for society. Impoverishment in the context of price liberalization and falling production of the bulk of the population of Russia sharply violated the social equilibrium in society, led to the advancement of the demands of the Lumpen part of the population, which, as experience shows, carries a large destructive charge, aimed mainly at redistribution, and not to create national wealth.

5.1 Prospects for the formation of the middle class.

What are the prospects for the formation of a middle class in our country today? In many ways, they depend on the successful adaptation of the population, the formation of productive models of socio-economic behavior, adequate to the current economic situation. The characteristics of the adaptation process are now clear. First of all, the previously dominant hopes for the state are being replaced by a significantly greater orientation of the population towards their own strengths and capabilities. Rigid and organic types of socio-economic behavior give way to a variety of types of social action. Direct and direct power economic and ideological control is being replaced by such universal regulators as money and legal regulations. New ways and standards of behavior are conditioned by different sources of formation, although they are often not corrected either by stable moral norms or legal sanctions.

Lack of demand for qualified personnel or being in demand only with the necessary connections deforms the chain: education - qualifications - income - long-term savings - the level of consumption, which ensures the formation and development of the middle class. Education does not guarantee a job with growth prospects. Work does not guarantee income: the salaries of representatives of the same profession in the private and public sectors differ by an order of magnitude. Income does not guarantee status as many sources of high income are illegal. And the inconsistency of the legislation, the imperfection of the tax system turn almost any enterprise into a delinquent and force the owners of enterprises, when hiring workers, to pay attention not only to their professional and business qualities, but also to the factors confirming their unconditional "reliability." Interestingly, the savings factor did not benefit from any of the groups. Today, only one third of the population answered positively to the question: "Do you have a certain margin of safety that will allow you to hold out if the economic situation worsens?" Twice as many respondents answered negatively to this question.

Studies have shown that with an increase in the volume of savings, their share in cash increases. In the responses received during the focused interviews, instability in the country and the unreliability of banks are indicated as the main reasons for reducing private investment potential. The respondents believe that society has not left the period of instability, and a sharp change in the principles of financial policy is not excluded. Lack of trust in the government and its financial institutions deprives the potential middle class of the opportunity to build long-term strategies for increasing prosperity and transfers a significant part of possible savings to the consumption sphere.In general, the data presented in the literature indicate the limited scope of adaptation processes and crisis phenomena in the process of adaptation, and in a subjective way. the worst situation turned out to be the generation of 40-50 year olds, i.e. people who are in active working age and, thanks to experience and qualifications, have sufficiently high social ambitions. In this group of respondents, either disappointment with the reforms or their rejection is growing. This generation, which usually constitutes the core of the middle class - the layer of social stability - did not become such, but, on the contrary, turned into a major destabilizing group.

Poorly adapted strata in half of the cases consider their social status as average, which first of all testifies to the lack of realization of the educational and professional-qualification potential in the process of adaptation: the status positions formed in the past are not confirmed by the practice of adaptation, but remain in the minds of the respondents. The “success group” is more likely to be characterized by an underestimation of social status (about 10% of the respondents consider their social status to be below average). In our opinion, the main reason for the underestimated social self-esteem here is the fact that the methods of adaptation (for example, sources of income that form a "decent financial position") are not prestigious by the standards previously adopted in society.

Thus, the imbalance in the relationship between status-role positions and social identity, which "results" in unstable forms of social behavior, also speaks of the crisis nature of adaptation. The impossibility of the majority of the population realizing their socio-economic aspirations, raising or at least maintaining social status will block progress in all other areas of transformation, create social tension.

One cannot ignore the political self-identification of the potential middle class, which, in principle, should reflect its orientation towards the stability of the political situation. Political self-identification consists, first of all, in the delegation of power in the form of electoral behavior. Having found himself in the sphere of interaction of various political parties and movements, an individual must make a "conscious choice" in favor of a political organization, which to the greatest extent expresses his interests. In conditions when the traditional political scale of the Western European type does not "work" and rational pragmatism is not institutionalized, the task of finding a "working" indicator of political identification arises.

The results of our research clearly indicate the existence of a social base that supports pragmatic reformers who have the levers of real power. For this part of the population of the electorate, it is not so much the ideological context and populist rhetoric that is important as a guarantee of stability and continuity of power, ensuring the preservation of the rules by which a significant part of the population has already learned to live.

This is an extremely important issue, because the success of the reforms, the creation of a new democratic society with a market mechanism, largely depends on the possibilities of forming a middle class. According to some data, today about 15% of the population employed in the national economy can be attributed to this social category, but it is likely that its social maturation to the "critical mass" will take a lot of time. Already, there is a tendency towards the formation of certain social strata belonging to the middle class - businessmen, entrepreneurs, managers, certain categories of scientific and technical intelligentsia, highly qualified workers who are interested in implementing reforms. However, this tendency is very contradictory, since the common socio-political interests of various social strata, potentially forming the middle class, are not supported by the processes of their convergence according to such an important criterion as the level of income and the prestige of professions.

6. Conclusion.

Based on all of the above, we can say that the middle class in Russian society is not large enough and its boundaries are strongly "blurred".

The emergence of the middle class is accompanied by a change in the entire social structure of society. Traditional classes and layers lose their clear outlines, blurred. A highly skilled worker can be both the working class and the middle class at the same time. According to some signs, spheres of life, his belonging to his own class, to his stratum in it, and according to other signs - to the middle class may turn out to be "stronger". A kind of second social structure appears, despite the fact that the first (traditional class) also has not yet lost its significance. Leaving aside the question of the functions of the middle class, let us dwell on the obstacles that the process of formation of the middle class in Russia is currently facing. These obstacles are:

The lack of a layer of modern highly qualified workers, specialists, managers, etc., there are relatively few of them in Russia, the quality of an employee cannot significantly exceed the quality of the material and technical base on which he works;

The lack of demand by society and what is, due to the deep economic crisis accompanying the transition of the economy to market relations;

Low living standards, low incomes of those groups that could in the future make up the middle class;

The instability of the statuses of most social groups, including new ones, is caused not only by the crisis and transition, but also by the fact that property is not yet secured by a system of social institutions that ensure its protection and normal functioning.

The formation of a middle class is apparently a necessary stage in the development of a socially oriented market economy. However, the period of its rather definite existence in the social structure of post-industrial society may turn out to be rather short. If the tendency to equalize the position of different classes, groups, strata is strong enough, then the boundaries of the middle class will gradually become less clear.

Thus, the structural formation of the middle class is possible in the presence of a consistent and complementary set of internal and external factors. The internal ones include the development of autonomous activity, a clear delineation of the circle of social interests, group identification, the formation of a system of sociocultural values, norms and sanctions, and the external ones include the stabilization of socio-economic and political institutions and the ability of society to reproduce this stability, under which it follows to understand not the conservation of the existing order, but the predictability and openness of the actions of the authorities.

Social inequality and stratification

Completed by a student

2nd year Faculty of Economics

Oksana Kulkova

Checked: ______________

Ryazan

Introduction

1. The essence of social inequality and its causes.

2. The system of social stratification. The main class systems in an industrial society.

3. Dynamics of social stratification in Russia

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

The history of all sociology as a science, as well as the history of its most important special discipline, the sociology of inequality, has a century and a half.

Throughout the ages, many scientists have pondered the nature of relations between people, the plight of most people, the problem of the oppressed and oppressors, the justice or injustice of inequality.

Even the ancient philosopher Plato reflected on the stratification of people into rich and poor. He believed that the state is like two states. One is made up of the poor, the other is the rich, and they all live together, plotting all sorts of intrigues for each other. Plato was “the first political ideologue to think in terms of classes,” says Karl Popper. In such a society, people are haunted by fear and insecurity. A healthy society should be different.

The essence of social inequality and its causes.

A variety of relationships, roles, positions lead to differences between people in each particular society. The problem boils down to somehow ordering these relationships between categories of people that differ in many aspects.

What is inequality? In its most general form, inequality means that people live in conditions in which they have unequal access to limited resources of material and spiritual consumption. To describe the system of inequality between groups of people in sociology, the concept of "social stratification" is widely used.

When considering the problem of social inequality, it is quite justified to proceed from the theory of socio - economic heterogeneity of labor. Performing qualitatively unequal types of labor, satisfying social needs to varying degrees, people sometimes find themselves engaged in economically heterogeneous work, for such types of labor have different assessments of their social utility.

It is the socioeconomic heterogeneity of labor that is not only a consequence, but also the reason for the appropriation by some people of power, property, prestige and the absence of all these signs of advancement in the social hierarchy of others. Each of the groups develops its own values and norms and is based on them, if they are placed according to a hierarchical principle, then they are social strata.

In social stratification, positions tend to be inherited. The operation of the principle of inheritance of positions leads to the fact that not all capable and educated individuals have an equal chance of occupying positions of power, high principles and well-paid positions. There are two selection mechanisms at work here: unequal access to truly quality education; unequal opportunities for gaining positions by equally trained individuals.

Social stratification has a traditional character. Since, with the historical mobility of the form, its essence, that is, the inequality of the position of different groups of people, persists throughout the history of civilization. Even in primitive societies, age and gender, combined with physical strength, were an important criterion for stratification.

Given the dissatisfaction of members of society with the existing system of distribution of power, property and conditions for individual development, it is nevertheless necessary to bear in mind the universality of inequality of people.

Stratification, like any other science, has its own forms. Until now, we have talked about inequality without taking into account its form. Meanwhile, the intensity of stratification also depends on the form. Theoretical possibilities here fluctuate from the extreme, when the same amount of both is attributed to any status. There were no extreme forms of stratification in any historical object.

Let us compare the situation when there are numerous social strata in society, the social distance between which is small, the level of mobility is high, the lower strata make up a minority of members of society, rapid technological growth constantly raises the “bar” of meaningful work in the lower tiers of production positions, the social protection of the weak, among other things, guarantees strong and advanced calmness and realization of potencies. It is difficult to deny what society is, such inter-layer interaction is more likely in its own way an ideal model than an everyday reality.

Most modern societies are far from this model. Or the concentration of power and resources in a numerically small elite is inherent. The concentration of such status attributes as power, property and education among the elite impedes social interaction between the elite and other strata, leads to an excessive social distance between it and the majority.This means that the middle class is small and the top is deprived of connection with other groups. Obviously, such a social order fosters destructive conflicts.

The system of social stratification. The main class systems in an industrial society.

In his work "The State" Plato argued that the correct state can be scientifically substantiated, and not groping, fearing, believing and improvising.

Plato assumed that this new, scientifically engineered society would not only implement the principles of justice, but also ensure social stability and internal discipline. This is how he imagined a society led by rulers (overseers).

Aristotle in Politics also addressed the issue of social inequality. He wrote that today in all states there are three elements: one class is very rich; the other is very poor; the third is the middle one. This third is the best, since its members, according to the conditions of life, are most ready to follow the rational principle. It is from the poor and the rich that some grow up to be criminals, and others as swindlers.

Reflecting realistically about the stability of the state, Aristotle noted that it is necessary to think about the poor, for a state where many poor people are excluded from government will inevitably have many enemies. After all, poverty gives rise to rebellion and crime where there is no middle class and the vast majority of the poor, complications arise, and the state is doomed to ruin. Aristotle opposed both the rule of the dispossessed poor and the selfish rule of the wealthy plutocracy. The best society is formed from the middle class, and the state, where this class is more numerous and stronger than the other two combined, is best governed, for social equilibrium is ensured.

In the opinion of sociologists of all ideological trends, no one in the history of social thought so definitely as K. Marx emphasized that the source of social development is the struggle between antagonistic social classes. According to Marx, classes arise and compete on the basis of different positions and different roles performed by individuals in the production structure of society.

But K. Marx himself rightly noted that he did not owe the merit of discovering the existence of classes and their struggle among themselves. Indeed, since the time of Plato, but, of course, especially since the time when the bourgeoisie imperiously entered the stage of history in the 18th century, many economists, philosophers, historians have firmly introduced the concept of social class into the social science of Europe (Adam Smith, Etienne Condillac, Claude Saint - Simon, Francois Guizot, Auguste Mignet and others).

However, no one before Marx had given such a profound substantiation of the class structure of society, deriving it from a fundamental analysis of the entire system of economic relations. No one before him had given such a comprehensive disclosure of class relations, the mechanism of exploitation in the capitalist society that existed in his time. Therefore, in the majority of modern works on the problems of social inequality, stratification and class differentiation, both the supporters of Marxism and the authors who are far from the positions of K. Marx give an analysis of his theory of classes.

Of decisive importance for the formation of modern ideas about the essence, forms and functions of social inequality, along with Marx, was Max Weber (1864 - 1920) - the classic of world sociological theory. The ideological basis of Weber's views is that the individual is the subject of social action.

In contrast to Marx, Weber, in addition to the economic aspect of stratification, took into account aspects such as power and prestige. Weber viewed property, power, and prestige as three separate, interacting factors that underlie hierarchies in any society. Differences in property give rise to economic classes; power differences give rise to political parties, and prestige differences give rise to status groupings or strata. From here he formulated his idea of the “three autonomous dimensions of stratification”. He emphasized that “classes,” “status groups,” and “parties” are phenomena related to the distribution of power within a community.

The main contradiction between Weber and Marx is that, according to Weber, a class cannot be the subject of action, since it is not a community. In contrast to Marx, Weber linked the concept of class only with capitalist society, where the market is the most important regulator of relations. Through it, people satisfy their needs for material goods and services.

However, in the marketplace, people occupy different positions or are in different “class situations”. Everybody buys and sells here. Some sell goods, services; others are labor. The difference here is that some own property, while others do not.

Weber does not have a clear class structure of capitalist society, so different interpreters of his work provide mismatched lists of classes.

Taking into account his methodological principles and generalizing his historical, economic and sociological works, one can reconstruct the Weberian typology of classes under capitalism as follows:

1. A working class deprived of property. He offers his services on the market and is differentiated according to the level of qualifications.

2. Petty bourgeoisie - a class of small businessmen and merchants.

3. Deprived white collar workers: technicians and intellectuals.

4. Administrators and managers.

5. Owners who also strive through education to the advantages that intellectuals have.

5.1 Ownership class, i.e. those who receive rent from owning land, mines, etc.

5.2 "Commercial class", i.e. entrepreneurs.

Weber argued that property owners are a "positively privileged class." At the other extreme, the “negatively privileged class,” which included those who had neither the property nor the qualifications to offer in the market.

There are many stratification criteria by which any society can be divided. Each of them is associated with special ways of determining and reproducing social inequality. The nature of social stratification and the way it is affirmed in their unity form what we call a stratification system.

When it comes to the main types of stratification systems, a description is usually given of caste, slave, estate and class differentiation. At the same time, it is customary to identify them with the historical types of social structure observed in the modern world or have already irrevocably gone into the past. We adhere to a slightly different approach, believing that any particular society consists of combinations of various stratification systems and many of their transitional forms.

Therefore, we prefer to speak of “ideal types, even when we use elements of traditional terminology.

Below, nine types of stratification systems are proposed, which, in our opinion, can be used to describe any social organism, namely:

Physical - genetic;

Slave-owning;

Caste;

Estates;

Ectaratic;

Social - professional;

Class;

Culturally - symbolic;

Culturally - normative;

The first type of physical and genetic stratification system is based on the differentiation of social groups according to “natural” socio-demographic characteristics. Here, the attitude towards a person or a group is determined by gender, age and the presence of certain physical qualities - strength, beauty, dexterity. Accordingly, the weaker, those with physical disabilities are considered flawed and occupy a degraded social position.

Inequality in this case is affirmed by the existence of the threat of physical violence or its actual use, and then fixed in customs and rituals.

This "natural" stratification system dominated the primitive community, but continues to reproduce to this day. It manifests itself especially strongly in communities struggling for physical survival or expansion of their living space. The greatest prestige here is possessed by the one who is able to carry out violence against nature and people or to resist such violence: a healthy young man is a breadwinner in a peasant community living on the fruits of primitive manual labor; courageous warrior of the Spartan state; a true Aryan of the National Socialist army, capable of producing healthy offspring.

The system that ranks people according to their ability to physical violence is in many ways a product of the militarism of ancient and modern societies. Currently, although devoid of its former significance, it is still supported by military, sports and sexually - erotic propaganda. The second stratification system - slaveholding - is also based on direct violence. But the inequality of people here is determined not by physical, but by military-physical coercion. Social groups differ in the presence or absence of civil and property rights. Certain social groups are completely deprived of these rights and, moreover,, along with things, are turned into an object of private property. Moreover, this position is most often inherited and thus fixed in generations. Examples of slave systems are very diverse. This is ancient slavery, where the number of slaves sometimes exceeded the number of free citizens, and slavery in Russia during the "Russian Truth", this is plantation slavery in the south of the North American United States before the Civil War of 1861-1865, this is, finally, the work of prisoners of war and deported persons on German private farms during the Second World War.

The methods of reproduction of the slave system are also characterized by significant diversity. Ancient slavery was maintained mainly through conquests. For early feudal Russia, there was more debt, enslaving slavery. The practice of selling one's own children in the absence of the opportunity to feed them existed, for example, in medieval China. All sorts of criminals (including political ones) were also turned into slaves. This practice was practically reproduced much later in the Soviet GULAG (although private slavery was carried out here in latent extra-legal forms).

The third type of stratification system is caste. It is based on ethnic differences, which, in turn, are reinforced by religious order and religious rituals. Each caste is a closed, as far as possible, endogamous group, which is assigned a strictly defined place in the social hierarchy. This place appears as a result of the isolation of the special functions of each caste in the system of the division of labor. There is a clear list of occupations that members of this caste can engage in: priestly, military, agricultural. Since the position in the caste system is inherited, the possibilities for social mobility here are extremely limited.

And the more pronounced caste, the more closed this society turns out to be. A classic example India is rightfully considered a society dominated by a caste system (this system was legally abolished only in 1950). Today, although in a smoother form, the caste system is reproduced not only in India, but, for example, in the clan system of the Central Asian states. In the middle of the twentieth century, clear features of caste were affirmed by the policy of the fascist states (the Aryans were assigned the position of the highest ethnic caste, called upon to rule over the Slavs, Jews, etc.). In this case, nationalist ideology assumes the role of the holding together theological doctrines.

The fourth type is represented by the estate stratification system. In this system, groups differ in legal rights, which, in turn, are rigidly linked to their responsibilities and are directly dependent on these responsibilities. Moreover, the latter imply obligations to the state, enshrined in legislation. Some estates are obliged to carry out military or bureaucratic service, others - "tax" in the form of taxes or labor duties.

Examples of developed estate systems are feudal Western European societies or feudal Russia. The estate is, first of all, a legal, and not, say, ethnic - religious or economic division. it is also important. that belonging to the estate is inherited, contributing to the relative closeness of the system.

Some similarity with the estate system is observed in the ectaratic system representing the fifth type (from French and Greek - "state power"). In it, differentiation between groups occurs, first of all, according to their position in the power-state hierarchies (political, military, economic), according to the possibilities of mobilizing and distributing resources, as well as the prestige they feel, are connected here with the formal ranks that these groups occupy in their respective power hierarchies.

All other differences - demographic and religious - ethnic, economic and cultural - play a derivative role. The scale and nature of differentiation (the scope of power) in the ectaratic system are under the control of the state bureaucracy. At the same time, hierarchies can be formalized - legally - through bureaucratic tables of ranks, military charters, the assignment of categories to state institutions, or they can remain outside the scope of state legislation (a clear example is the system of the Soviet party nomenclature, the principles of which are not spelled out in any laws). The formal freedom of members of society (with the exception of dependence on the state), the absence of automatic inheritance of positions of power also distinguish the etacratic system from the system of estates.

The etakratic system is revealed with the greater force, the more authoritarian the state rule takes. In ancient times, societies of Asian despotism (China, India, Cambodia), located, however, not only in Asia (but for example, in Peru, Egypt), were a striking example of the etacratic system. In the twentieth century, it is actively establishing itself in the so-called socialist societies and, perhaps, even plays a decisive role in them. It must be said that the allocation of a special ectaratic system is not yet traditional for work on stratification typologies.

Therefore, we would like to draw attention to both the historical significance and the analytical role of this type of social differentiation.

This is followed by the sixth, social - professional stratification system. Here the groups are divided according to the content and conditions of their work. A special role is played by the qualification requirements for a particular professional role - the possession of relevant experience, skills and abilities. The approval and maintenance of hierarchical orders in this system is carried out with the help of certificates (diplomas, ranks, licenses, patents) that record the level of qualifications and the ability to perform certain types of activities. The effectiveness of qualification certificates is supported by the power of the state or some other sufficiently powerful corporation (professional workshop). Moreover, these certificates are most often not inherited, although there are exceptions in history.

Social - professional division is one of the basic stratification systems, various examples of which can be found in any society with any developed division of labor. This is the structure of craft workshops in the medieval city and the category grid in modern state industry, a system of certificates and diplomas for obtaining education, a system of scientific degrees and titles that open the way to more prestigious jobs.

The seventh type is represented by the popular class system. The class approach is often opposed to the stratification one. But for us, class division is only a special case of social stratification. Of the many interpretations of the concept of "class", in this case, we will focus on the more traditional - socio-economic. In this interpretation, classes represent social groups of politically and legally free citizens. Differences between groups primarily in the nature and size of ownership of the means of production and the product produced, as well as in the level of income received and personal material well-being. Unlike many previous types, belonging to classes - bourgeois, proletarians, independent farmers, etc. - is not regulated by the highest authorities, is not established by law and is not inherited. In its pure form, the class system does not contain any internal formal barriers at all (economic prosperity automatically transfers you to a higher group).

Economically egalitarian communities, where class differentiation is completely absent, is a rather rare and unstable phenomenon. But throughout most of human history, class divisions are still subordinate in nature. They come to the fore, perhaps, only in bourgeois Western societies. And the class system reaches its greatest heights in the United States of America imbued with the spirit of liberalism.

The eighth type is culturally symbolic. Differentiation arises here from differences in access to socially significant information, unequal and opportunities to filter and interpret this information, the ability to be a carrier of sacred knowledge (mystical or scientific). In ancient times, this role was assigned to priests, magicians and shamans, in the Middle Ages - to the ministers of the church, who constitute the bulk of the literate population, interpreters of sacred texts, in modern times - to scientists, technocrats and party ideologists. expression of public interest has existed always and everywhere. And a higher position in this respect is occupied by those who have the best opportunities to manipulate the consciousness and actions of other members of society, who are better than others who can prove their rights to true understanding and own the best symbolic capital.

Simplifying the picture somewhat, we can say that theocratic manipulation is more characteristic of pre-industrial societies; for industrialists - partocratic; and for post - industrial - technocratic.

The ninth type of stratification system should be called cultural - normative. Here, differentiation is built on differences of respect and prestige arising from the comparison of lifestyles and norms of behavior followed by a given person or group. Attitudes towards physical and mental work, consumer tastes and habits, communication manners and etiquette, a special language (professional terminology, local dialect, criminal jargon) - all this forms the basis of social division. Moreover, there is not only a distinction between “friends” and “aliens," but also a ranking of groups (“noble-not-noble”, “decent-not-decent,” “elite-ordinary people”). The concept of elites is surrounded by a kind of mysterious flavor. They talk a lot about him, but often, they do not outline any clear denoting boundaries.

Elite is not just a category of politics. In modern society, there are many elites - political, military, economic, professional. Somewhere these elites intertwine, somewhere they compete with each other. It can be said that there are as many elites as there are areas of social life. But whichever area we take, the elite are a minority opposed to the rest of society. its middle and lower layers as a kind of "mass". At the same time, the position of the elite as the upper class or caste can be fixed by a formal law or religious code, or it can be achieved in a completely informal way.

Elitist theories arose and took shape to a large extent as a reaction to radical and socialist doctrines and were directed against various currents of socialism: Marxist, anarcho-syndicalist. Therefore, the Marxists, in fact, were very skeptical about these theories, did not want to recognize them and apply them on the material of Western societies. For this would mean, firstly, the recognition that the lower strata are a weak or not at all organized mass, which must be controlled, a mass incapable of self-organization and revolutionary action, and secondly, the recognition, to some extent, of inevitability and The “naturalness” of such a sharp inequality. As a result, it would be necessary to radically revise the views on the role and nature of the class struggle.

But the elitist approach is directed against democratic parliamentarism. It is generally anti-democratic by nature. Democracy and accessories presupposes majority rule and universal equality of people as independent citizens, sufficiently organized to realize their own goals and interests. And because of this, the advocates of democracy treat any attempts at elite rule rather coldly.

Numerous approaches to the concept can be conditionally divided into two main groups - power and meritocratic. According to the first, the elite are those who have decisive power in a given society, and according to the second, those who have certain special virtues and personal qualities, regardless of whether they have power or not.

In the latter case, the elite is distinguished by talent and merit. Sometimes authoritative and meritocratic approaches are conventionally referred to as "Lassuela line" and "Pareto line". (Although the first approach may just as well be called the "Mosca line" or "Mills line".)

One group of researchers understands the elite as the layers with the highest positions of power or the highest formal power in organizations and institutions. Another group refers to the elite of charismatic personalities, God-inspired, capable of leadership, representatives of the creative minority.

In turn, power approaches are subdivided into structural and functional. Those who choose a structural approach that is simpler from an empirical point of view consider the elite the circle of persons holding senior positions in the institutions under consideration (ministers, directors, military commanders)

Those who stop at the functional approach set themselves a more difficult task: to single out the groups that have real power in making socially important decisions (many representatives of these groups, of course, may not occupy any prominent public posts, remain in the "shadow") ...

Let us dwell briefly on the positions of the classics of the imperious and meritocratic approaches.

4. Social mobility.

The study of social mobility was started by P. Sorokin, who published the book "Social Mobility, Its Forms and Fluctuation" in 1927.

He wrote: “Social mobility is understood as any transition of an individual or social object (value), ie. all that is created or modified by human activity, from one social position to another. There are two main types of social mobility: horizontal and vertical. Horizontal social mobility, or displacement, means the transition of an individual or social object from one social group to another located at the same level. Moving an individual from a Baptist to a Methodist religious group, from one citizenship to another, from one family (both husband and wife) to another during divorce or remarriage, from one factory to another, while maintaining their professional status - these are all examples of horizontal social mobility. They are the movement of social objects (radio, car, fashion, the idea of communism, Darwin's theory) within one social layer, like moving from Iowa to California or from some place to any other. In all these cases, "displacement" can occur without any noticeable changes in the social position of the individual or social object in the vertical direction.

Vertical social mobility refers to those relations that arise when an individual or social object moves from one social stratum to another. Depending on the direction of movement, there are two types of vertical mobility: upward and downward, i.e. social ascent and social descent. In accordance with the nature of stratification, there are downward and upward currents of economic, political and professional mobility, not to mention other less important types. Upward currents exist in two main forms: the penetration of an individual from a lower formation into an existing higher formation; the creation of a new group by such individuals and the penetration of the entire group into a higher layer to the level with the already existing groups of this layer. accordingly, the downward currents also have two forms: the first is the fall of the individual from a higher initial group to which he previously belonged; another form manifests itself in the degradation of the social group as a whole, in the lowering of its rank against the background of other groups, or in the destruction of its social unity. In the first case, the fall reminds us of a person who fell from the ship, in the second - the immersion in the water of the ship itself with all the passengers on board or the wreck of the ship when it crashes to smithereens.

Social mobility can be of two types: mobility as voluntary movement or circulation of individuals within the social hierarchy; and mobility driven by structural change (eg industrialization and demographic factors). With urbanization and industrialization, there is a quantitative growth of professions and corresponding changes in the requirements for qualifications and vocational training. As a consequence of industrialization, there has been a relative increase in the labor force, employment in the “white collar” category, and a decrease in the absolute number of agricultural workers. The degree of industrialization actually correlates with the level of mobility, as it leads to an increase in the number of high-status professions and to a drop in employment in the lower-ranking professional categories.

It should be noted that many comparative studies have shown: under the influence of forces of change in stratification systems. First of all, social differentiation is increasing. Advanced technology is giving impetus to the emergence of a large number of new professions. Industrialization aligns professionalism, training and remuneration. In other words, individuals and groups are characterized by a tendency towards relatively stable positions in the ranked stratification hierarchy. As a result, social mobility increases. The level of mobility increases mainly as a result of the quantitative growth of occupations in the middle of the stratification hierarchy, i.e. due to forced mobility, although voluntary mobility is also becoming more active, since the orientation towards achievement acquires great weight.

Equally, if not to a greater extent, the system of social organization influences the level and nature of mobility. Scientists have long drawn attention to the qualitative differences in this respect between open and closed societies. In an open society, there are no formal restrictions on mobility and almost no abnormal ones.

A closed society, with a rigid structure that prevents an increase in mobility, thereby resists instability.

It would be more correct to call social mobility the reverse side of the same problem of inequality, because, as M. Buttle noted, “social inequality is intensified and legitimized in the process of social mobility, the function of which is to divert to safe channels and curb discontent.

In a closed society, upward mobility is limited not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively, therefore, individuals who have reached the top, but do not receive the share of social benefits that they expected, begin to view the existing order as an obstacle to achieving their legitimate goals and strive for radical changes. Among the people whose mobility is directed downward, in a closed society there are often those who are more prepared for leadership than the bulk of the population by education and abilities - they form the leaders of the revolutionary movement at a time when the contradictions of society lead to a conflict of classes in it ...

In an open society, where there are few barriers to progress upward, those who rise up tend to move away from the political orientation of the class into which they moved. The behavior of those who lower their position looks similar. Thus, those who rise to the highest stratum are less conservative than the permanent members of the highest stratum. On the other hand, the “thrown down” are more left-wing than the stable members of the lower stratum. Consequently, the movement as a whole contributes to stability and at the same time the dynamism of an open society.

Dynamics of social stratification in Russia

The nineties of the twentieth century, most likely, will go down in the history of Russia as the era of three revolutions, or, perhaps, three stages of one revolution, rigidly predetermining each other. The first, political, ended in August 1991; the second, economic, gives the first tangible results. However, in parallel with it and overtaking it, the third will gain momentum - the social revolution, which will become a reality very soon, but will finally change the face of Russia only at the end of the millennium.

Such an arrangement of priorities is quite natural: politics and economics are hot topics, and the focus of the day today is the task of "feeding the people." There is nothing more obvious from the point of view of common sense. According to the assurances of some politicians, the government can quickly implement its declarations: stabilize the market, strengthen the financial system and balance the state budget. The dream of the reformers will come true: the people will be "fed" (that is, they will satisfy the critical minimum of their needs) without rebelling.

It is obvious, however, that for this idyll, in all likelihood, the country will have to pay long and painfully. The blows of the ax, which are used to build a bright market tomorrow, will inevitably have something to do with our destiny: the future tends to take cruel revenge for the lightness with which the problems of the present are solved.

The worst result of the reforms will be a crushing blow to the social structure inherited from the Soviet era. This structure turned out to be so stable and shock-resistant that it withstood the fall of "real socialism" The fall of the ruling elite did not lead to any serious social conflicts or catastrophes (as some society precisely on the basis of the possession of power. The fall of the partocratic elite was relatively mild, since other features stratifying an industrial-type society (income, ownership of property, education, profession, social prestige, etc.) in Soviet society were not significant to the extent that inevitably leads to severely conflicting relations social strata.

The strong cohesion of heterogeneous strata under Soviet conditions took place not only due to the short social distance between them, but also due to such a phenomenon as a certain mutual balance of statuses: low wages and the absolute powerlessness of an intellectual devalued his high educational rank and relative freedom in the eyes of a worker who had at least, a more solid income, - which did not allow the latent ill will to grow into open hatred. On the contrary, the representative of mental labor compensated for his humiliation by the consciousness of the prestige of higher education and an intellectual profession, career prospects and greater freedom to manage his working time.

In other words: the financial situation was not the dominant factor of stratification; it was counterbalanced by no less significant - non-economic - parameters.

It is these foundations of social integration that are rapidly coming to an end before our very eyes. The transfer of control over property from the state to the citizens threatens to go according to the worst scenario: a huge part of the national product is irresistibly transferred not even to the disposal, but to the legal property of the new and old economic elites, and a disproportionately small part flows through the fingers of the majority of the population. Income level becomes the main parameter of stratification, not balanced by any counterbalance. There is an equalization of statuses in terms of income, which means that the most unstable type of class society threatens to replace a highly integrated, stable social structure.

A society of this type is doomed to constantly balance on the brink of social war. The sharper and more one-dimensional social stratification, the higher the charge of negative public sentiments (hatred, envy, fear) experienced by different layers towards each other, the deeper their mutual rejection. In this sense, the future of social peace in the country depends on whether the government will be able to prevent the monstrous imbalances in the distribution of former state property between various socio-economic groups, which are growing like an avalanche in the process of spontaneous privatization.

In Western societies, the trend towards a reduction in social distance takes place precisely due to the strong position and long-term growth of the middle class, which thereby smoothes out the sharpness of social stratification and is the main guarantor of stability. On the contrary, in the Third World countries the colossal gap in incomes, in the level and style of consumption, in the very way of life between the upper and the poorest strata of the population is colossal, and the share of the middle strata is incomparably (with the West) low.

The new stratification may turn out to be a social dynamite that will blow up society, because if the minimum necessary level of income, the size and influence of the middle class is not achieved, the most dangerous from the point of view of stability type of social identification - class identification - will inevitably prevail in society. The beginning of this disintegration of society into class identifications will most likely take place not before, but after the stabilization of the market (and, let's not forget, stabilization at a very low level). By this time, a huge number of people, having lost hopes for a change in their personal situation, warmed up in a period of economic chaos and uncertainty, will understand that power outages are not yet the worst tragedy in this life - and with the sobriety of disappointment, they realize the rigid framework of their social rank ...

In this situation, each of the main three classes will carry a potential threat to stability in its own way. The upper class (large entrepreneurs and owners, shareholders of monopoly enterprises, bureaucracy associated with the public sector and the comprador bourgeoisie serving ties with the world market), having concentrated enormous wealth in their hands, will turn out to be a red rag for almost the entire society. Demonstrative consumption oriented to Western consumer standards, which our nouveau riche cannot refuse today, will fuel the inextinguishable rage of the lower strata.

On the other hand, the chasm that will lie between the rich and the middle classes will prevent the former from counting on parties that have a social base in the person of the latter.

The most active part of the poor class (workers of ruined and unprofitable enterprises, former collective farmers who did not become farmers, unemployed, as well as the vast majority of people who were unable to rationally use the opportunities of the privatization era) - will become a supplier of "extras" for various kinds of revolutionary movements.

But even without all this, a large poor stratum in itself will create an unbearable burden on the economy. High taxes, the necessary assistance to the poor (not to help means rebellion and blood) are unlikely to become an incentive for the development of business activity. The government, forced to burden other classes with them, will not deserve gratitude from the lower and will become an enemy in the eyes of the upper and middle classes, which will bear the brunt of taxes.

The middle class - small and medium entrepreneurs, the prosperous part of the intelligentsia, workers of profitable enterprises, new owners who have benefited from privatization - in a situation of sharp stratification will experience double frustration: fear of an angry lower class and hatred of the unattainable upper class. The saddest possible outcome of privatization is the creation of a layer of "frustrated property owners" - this potential base of fascism (which, according to Seymour Lipset's definition, is middle-class extremism).

The fate of a society dominated by a one-dimensional assessment perspective is sad. The more the distribution of wealth coincides with the distribution of social prestige, the greater the likelihood of mutual rejection of strata - lower, middle and higher, the closer and more acute the danger of disintegration with its varieties from revolution to civil war.

Of course, there is no country in the world where the poor do not dislike the rich. But this natural dislike can be intensified or weakened, depending on factors of a socio-cultural rather than an economic nature. If the representatives of the low-income strata learn that they have no chance of society promoting their "non-commodity" merits, this will lead not only to frightening moral degradation, but also to an explosive exacerbation of class hatred. On the contrary, where society, along with the commercial scale of assessment, cultivates any other (for example, ethical, cultural ..) - the social hatred of the poor for the rich can be balanced by the desire of the former to moral (aesthetic, etc.) superiority over the latter. Having no chance of getting rich, he can achieve recognition and honor in a completely different field.

Conclusion

Social policy is a policy of regulating the social sphere, aimed at achieving welfare in society. The social sphere of public relations includes the forms of regulation of labor relations, the participation of workers in the management of the production process, collective agreements, the state system of social security and social services (unemployment benefits, pensions), the participation of private capital in the creation of social funds, social infrastructure (education, healthcare, housing, etc.), as well as the implementation of the principle of social justice.

Thus, the subject of social policy (social groups with power in the social sphere), ensuring the achievement of well-being in society - a set of historically established forms of joint activities of people - implements the principle of social justice, which, as the most general, is the goal of the social sphere. public relations.

SOCIAL-CLASS ORGANIZATION OF THE SOCIETY- the whole set of social-class relations between individuals, united into social classes, social-class groups and into elementary professional, property and legal groups and these individuals themselves. S.-K.O. covers a wider range of social relations than the social-class structure. The first includes not only stable, essential, non-random, regularly recurring, but also unstable, random, irregular relationships.

For a long time, the complexity of the study of social relations in Soviet society, in addition to epistemological reasons, was imprinted by the party approach to the study of all phenomena of social life, which prevailed until the Communist Party lost its leading position in society. At the same time, it should be noted that, to the credit of domestic social scientists in the 1960s-1980s, despite the ideological circumstances that complicate an impartial analysis of the social-class structure, they made a significant contribution to the development of ideas about the nature of social relations and structures. At the same time, many scientific problems associated with social-class structuring in modern domestic (as well as foreign) literature have not been disclosed at all. It should be especially noted that one cannot speak of any significant separation between Western sociology and Russian sociology. In modern foreign social science, there is a huge variety of mutually exclusive ideas about social and socio-class structures. Western authors traditionally put very different meanings into this concept.

Some researchers consider social structure as a system of social inequality, others define it as a set of groups of associations and institutions, others consider it a system of statuses and roles, reducing the analysis to functional interdependence between them, etc. As the leading French sociologist P. Ansard writes in his book "Contemporary Sociology": "On the whole, from 1945 to the 1970s, in France, Italy, as well as in the FRG and the USA, many researchers in the field of social sciences do not dogmatically associate themselves with individual details of Marx's provisions, extracted the most essential from them with the intention to overcome the boundaries of narrow economism (Sartre, 1960) or in order to undermine the authority of functionalist conservative models (Mills, 1967; Habermas, 1968) ". However, this author further notes, "The 1970s and 1980s were marked by a departure from this substantial side of Marxism in the social sciences, which was due to various reasons in which historical events played an important role." Today, domestic social scientists are ahead of Western ones in a number of substationary issues related to the study of social relations. Therefore, highlighting the specifics of social relations, it is logical to refer specifically to domestic developments.

Patriarch of Russian sociology M.N. Rutkevich in substantiating the expediency of identifying the social-class structure in modern conditions for him (the work was published in 1979) put forward the following main arguments: first, the social structure of society, while remaining class and under socialism, also includes other types of social structures of this type. At the same time, the social-class structure should in no case be confused with the national-ethical, socio-demographic, socio-territorial, professional and other types of social structure of this type. However, since the first is, according to this author, the most important of all the listed types of social structure and leaves its mark on any of them, in the literature it is often referred to simply as social structure. Second, overcoming the essential differences between the two forms of socialist property — public and collective-farm cooperative — and, at the same time, between the working class and the collective farm peasantry does not exhaust the tasks of building a classless society. The term "social-class structure" has that advantage, according to M.N. Rutkevich, which focuses on overcoming not only the differences between the two "friendly classes" of Soviet society, but also a whole series of social differences as necessary for "achieving a classless society."

Close to this point of view is the understanding of social and class differences, set out in the monograph "Problems of Changing the Social Structure of Soviet Society," where they mean "a category that characterizes those phenomena in the system of social relations that are eliminated during the transition to communism, which are a rudiment class antagonistic society ".

The work "The Social Structure of a Developed Socialist Society in the USSR" also states that "since there are often attempts to present the class structure of a socialist society in the USSR only as a division of society into two friendly classes, without taking into account other differences inherited from the class antagonism of society. , insofar as it seems justified to use the term "social-class structure", which focuses on the isolation of the structure under consideration from the social structure of society in the general sense. "

The above approach, which was quite typical at that time, is characterized by the following errors: 1) The authors do not give a clear criterion for social and socio-class structures, they do not show the ratio of these categories. Hence, the social-class, professional, demographic, property and other types of social structures are considered as one-order, which is methodologically incorrect, since the social-class structure includes a number of structures (professional, property, etc.) that these researchers put with it. in one row as one-order categories. Based on the principles of the systems approach, it should be recognized that it is obviously erroneous to recognize social phenomena of the same order, some of which are completely included in the composition of others. 2) The need to identify the social-class structure is associated with the ultimate goal of the development of socialism - the construction of a classless society. In this regard, the authors tried to consider the social-class structure as a relic of capitalism (i.e., in any case, they try to appeal to the period either before or after socialism).

Today in the social sciences it has become axiomatic both the impossibility of building a Marxist model of communism and the recognition of the fact that the society built in the USSR was not socialist. Naturally, in the light of these new theoretical principles, the appeals to the postulates of the theory of "scientific communism" are obviously absurd. To the credit of Russian social scientists, attempts were made (sometimes quite successful in methodological terms) already at that time to examine the real social structures of Soviet society. It was noted that our society developed on its own basis and its social structure was formed according to the laws inherent exclusively to itself (Gerasimov N.V.). Accordingly, it was concluded that the social-class structure is also formed according to the laws inherent in Soviet society. “However, the overwhelming part of modern studies of the social structure of Soviet society,” notes M.H. Titma, “especially its social-class structure, is devoted to the study of ways to achieve social one-sidedness. But in the nearest historical perspective it is difficult to expect the complete disappearance of even simple physical labor. It is all the more inappropriate to consider mental labor as socially homogeneous. "

Thus, already within the framework of Marxist theory, Soviet social scientists realized the need to look for differences between the concepts of "social structure" and "social-class structure" in the phenomena inherent in real society. V domestic literature If we leave aside the actual identification by some authors of social relations with social relations in general (Selunskaya V.M.), we can distinguish three main points of view on the specifics of social relations.

A number of researchers share the suggestion put forward by M.N. Rutkevich's understanding of social relations as "equality and inequality of various groups of people and, above all, social classes according to their position in society." We must agree with A.K. Belykh and V.M. Alekseeva, who believed that the specificity of social relations is not revealed in the above point of view: "These types of relations encompass all social relations. Indeed, economic, political and spiritual-ideological relations are all relations between people, their communities represented by nations, classes , social groups, labor collectives. And relations of equality and inequality also function in all social spheres - equality and inequality, economic, social, political and spiritual-ideological. " These authors believed that "the methodological criterion for isolating one or another type of social relations is the object about which relations between people are formed." The last remark in itself also does not raise objections today.

According to A.K. Belykh and V.M. Alekseeva, social relations are "relations between people, their collectives as carriers of qualitatively different types of labor, various labor functions." "And the social structure," notes A.K. Belykh, "is the diversity of social and labor subjects." R.I. Kosolapov, who writes that the social structure is based on the social division of labor. "The social structure is a natural reflection of the division of labor in the guise of groups of people belonging to various specialized spheres of production and social life, in the relations of these groups to each other ..." G.V. Mokronosov also concluded that "the social division of labor and the social structure of society essentially coincide, since we are talking about the same thing - the place of groups, classes in the system of production relations."

With this approach, the actual identification of social and labor relations is allowed, the reduction of the former to the social division of labor loses its meaning in the selection of the very category of "social relations", tk. it can be completely replaced by the category "social division of labor". This leads to the fact that family, age, religious, political and many other relations drop out of social relations and only labor relations remain.

Other authors adhere to the views of V.P. Tugarinov, according to which the area of social relations includes classes, estates, nations, nationalities, professions and categories reflecting its various relationships between these human groups. This point of view gives a fairly accurate idea of the specifics of social relations. At the same time, with this approach, relations between individuals are excluded from social relations, which leads to an artificial narrowing of their sphere of activity. Having supplemented the above list with relations between individuals, we will consider all subject-subject relations as social relations. This point of view corresponds to the views on the specifics of social relations M. Weber ( cm.), who, considering all the diversity of these relations, always had in mind "... only a certain type of behavior of individuals." He also noted that "social" we call an action that, according to the supposed actor or actors, the meaning correlates with the action of other people or is oriented towards it. "

It should be noted that in social science two approaches to the study of social structures have coexisted for a long time. With one of them, exclusively social strata are considered as the main components of this structure, which does not allow the researcher to reveal real socio-economic, political, ethnic and other social contradictions, as well as to determine real, and not imaginary (abstract) trends in the development of society and factors, their defining. In the second approach, classes are taken as the main components of the social structure, and within this direction itself there are fundamentally different approaches.

First, when the adherents of class theory emphasize that social structure is primarily associated with differentiation between individuals. In this case, first of all, it is not the occupation of people that is considered, but their professional position, not the income of people, but the distribution of income between the subjects, which makes it possible to reveal social inequality. At the same time, the need to disclose and explain the historical forms and degrees of differentiation and the influence of the latter on social evolution is proclaimed as a theoretical goal. An obvious drawback of this narrow approach is the narrowing, which negates its methodological significance, of the content that is put into the concept of "social structure of society" only to differentiation between individuals. In fact, the named structure also includes demographic, moral and many other relationships.

Secondly, when researchers interpret the concept of "class structure" broadly, really talking about "the same hierarchies of social groups as those of the representatives of the stratification approach itself" (Radaev V.V., Shkaratan O.I.).

Third, when researchers recognize that the category "social-class structure" is narrower than the concept of "social structure" and that the first structure is fully included in the second (integration approach). At the same time, there is a real opportunity both to delimit the named structures and to give them clear, internally not contradictory definitions.

Any society is a complex social aggregate, consisting of a set of interacting subjects that break up not directly into individuals, but into two or more social communities, which, in turn, are already subdivided into individuals. The selection of a particular social structure is based on the functional or causal relationship of interacting individuals. Depending on the degree of intensity of this connection, it becomes possible for a number of structures to exist in the same set of people.

The nature of such a connection will show the opposite and intersecting coexistence of social groups. "The degree of intensity of the functional connection and its nature, - wrote Sorokin ( cm.), - this is the basis for the possibility of coexistence of a number of collective unities in the same population. "He further points out that the social variety of interaction processes or the nature of connections" entails a variety of collective unities formed by differently combined individuals - on the one hand, on the other - the belonging of each individual not to one, but to a number of real aggregates. "All social groups, depending on the number of their combined features, can be defined as elementary or cumulative (integral)." Under an elementary or simple collective unity / social group. - S.S./, - writes Sorokin, - I understand a real, not an imaginary set of persons united into one interacting whole by any one sign, quite clear and definite, not reducible to other signs. "Such signs can be: profession, race , the scope of rights, language, territorial affiliation, gender, etc. "Under the cumulative group ... of course, the totality of interacting individuals linked into one organized whole by links not one, but a number of elementary groups" (Sorokin).

Accordingly, the social structure formed on the basis of social groups differentiated according to one characteristic (sufficiently clear and definite, not reducible to other characteristics), can be defined by us as an elementary social structure (for example, a professional structure). A structure that combines several elementary structures is a cumulative or integral structure. Cumulative groups will act as elements of such a structure, which, in turn, will break up into elementary groups. The cumulative group, in particular, is the social class. Accordingly, characterizing the social-class structure, one can speak of it as a cumulative, or integral, social structure. A class in modern science means a concept that expresses a set of objects that satisfy any similar conditions or characteristics. There is nothing supernatural in this category, and since there are significant (in number and social status) subjective groupings in social structures that unite individuals on the basis of some similar characteristics, it is legitimate to describe the most significant of them using the concept of "social class".

Already in Medieval Western Europe, the Church Fathers attempted to divide humanity into certain categories (or classes). Initially, they understood the categories as groups of people with homogeneous political, social and professional characteristics, charismatic and corporate community. This "anthropological spiritualism", according to which the division into categories occurred from top to bottom, depending on the set of perfections predetermined by the Augustine exegesis of three characters in the Bible - Moses, Daniel and Job, embodying three types of human character: contemplative, religious and secular, caring only about the earthly. With this approach, even the feudal overlords did not have to count on any prominent place in the hierarchy. Therefore, along with the named traditional approach in 8 tbsp. there is a "sociological anthropology", which proposed a three-member division of society into: free, warriors and slaves. The above scheme, however, did not enjoy success, because, firstly, it ignored the activities of the clergy in society and, secondly, since the intermediate position of warriors between free and slaves was characteristic only of the empire. French authors (Adalbert Laonsky and others) proposed dividing society into "worshipers" (clergy), "soldiers" and "unarmed people" (working people). The latter sociological scheme later became generally accepted. In the 17th century. science has established the existence of social classes (C. Fourier, A. Smith, physiocrats, O. Thierry, and others). In the subsequent period, the role and significance of these social formations were described in the works of A. Smith, D. Ricardo, utopian socialists, K. Marx ( cm.), M. Weber, P.A. Sorokin. Interesting considerations on the contradictory nature of social and class interests were expressed by Lenin ( cm.).

For all the differences in the views of these thinkers on social classes, their points of view were similar in terms of the methodology of class differentiation of society. They were unanimous that social-class stratification is based on the social division of labor ( cm.) and socio-economic inequality of individuals. By itself, this scientific approach has not lost its epistemological significance today. As already noted, in modern Western social science there are significant differences in the interpretation of social classes and socio-class structure. "The concept of classes, - pointed out R. Dahrendorf ( cm.), is one of the most vivid illustrations of the inability of Western researchers to reach at least a minimum of agreement on this range of problems. "

However, with all the diversity of views on the social-class structure, there are a number of dominant trends. This is due to the fact that all the authors of Western concepts to one degree or another resorted to one of two sources - the works of M. Weber or P. Sorokin.

According to M. Weber, social classes are categories that differ in economic characteristics, in other words, these are groups of people who are in a similar economic situation, or have the same "life chances". This author proposes a three-term model of social structure, which includes classes, status groups and parties. The largest number of Western sociological works are devoted to Weberian status groups, although different authors interpret them in different ways. Thus, R. Dahrendorf singles out classes based on the proximity or remoteness of certain groups to the system of power. There is also a sociological differentiation of social subjects according to the volume-legal criterion. This approach rightly emphasizes the importance of social differentiation depending on the volume of power prerogatives, but it incorrectly ignores such fundamental criteria of social-class stratification as ownership of economic goods and other elements of economic relations.

In the period before the loss of the leading position in society by the CPSU, practically all Soviet scientists emphasized the use of Lenin's definition of classes as a general methodological premise for defining the categories of "social class" and "social-class relations." As you know, under the social classes V.I. Lenin understood "large groups of people differing in their place in a historically defined system of social production, in their relation (for the most part enshrined and formalized in laws) to the means of production, in their role in the social organization of labor, and consequently in the methods of obtaining and the size of that share of social wealth, which they have. Classes are such groups of people, of which one can appropriate the labor of another due to the difference in their place in a certain structure of the social economy. " However, in the interpretation of Lenin's definition of classes, in the interpretation of its individual points, in assessing the place and role of class-forming attributes, their subordination, in the question of the degree of applicability of the Leninist criterion apparatus to the modern society of that time, a number of researchers managed to overcome the narrow framework of the dogmas of Lenin's theory of classes. Often the latter was replaced by interpretations of social classes based on the traditions of the Russian and American sociological schools.

So, T.I. Zaslavskaya ( cm.), considering as criteria for the selection of classes: 1) attitude to the means of production; 2) the role in the social organization of labor and 3) the share of social wealth, notes that "the peculiarity of classes is that they differ simultaneously according to all the above criteria. But each of these criteria, considered independently of the others, also has a considerable socially differentiating force and allows you to single out groups, although not of a class nature, but playing an important role in the social functioning of society. " The last statement, in fact, lies in the context of the views of P.A. Sorokin. These groups, singled out according to one of the criteria ("united into one interacting whole by any one feature" - Sorokin), are elementary collective unities, and social classes act as cumulative (integral) groups.

To determine the essence of social-class relations, it is necessary to consider social classes from two sides: 1) from the point of view of their place and functional role in society; 2) through the contradiction of social and class interests. The essence of one of the sides of social-class relations lies in the contradiction of interests, primarily of economic, of certain social groups (which will arise mainly from the possibility of some social groups to appropriate the labor of others). The presence of a conflict of interests (primarily economic) as a criterion for distinguishing social classes does not in itself cause controversy in Russian social science (another matter, the presence of discrepancies in its application to real social systems). When considering social classes according to their place and functional role in society, there is still no consensus. To a large extent, this was predetermined by the long-existing fundamental position on the direct application of Lenin's criteria when considering social classes and groups in society.

This was due to: firstly, the lack of an unambiguous well-established view in modern economic science (and in social science as a whole) on what should be understood under the "attitude to the means of production", under the "role in the social organization of labor" and "under the method receiving and the size of the share of social wealth that they have. " In other words, in fact, in political economy, there was a definition of one unknown (social class) through other unknowns (that is, through categories of which there is no unambiguous and accurate representation). Secondly, there was a mutual discrepancy between the criteria for distinguishing social classes in V.I. Lenin. As a working definition of social classes according to their place and functional role in society, the definition given by P.A. Sorokin. In his opinion, the social class "is a cumulative, normal, solidary, semi-closed, but approaching open, typical for our time group, made up of the cumulation of three main groupings: 1) professional; 2) property; 3) volume-legal".

In other words, a social class can be defined as a solidary set of individuals who are similar in profession, in property status, in the scope of rights, and, therefore, have identical professional-property-socio-legal interests. The professional structure determines the existence of professional groups united by the type of labor activity, possessing a complex of special theoretical knowledge and practical skills acquired as a result of special training and work experience. Dismemberment by profession deals with the formation of various groups in society, which are divided primarily not by the difference in mutual relations to each other, but by the difference in their relations to the object of activity. This kind of technical stratification can reach a huge number of species, subspecies, various small subdivisions, and social inequality is already formed among an infinite number of these subdivisions. The profession is the usual long-term occupation of the individual, which gives him a livelihood. This professional occupation, as a rule, is also the main activity. In other words, "... the source of income and the social function of the individual are linked to each other and form a profession in their totality" (Sorokin). This qualification and professional differentiation will generate social inequality. It is the different specialties, different qualifications in the labor process that lead to social differences between individuals.

The formation of social classes is based on enlarged professional groups (genetic aspect). At the same time, in a socially-class-differentiated society, representatives of the same profession can belong to different social-class formations (functional aspect). The property structure (or grouping according to the degree of wealth and poverty), regardless of whether it approaches the type of more closed or less closed groups in a given country, causes stratification of the entire society into groups of rich and poor. Moreover, the wealth and poverty of an individual do not entirely depend on his will. "Members of the same property group ... fatally become solidary in many respects, members of different property groups fatally antagonists" (Sorokin). The similarity of property status leads to a spontaneous organization of similar property individuals. Persons belonging to the same profession, depending on the amount of their income, may belong to different groups with opposite interests. The volume-legal structure (or grouping according to the volume of rights and obligations), which does not coincide with the previous two structures, splits into two main groups: the privileged, constituting the highest social rank, and the disadvantaged, giving the lowest social rank. The privileged constitute a solidary collective unity; the “deprived” (Sorokin) form the same unity. At the same time, in any society with developed social structures, the real differentiation of individuals and groups, depending on the scope of their rights and obligations, is much more complicated than the above.

Thus, the following are distinguished as signs of social classes: 1) professional; 2) property; 3) volumetric legal. As soon as a society forms stable professional, property and legal groups; as soon as they acquire a certain strength (as a social combination), immediately begins interaction between society, taken as a whole, and between individual social groups, each of the parties affecting the nature of the other. Earlier it was noted that the profession, property status and scope of rights have a huge impact on individuals. If belonging to each of these groups very strongly determines the behavior of people, then this conditioning will be much stronger when the influence of all these three structures merges. Individuals united by all three ties will have similar economic interests, which acts as a material condition for their unification into social classes, in order to more successfully implement and protect their interests. Social groups that differ sharply from each other in the three given characteristics at once will be repelled and opposed much more strongly than groups that differ in only one characteristic.

At the same time, speaking about the unification of social groups into social classes, it is necessary to take into account the entire system of socio-economic relations as an exhaustive characteristic of the social class. So, Yu.S. Polyakov, emphasizing this, points out that "it is obvious that only the entire set of production relations that develop in the process of production, exchange, distribution and consumption of material goods gives an exhaustive political and economic characterization of the class." Since all social groups in society interact with each other and at the same time strive for the most optimal realization of their interests (primarily economic), the whole society should objectively disintegrate into some large groups of people opposing each other depending on the degree of coincidence (opposition) of them interests (primarily economic). What will predetermine this coincidence (opposition)? In our opinion, this is still the same opportunity for some social groups to appropriate the labor of others (which depends on their place and functional role). To protect their economic interests, there is a spontaneous unification of both into social classes. Such a union acts as the economic basis for the formation of social classes.

Dahrendorf in his work "Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society" (1957) wrote in this regard that "class is a category that is used to analyze the dynamics of social conflict and its structural roots." At the same time, the social class is not only economic, but also social, political, spiritual and ideological education. In The Poverty of Philosophy, K. Marx writes: "The economic conditions first turned the mass of the population into workers. The domination of capital created for this mass the same position and common interests. Thus, this mass is already classes in relation to capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle ... this mass rallies, it is constituted as a class for itself. The interests it protects become class interests. " It is clearly seen from this quote that in the process of the emergence and development of social classes, according to K. Marx, there is such a form when people who are in a position determined by the above criteria (place and role in the system of functional labor relations, property relations, management relations and special economic interests), are not yet connected by the internal connection of conscious (ideological) relations, but only by the connection of subjective relations and objective dependencies that exist within the framework of production relations. Then we say that they form a "class in themselves", which, however, is not a simple aggregate, since it is connected by a system of objective relations, but it does not yet represent a class "for itself," that is, does not yet have a fully developed consciousness of its class economic and political interests. Moreover, the objective class interests are reflected in the subjective class consciousness by no means mirrored. Awareness of one's essential, true interests, without which the transformation of "class into oneself" into "a class for oneself" is impossible, inevitably occurs through a system of psychological attitudes given by previous historical experience. A social class can become a "class for itself" only by developing its own ideology.

On the basis of all this, its organizational design takes place. Let us especially note that under the influence of this Marx's thesis on the "class for oneself" M. Weber proposed to distinguish between "class" and "social class" in the social-class structure. By class, this author understood a social community associated only with the similarity of economic interests, the "economic position" of a given category of subjects. By the category "social class" M. Weber showed that the highest manifestation of class community is the awareness of one's class economic and political interests and goals that mobilizes and encourages collective action.

The modern classic of French sociology P. Bourdieu ( cm.) also proposed to distinguish between possible (logical) and real social classes. This author writes that on the basis of knowledge of economic and other relations, it is possible to "single out classes in the logical sense of the word, i.e. classes as a set of agents occupying a similar position, which, being placed in similar conditions and subject to similar conditions, have all the chances for possessing similar dispositions and interests, and, therefore, to develop similar practices and take similar positions. " P. Bourdieu rightly believes that this class "on paper" has a theoretical existence, "it allows one to explain and foresee the practices and properties of the classified and ... behavior leading to their unification into a group / into a real social class. - S.S./ "." ... This is only a possible class, since it is a set of agents that will objectively offer less resistance if necessary to "mobilize" them than any other set of agents. "The transformation of a logical class into a real social class, writes it is further possible only through the development in its members of a sense of the position "occupied in the social space" / social-class relations. S.S./. I. Kraus also writes: "Classes ... are conflict groups that, uniting, challenge the existing distribution of power, advantages and other opportunities ... classes are formed when a set of individuals defines their interests as similar to the interests of others from the same population and as different and opposing interests of another set of persons ". This researcher emphasizes the important role in the formation of a social class that the latter has its own ideology.

Thus, objective class interests are not reflected in the subjective class consciousness in a mirror image. Awareness of one's essential, true interests, without which the transformation of "class into oneself" into "a class for oneself" is impossible, inevitably occurs through a system of psychological attitudes given by previous historical experience. A social class can become a "class for itself" only by developing its own ideology. On the basis of all this, its organizational design takes place. In connection with the non-reducibility of all components of the social-class structure of society only to social classes and elementary professional, property and legal groups, it is epistemologically necessary, proceeding from the goal of a more or less adequate reflection in the theory of the diversity of corporate social subjects, to introduce for a meaningful description of the named structure a number of categories, as well as supplement the above definition of the social class of P.A. Sorokin.

A social class in modern science is understood as a cumulative, normal, solidary, semi-closed, but with an approach to open, associated with positive social-class complementarity, a group made up of the cumulation of three main groups: 1) professional; 2) property; 3) volumetric legal. The concept of positive (negative) complementarity was introduced by L.N. Gumilev to characterize the ethnosphere. It was understood as “the feeling of subconscious mutual sympathy (antipathy) among members of ethnic groups, which determines the division into“ friends ”and“ aliens. " and the defining division into “us” and “aliens.” Positive social-class complementarity is what (in the terminology of P. Bourdieu) distinguishes “real social class” from “possible (logical) class”.

It seems epistemologically promising to introduce a number of concepts into social philosophy that fix a certain stage in the development of a social-class community - this is "class-layer", "class-estate", "distracho-class", "syncretic class". It is also advisable to single out socio-economic categories that show the intra-class differentiation of subjects: "social-class group", "marginal social-class group" and "caste social-class group". Why is the introduction of the concept "class-layer" promising? The fact is that in modern sociology not only are there no clear criteria for distinguishing between the categories "class" and "stratum", but also, as O.I. Shkaratan "for many authors they are generally synonyms".

Today, in social science, the typical idea is that any modern society consists of groups or a multitude of individuals who have or bear certain characteristics. Moreover, these characteristics are considered as classification criteria, which can be one- or, more often, multidimensional (in our terminology, these are elementary or cumulative structures). With this approach, the researcher's attention is traditionally shifted from production to distribution, without comprehending the objective relations between them. This situation has led today to the fact that, as V.V. Radaev and O.I. Shkaratan: "in a significant part of the research, the same features are used to distinguish both classes and layers." And from this follows the widespread opinion among social scientists that the category of class covers heterogeneous social subjects, depending on the epistemological context that various scientists put into this term. “The meaning is also different,” as OI Shkaratan notes, “put by different authors in the term“ social stratum. ”Most sociologists use this term to designate social differentiation within a hierarchically organized society. "class." In the same cases when these concepts are distinguished, the term "stratum" denotes groups within "classes", distinguished on the same grounds as the "classes." Therefore, it is promising in scientific terms to introduce into circulation instead of the category "the concept of" class-layer ", which makes it possible to emphasize that the named state of the social-class community is one of the stages of the life of a social class and at the same time makes it possible to clearly distinguish the specifics of this stage." Class-layer "is a community that differs from the social class lack of positive complementarity, that is, in essence close to the "possible class" of Bourdieu. constituting a class-stratum, the level of their awareness of their common needs and interests (primarily economic), the degree of their cohesion and organization is less than that of representatives of the social class. To characterize intraclass groups, the category "social class group" is used. The named groups are understood as such intraclass groups that partially differ from each other in one (or two) basic cumulations: either professional, or property, or volume-legal; for the other two (or one) they completely coincide with other subjects of a given social class.

To analyze the process of evolution of the social-class structure of society, the category of social "distracho-class" (from the Latin word - distractor - torn to pieces) is often used today. This class is understood as a cumulative, semi-closed, but approaching open, group, made up of the cumulation of three main groups: 1) professional; 2) property; 3) volumetric legal, and characterized by an increased degree of fragmentation and looseness of internal structures. The distracho-class is a social class in the process of strengthening the autonomization of its intra-class (social-class) groups, leading in the long run to its disintegration into several new social classes. As a rule, the aforementioned social-class community is characterized by even less opportunity for joint action than the class-layer; there is no unified ideological position among the subjects of its constituents.

Recognition of the expediency of using the category "social distracho-class" in modern social science required the introduction of the concept of "embryonic (syncretic) social class" (or, for short, "syncretic class") into scientific circulation. The named social community is a social-class group that is part of the distracho-class, in the process of its transformation into a proper social class. The syncretic class is distinguished by its fusion, indivisibility due to the initial underdevelopment of the state.

In recent years, in the philosophical and sociological literature, much attention has been paid to such a phenomenon as marginality, which acts as one of the characteristics of the state of social, including social-class, structures. The named concept is usually used "... to denote relatively stable social phenomena that arise on the border/ highlighted by me. - S.S./ interaction of different cultures, social communities, structures, as a result of which a certain part of social subjects is outside them "(Popova I.P.) Despite the seeming simplicity of the definition of the named phenomenon and its more than seventy-year scientific history, up to the present time in application There is a large number of epistemological difficulties in the category of "marginality." economy, etc.), which gives the concept a fairly general, interdisciplinary character. Secondly, in the process of clarification and evolution of the concept in sociology, several meanings have become established, associated with various types of marginality. Thirdly, its vagueness, uncertainty makes it difficult to measure the phenomenon itself, to analyze it in the context of social processes. "Thus, in modern social science, it is advisable to talk not about any abstract marginality of some unidentified social phenomenon, but only about the marginality of certain types (or classes) of phenomena and relations. The use of the concept of "marginality" when characterizing the components of the social-class structure puts forward such attributive features as "borderline", "intermediateness", "ambiguity" and "uncertainty" (which emphasizes the increased degree of entropy of marginal social-class subjects.In our opinion, it is impossible to describe the social-class organization and structure of society in modern systemic language without introducing the category "marginal social-class group" (or, for short, "marginal group"), which is a social class group included in one social class, but according to a number of characteristics it is also close to another social class. This group occupies a specific "borderline" position in the social-class structure of society. The named group with a high degree of probability can be characterized as an entropy element at the group level.

A social class-estate (or, for short - "class-estate") is a semi-closed group, approaching a closed one; access to it is limited, including customs and traditions, its representatives have inherited rights and obligations. An example of such social-class communities is Japan in the second half of the 20th century. In this country, the system of inheritance of political power is widely developed, "when the sons, daughters and grandchildren of politicians of the older generations almost automatically take seats in parliament from the same electoral districts ( nisei or sansei giin). In the mid-1990s, these second- or third-generation parliamentarians held up to a quarter of the seats in the lower house and up to one-fifth in the upper house of the Japanese parliament. If we add to them spouses, brother-in-law, nephews and other relatives, as well as former secretaries of retired parliamentarians, the scale of the phenomenon of inheritance of power will turn out to be even more impressive "(Kravtsevich A.I.) It should also be added that the Japanese cabinet of ministers ( supreme executive power) is formed from the acting politicians-parliamentarians from the ruling or ruling parties.At the same time, the real government of the country is not in the hands of ministers and their deputies (politicians elected by the people), who are traditionally replaced annually, but in the hands of a career bureaucracy. is also today a class-estate. The system of consultation meetings with government bodies, "combining the collective experience of the bureaucracy, business and academic circles, trade unions and consumers and designed to help achieve public consensus on the policy adopted" (Kravtsevich A.I.), in in more cases, it is a screen for making appropriate the corresponding surroundings of decisions prepared by the bureaucracy.

Caste social-class groups (or, for short, "castes") are social-class groups that occupy a certain (strictly ranked) place in the social hierarchy, are associated with rigidly fixed types of activity and are limited in communication with each other.

Thus, a social class is a real sociological category that allows us to single out a group of individuals in social and socio-economic relations, based on a number of (socio-economic) characteristics, who act in social and socio-economic relations as a large closed system with a certain dynamic algorithm of behavior and a specific internal structure that changes depending on from the stage of development of a class - from the degree of its "maturity" (class-stratum, social distracho-class, etc.).

In modern social science, a social class is understood as a cumulative, normal, solidary, semi-closed, but with an approach to open, associated with positive social-class complementarity, a group made up of the cumulation of three main groups: 1) professional; 2) property; 3) volumetric legal. Social-class complementarity is understood as the feeling of subconscious mutual sympathy (antipathy) among members of social classes, leading to the formation of a single ideology in them and defining the division into "friends" and "aliens." In the course of their life, social classes and social-class groups can unite into social-class groups ("social superclasses") with the aim of a joint struggle to optimize the conditions for the realization of their socio-economic interests. At the same time, the main condition for this integration is the temporary coincidence of the interests of the uniting subjects and an obvious contradiction to their socio-economic interests of other social classes. Such a combination of certain social-class subjects can take place for a certain, as a rule, rather short historical period. It should also be noted that the potential of this association is largely determined by the moral relations of a particular society (customs, traditions, moral norms, ideals, etc.).

Based on the above, it is possible to define social-class relations in a narrow sense as relations between individuals included in specific cumulative (integral) groups - social classes. Accordingly, social-class relations in a broad sense are understood as the relations between people united in elementary professional, property and volume-legal groups and cumulative (integral) groups - social class groups and social classes.

The social-class structure of society is a combination of: 1) the most stable, essential, regularly recurring social-class relations that arise between individuals united into social classes, social-class groups and into elementary professional, property and volume-legal groups; 2) these individuals themselves, united into social classes and social-class elementary social groups. In any real society, there is, constantly reproducing or disappearing, a wide variety of social-class relations. If we assume that in any society all the named relations will be stable, essential, regularly recurring, that is, that there will be no chaotic social-class processes or phenomena, then in the named society there will be no dynamism and it will be doomed stagnant.

As already noted in the special literature (E.A. Sedov), for normal functioning and a more or less adequate response to changes in the surrounding socio-economic realities (that is, for the perception of information), chaotic processes should not only be present, but also occupy a fairly significant share in the totality of socio-economic relations. At the same time, if these chaotic processes pass a certain limit, that is, if the presence of non-chaotic processes becomes insufficient to maintain certain structures in society, then this society dies. At the same time, there is a degradation of the social-class structure. Therefore, to characterize real social-class relations, it is necessary to use the concept of "social-class organization of society," which covers a broader aspect of social relations than the social-class structure. The first includes not only stable, essential, non-random, regularly recurring, but also unstable, random, irregular relationships. Some changes in the social-class organization of society will act as a specific social "embryo" of the evolution of the social-class structure.

Thus, S.-K.O. a dynamic society is always a continuously changing social phenomenon, the dynamics of which cannot be fully described in the language of modern mathematics, even using "mathematical chaos" as a means. At the same time, it seems theoretically possible with a sufficient degree of probability to describe the social-class organization of society for a certain period of time. To fix this state, it is legitimate to use the category "social-class fractal". The named concept refers to a certain static social configuration that acts as an instant statistical (mathematical) "snapshot" of the social-class organization. In a somewhat simplified way, the real existence of the social-class organization of society can be represented as an infinite number of social-class fractals continuously replacing each other. The category "social-class structure of society", as noted above, does not describe the entire diversity of social-class relations and does not carry an evolutionary potential.

In other words, if we imagine that all the diversity of social-class relations in a certain socio-economic system has been reduced only to the most stable, essential, regularly recurring, i.e. to non-random deterministic relations, then such a system could exist only under constant external conditions (stable natural and climatic conditions, constant sources of raw materials, the absence of scientific and technological progress or regression, a frozen demographic structure with a constant population, etc.), i.e. .e. it is, in principle, not vital. In order to respond to changes in external conditions in the socio-economic system, entropy (entropy is a measure of the uncertainty of stochastic processes) social-class relations must necessarily exist.

All real, not imaginary, social-class relations are divided into two types: 1) stable, substantial, regularly recurring - forming the social-class structure and being in this case the expression of structural information; 2) unstable, random, stochastic - which are the embodiment of entropic processes leading to the transformation of the social-class structure and allowing the latter to adequately respond to changes in the socio-economic system. It is the totality of all these relations (stable and unstable, statistical and stochastic, etc.) that is described by the term "S.-K.O." In S.-K.O. in any real society, there will be elements that are not part of the social-class structure - individuals who can unite into certain, fairly stable groups. In turn, in any social class there will also be entropic elements - ensuring the possibility of its change, and structural and informational elements - ensuring the possibility of its self-preservation. (The distracho-class is the class with the maximum entropy, and the social class-estate is the class with the lowest entropy.) The actual level of diversity at the higher levels of the social-class structure can be ensured by its effective restriction at the lower levels.

Demographic processes in a social context

1. Russia entered the third millennium not in the best demographic shape. Unjustifiably high mortality, low fertility, population decline, and fading migration. All of this is taking place against a backdrop of deeper and more painful economic and social changes, and it is not surprising that public opinion tends to view negative demographic trends as a direct consequence of these changes.

2. The understanding of not only the demographic present, but also the demographic future of Russia depends on whether such a view is correct or incorrect. If we are really talking about a simple reaction to the economic and social crisis of the 90s, then one can hope that as this crisis is overcome, the demographic situation will also improve. If the main demographic trends have deeper reasons and a longer origin, then there is probably no reason for such optimism.

3. Although the author of the report is among those demographers who view demographic processes as relatively autonomous in relation to other social processes, he certainly does not consider them completely independent of the social, economic or political context. Moreover, he believes that demographic trends in Russia should be viewed in two contexts: domestic and global. This applies to all major demographic processes: mortality, fertility and migration.

4. Trends in mortality in Russia with the greatest reason can be characterized as crisis, although they can not be associated only with the events of the last 10-15 years, they can be clearly traced at least from the mid-60s. The main reason is the preservation of conservative statist-paternalistic attitudes, which greatly limit the scope of individual activity and responsibility, including when it comes to protecting their own health and life. This is especially noticeable at the later stages of mortality modernization, when it is more dependent on individual behavior. Through its earlier and very important stages, the process of the extinction of generations in Russia in the twentieth century was quite successful. Nevertheless, the entire system of values - both individual and social - still remains largely archaic, predetermines such a distribution of priorities in which both society and each individual sacrifice health and even life in the name of other, considered more important goals, protection health care is invariably financed on a "leftover principle", the due freedom of choice of a doctor, hospital, treatment method, insurance, etc. is not ensured. All this led to the fact that several decades ago modernization changes were blocked and the mortality situation stopped improving. This, in fact, is the long-term mortality crisis in Russia; the last decade has not brought any fundamental changes.

5. Oddly enough, but frankly crisis, long-term mortality trends worried Russian public opinion much less than fertility trends, which are much more difficult to give an unambiguous assessment. There is no doubt that, from the point of view of the domestic Russian context, the extremely low birth rate, the main reason for the decline in Russia's population, is extremely unfavorable for the country. However, unlike the very high mortality rate, it is not something exceptional; a similar birth rate is observed in many developed countries with completely different socio-economic conditions. This could be interpreted as a general crisis of the entire modern "post-industrial" civilization, the causes of which cannot be found and eliminated in one country. However, even with this approach, one cannot fail to see that the decline in the birth rate in postindustrial societies is associated with many changes, which are usually interpreted as positive attributes of modernization: the almost complete elimination of child mortality, the emancipation and self-realization of women, growing specific investments in children, the growth of education, etc. Taking this into account, perhaps we should talk not about the crisis, but about the internal contradictions of the modernization process, and maybe also about the fact that modernization objectively shifts the emphasis from quantitative to qualitative characteristics of social life.

However, the decline in fertility should also be viewed in a broader, global context. In this decline, one can see a systemic response to the global demographic crisis generated by the global population explosion and the growing pressure on the planet's limited resources. With this interpretation, the decline in the birth rate on a global scale below the level of simple reproduction for a sufficiently long period is a blessing, and the decline in the birth rate in Russia, as well as in the “West,” is just an episode of such a global turn. No matter how unpleasant it may be for all developed countries, and especially for Russia with its vast territory, nothing can be done about it, because the interests of preserving all of humanity are higher than the interests of individual countries.

6. The connection between internal migrations and the social context, mainly within the Russian one, is obvious. For most of the twentieth century, the multimillion-dollar movement of the rural population to the cities was one of the main tools and at the same time the results of modernization shifts that changed the face of the country. With the same shifts, in particular, with the industrial development of new regions, the creation of new cities, etc. inter-district, in particular, and inter-republican migrations of the Soviet period were also connected. At the same time, external migration was artificially blocked for most of this period.

The political changes at the end of the century, the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of a new Russia within borders that never existed before greatly changed the general context and highlighted external migrations (especially since the potential of internal migrations by this time was largely exhausted).

The new internal Russian context in which external migrations now have to be viewed is contradictory. On the one hand, the apparent discrepancy between the declining Russian population and the vast territory of the country (larger than during the Soviet era) makes immigration desirable, and this is a demographic process that is much easier to manage than mortality or fertility. On the other hand, any immigration generates economic, social, and sometimes political tensions, problems of intercultural interaction, etc., which is inevitable in Russia, where anti-immigration and sometimes openly xenophobic sentiments still prevail. Therefore, one cannot count on Russians' overly benevolent attitude to immigration in the near future.

But there is also a global context, which is determined by the rapid increase in the number of inhabitants in poor developing countries and the growing demographic pressure on the developed countries. It manifests itself, in particular, in the growing legal and illegal migration to these countries, the search for political asylum in them, etc. The final result is formed under the influence of all components of both the domestic and global context, which makes this result difficult to predict.

7. Answering the question posed at the beginning of the report, it should be said that the main current demographic problems in Russia should hardly be associated with the economic and social development of the country in the last 10-15 years. Perhaps this period has highlighted and exacerbated some problems, but at their core they have long historical and socio-cultural roots. Moreover, most of these problems are immanent to the type of development that Russia chose more than one decade or even several centuries ago, when it embarked on the path of catch-up modernization. Any reasonable strategy of society should take into account the deep conditioning of the current Russian demographic trends, and not proceed from the illusory possibilities of their easy and quick change.

Youth as a socio-demographic group. The controversy between scientists about the definition of youth, the criteria for separating it into an independent group, age boundaries have a long history. In this context, one cannot consider, like some researchers, youth only as a demographic group, thereby emphasizing only its biologically given characteristics. After all, the age category is biosocial. This is not just a biological "counter" of human life, an indicator of physiological and psychological changes in personality, it affects the social status of a person, his place and role in the system of social division of labor, his performance of certain social roles, the availability of rights and obligations etc. Age changes the characteristics of a person's labor activity, her capacity for work, professional skill, creativity, and mobility. With age, the structure of needs for the satisfaction of material and spiritual benefits is transformed. From this we can conclude that the age factor is undoubtedly a social phenomenon. In addition, young people play a specific social role in society, which is expressed in their social and innovative activities. It is not for nothing that sociologists introduced the concept of juvenization, which denotes such social changes and innovations that are the result of the vigorous activity of young people. This allows us to speak of young people not only as a demographic, but also as a social group. At the same time, the resource of social and innovative behavior and the group-forming factor is the "disposition capital" - a specific type of "cultural capital" that young people have and thanks to which they differ from other social groups. It is he who predetermines all the social functions of youth proper, determining their activities aimed at preparing and including in various spheres of social life, in the social mechanism, as well as a specific youth subculture, internal differentiation, which does not always coincide with the established forms of general social differentiation. Thus, young people can be spoken of as a socio-demographic group, therefore. That individuals belonging to it have a common social feature and perform the necessary function of juvenile society. And the main feature of a social group is the implementation of a socially significant function.

TOPIC: Traditional society

INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………… ..3-4

1. Typology of societies in modern science …………………………… .5-7

2.General characteristics of traditional society …………………… .8-10

3. Development of traditional society …………………………………… 11-15

4. Transformation of traditional society …………………………… 16-17

CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………… ..18-19

REFERENCES ………………………………………………………… .20

Introduction.

The relevance of the problem of traditional society is dictated by global changes in the worldview of mankind. Civilizational studies today are particularly acute and problematic. The world oscillates between prosperity and poverty, personality and numbers, endless and private. Man is still looking for the authentic, the lost and the hidden. There is a "tired" generation of meanings, self-isolation and endless waiting: waiting for light from the West, good weather from the South, cheap goods from China and oil profits from the North. Modern society requires initiative young people who are able to find "themselves" and their place in life, to restore Russian spiritual culture, morally stable, socially adapted, capable of self-development and continuous self-improvement. The basic structures of the personality are laid in the first years of life. This means that the family has a special responsibility to foster such qualities in the younger generation. And this problem becomes especially urgent at this present stage.

Arising in a natural way, "evolutionary" human culture includes an important element - a system of social relations based on solidarity and mutual assistance. A lot of studies, and even everyday experience, show that people became people precisely because they overcame selfishness and showed altruism, which goes far beyond short-term rational calculations. And that the main motives for such behavior are of an irrational nature and are associated with the ideals and movements of the soul - we see this at every step.

The culture of traditional society is based on the concept of "people" - as a transpersonal community with historical memory and collective consciousness. An individual person, an element of such people and society, is a "conciliar personality", the focus of many human ties. He is always included in solidarity groups (families, village and church communities, labor collectives, even a gang of thieves - acting according to the principle "One for all, all for one"). Accordingly, the prevailing relationships in traditional society are of the type of service, fulfillment of duty, love, care and compulsion. There are also acts of exchange, for the most part that do not have the character of free and equivalent purchase and sale (exchange of equal values) - the market regulates only a small part of traditional social relations. Therefore, the common, all-encompassing metaphor of social life in traditional society is “family”, and not, for example, “market”. Modern scholars believe that 2/3 of the world's population, to a greater or lesser extent, has features of traditional societies in their way of life. What are traditional societies, when did they arise and how is their culture characterized?

The purpose of this work: to give a general description, to study the development of a traditional society.

Based on the goal, the following tasks were set:

Consider different ways of typology of societies;

Describe traditional society;

To give an idea of the development of a traditional society;

Identify the problems of transformation of traditional society.

1. Typology of societies in modern science.

In modern sociology, there are various ways of typology of societies, and they are all legitimate from certain points of view.

Distinguish, for example, two main types of society: first, pre-industrial society, or the so-called traditional, which is based on the peasant community. This type of society still covers most of Africa, a significant part of Latin America, most of the East and dominated Europe until the 19th century. Secondly, the modern industrial-urban society. The so-called Euro-American Society belongs to it; and the rest of the world is gradually catching up to it.

Another division of societies is also possible. It is possible to divide societies on political grounds - totalitarian and democratic. In the first societies, society itself does not act as an independent subject of social life, but serves the interests of the state. The second societies are characterized by the fact that, on the contrary, the state serves the interests of civil society, the individual and public associations (at least ideally).

One can distinguish between the types of societies according to the dominant religion: Christian society, Islamic, Orthodox, etc. Finally, societies are distinguished by the dominant language: English-speaking, Russian-speaking, French-speaking, etc. It is also possible to distinguish societies by ethnicity: single-national, bi-national, multinational.

One of the main types of typology of societies is the formational approach.

According to the formational approach, the most important relations in society are property and class relations. The following types of socio-economic formations can be distinguished: primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist and communist (includes two phases - socialism and communism).

None of the above-mentioned main theoretical points, which form the basis of the theory of formations, is now indisputable. The theory of socio-economic formations is not only based on theoretical conclusions of the middle of the 19th century, but because of this it cannot explain many of the contradictions that have arisen:

· Existence along with zones of progressive (ascending) development of zones of backwardness, stagnation and dead ends;

· Transformation of the state - in one form or another - into an important factor of social production relations; modification and modification of classes;

· The emergence of a new hierarchy of values with the priority of universal values over class ones.

The most modern is another division of society, which was put forward by the American sociologist Daniel Bell. He distinguishes three stages in the development of society. The first stage is a pre-industrial, agricultural, conservative society, closed to outside influences, based on natural production. The second stage is an industrial society, which is based on industrial production, developed market relations, democracy and openness. Finally, in the second half of the twentieth century, the third stage begins - post-industrial society, which is characterized by the use of the achievements of the scientific and technological revolution; sometimes it is called the information society, because the main thing is no longer the production of a certain material product, but the production and processing of information. The indicator of this stage is the spread of computer technology, the unification of the whole society into a single information system in which ideas and thoughts are freely circulated. Leading in such a society is the requirement to observe the so-called human rights.

From this point of view, different parts of modern humanity are at different stages of development. Until now, maybe half of humanity is in the first stage. And the other part goes through the second stage of development. And only a smaller part - Europe, USA, Japan - entered the third stage of development. Russia is now in a state of transition from the second stage to the third.

2. General characteristics of traditional society

Traditional society is a concept that focuses in its content a set of ideas about the pre-industrial stage of human development, characteristic of traditional sociology and cultural studies. There is no single theory of traditional society. The concept of traditional society is based, rather, on its understanding as a socio-cultural model asymmetric to modern society, rather than on the generalization of the real facts of the life of peoples not engaged in industrial production. The dominance of a natural economy is considered characteristic of the economy of a traditional society. In this case, commodity relations are either absent altogether, or are focused on meeting the needs of a small stratum of the social elite. The basic principle of the organization of social relations is a rigid hierarchical stratification of society, usually manifested in the division into endogamous castes. At the same time, the main form of organizing social relations for the overwhelming majority of the population is a relatively closed, isolated community. The latter circumstance dictated the domination of collectivist social representations, focused on strict adherence to traditional norms of behavior and excluding individual freedom of the individual, as well as the understanding of its value. Together with caste division, this feature almost completely excludes the possibility of social mobility. Political power is monopolized within a separate group (caste, clan, family) and exists mainly in authoritarian forms. Characteristic feature traditional society is considered either the complete absence of writing, or its existence in the form of the privilege of individual groups (officials, priests). At the same time, writing often develops in a language other than spoken language the overwhelming majority of the population (Latin in medieval Europe, Arabic in the Middle East, Chinese writing in the Far East). Therefore, intergenerational transmission of culture is carried out in verbal, folklore form, and the family and community are the main institutions of socialization. The consequence of this was the extreme variability of the culture of one and the same ethnic group, manifested in local and dialectal differences.

Traditional societies include ethnic communities, which are characterized by communal settlements, preservation of blood ties, mainly handicraft and agrarian forms of labor. The emergence of such societies goes back to the earliest stages of human development, to primitive culture.

Any society from the primitive hunter community to the industrial revolution of the late 18th century can be called a traditional society.

Traditional society is a society that is governed by tradition. The preservation of traditions is a higher value in it than development. The social order in it is characterized (especially in the countries of the East) by a rigid class hierarchy and the existence of stable social communities, a special way of regulating the life of society, based on traditions and customs. This organization of society seeks to preserve the social and cultural foundations of life unchanged. Traditional society is an agrarian society.

A traditional society is usually characterized by:

· Traditional economy - an economic system in which the use of natural resources is determined primarily by traditions. Traditional industries predominate - agriculture, resource extraction, trade, construction, non-traditional industries practically do not develop;

· The predominance of the agrarian structure;

· Stability of the structure;

· Estate organization;

· Low mobility;

· High mortality;

· High birth rate;

· Low life expectancy.

A traditional person perceives the world and the established order of life as something inseparably integral, sacred and not subject to change. A person's place in society and his status are determined by tradition (as a rule, by birthright).

In traditional society, collectivist attitudes prevail, individualism is not welcomed (since freedom of individual actions can lead to a violation of the established order). In general, traditional societies are characterized by the primacy of collective interests over private ones, including the primacy of the interests of existing hierarchical structures (state, clan, etc.). It is not so much individual capacity that is valued, but the place in the hierarchy (bureaucratic, estate, clan, etc.) that a person occupies.

In a traditional society, as a rule, redistribution rather than market exchange prevails, and the elements of a market economy are tightly regulated. This is due to the fact that free market relations increase social mobility and change the social structure of society (in particular, they destroy the estate); the redistribution system can be governed by tradition, but market prices cannot; forced redistribution prevents "unauthorized" enrichment, impoverishment of both individuals and classes. The pursuit of economic benefits in traditional society is often morally condemned, opposed to disinterested assistance.

In a traditional society, most people live their entire lives in a local community (for example, a village), and the ties with the “big society” are rather weak. At the same time, family ties, on the contrary, are very strong.

The worldview of a traditional society is conditioned by tradition and authority.

3.Development of a traditional society

Economically, traditional society is based on agriculture. Moreover, such a society can be not only landowning, like the society of ancient Egypt, China or medieval Russia, but also based on cattle breeding, like all the nomadic steppe powers of Eurasia (the Turkic and Khazar kaganates, the empire of Genghis Khan, etc.). And even fishing in the extremely fish-rich coastal waters of southern Peru (in pre-Columbian America).

A characteristic feature of pre-industrial traditional society is the domination of redistributive relations (ie, distribution in accordance with the social status of each), which can be expressed in various forms: centralized state economy of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, medieval China; Russian peasant community, where redistribution is expressed in regular redistribution of land according to the number of eaters, etc. However, one should not think that redistribution is the only possible way of economic life in a traditional society. It dominates, but the market in one form or another always exists, and in exceptional cases it can even acquire a leading role (the most striking example is the economy of the ancient Mediterranean). But, as a rule, market relations are limited to a narrow range of goods, most often items of prestige: the medieval European aristocracy, getting everything they needed in their estates, bought mainly jewelry, spices, expensive weapons of thoroughbred horses, etc.

In social terms, traditional society is much more strikingly different from our modern one. The most characteristic feature of this society is the strong attachment of each person to the system of redistributive relations, the attachment is purely personal. This is manifested in the involvement of everyone in a collective that carries out this redistribution, and in dependence of each on the “elders” (by age, origin, social status), who are “at the boiler”. Moreover, the transition from one collective to another is extremely difficult, social mobility in this society is very low. At the same time, not only the position of the estate in the social hierarchy is valuable, but also the very fact of belonging to it. Here we can give specific examples - caste and estate systems of stratification.

A caste (as in traditional Indian society, for example) is a closed group of people who occupy a strictly defined place in society. This place is delineated by many factors or signs, the main ones of which are:

· Traditionally inherited profession, occupation;

Endogamy, i.e. the obligation to conclude marriages only within their own caste;

· Ritual purity (after contact with the "lower" it is necessary to go through a whole procedure of purification).

The estate is a social group with hereditary rights and responsibilities, enshrined in customs and laws. Feudal society medieval Europe, in particular, it was divided into three main estates: the clergy (the symbol is the book), the knighthood (the symbol is the sword) and the peasantry (the symbol is the plow). There were six estates in Russia before the 1917 revolution. These are nobles, clergy, merchants, bourgeoisie, peasants, Cossacks.

The regulation of class life was extremely tough, down to minor circumstances and insignificant details. Thus, according to the "Charter to the Cities" of 1785, Russian merchants of the first guild could ride around the city in a carriage drawn by a pair of horses, and merchants of the second guild - only in a carriage by a couple. The class division of society, as well as the caste division, was sanctified and consolidated by religion: everyone has their own destiny, their own destiny, their own corner on this earth. Stay where God placed you, exaltation is a manifestation of pride, one of the seven (according to the medieval classification) deadly sins.

Another important criterion for social division can be called a community in the broadest sense of the word. This refers not only to the peasant community of the neighbors, but also a craft workshop, a merchant guild in Europe or a merchant union in the East, a monastic or knightly order, a Russian communal monastery, thieves or beggarly corporations. The Hellenic polis can be viewed not so much as a city-state, but as a civil community. A person outside the community is an outcast, outcast, suspicious, enemy. Therefore, expulsion from the community was one of the most terrible punishments in any of the agrarian societies. A person was born, lived and died tied to his place of residence, occupation, environment, exactly repeating the lifestyle of his ancestors and being absolutely sure that his children and grandchildren will follow the same path.

Relationships and connections between people in traditional society were permeated through and through with personal devotion and dependence, which is understandable. At that level of technological development, only direct contacts, personal involvement, individual involvement could ensure the movement of knowledge, skills, abilities from teacher to student, from master to apprentice. This movement, we note, took the form of passing on secrets, secrets, recipes. Thus, a certain social task was also solved. So, the oath, which in the Middle Ages symbolically ritually strengthened the relationship between vassals and lords, in its own way equalized the parties involved, giving their relationship a touch of simple patronage of the father to the son.

The political structure of the overwhelming majority of pre-industrial societies is determined more by tradition and custom than by written law. Power could be justified by the origin, the scale of the controlled distribution (land, food, finally, water in the East) and backed up by divine sanction (this is why the role of sacralization is so important, and often - of direct deification of the figure of the ruler).

Most often, the state system of society was, of course, monarchical. And even in the republics of antiquity and the Middle Ages, real power, as a rule, belonged to representatives of a few noble families and was based on the named principles. As a rule, traditional societies are characterized by the fusion of the phenomena of power and property with the determining role of power, that is, having more power, and had real control over a significant part of the property that was at the collective disposal of society. For a typically pre-industrial society (with rare exceptions), power is property.

The cultural life of traditional societies was decisively influenced by the justification of power by tradition and the conditioning of all social relations by estate, communal and power structures. Traditional society is characterized by what could be called gerontocracy: the older, the smarter, the more ancient, the more perfect, the deeper, the true.

Traditional society is holistic. It is lined up or organized as a rigid whole. And not just as a whole, but as a clearly prevailing, dominant whole.

The collective is a socio-ontological, not a value-normative reality. It becomes the latter when it begins to be understood and accepted as a common good. While also holistic in nature, the common good hierarchically completes the value system of traditional society. Along with other values, it ensures the unity of a person with other people, gives meaning to his individual existence, and guarantees a certain psychological comfort.

In antiquity, the common good was identified with the needs and development trends of the polis. Polis is a city or a society-state. The man and the citizen coincided in him. The polis horizon of ancient man was both political and ethical. Outside its borders, nothing interesting was expected - only barbarism. The Greek, a citizen of the polis, perceived the state goals as his own, saw his own good in the good of the state. With the polis, its existence, he tied his hopes for justice, freedom, peace and happiness.

In the Middle Ages, God acts as a common and highest good. He is the source of all that is good, valuable and worthy in this world. Man himself was created in his image and likeness. From God and all power on earth. God is the ultimate goal of all human endeavor. The highest good that a sinful man is capable of for the earthly is love for God, service to Christ. Christian love is a special love: God-fearing, suffering, ascetic-humble. In her self-forgetfulness, there is a lot of contempt for herself, for worldly joys and comforts, achievements and successes. By itself, the earthly life of a person in its religious interpretation is devoid of any value and purpose.

In pre-revolutionary Russia, with its communal-collective way of life, the common good took on the form of a Russian idea. Its most popular formula included three values: Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality.

The historical life of a traditional society is notable for its slow pace. The boundaries between the historical stages of "traditional" development are barely distinguishable, there are no abrupt shifts and radical shocks.

The productive forces of traditional society developed slowly, in the rhythm of cumulative evolutionism. What economists call deferred demand was missing, i.e. the ability to produce not for the sake of urgent needs, but for the sake of the future. Traditional society took from nature exactly as much as needed, and nothing more. Its economy could be called environmentally friendly.

4. Transformation of traditional society

Traditional society is extremely resilient. As the famous demographer and sociologist Anatoly Vishnevsky writes, "everything in it is interconnected and it is very difficult to remove or change any one element."

In ancient times, changes in traditional society took place extremely slowly - over generations, almost imperceptibly for an individual. Periods of accelerated development also took place in traditional societies (a striking example is changes in the territory of Eurasia in the 1st millennium BC), but even in such periods, changes were carried out slowly by modern standards, and upon their completion, society again returned to a relatively static state. with a predominance of cyclical dynamics.

At the same time, since ancient times there have been societies that cannot be called completely traditional. The departure from traditional society was associated, as a rule, with the development of trade. This category includes the Greek city-states, medieval self-governing trading cities, England and Holland of the 16th-17th centuries. Ancient Rome (until the 3rd century AD) with its civil society stands apart.

The rapid and irreversible transformation of traditional society began to take place only from the 18th century as a result of the industrial revolution. To date, this process has captured almost the entire world.

Rapid changes and departure from traditions can be experienced by a traditional person as a collapse of orientations and values, a loss of the meaning of life, etc. Since adaptation to new conditions and a change in the nature of activities are not included in the strategy of a traditional person, the transformation of society often leads to the marginalization of part of the population.

The transformation of traditional society is most painful when the dismantled traditions have a religious basis. At the same time, resistance to change can take the form of religious fundamentalism.

During the transformation of a traditional society, authoritarianism can grow in it (either in order to preserve traditions, or in order to overcome resistance to change).

The transformation of traditional society ends with a demographic transition. The generation that grew up in families with few children has a psychology that differs from the psychology of a traditional person.

Opinions about the need to transform traditional society differ significantly. For example, the philosopher A. Dugin considers it necessary to abandon the principles of modern society and return to the "golden age" of traditionalism. Sociologist and demographer A. Vishnevsky argues that traditional society “has no chance”, although it “fiercely resists”. According to the calculations of the academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Professor A. Nazaretyan, in order to completely abandon development and return society to a static state, the number of humanity must be reduced by several hundred times.

Based on the work carried out, the following conclusions were drawn.

Traditional societies are characterized by the following features:

· Predominantly agricultural mode of production, understanding land tenure not as property, but as land use. The type of relationship between society and nature is not built on the principle of victory over it, but on the idea of merging with it;

· The basis of the economic system is communal-state forms of property with a weak development of the institution of private property. Conservation of community lifestyles and community land use;

· Patronage system of distribution of the product of labor in the community (redistribution of land, mutual assistance in the form of gifts, marriage gifts, etc., regulation of consumption);

· The level of social mobility is low, the boundaries between social communities (castes, estates) are stable. Ethnic, clan, caste differentiation of societies, in contrast to late industrial societies with class division;

Save to Everyday life combinations of polytheistic and monotheistic ideas, the role of ancestors, orientation towards the past;

· The main regulator of social life is tradition, custom, adherence to the norms of life of previous generations. The huge role of ritual and etiquette. Of course, "traditional society" significantly limits scientific and technological progress, has a pronounced tendency to stagnation, does not consider the autonomous development of a free individual as the most important value. But Western civilization, having achieved impressive successes, is currently facing a number of very complex problems: ideas about the possibilities of unlimited industrial and scientific and technological growth have proved to be untenable; the balance of nature and society is disturbed; the pace of technological progress is unbearable and threatens with a global environmental catastrophe. Many scientists pay attention to the merits of traditional thinking with its emphasis on adaptation to nature, the perception of the human person as a part of the natural and social whole.

Only a traditional way of life can be opposed to aggressive influence modern culture and a civilization model exported from the West. For Russia, there is no other way out of the crisis in the spiritual moral sphere, except for the revival of the original Russian civilization on the traditional values of national culture. And this is possible subject to the restoration of the spiritual, moral and intellectual potential of the bearer of Russian culture - the Russian people.

LITERATURE.

1. Irkhin Yu.V. Textbook "Sociology of Culture" 2006.

2. Nazaretyan A.P. Demographic utopia of "sustainable development" Social sciences and modernity. 1996. No. 2.

3. Mathieu M.E. Selected Works on the Mythology and Ideology of Ancient Egypt. -M., 1996.

4. Levikova S. I. West and East. Traditions and Modernity. - M., 1993.

Society as a complex entity is very diverse in its specific manifestations. Modern societies differ in the language of communication (for example, English-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking, etc.), in culture (societies of ancient, medieval, Arab, etc. cultures), geographical location (northern, southern, Asian, etc. countries) , the political system (countries of democratic rule, countries with dictatorial regimes, etc.). Societies also differ in terms of the level of stability, the degree of social integration, opportunities for personal self-realization, the level of education of the population, etc.

Universal classifications of the most typical societies are based on the allocation of their main parameters. One of the main directions in the typology of society is the choice of political relations, forms of state power as the basis for distinguishing various types of society. For example, in Plato and Aristotle, societies differ in the type of state structure: monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy. In modern versions of this approach, there is a distinction between totalitarian (the state determines all the main directions of social life), democratic (the population can influence state structures) and authoritarian societies (combining elements of totalitarianism and democracy).

Marxism lays the basis for the typologization of society on the difference between society by the type of production relations in various socio-economic formations, primitive communal society (primitively appropriating a mode of production), societies with an Asian mode of production (the presence of a special type of collective ownership of land), slave societies (ownership of people and the use of slave labor), feudal societies (exploitation of peasants attached to the land), communist or socialist societies (equal attitude of all to ownership of the means of production by eliminating private property relations).

The most stable in modern sociology is the typology based on the allocation of egalitarian and stratified societies, traditional, industrial and post-industrial. Traditional society is considered egalitarian.

1.1 Traditional society

Traditional society is a society that is governed by tradition. The preservation of traditions is a higher value in it than development. The social order in it is characterized by a rigid class hierarchy, the existence of stable social communities (especially in the countries of the East), a special way of regulating the life of society, based on traditions and customs. This organization of society seeks to preserve the social and cultural foundations of life unchanged. Traditional society is an agrarian society.

A traditional society is usually characterized by:

Traditional economics

The predominance of the agrarian structure;

Stability of the structure;

Estates organization;

Low mobility;

High mortality;

High fertility;

Low life expectancy.

In traditional society, collectivist attitudes prevail, individualism is not welcomed (since the freedom of individual actions can lead to a violation of the established routine, time-tested). In general, traditional societies are characterized by the primacy of collective interests over private ones, including the primacy of the interests of existing hierarchical structures (state, clan, etc.). It is not so much individual capacity that is valued, but the place in the hierarchy (bureaucratic, estate, clan, etc.) that a person occupies.

In a traditional society, as a rule, redistribution rather than market exchange prevails, and the elements of a market economy are tightly regulated. This is due to the fact that free market relations increase social mobility and change the social structure of society (in particular, they destroy the estate); the redistribution system can be governed by tradition, but market prices cannot; forced redistribution prevents unauthorized enrichment / impoverishment of both individuals and classes. The pursuit of economic benefits in traditional society is often morally condemned, opposed to disinterested assistance.

In a traditional society, most people live their whole life in a local community (for example, a village), ties with a large society are rather weak. At the same time, family ties, on the contrary, are very strong.

The worldview (ideology) of a traditional society is conditioned by tradition and authority.

Traditional society is extremely resilient. As the famous demographer and sociologist Anatoly Vishnevsky writes, “everything in it is interconnected and it is very difficult to remove or change any one element”.

Opinions about the need (and degree) of transformation of traditional society differ significantly. For example, the philosopher A. Dugin considers it necessary to abandon the principles of modern society and return to the golden age of traditionalism. Sociologist and demographer A. Vishnevsky argues that traditional society “has no chance”, although it “fiercely resists”. According to the calculations of the academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Professor A. Nazaretyan, in order to completely abandon development and return society to a static state, the number of humanity must be reduced by several hundred times.