Civilizational Analysis in Contemporary Historical Sociology and Russian Political Transformations

Abstract

Mikhail Maslovsky — Professor, Chair for General Sociology and Social Work, Nizhny Novgorod State University. Address: 23, Gagarin Ave., Nizhny Novgorod, 603950, Russian Federation. E-mail: maslovski@mail.ru

The article discusses civilizational analysis as a new paradigm in historical sociology. Within the Weberian sociological tradition, a distinction is made between the structure-oriented approaches of Randall Collins and Michael Mann and the culture-oriented civilizational perspective represented by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Johann Arnason. However, it is argued that all these theoretical approaches can be seen as complementary.

Particular attention is devoted to Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet model of modernity. He gave especially focused on the Russian cultural and political tradition, which combined a peripheral position within the Western world with some traits of a separate civilization. He discussed the character of imperial modernization in Russia and argued that the origins of the totalitarian project could only be understood with reference to its background. In Arnason’s view, the Soviet model incorporated the legacy of imperial transformation from above and the revolutionary vision of a new society which resulted in a specific version of modernity. Arnason distinguished between two types of communist political regimes: the charismatic variant leading to autocracy and a more rationalized oligarchic one. He described two main trends in the dynamics of the Soviet regime from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s: the internal re-traditionalization and the external one of globalization. Arnason did not discuss in detail the processes of social and political change in post-Soviet Russia, but his approach can be applied to the problematic of post-communist transformations.

In the article different theoretical perspectives on post-communist politics are discussed, including Seymour Lipset’s analysis of the social preconditions for democracy and Randall Collins’s geopolitical theory of legitimacy. According to Stephen Hanson, political processes in Russia during the last decade can be regarded as an authoritarian turn of a “post-imperial democracy”. Apparently, the issues of Orthodox religious tradition, civilizational aspects of the Soviet model of modernity and Soviet imperial background are related to the problematic of post-Soviet political transformations. From the perspective of civilizational analysis, post-Soviet Russia can hardly be considered a distinct civilization. While the civilizational identity of the Soviet system was formed by Marxism-Leninism as a “political religion” there is no such identity in today’s Russia. It is emphasized that recent political processes in Russia have been influenced mostly by the legacy of the Soviet model of modernity, and to a much lesser degree by the Orthodox tradition. As the studies of Levada Center demonstrate, in the 2000s public opinion in Russia accepted the Soviet epoch as a kind of “invented tradition” and expressed nostalgia for the years of Brezhnev’s rule. The legacy of the Soviet empire also continues to influence Russian politics. The imperial imagery is used by the Russian elite to increase the level of legitimacy of the political regime. However, according to Pierre Hassner, today’s Russia should be considered a “virtual empire”. On the whole, civilizational analysis can be seen as an important theoretical resource for understanding post-Soviet political transformations.