Modeling Social Self-Organization and Historical Dynamics. A General Approach

Akaev, Askar; Malkov, Sergey; Bilyuga, Stanislav; Malkov, Artemy; Musieva, Jameelah; Korotayev, Andrey

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-34999-7_15

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…4 For a thorough criticism of such approaches, as well as the question of the role of wars and other external factors in the process of state formation, see in Grinin 2003cin Grinin , 2004in Grinin , 2007a2014b, 2014cGrinin, Korotayev 2009b, 2012. But let us emphasize once again that the division between external and internal factors is somewhat arbitrary, since external forces in one system of coordinates become internal forces in another system (for more details, see Grinin 1997bGrinin , 2007aGrinin , 2007bGrinin , 2020bKorotayev 1997Korotayev , 2003bAkaev et al 2023;Sadovnichy et al 2023).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Evolution: Theoretical Aspects and General Outlines

Grinin,

Korotayev

2023

SEH

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The present article is devoted to social evolution both as a part of macroevolution and as a specific process that have led humanity to outstanding successes and heights (while creating in the meantime serious crises and major problems). The article examines important theoretical aspects of social evolution within the framework of a more general approach, which we call evolutionary studies. The authors give a definition of social evolution, examine its most important mechanisms, compare it with biological evolution, introduce the concept of social aromorphosis, and analyse the concept of unilinear and multilinear evolution. We show that only by considering the evolution as multilinear one can identify the major trends and patterns of social evolution and evolution in general. The authors view social evolution both as changes in a relatively local and not so long-term perspective and as a larger process that we call social macroevolution. In our understanding, social macroevolution is a special dimension of social evolution that encompasses a series of the most important and milestone transformations that have led to the emergence and development of the World System (and, accordingly, a theory that focuses on their analysis). The genesis of the World System and a number of its further changes are the key elements of the social macro-evolutionary process. Moreover, the emergence of the World System was not only the most important result of the entire previous course of social evolution, but also became, in a certain sense, the threshold beyond which it is absolutely necessary to distinguish social macroevolution as a special supra-social part of social evolution (i.e., the part that no longer relates to the level of only individual society). The main trends of macroevolution, such as the irreversibility of evolution, its particular direction, variability, are expressed both in the systemic features and in the transformations of the World System. The article was prepared as a part of the research work of the state task of the RANEPA.

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