A man of the European period of the spiritual Reformation introduced the postulate of valuable inadequacy of the past, present, and future into social philosophy. So the revival of ideas of humanistic historism will mean the ability of the global socium to carry on the responsibility for the further tragic character of reality.
The principle of historism remains to be one of the most important ones for sociology as well. In order to understand a contemporary social phenomenon, it is necessary, as a rule, to analyze its sources and the processes underlying it. In this case, socio-historical phenomena can be correctly
explained only within the frames of their historical time. At the same time,
the historical experience testifies to that Modern generates social actors which are unable to wait and to prepare successively and systematically themselves to the future. This forces to absolutize the present as an alternative to the past and future which threaten by new challenges.
The russian philosopher O. Panarin stated that the ideology of Modern gave birth to two methods to do violence to the past as something qualitatively different: these are its discrediting and modernization through the projection of contemporary standards and ideas on it10. In his opinion, this aim is supported by the so-called new social history which deprive, by applying contemporary
methods to the analysis of the farthest historical epochs, its consciousness of a shock from the meeting with the qualitatively other method of thinking and values.
All that turns us to the dilemma with which M. Weber was faced all his creative life: how the principle of attitude to a value and the principle of freedom from evaluative reasonings correlate in the real process of historical cognition. The famous German sociologist offered to distinguish two sides of an object of historical cognition, namely its ideal type and “secondary historical data” which concern the valuable characteristics of an object11.
So the important methodological finding of M. Weber, the notion of “ideal type”, takes a functionally meaningful place among the tools of historical sociology.
When speaking about the methodology of historical sociology, it is worth to pay attention to the possibility of application of methods which strengthen interdisciplinary ties between social sciences. One of the founders of the school “Annales” close to researchers of the new social history, T. Bloch underlined properly that the isolability of every specialist enables one to comprehend only
a half of truth even in its field. Therefore, the single true history which is possible only under the mutual help is the world history.
Beginning from the second half of the XXth century, the important methodological changes take place in theoretical history. In this case, as theoretical history, one understands more and more frequently the study and description of causal-resultative ties which are based on the interdisciplinary approach. These ties determine the behaviour and the field of development of big social groups in great chronological intervals with prognostic potentiality.
The statement of futurological tasks in front of theoretical history is a rather new phenomenon. In history, the past quickly acquires the features of stable inevitability which cancels any alternative variants of development. Therefore, it is traditionally believed that one can foresee only the future. The past is a reality in which there is no place for the possible. If we admit that any knowledge is
probable by its nature, then we must agree that the prognostication of the future is such a complicated thing as the interpretation of the past. The differentiation of these scientific problems is associated with different methodological tools.
The new comprehension of the vector of socio-historical time argues that the past can be similarly unforecasted as the future. The problem of interpretation of alternative variants of the past lies in the circle of tasks of historical phenomenology. Its paradigm is formed on the basis of philosophical ideas of E. Husserl and M. Heidegger who posed the problem to find the objective essence of consciousness. The studied object of historical phenomenology is a certain source as the intersubjective reality. The main methodological task of a historian-phenomenologist is the assignment of the right on monologue to a strange consciousness. Thus, historical phenomenology rejects the marxisthegelian paradigm which posed the task of explanation of the historical
reality. Instead of this, the problem of comprehension of a man from the past and, on this basis, the interpretation of the surrounding world should be considered.
The development of this trend of historical researches has formed the scientific directions of “microhistory” and “history of daily life”. The last concentrates attention not on political history which is actually perceived as the history of elite but on the people’s life in its functionality. In particular, verbal history turns to subjects of everyday life by including the unconventional
historical sources which give a possibility to learn moods of the “silent majority” into the scientific turnover, which influence significantly social processes.
Methodologically this direction of historical researches is close to sociological poll. During the processing of the results of investigations, a significant meaning is acquired by the cliometric, namely mathematical, methods of historical research of social systems, institutions, and trends.
At the same time, by concentrating on the research of important details, historians began to neglect by a large-scale vision of the past. An important step from “microhistory” to the Big or Universal history, which is based on the interdisciplinary approach with the use of ideas of synergetics, psychology, and futurology, was done on the boundary of millennia. In the most successive
and laconic way, these ideas were presented in the Russian sociology in the work of A. Nazaretyan “Civilizational crises in the context of Universal history”. The Universal history considers the problems of interaction of the noosphere and biosphere, tendencies of development of vectors of the historical
evolution, and futurological forecasts.
As one of the perspective directions of contemporary socio-historical researches, we mention historical globalistics. It also concentrates attention on contemporary evolutionistic theories. In the format of the global history, the researches within the “world-systemic theory” of I. Wallerstein and the
historical projections of geopolitical ideas are developing as well. The methodology of historical globalistics brings back historians from the field of really humanitarian knowledge to the sphere of social sciences.
This direction of researches is formed under conditions of the crisis of methodological models of structuralism and the loss of ideas of the essence and unity of the historical process. Its development takes place under conditions of the actualization of the cultural-historical approach and
domination of the concept of historical relativism which casts doubt on the possibility of application of philosophical concepts in the process of historical analysis. Instead of this, historical globalistics objects to eurocentristic, linear, and purely deterministic concepts of the traditional world history.
Its methodological tools include the theories of cultural anthropology and synergetics. In this case, the socio-historical reality again becomes existently open for various possibilities.
On the whole, the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third one, the formal start of a new historical epoch, and the qualitative renovation of the world socium (the humanity), which is the principal thing, stimulate the imperative need in a renovated paradigm of social theory for the
scientific community. We bear the paradigm of social science in mind which translates adequately the ideas of humanistic social engineering on the contemporary situation and joins the idea of cyclic development. The creation of a suitable relevant model opens new horizons for synthetic interdisciplinary researches.
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