On one hand, intensively takes place the process of further differentiation of scientific disciplines and the specialization of their object fields and the circle of tasks which they are called to solve. The case in hand is, for example, about the really theoretical sociology and history and] about a number of applied sociological disciplines. An analogous position is observed in the environment
of special (or auxiliary) historical disciplines whose number is already about one hundred. They widened significantly the own subject-problem field including the contemporary developments in the branch of social sciences which are oriented on mathematical and comparative methods of analysis.
On other hand, the formation of “highly specialized” scientific branches closed on themselves limits the possibilities for efficient use of the achievements of various scientific disciplines. A paradoxical situation arises, when we know increasingly more about a decreasing problem field, but
simultaneously lose the general conceptual perspective. That’s why, we meet now the objective need of not only permanent analysis, but of a certain conceptual synthesis.
The major joint problem concerning the general methodology is the cognition of the social historical time. The spatio-temporal characteristics essentially influence the determination of methodological approaches to the analysis of the social and historical reality. This tie can be traced in the still
rather popular civilizational formational paradigm of many historical researches. For the classics of marxism, there existed in essence only one global civilization which developed according to the objective historical laws.
These laws should be comprehensively learnt and put on service to a progressive class called to substitute the general social position by a better one. However, with the comprehension of cultural-anthropological differences between different geographic zones and with the critical realization of a simplified black-and-white picture of the social reality and the historical past, the scientific picture of the world begins to resemble a complicated multicolour mosaic.
Respectively, the cognition of historical and social characteristics of various objects under study becomes nonlinear. Indeed, it is clear that certain local civilizational characteristics set the geographic-spatial parameters of “a place of development” and the temporal characteristics define the formational ones.
At the same time, such a turn of scientific thought induced the general crisis of methodological tools of the world history. There arose the problem of interpretation of not only the very possibility of existence of the general history,
but also the possibility of its development by scientific laws. In the systematic way, these claims to “the poverty of historicism” were formulated by K. Popper.
He emphasized that the universal humanity history does not exist, but there are only the separate variants of the history of local parts of the humanity.
In history, there exist personal and irrational factors which make it unique and unrepeatable. Therefore, any historical prophecies as for the world history, which goes as if by a definite course, are impossible7. This made actually a first ideological impact to the classic understanding of the socio-historical time whose vector goes in the process of development from the past through the
contemporary instant to the future.
However, the modern history philosophy still continues its influence on public consciousness by forming the already lesser but really existent (and hardly dying) area with countries which carry the sense of socio-historical development through the idea of unity of historical time whose foundation is composed by the monotheistic idea of the unique God. The will of the Creator and his co-authors
(various social actors) defines the vector of historical time from the reference point to the dreamt final which clarifies the sense of human reality. The Ideal of the epoch of Modern still acts and offers a joint future for the whole humanity irrespective of locally civilizational distinctions. Today, big political and theoretical constructions associated with marxism and liberalism continue
to work for this idea. Both trends were and remain joint in the single vision of the perspective of modernization of the general problem of social adaptation of the peoples earlier “delayed” in their development to calls of the contemporaneity.
But K. Popper, by declaring the historical design directed to radical social changes to be impossible, was able for some time to cold the impetuous imagination of “social engineers” of the future. Moreover, after the crash of the soviet alternative historical project, it was declared about “the end of history”.
The author of this concept, F. Fukuyama, asserted that, near “the end of history”, there is no need for all the societies to be liberal and it suffices that any ideological claims for other forms of organization of social life be forgotten”.
Thus, the ideology of post-modern dominating henceforth retains only the right to live “in the eternal contemporaneity” in the world divided by social statuses, by forgetting any great socio-historical projects. In this case, the classic concept about socio-historical time as the unity of the past, present, and future is substituted by a new paradigm of dichotomic opposition of the archaic past
to the almost ideal present. By this reason, the traditional societies are declared to be unable to an adequate answer to challenges of post-modern. In this way,
the global civilization is again divided into selected peoples which live in the time of Internet and into nations-derelicts which try to survive in the unfavourable environment. By considering “the limits of growth” (close to the ideas of T. Malthus) proclaimed by experts of the Rome club still in the 1970s, the latter remain only to fit the contemporary imperatives of the so-called “steady development” and to fully forget about the content and tendency of sociohistorical time.
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