Socially-historical development can be explored as a successive development of universal epochal cycles in the spatio-temporal continuum which are the relevant units of analysis and prognosis of the socio-historical reality.
The ideal model for each from the above-mentioned cycles can be represented in the form of successive development of four elements of the single historical essence. These elements of the structure of the epochal cycle replace each other in a certain sequence: steady (involution), transient (co-evolution), steady (evolution), and again transient (revolution) periods of the social
development.
The epochal cycle is opened by a revolutionary period which creates the necessary and sufficient preconditions for the transition of a society to a new level (to a new cycle) of its formation. This impetuous period is associated with a radical change in the societal characteristics of the society. A revolution allegedly summarizes the previous development of the society and opens simultaneously
a new cycle. It is opposite to other transient period, co-evolution, by the direction of historical changes.
As we show below, co-evolution is the phase transition from the normative period of involution to the normative period of evolution, allegedly combines two normative periods, and is realized within the framework of one epochal cycle.
But revolution is a qualitative transformation of the entire society’s structure. At the same time, it creates a mechanism of transition from the normative state of evolution (a cycle being completed) to the normative state of involution (already a new cycle), a new level, and a new modus of the developing social entity.
During a revolutionary period, the role of a subject-individual is activated. Recall the period of the Great French revolution of 1789–1794, when a special role on the historical arena was played by distinctive personalities. The names of Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, and Napoleon became significant for each of the stages of the revolution, and their actions are typical of analogous processes.
Almost the same was observed in Russia in 1905–1917, when the cohort of activists-revolutionaries exceeded, in fact, the demand of the history for them. On this stage of the epochal cycle, we observe the activization of remarkable historical public figures which lead the creators of the history from the masses.
We recall the battles of the European bourgeois revolutions 1848–1849, when embodiments of the subject “I” played the essential roles in each country. They are leading historical personalities such as A. Thiers in France, C. Cavour in Italy, O. Bismarck in Germany, and L. Kossuth in Hungary.
The period of involution arises every time after the next (sudden, to a certain extent) revolutionary period of renovation of the society. This period of epochal cycle starts from a revolution which generates actually a new subject of the history and, by having changed radically social qualities, opens the new horizons of social development.
The historical sense of involution is the mastering by structural parts of the society, by human generations, of a new social quality. In a certain sense, we may say that this is the period of socialization of generations as well as the time of their generalization and moral aging. With the entrance into the state of involution, the social mechanisms which actualize a role of mythologemas and traditional bases of the regulation of social behaviour and social life as a whole
strengthen their influence. In the involutionary stage of the cycle, we are concerned with characteristics of the so-called “closed society” (by K. Popper).
In such a society, the freedom degree of individuals is limited by the influence of a collective and the moral makes progress, which advances socially meaningful aims and interests on the first place. The moral norms similar to those which acted in the Soviet Union (“Think first about the Homeland and then about himself”) turn the individual’s life into the continuous service to high social ideals.
By a psychological basis becomes the emotional-sensitive (but not rational) typology of man’s behaviour which is mainly oriented to external social control prevailing over internal self-control. Respectively, the leading socio-historical subject into the period of involution is a collective, almost total “We”.
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