The social and Modern

The gradual negation of traditional ideas of the social as such that is given from the God and is managed therefore by the Supreme Intellect took place in the XVII–XVIIIth centuries in the European epoch of Enlightenment. Aristotle considered the social Space as a closed system. After the discovery made by J. Bruno, the concept of the infinite Universe became gradually consolidated.
Since that time, a man considers the environment as a subject of scientific and experimental cognition. Starting from the XVIIIth century, time becomes linear and irreversible. Instead of cyclic historical ideas, the ideas of infinite
historical progress are established.
A significant contribution to this process was made by J.-J. Rousseau who advanced the hypothesis of origin of a “civilized state” which is characterized by the presence of a civil society due to the conclusion of a public treaty. The Great French revolution of 1789–1794 began a new big social cycle of the history whose sense of not only in the transformation of a man into an irreligious sceptic, but into a co-author of the Creator. These ambitions are the basis for the development of the social under the conditions of Modern.

The social and Modern. Essential changes in the semantics of the notion “social” happened for the time of Enlightenment. The desacralization of the social world as Space occurred gradually, which was typical of the sensation of traditional society. The religious reformation of the XVI–XVIIth centuries in Europe gave birth to a civil society whose structures operate in the urban
civilization. The Protestant idea of the division of peoples into the selected (proprietors) and derelicts (proletarians who, by the tradition of the Roman
right, have only their descendants in property) caused the transition from the
estate-based differentiation of the society which is inherent in traditional
sociums, to the class-based one. Rationalism liberated a man from traditional
taboos. One of the consequences of this process is racism. In this case, a colonization compelled to deviate from the Christian idea of general brotherhood of peoples, since the savages of other sociums should be ”civilized”.

The modern global civilization was formed in the XVII–XIXth centuries by the efforts of western rationalists as a complicated system of many cultures and local civilizations.
By starting from different ideas of the social, peoples formed differently the systems of production and distribution of material goods. Traditional societies are characterized by the production for consumption. Whereas, in the modern society, the production is oriented to the receipt of income. The main metaphor of the traditional socium is the idea of the social as the related. But, for the modern society, the social is, first of all, the competitive and market-based.
The modern paradigm for the notion of “social” was proposed into 1845 by K. Marx who stated that the man’s essence is not a certain abstract inherent in a separate individual but, in its reality, is the totality of all public relations.
That is, the actions of individuals generate a society. However, a socium and
an individual are indivisible and form each other. The phenomenon of “social” is identified out of the limits of personal contacts and is functioning with the help of social institutions.

The famous historian and social thinker A. Toynbee considered a society as an institution of higher order which comprises all other institutions, but it does
not belong to any one26. He stated that a society cannot be a source of social
action, but a separate individual or a group of individuals whose fields of actions create a society can be such a source. A society is a mediator such that individuals interact between themselves with its help. Persons rather than societies create the human history.

At the same time, the dual opposition of the individual and the collective allows one to state about the impossibility to negate a mass factor in the historical process. With special force, this tendency manifests itself from the time of formation of the so-called mass society, a diagnosis to which was given by the Spanish philosopher J. Ortega-y-Gasset in his work “The revolt of the masses”.
In this case, in socio-historical processes, decisive are not only the quantitative
characteristics of a certain social group, but its size multiplied by social activity.
For example, in the 1960s, the West was an arena for the competition for social
influence between the class of professional politicians and the movement of various civil initiatives. The democracy of participation calls for enhanced social activity out of the limits of the production sphere in public-political affairs.
However, the mass consumer society subordinates more and more the sociocultural
and political spheres to its interests, which implies a gradual dehumanization of the notion of “social”.