The social and post-modern

The founder of sociology A. Comte determined the future society as its object which will cover and join the whole humanity. Such an aim at modernistic globalization was leading in the XXth century in the period of competition of the socialistic and liberal social paradigms. At that time, modernism leaned on the formational vision of the joint world history whose development was characterized by gradual progress. On the boundary of the XXIth century, it is understandable that a developed consumer society is the monopolistic product of only the western civilization.
The Russian politologist O. Panarin stated that contemporary societies do not simply reproduce themselves in history, they are involved in the creation of
a megasociety. Therefore, the decisive social relations are now those concerning the strategy of formation of the future rather than the relations of property. The ideology of post-modern denies the steady norms and procedures of social life and criticizes totally “the big senses” and projects.
The faith in the Messianic historical perspectives is lost. Post-modernism
deprive the history of the vector of future. From the times of K. Popper, the historical design is declared by “poverty of historicism”. The sociohistorical
methodology of the period of modernism existed on the principles of formation of objective laws and tendencies. The leading values of Modern were democracy, equality, and progress. Liberals of post-Modern affirm, on the
contrary, the equivalence of any time intervals and offer to give up any troubles
about the sense and directivity of social time.

Most symptomatic for post-Modern in the interpretation of the social is the return to the concepts which prefer the priority of the biological constituent
of a man. The case in hand is racism and social-Darwinism which lead a socium to the arena of struggle for existence in which only the most adapted persons can win a victory. The joint historical time of the beginning and end of the history is replaced by the global segregation of peoples divided into the selected and derelicts. In this case, the powerful center as a global City exploits the poor provincial periphery.
The termination of the social cycle started by the Great French revolution of
the end of the XVIIIth century is marked by the search for the new content of the notion of “social globalism”.

Thus, the historical motion of the semantics of the notion of “social” allows one to make attempt to typologize the mostly used definitions.
Descriptive definitions: the social is the totality of certain properties and peculiarities of public relations which is integrated by an individual or a community in the process of joint activity under specific conditions and
manifests itself in their connections, the attitude to a place in the society,
phenomena, and the processes of social life. The field of realization of the social is focused on the interaction and coexistence of the individual and the public Historic definitions: the social is a product of traditions and all the previous development of the humanity. In this context, one should also consider the problem of historical ties of different generations.

Normative definitions, as a rule, accent attention on the social life of an individual and a socium governed by the system of normative regulations and
control over their execution. In this case, a special attention is paid to the role of
ideas, symbols, and structures in social life.
Definition of the social through the psychological and vice versa. K. Marx,
in particular, noted that a social reality determines consciousness. That is, the psychological reveals itself in this paradigm through the social. However, because the social and the psychological are indivisible in essence and have a joint object, namely a man, we may suppose that, in the world of post-material
values, on the contrary, it is appropriate to interpret the social in terms of the
psychological.
Such a content of the notion “social” opens wide possibilities for the development of new methodological approaches to historical sociology.