The socio-philosophical foundations for a typology of civilizations

The purpose of this article is to identify socio-philosophical typologies of civilizations and identify their conceptual and disciplinary foundations. In social philosophy, there is a widespread typology of civilizations based on the dominance of particular elements of spiritual life. This is the division of civilizations into traditional ones, in which religion dominates, and technogenic (“liberal”) civilizations, where science dominates. The author takes issue with such classifying of civilizations on a spiritual basis. As an alternative, he proposes the possibility of determining types of civilizational development by considering the modes of production of material life. These are divided into the mode of production of material goods and the mode of the immediate production of human life. This makes it possible to distinguish two kinds of social development: a) the anthropocentric - with the dominant mode of human production; and b) the technocentric - dominated by the production of material goods. Taking into account the established terminological tradition, we can also talk about anthropogenic and technogenic types of civilizational development. Existing interpretations of the industrial civilization of the West as based on an ancient mode of production, and the traditional civilizations of the East as based on an Asiatic mode of production may also be reassessed through the lens of these modes of production of material life.