The evolution of the theory of nation-building: from Starosolsky to Harari

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to reveal the essence of the nation as a complex socio-economic and spiritual-cultural phenomenon through a comparative analysis of modern and traditional approaches to the problems of social evolution of mankind. The research was carried out on the basis of the principles of systematicity, objectivity, comprehensiveness and historicism by applying the methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, abstraction, analogies, as well as problematic, comparative and retrospective methods. From our point of view, modern Ukrainian social scientists, who in one way or another touch on the problems of nation building, are not familiar with the latest concepts of Western historical science. We are talking, in particular, about the ideas of one of the brightest researchers in the field of so-called transnational history, the Israeli futurologist Yuval Noah Harari. It is interesting to analyze his views in comparison with the opinions of Volodymyr Starosolskyi, a representative of the classical national school of political science, who, unfortunately, is also little known to the Ukrainian scientific community. A detailed study of the materials on the topic allows us to assert that the nation is not only a temporal phenomenon, but also to a large extent a spatial phenomenon. On the one hand, the nation and the national state arose as a political superstructure over the system of non-economic coercion and the transfer of knowledge, separated in the modern era into particular functions. On the other hand, we should speak about the unique experience of industrialization of the Euro-Atlantic zone, transferred to other regions in the process of transforming these regions into peripheral areas of the Western European market. Like any social thing, a nation goes through periods of nascent growth and transformation in its development. This process is accompanied by successive evolutionary changes in the mental sphere, the essence of which is the permanent expansion of the zone of consumption of man-made content due to the reduction of the zone of contact with the natural environment. In this way, there is a transition from customary to project methods of forming societies, and the paradigm of scientific understanding of the national phase of civilizational progress is also undergoing a transformation.