Мoscow: KRASSAND, 2009. - 344 p.
The present book, being a sequel to Dialectics of Force: Ontόbia, is dedicated to the topics of progress and force of society - topics which may appear trivial at first sight; a mountain of literature his been written on them. The author, however, having presented conscientiously the views on progress and force of all important thinkers of the past and the present, chose to follow a different way and formulated the criterion of progress based on entirely different scientific paradigms. Moreover, he dared to formulate the two Principles of social development, which are akin in their fundamental nature to the First and Second laws of thermodynamics. The result is a book that is very complex in content, yet the journalistic style of presentation used throughout most of the work makes it accessible even to those who never read Hegel.
The book is intended for instructors and students of philosophy and social sciences, and also for all those who are interest in problems of man and mankind.
© Alex Battler, 2009
© KRASSAND, 2009
Translated from the Russian by Pavel V. Sorokin
Dedicated to my teachers
David Isaakovich Goldberg
and
Alexander Grigorievich Yakovlev
Listed below is a Table of Contents of this book.
Contents
Part I. The phenomenology of progress
1. The philosophers of Antiquity on progress. Prometheus
2. The Middle Ages: was it progress - or regress?
3. The Renaissance
Niccolò Machiavelli
Jean Bodin
4. The Enlightenment: The debate between the modernists and the “classicists"
Bernard de Fontenelle
Abbé de Saint-Pierre
Giambattista Vico
5. The Enlightenment: France in the 18th century
Charles-Louis de Montesquieu and Voltaire
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot
The Encyclopédistes
Marie-Jean-Antoin-Nicolas de Condorcet
6. 19th-century France
Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon
Victor Cousin, Theodore Simon Jouffroy and
Francois-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot
August Comte
The idea of progress in the times of the French revolutions
Ernest Renan
7. England and the theory of progress: the 18th-19th centuries
William Godwin
Robert Owen
Herbert Spencer
8. Germans on progress: the 18th-19th centuries
Immanuel Kant
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Friedrich Schelling
Karl Krause
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Karl Marx on progress
9. Modern views on progress of the West (Europe): the 20th century and beyond
John Bagnell Bury
Alfred North Whitehead
Edgar Zilsel
Karl Popper
Julian Huxley
Teodor Shanin
Carla Aubry Kradolfer: progress and evolution
Michael Allaby
Optimists and pessimists
11. Russians on progress: the 19th-20th centuries and beyond
Lev Ilyich Mechnikov
Lev Platonovich Karsavin
The «transgress» of Andrei Fursov
Part II. Progress and force
1. The organic world: «progress» and complexity
Life begins with man
The problem of laws’ applicability
2. Force and progress
The philosophical aspects of consciousness and thought
Consciousness + thought = mind
Though and knowledge
Knowledge and force
Information and knowledge
Information – entropy – knowledge
Life and progress
3. The social laws of force and progress
4. Social force as a social-political concept
The state
Might of the state
Means and forms of policy realization. Violence.
Politics and the goals of the state
5. Knowledge of force and force of knowledge
Knowledge and truth
Knowledge and ideas
Measuring knowledge
Force, knowledge and progress
Part III. The life delta
1. From theory to practice
Increase of the human species
The development of science and technology –
the main factor in population growth and average lifespan increase
Population growth in the “non-standard” countries
Why they died out – the Aztecs, the Incas and other tribes
Life duration: what is it?
The law of entropy growth and the problem of endless life
2. The 20th century: the triumphant march of progress
The life delta: quantity has transformed into quality
Society and science: achievements and problems
3. The 21st century: opponents and allies of progress
Religion, average life expectancy and progress
Capitalism and socialism, or one nation’s false way
The crisis of Western capitalism
Forecasts of the Earth’s population number and average life expectancy
In place of a conclusion
Bibliography