The Growth of Contingency of Images of the Past and the Transformation of Macrohistory

Abstract

The article analyzes the contradictions in the development of various fields of macrohistory, primarily theories of modernization and multiplicities of modernities, the civilizational approach, and global history. The origins of these contradictions are traced to the increasing instability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity characteristic of the late modern period. Drawing on the works of N. Luhmann, M. Serres, A. A. Oleynikov, M. Ferretti, M. Rothberg, P. Katzenstein, S. Conrad, and others, the author demonstrates the growing contingency of social communications, a general shift in temporal structures, and the gradual formation of multidirectional memory and multiple identities. At the same time, some factors associated with the collapse of Western developmental historicism tend to relativize theories of the nation, modernization, local civilization, and globalization, while asserting radical historicism. Other factors, stemming from the need to compensate for contingency and the pursuit of social consensus, facilitate attempts to revive traditional values and ideas of local civilization, and to preserve teleological elements of global history. A broad dialogue is emerging between theories of modernity, the civilizational approach, and global history. Drawing on the works of J. Arnason, G. Therborn, R.G. Braslavsky, M. David-Fox, J. Jansen, and J. Osterhammel, the study analyzes the conceptual content of civilizational formations, entangled modernities, multi-perspectivity, multi-scalarity, and related terms.