Social development: traditional and modern approaches to study
Problem setting. The course of scientific debate for explaining social development has been determined for a long time by the competition of two theoretical and methodological approaches. The first approach – the evolutionist one affirmed the unity of the historical process, which obeys certain general laws (the so-called historical progress theories), and the second – the civilizational one presented social dynamics as a complex configuration of coexisting civilizations and cultures that successively replace each other over time (the historical circulation theories).