Rostow, Walt) (1916-) - American economic historian who made significant contributions to the study of economic and social development and served as a consultant to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His most famous work, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), was subtitled The Non-Communist Manifesto. Rostow identified five "stages of economic growth": traditional society; shift prerequisites; shift; movement towards maturity; maturity. The level of investment was seen as a decisive factor in putting societies on a growth trajectory. This study was intended as a theoretical aid in addressing the problem of underdevelopment applicable to all societies. The approach was criticized by A.G. Frank (1969) as theoretically and empirically inadequate and unlikely to be a suitable recipe for development, since it ignores the history of imperialism and the dialectical relationship between development and underdevelopment.
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Rostow Walt Whitman
1916) - Amer. economist, sociologist, politician figure. Along with R. Aron, he is one of the creators of the modern version of the theory of industrial society. He entered the history of sociology as the author of the concept of economic stages. growth. The problem of identifying the stages through which any economy must go through in the process of its development, historians of the economy of the early twentieth century. was solved through analogies with human life (growth, maturity, decline). Then in the middle of the century, the Australian. theorist K. Clark described this process as a successive change in the dominance of primary (agricultural), secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (trade and services) production. R. proposed to allocate five stages in the history of the society, characterized by different. technological level. development: 1) "traditional society" - agrarian society with primitive agricultural production, hierarchical social. a structure with power concentrated in the hands of landowners, a "pre-Newtonian" level of science and technology; 2) "transitional society" - the period of creating the prerequisites for a "shift" (an increase in capital investment per capita, an increase in agricultural productivity, the emergence of "new types of enterprising people" acting as the driving force of the society, the growth of "nationalism ", striving to provide an economic foundation for national security, the emergence of a centralized state); 3) the stage of "shift" (take-off) - the period of the "industrial revolution", leading to an increase in the share of capital accumulation, the rapid growth of the main industries, a radical change in production methods (at this stage, according to R., England was at the end of the 18th century ., France and the USA - in the middle of the 19th century, Germany - in the second half of the 19th century, Russia - in 1890 - 1914, India and China - from the beginning of the 50s of the 20th century); - the stage of "maturity" - an industrial society, characterized by the rapid development of industry, the emergence of new industries, an increase in the level of investment to 20% of the national. income, the widespread introduction of the achievements of science and technology, the growth of the urban population up to 60-90%, an increase in the share of skilled labor, a change in the structure of employment (according to R., a transitional period of 50-60 years is necessary to reach the stage of maturity); 5) the era of "high mass consumption" - the main problems of society are the problems of consumption, not production, the main industries - the service sector and the production of consumer goods, and not traditional industries. The concept of economic stages. growth, considered by R. as an alternative to Marxism, should, according to his plan, supplant the historical. materialism from modern sociology. R.'s views further served as one of the sources of theories of post-industrial society. Cit.: The Stage Of Economic Growth. Camb. 1960. D.M. Nosov.
American sociologist, economist, statesman. Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas (since 1969). One of the authors of the concept of "industrial society". Author of the concept of "stages of economic growth". Major works: The Stages of Economic Growth. Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), The Process of Economic Growth (second edition - 1962), View from the Seventh Floor (1964), Dynamics of Soviet Society (1967), United States on world stage. Essays on modern history" (1969), "Politics and stages of growth" (1971), etc. R. proposed to distinguish five types of society in accordance with the different stages of its evolution. According to R., this is a "traditional society" (agrarian, hierarchical, with a concentration of power among landowners, primitive technology and science); "transitional society" (characterized by the intensification of agricultural production, the formation of centralized states on the basis of "nationalism", the emergence of a new class of "enterprising people"); "shift stage" society (era of the industrial revolution); a society at the "stage of maturity" (industrial society with a significant (up to 20%) component of capital investments in the structure of national income, a wide spread of achievements in science and technology, the transformation of urban dwellers into the predominant sector of the population, and the growth of highly skilled labor in the overall structure of employment); society of the "era of high mass consumption" (the dominance of the service sector and the production of consumer goods with associated transformations of the "quality of life" of people). R.'s concept, which was one of the modernist sociological variants of the refutation of the hypothesis of socio-economic formations, first of all attracted attention by the accentuated overcoming of the Eurocentrism inherent in the corresponding doctrine of Marx.
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ROSTOW Walt Whitman
(1916-2003) - amer. economist, sociologist, historian of social-economics. thoughts, polit. figure. Main cit.: "Investment and the Great Depression" (1938), "Essay on the development of the British economy in the XIX century." (1948), "The Process of Economic Growth" (1952), "The Transition in a Growth of Self-Sufficiency" (1955), "The Stages of Economic Growth" (1959), "The Politics and Stages of Growth" (1971), "How It Began: The Origin Modern Economics” (1975), “World Economy: History and Prospects” (1978), “The Theorists of Economic Growth from D. Hume to the Present Day” (1990). Along with R. Aron yavl. one of the creators of the modern version of the theory of industrial society. He entered the history of sociology as the author of the concept of “stages of economics. growth." The problem of singling out the stages to-rye must go through any economy. system in the process of its development, economic historians of the early XX century. was solved through analogies with human life (growth, maturity, decline). Then, in the middle of the 20th century, the Australian theorist K. Clark described this process as a successive change in the dominance of primary (agricultural), secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (trade and services) production. R. proposed to single out 5 stages in the history of the society, characterized by decomp. technology level. development: 1) “traditional society "- agrarian society with primitive agricultural production, hierarchical social. structure, power concentrated in the hands of landowners, "pre-Newtonian" level of development of science and technology; 2) “transitional society” - the period of creating the prerequisites for a “shift” (an increase in capital investments per capita, an increase in agricultural productivity, the emergence of new types of “enterprising people” acting as the driving force of the society, the growth of nationalism, striving to provide the economic foundation of national security, the emergence of a centralized state); 3) the stage of "shift" (English take-off) - the period of the "industrial revolution", leading to an increase in the share of capital accumulation, the rapid growth of the main capital. industries, a radical change in production methods; 4) the stage of "maturity" - an industrial society, characterized by the rapid development of industry, the emergence of new industries, an increase in the level of investment to 20% of the national. income, the widespread introduction of the achievements of science and technology, the growth of the urban population, an increase in the share of skilled labor, a change in the structure of employment (according to R., a transitional period of 50-60 years is necessary to reach the stage of maturity); 5) the era of "high mass consumption", when the main. problems about-va become problems of consumption, not production, DOS. industries - the service sector and the production of consumer goods, not traditional. industries. R.'s views, his concept of economic stages. growth, considered as an alternative to Marxism, later served as one of the sources of the theory of post-industrial society. L.G. Skulmovskaya
Biography
Born into a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. Studied at Yale University; Rhodes Scholar at Oxford; PhD (1940). He taught at Columbia, Oxford, Cambridge and Texas universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1945). Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1969).
Scientific activity
The most famous theoretical concepts were developed by W. Rostow in the late 1950s and early 1960s, even before he entered politics. Developing the ideas first put forward in the 1940s by P. Drucker, J. K. Galbraith and R. Aron, U Rostow became one of the developers of the theory of post-industrial society. If his predecessors focused on the development of an industrial society into a post-industrial one, then Rostow studied, first of all, the formation of an industrial society. He outlined the theory of the stages of economic development in his most famous book, which was called the Stages of Economic Growth. Non-Communist Manifesto (1960).
Political activity
In 1961, Rostow temporarily retired from teaching and immersed himself in politics. When John F. Kennedy became president, he appointed Rostow to the post of deputy assistant to the president for national security. One of the central foreign policy ideas of the new government - the idea of pulling backward countries up to the level of developed ones - was initiated precisely by Rostow. According to his views, developed countries should help those who are lagging behind, accelerating their passage through the stages of economic growth.
The desire to impose progress by force, combined with anti-communism, however, played a role in fueling the infamous Vietnam War. Rostow believed that until Vietnam reached a high level of development and gained immunity against the "communist threat", America should by all means prevent the spread of communist ideas there (as well as in other countries). This idea led Rostow to demand that the Vietnamese conflict be resolved by purely forceful methods. He defended this tough position under the next president, L. Johnson, first serving as a member of the Inter-American Committee on Cooperation for Progress, and then as a national security adviser.
Social activity
With the advent of President R. Nixon in 1969, Rostow, with his reputation as a military "hawk", was forced to leave public service. Trying to resume teaching, however, he encountered great difficulties. The American scientific intelligentsia, gravitating towards liberal and pacifist ideas, considered Rostow responsible for the Vietnamese tragedy. The only place where he managed to find a job was the School of Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin, created by L. Johnson. In this rather minor institution, Rostow became a professor of political economy. He was actively engaged in teaching and research activities, and until the very end of his life he did not feel any regrets about his position in the Vietnam War. In the last decade of his life, Rostow headed a public organization created with his active participation, which was engaged in programs that ensure the monitoring of pregnant women and the provision of assistance to children.
scientific ideas
Rostow has written more than 30 books in various areas of social science - economic history, economic theory, political science, Sovietology, etc. His main scientific contribution is related to three concepts - the theory of "economic growth stages", the concept of transition phases to democracy and the price theory of long conjuncture waves.
The very idea of identifying the stages that society must consistently go through as it develops was not discovered by Rostow. Its roots lie in the concepts of the first sociologists (O. Comte, G. Spencer), on the basis of which K. Marx created his theory of formational development. Instead of the principle proposed by Marx of separating the phases of development according to the modes of production, Rostow proposed to take into account other economic criteria - technological innovations, the rate of economic growth, changes in the structure of production, etc.
W. Rostow distinguishes five stages of the development of society, two of which are intermediate, providing a transition to a new phase of development.
- traditional society. These are agrarian societies with rather primitive technology, the predominance of agriculture in the economy, the class structure and the power of large landowners.
- Transitional society. At this stage, the prerequisites are created for the transition to a new phase of development: entrepreneurship is born, centralized states are formed, national self-consciousness is growing.
- A "shift" stage with industrial revolutions and major socio-economic and political transformations following them.
- The stage of "maturity", associated with the development of the scientific and technological revolution, the growth of cities.
- The era of "high mass consumption". Its most important feature is the significant growth of the service sector, the transformation of the production of consumer goods into the main sector of the economy.
In characterizing the modern post-industrial society, domestic and foreign authors distinguish such features as a sharp increase in "artificial intellectual industries" - microelectronics, biotechnology, telecommunications; increasing globalization of the economy. New problems are noted, caused primarily by the unfavorable demographic situation in most Western countries. For all the importance of technological progress, the achievements of the economy in a post-industrial society, the main thing that, according to leading researchers, determines the nature of its development today is the spiritual potential of a person, his knowledge, abilities, values, priorities. This is what is becoming the central resource of the 21st century.
In his later work, Politics and Stages of Growth (1971), he added a sixth stage to the previously identified five stages - the stage of "search for the quality of life", when the spiritual development of a person comes to the fore.
Rostow believed that no country could skip any stage or pass them in any other order. Although the path of development is the same for all countries of the world, the passage of stages is more or less individual in nature - in different countries the pace of passage through the stages could vary greatly. The countries that are lagging behind in development borrow the experience of the advanced ones and have a chance to catch up or even overtake them. For example, although the "take-off" of industry in the United States occurred about half a century later than in Great Britain, but America approached the phase of "high mass consumption" several decades earlier than the United Kingdom.
Marxists have criticized Rostow's theory for technological determinism, but economic historians have met the concept of stages of economic growth rather skeptically, considering it too speculative. When cliometrics began to develop in the 1960s-1970s, it turned out that the “take-off” phase, as W. Rostow described it, was not found in the economic history of developed countries. The Industrial Revolution was not really a sudden and rapid rise, but a smoother and longer process. Perhaps the only country where industrialization took place exactly according to the Rostow scenario is the USSR of the Stalinist period. Thus, the theory of stages of economic growth played an important role in stimulating the analysis of the industrial revolution, but was generally rejected.
Among the economists involved in the theory of long waves of the conjuncture discovered by N. D. Kondratiev, Rostow is known as one of the representatives of the price approach to explaining the causes of these long-term fluctuations. In Why the Poor Get Richer and Wealth Grows Slower (1980), he proposed that rises and falls in the price level be seen as an initial factor that influences the rise and fall of innovation and, ultimately, the alternation of growth and expansion phases in the economy as a whole. .
In our country, for a long time, Rostow's ideas were subjected to harsh criticism. The fact that Rostow provided his most famous book with the defiant subtitle The Non-Communist Manifesto, not to mention his political activities as an ardent anti-Communist, could not help but make him a favorite target for criticism from Soviet researchers. Only in post-Soviet Russia, Rostow's ideas are beginning to be perceived as part of the overall development of world science and are no longer evaluated through the prism of ideology.
Rostow, best known for his role in shaping US foreign policy in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, was a staunch anti-communist and adamant believer in the effectiveness of capitalism and free enterprise. He served as national security adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was a strong supporter of US involvement in the Vietnam War. In recent years, he has taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, working with his wife, Elspeth Rostow, who later became dean of the school.
He was a prolific writer and wrote extensively in defense of the free enterprise economy, especially in developing countries. In 1960, he published The Stages of Economic Growth: A non-communist manifesto, which has been used as a textbook in several areas of the social sciences.
His older brother, Eugene Rostow, a legal scholar and civil servant, also held many high government positions in foreign affairs.
Walt Rostow was born October 7, 1916 in New York (New York City), in a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia (Russia). His parents, Victor Rostow and Lillian Rostow, were active supporters of socialism, and named all three of their sons - Eugene Victor Debs Rostow (Eugene Victor Debs Rostow), Ralph Waldo Emerson Rostow (Ralph Waldo Emerson Rostow) and Walt Whitman Rostow - in honor of the trade union leader, philosopher and poet, who shared a commitment to socialist ideas.
At the age of 15, Walt became a student at Yale University (Yale University), receiving a full scholarship to study, and graduated at 19, and in 1940, 24-year-old Rostow defended his doctorate there. The Rhodes Scholarship allowed him to also study at Oxford's Balliol College (Balliol College, Oxford).
In 1936, during the abdication crisis of Edward VIII, Rostow helped journalist Alistair Cooke cover the events for the NBC radio network. After completing his education, Rostow taught economics at Columbia University (Columbia University).
During World War II, Rostow served in the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, under Major General William Joseph Donovan. Among other tasks, he was involved in the selection of targets for American bombing raids. Later, Nicholas Katzenbach, former US Attorney General under President Johnson, joked that he finally understood the difference between himself and Walt Rostow - he was a navigator who was shot down and he spent two years in a prisoner of war camp, and Rostow was the guy who chose targets for him.
Immediately after the war, Rostow became assistant to the head of the German-Austrian Economics Section at the US State Department in Washington, D.C..
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In 1946-1947 he returned to Oxford as a professor of American history, but already in 1947 he was forced to leave his academic career, as he was appointed Assistant Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Europe. In this position, he was involved in the development of the Marshall Plan.
In 1949, Rostow taught American history at Cambridge University (Cambridge University), from 1950 to 1961 he was professor of economic history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and in 1951-1961 was an employee of the Center for International Studies (Center for International Studies) at MIT .
In 1958, he became the speechwriter for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1960, Rostow joined the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, a year later he took the position of deputy national security adviser and at the end of 1961 was appointed one of the advisers to the US State Department and chairman of the Policy Planning Council.
Having vacated his position as national security adviser in 1969, Rostow returned to teaching history and economics at the University of Texas, where he remained until his death on February 13, 2003, at the age of 86.
Rostow's philosophy of history was written as an open counterbalance to Marx's teachings about the imminent advent of a worldwide communist society. Rostow, recognizing the existence of an objective pattern in history, proposed to consider it as the history of "stages of economic growth", when it rises from the traditional state (general poverty, half-starved existence) through a series of intermediate steps to the "stage of mass consumption". According to Rostow, only England and the USA have reached this stage so far. Rostow absolutized the role of productive forces in the life of society, the construction of consumption in the main value orientation of history is controversial. But this theory must be taken concretely historically: it was created at a time when there was an acute struggle for influence on the social consciousness of the peoples of the "third world", and the leader of the communist camp threatened to "bury capitalism" economically, to which more than a century ago he called "the proletarians of all world" "Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels.
Rostow proposed to distinguish five stages in the history of society, characterized by different levels of technological development: (1) "traditional society" - an agrarian society with primitive agricultural production, a hierarchical social structure, power concentrated in the hands of landowners, a "pre-Newtonian" level of science and technology; (2) "transitional society" - the period of creating the prerequisites for a "shift" (increase in capital investment per capita, growth in agricultural productivity, the emergence of "new types of enterprising people" acting as the driving force of society, the growth of "nationalism" seeking to ensure economic the foundation of national security, the emergence of a centralized state); (3) the stage of "shift" (take-off) - the period of "industrial revolution", leading to an increase in the share of capital accumulation, the rapid growth of major industries, a radical change methods production (at this stage, Rostow, England was at the end of the 18th century, France and the USA - in the middle of the 19th century, Germany - in the second half of the 19th century, Russia - in 1890-1914, India and China - from the beginning of the 50s. 20th century); (4) the stage of "maturity" - an industrial society characterized by the rapid development of industry, the emergence of new industries, an increase in the level of capital investment to 20% of national income, the widespread introduction of scientific and technological achievements, the growth of the urban population up to 60-90%, an increase in the share of skilled labor , a change in the structure of employment (according to Rostow, a transitional period of 50-60 years is necessary to reach the stage of maturity); (5) the era of "high mass consumption" - the main problems of society are the problems of consumption, not production, the main industries - the service sector and the production of consumer goods, rather than traditional industries. The concept of the stages of economic growth, considered by R. as an alternative to Marxism, was, according to his plan, to displace historical materialism from modern. sociology. views Rostow later served as one of the sources of theories of post-industrial society.
4. Philosophical and historical concept of K. Jaspers. Criticism of the rationalistic interpretation of the history of K. Marx. Man and history. Types of communications and the meaning of history. The concept of "axial time". The formation of human history as world history.
The main theme of the philosophy of history of K. Jaspers (1883-1969) is the theme of the unity of world history. Jaspers is skeptical about the popular in the 20-30s of the XX century. theory of cultural cycles, developed by Spengler and later by Toynbee, and emphasizes that humanity has a common origin and a single path of development, despite all the differences in the lives of individual peoples and cultures.
Jaspers divides the entire history of mankind into three consecutive phases: prehistory, history and world history.
A special role in the phase of history is played by the period called by Jaspers the axial time. During this period between 800 and 200 B.C. BC. the most abrupt turn in history took place, a person of the type that exists to this day appeared, and an axis of world history was formed, as it were.
Jaspers emphasizes that the axis of world history, if it exists at all, can only be discovered empirically, as a fact that is significant for all people, including Christians. "This axis should be sought where the prerequisites arose that allowed a person to become what he is; where such a formation of human existence took place with amazing fruitfulness, which, regardless of a certain religious content, could become so convincing ... that thereby for all peoples, a common framework for understanding their historical significance would be found.
Many extraordinary things happened during the axial time. Confucius and Lao Tzu lived in China at that time, and all directions of Chinese philosophy arose. In India, the Upanishads arose, the Buddha lived, in philosophy all the possibilities of philosophical understanding of reality were considered, up to skepticism, materialism, sophistry and nihilism.
In the axial time, almost simultaneously and independently of each other, several spiritual centers were formed, internally related to each other. The most important characteristic of this time is the breakthrough of the mythological worldview, the transition from myth to logos.
Jaspers identifies four heterogeneous periods of human history: the Promethean era (the emergence of speech, tools, the ability to use fire), the era of the great cultures of antiquity, the era of the spiritual basis of human existence (beginning with the axial time, when a genuine person is fully formed in his spiritual openness to the world) and era of technological development.
5. Philosophy of History F. Nietzsche. On the benefits and harms of history for life. Historical non-historical and supra-historical knowledge. The idea of "eternal return", negativism and pessimism as a method of historical knowledge.
Much more fruitful in German historiosophy was the school of psychologizing philosophers of life, the most prominent representatives of which were Friedrich Nietzsche. In contrast to the positivists, they did not see in reason and rationality the driving force and goal of progressive historical development, but passionately sought to turn the spirit into an irrational Spirituality in order to make spiritual values more personal, free and sovereign. In this case, the goal of scientific research becomes a holistic review of the entire historical canvas in its great lines of development. Such integrity is achieved by liberation from the logical constructions of dialectics and positivism, turning into an intuitive, understanding psychology of history.
Nietzsche changed the very atmosphere of historical science, set fantasy in motion, changed the scale of evaluation of historical events. Rationalism and criticism have given way to intuitively and sovereignly posited values. Thanks to this, historical science has acquired sharpness, subtlety and freedom of judgment.
F. Nietzsche went down in history with a daring idea - "to look at science from the point of view of an artist." He spoke of himself as "an artist with a penchant for historical science." His artistic nature was close to the romanticism of I.O. Goethe and R. Wagner, which was deeply reflected in philosophical works (especially of the early period).
It is important to emphasize that F. Nietzsche believed in development without God and against God. The passionate atheism and anti-Christianity of F. Nietzsche were strengthened by a heightened sense of one's own self - the feeling of a person who was afraid of losing his greatness, individuality and freedom in religion. This is how the philosophy of the history of radical atheism is created, from which conclusions follow about the complete self-deification and liberation of man by the hands of the aesthetizing aristocracy of the spirit.
The utopia of the superman is closely connected with the philosophy of history, or, more precisely, with the psychological construction of the philosophy of history. The spirit here, in the course of historical evolution, soars aristocratically above the masses in order to proudly and alone manifest itself in creative personalities. Side by side with the superman live ordinary people who carry within themselves a terrible possibility of decline and decay, condemned to a herd existence. But they are necessary in history: thanks to their inexhaustible will to live, positive qualities accumulate in the process of evolution, which leads to the emergence of more and more separate original brilliant personalities.
For F. Nietzsche, the history of mankind is a vain path of continuous errors and delusions. Therefore, he offered the world a radical reassessment of values in the spirit of his own system of values, a new chronology, originating from Zarathustra, through whom F. Nietzsche himself spoke.
The ingenious improvisations of F. Nietzsche had a significant impact not only on historical science, but also on the entire atmosphere of social thought of his time: theorists of all political trends, from conservatism to fascism, quoted his works. In historiosophy, O. Spengler became a brilliant student of F. Nietzsche. In his "The Decline of Europe" we trace the same method: a majestic general overview of great cultures and a fundamentally amateurish, arbitrary interpretation of historical details, which emphasizes the sovereign independence of the author's worldview.
Time in its endless flow, in certain periods, must inevitably repeat the same state of affairs. The idea of eternal return meant for him at that moment the possibility of a repetition of any phenomenon; after an infinite, unlimited, unforeseen number of years, a person who is like Nietzsche in everything, sitting also, in the shadow of a rock, will find the same thought, which will appear to him countless times. This was to exclude any hope of heavenly life and any consolation.
The philosopher expresses the concepts of "history" and "historical" through two of his key concepts: the will to power and the eternal return of the same. Applying them to being, he denies the integrity of the historical process, insisting on its discreteness and isolation of events, considering each of them only as one or another step in the ascent of the will to power to itself. Throwing away Darwin's theory, Nietzsche still remains true to evolutionism in the matter of the appearance of the Superman as a self-conscious breed, which should be a leap one step higher after man, having no intermediate individuals. The process of history, which we are aware of, is the process of approaching becoming (the eternal return of the same) to being, constantly escaping, and the event that would come if the world of becoming collided with the world of being, the philosopher calls "superpower".
On this basis, it can be assumed that the return is not a repetition of the same thing, or at least Nietzsche himself has two approaches to the return.
6. Postpositivism. Charles. Popper. "The Poverty of Historicism". Criticism of the Marxist understanding of the historical process. The concept of "the third world, the development of new criteria for scientific".
