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, the 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 Starosolsky, 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 independent
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, the 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.