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History of the world economy - Polyak GB

Factors of economic development

An important problem of historical and economic science is the problem of factors of economic development of mankind.

1. Many scientists as a leader identify the factor of scientific and technological progress: under its influence, there are fundamental changes in the system of economy and in the society itself, which passes to a qualitatively new stage of its development: from the agrarian to the industrial and then post-industrial.

2. Progress in the communication media is extremely important , including primarily the language - spoken and written, serving as a means of thinking, expression and communication. Other means of communication are money, roads, printing, postal, telephone, telegraph, teleprinter, telefax, electronic communication systems, books, magazines and especially newspapers, radio and television. At the present stage, progress in the creation and functioning of information systems is particularly important. Obviously, the more developed means of communication, the more opportunities for rapid development has society. Canadian scientist McLuhan, predicting the future of historical and economic development of mankind, argued that it is through information technology that the creative process will be collective and will spread to all of humanity.

3. The level of the country's economic development also directly depends on the degree of energy supply and type of energy most actively used in the national economy. In general, human society shows a tendency to use increasingly powerful sources of energy, starting with the energy of fire in the primeval era and reaching the energy of thermonuclear fusion at the present stage. Mankind is constantly engaged in the search for new, more efficient and cleaner forms of energy, and not only the economic destiny of individual countries but also the entire world depends on how successful the search is in this direction. It seems that the value of this factor, as well as communication, will increase with time.

4. Unlike the energy factor, natural, apparently, had a much stronger impact on the course of economic development in the past than in the present. Geographical location of the terrain, its climatic and geodetic conditions dictated to human society a certain structure of the economy, the direction and specificity of economic activity. However, over time, people have learned to neutralize the adverse effects of climate, compensate for the lack of natural resources, and the higher the level of economic development of society, the less significant it is to recognize this factor. It can be assumed that in the future the role of this factor will be weakened if we take into account its cumulative influence, but the role of its separate components - minerals, flora, fauna, water resources, etc. - can be very significant.

5. The factor of demographic is of great importance for economic evolution, especially such characteristics as the total population, its density, gender and age structure, the level of birth rate, mortality, and migration mobility. The Russian scientist M.M. Kovalevsky argued that the growth of population is in general the main engine of the national economy. In general, the experience of economic history indicates that there seems to be some level of population density and density optimal for these particular conditions, which ensures the fastest rates of economic evolution, with deviations from it slowing the growth rate, but in general, the lack of population Is indeed a more unfavorable factor than its excess.

6. Many scientists singled out the psychology of people, their subjective assessments of economic reality, personal motives of activity, the state of morality as the most important factor affecting economic development.

Other scholars emphasize the importance of such factors as national psychology, the system of legal relations, religious views. Undoubtedly, the economic policy of the state plays an important role.

Variants of periodization of economic history

Among the central problems of historical and economic science is the problem of periodization of economic history (the history of the world economy).

Periodization is the establishment of certain chronologically successive stages in the economic development of society.

Establishing the stages of development is the most important scientific problem, since the basis for their allocation should be the decisive factors common to all countries or for the leading ones. At the initial stage of the development of historical and economic science, most scholars unequivocally rejected the periodization developed by civil historians, since in it the factors lying outside the production sphere were taken as criteria for periodization. And only gradually in establishing the stages of development, historians and economists began to take into account indicators related to socio-economic progress, forms of economy, stages of development, differing achieved levels of productive forces, etc.

During the existence of historical and economic science, many variants of the periodization of the economic history of mankind have been developed.

Currently, there are three main approaches to this problem:

• The economic history of mankind is treated as an ascent from the lower to the higher;

• Theories of the historical cycle;

• The theory of civilizations.

The first group of theories includes, in particular, the concept of the Russian Enlightener of the 18th century. S. E. Desnitsky, who, proceeding from the idea of ​​the constant complication of the forms of economic life, singled out the stages: gathering, cattle breeding, farming and the commercial state of society.

Russian scientist LI Mechnikov established the periodization of economic history in terms of the development of waterways: the river period (the period of antiquity), the Mediterranean period (the Middle Ages), the oceanic period (New and Newest time).

The German scientist K. Buecher , having analyzed the length of the path that passes the product (service) from the producer to the consumer, singled out the stage of a closed household, where everyone produces everything he needs for himself; The stage of urban economy, where the producer works on an order; And the stage of the national economy, where the producer works in an unknown market.

B. Hildebrand, using the phenomenon of exchange, purchase, sale, identified three consecutive stages: natural, monetary, and then credit farms.

American scientist W. Rostow is the author of the concept of "stages of economic growth", which he developed in the 60s of the XX century. He believes that the whole story fits into five phases: 1) traditional society, which is characterized by the use of manual labor, the development of agriculture as the basis of the economy, low labor productivity, slow pace of technology and economic evolution; 2) the period of creation of conditions for a shift. The driving forces that prepared society for the shift were the development of science, the market and free competition, as well as the accumulation of capital and the growth of capital investment in the national economy; 3) the stage of a shift, or industrial revolution, with the rapid development of individual industries and the replacement of manual labor by machine; 4) the stage of maturity, when the rapid and constant progress of all branches of the economy was achieved; 5) a stage providing a high level of mass consumption. However, in the 1970s Rostow supplemented his scheme with the sixth stage, in which the society is engaged in the search for ways to improve the living conditions of a person qualitatively. This scientist believes that he gave a theory of economic history in general, which is a modern alternative to Marxism.

K. Marx developed a theory of theory. It was based on the thesis that all nations in principle develop the same way and sooner or later the same stages of socio-economic development take place: primitive communal (from the rise of man to the 4th millennium BC), slave ( IV millennium BC - V century AD), feudal (V-XVII centuries), capitalistic (from the middle of the XVII century to the present time in the leading countries), the communist one.

These stages are called socio-economic formations. At the heart of the transition from one formation to another lies the evolution of the productive forces and production relations. Thus, the economic history of human society appears as a process of the emergence, development and change of modes of production. The mode of production is the historically concrete unity of the productive forces and production relations.

Approaches to periodization under the influence of the scientific and technological revolution have now become widespread. Examples can be such schemes: preindustrial society - industrial - post-industrial (D. Bell, A. Turen , etc.), as well as agrarian - industrial - technotronic civilization (O. Toffler).

The second group, the theory of the historical cycle, has become particularly popular in historical and economic literature in the last 60-70 years, although the first of these were created as far back as the beginning of the 18th century. Thus, the Italian J. Vico, putting forward the concept of historical circles, argued that the development of all peoples goes on cycles. In the works of the German historian IG Herder, the history of peoples is likened to the life of a man with his ages. E. Meyer expressed the idea that the history of mankind is a series of closed cycles - for example, the Ancient World, the Middle Ages - and in each of them there are elements of both a feudal and a capitalist economy, in any of the cycles one can find both free and hired , And forced labor.
The third group is the theory of civilizations, close to the theories of cyclic circulation. Civilization approach is based on analysis of internal features of this civilization: it is assumed that civilization is characterized by a certain economic system, ethnic roots, religion, philosophy, style of creative thinking, a generalized image of the world, a special principle of the life of civilization. This principle unites people into the people of this civilization, ensures its unity and maintainability throughout its history.

Ideas about the heterogeneity of human development were expressed even by ancient thinkers. In the XIX-XX centuries. There were many new theories of civilizations, of which the most famous were N.Ya. Danilevsky, P.A. Sorokin, A. Toynbee.

Russian scientist N. Ya. Danilevsky believed that the main real unit of world history is a local cultural-historical type - civilization, each of which continuously struggles with the external environment and other civilizations. Civilizations are based on four foundations - cultural, religious, political and economic; These areas of activity have always been unevenly developed - in fact, there was a single one that hindered the development of peoples.

P.A. Sorokin proposed to divide all civilizations into three groups, depending on the prevailing methods of cognition of the world: a civilization of the sensual type - they are characterized by a preferential sensory study of the surrounding reality; Civilizations are ideational, in which rational thinking prevails; Civilizations are idealistic, dominated by an intuitive type of knowledge. The type of civilization depends on the history of this civilization and its economy.

According to the English scholar A. Toynbee, world history is simply the sum of deeply specific, unrelated civilizations, each of which passes through the same stages in its development - is born, reaches its peak, falls into decay and perishes. Civilizations, in contact, can not but influence each other, but this impact is not so strong that it fundamentally changes the nature of this civilization: the economic system, the everyday way of life, the peculiarities of the national mentality - that which makes up the identity of each culture. He singled out thirteen major civilizations, of which five civilizations are great. The most active of the five great civilizations that existed from antiquity to the present day, A. Toynbee considered the Western, which was able to exert the greatest influence on other civilizations. Among other great civilizations Toynbee also included the Far Eastern (China), Hindu (India), Middle Eastern (Islamic), East Slavic (Orthodox). The total number of civilizations in human history is about 30, most of them died without having a significant impact on the development of mankind. Toynbee believed that the viability of civilization is determined primarily by progress in the productive forces and by the growth of labor productivity, the mastery of the life environment, the ability to avoid situations that do not depend on a given society, and the existence of an intellectual elite-a creative minority: if it is not, then there is no civilization .

In the arsenal of modern civilization theory there is also the idea that world history in its development has passed the following stages: the stage of local civilizations (Sumerian, Aegean, etc.), the stage of special civilizations (Indian, European), the stage of global human civilization, when the world community Formed and began to act as a single whole organism.

It should be borne in mind that in most of the given variants of periodization there is a vagueness of chronological boundaries, and the criteria of periodization affect, as a rule, not only the sphere of production relations, but rather belong to the spiritual sphere, so it is impossible to absolutize them. For the ordering and presentation of historical and economic material, periodization by methods of production is most appropriate.

In the textbook "The History of the World Economy" , five epochs have been singled out in accordance with the general historical periodization: the Primitive Age, the Ancient World, the Middle Ages, New Time and the Newest Time, and in the context of these epochs the economic development of the leading countries is considered. At the same time, the chronological and country approach is tied to the formational one, attention is paid to the distinctive features of the ancient Eastern ("Asian mode of production") and ancient slavery; The feudal mode of production, as a system formed in the Middle Ages; Capitalism, i.e., a market economy, originating from the era of the Great Geographical Discoveries in the transition to the New Time. The features of the present stage of development of the economy of the capitalist countries are reflected. There is an analysis of the experience of the USSR in building a socialist society and the stages in the development of the world socialist system.

What gives knowledge of the history of the world economy

So, economic history (the history of the world economy) is a fundamental economic science. Without the appropriate development of this science, the development of economic theory is impossible. It is pertinent to recall that F. Engels called Marx a man, whose theory is the result of his life's continued study of economic history and the position of England ... "

Without knowledge of this discipline, there is no highly educated, broad-minded competent economist who understands the essence of economic processes and the reasons for the success or failure of the economic development of one or another country in a particular historical epoch.

He who has studied economic history will know why, for example, Holland, being an exemplary capitalist country in the 17th century, already in the 18th century. Has receded into the background. Or why England, the classical country of primitive accumulation of capital and the former workshop of the world in the mid-nineteenth century, at the end of the same century, missed the USA - a country with a colonial past, using the unproductive labor of slaves, and Germany, where feudalism lingered for much longer than In England, Holland, France.

Knowledge of economic history allows us to see in development and comparison such important socio-economic phenomena and processes as the evolution of land use and land tenure systems, the development of forms of industrial production organization, the formation of the monetary system and the taxation system,

Knowledge of economic history is the understanding that the forms of ownership, production relations, economic categories, economic indicators, economic mechanism that have developed in one or another epoch are in constant motion, do not remain unchanged, they are historically transitory and are subject to mandatory elimination, replacement, Transition from one stage to another.

A knowledgeable economic history will see and appreciate the uninterrupted line of the ascent of human society from the first economic revolution, when the producing economy emerged in the primitive epoch, passed through the stage of the industrial revolution, which led to the formation of an industrial civilization, to the second and third scientific and technological revolutions that paved the way for postindustrial, information Society.

Знающий экономическую историю поймет альтернативность (многовариантность) экономического развития — ни одна страна не копировала слепо модель другой, а определяла свой путь развития с учетом природных, социальных, исторических возможностей, а также эффективности экономической политики государства. Яркие тому примеры: решение аграрного вопроса в ходе буржуазных революций; особенности промышленного переворота по странам; ход монополизации; варианты выхода из экономического кризиса 1929—1933 гг. (Великой депрессии); модели возрождения национальной экономики после Второй мировой войны и др.

Изучение истории мировой экономики особенно важно потому, что эта наука имеет большое практическое значение — не зная прошлого, нельзя шагать правильно в будущее. Для выработки философии экономического развития (т. е. направления экономической политики) необходимо глубокое изучение прошлого, в значительной мере, хотя и недостаточно обобщенного историко-экономической наукой. Представляется, что неудача осуществляемых в нашей стране реформ во многом объясняется полным незнанием нашими преобразователями экономической истории человечества, его хозяйственного опыта и отклика на экономические явления и процессы историко-экономической науки. Примеры: применение монетаристской модели в условиях наличия одной формы собственности (государства), отказ от государственного регулирования экономики, хотя уже в начале XX в. саморегулирование в капиталистических странах было отвергнуто; либерализация всего, в том числе внешнеэкономических отношений без обеспечения воспроизводственного процесса внутри страны, хотя все страны в период становления экономики прибегали к протекционизму, и пр.

Questions for repetition

1. Что изучает история экономики?

2. Какие этапы прошла в своем развитии историко-экономическая наука?

3.Назовите основные факторы экономического развития.

4. Охарактеризуйте варианты периодизации экономической истории.