Periodization of world history in the “Short course of economics science” by Alexander Bogdanov

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of periodization of universal history in the work "A Short Course in Economic Science" written by Alexander Bogdanov. It analyzes the changes in the periodization of the historical process in various editions of the work, identifies the intellectual sources of those changes and establishes a connection between the evolution of Bogdanov’s historical concept and the development of historical science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The main direction in the evolution of Bogdanov’s historical views was the transition from a linear progressive scheme of world history to a description of history as a complex non-linear process in which periods of development are combined with periods of decline and stagnation. Abandoning the idea of steady linear progress, Bogdanov also abandoned the strict correspondence between a specific economic form and a certain historical era and concluded that various economic forms could coexist. The changes in Bogdanov’s approaches to the question of the role of economic forms in the periodization of world historical process testify to his search for special features specifying various eras in the history of mankind and reflect a general interest in the substantial characteristics of time characteristic of the European intellectual space of the first third of the 20th century. © 2020, Perm State University. All rights reserved.