Russia's Chance to Renew Global Modernity

Abstract

The social utopia of Modernity was embodied in the form of a basic liberal consensus in the value-institutional system of modern society, but in the course of implementation it revealed its natural limits associated with inflated expectations of endless progress, the expansion of universal rights, access to resources and opportunities. In the situation of the world capitalist system decline and achievement of many limits to growth, the alignment of technological and economic development of societies in the West and East, South and North, as well as the end of Western hegemony, the search for the construction of the latest versions of Modernity, explaining and legitimizing the changes taking place in the global world, is being activated. Russian society is interested in creating and scaling its version of Modernity, focused on explaining patterns, removing accumulated conflicts and initiating overdue value-institutional transformations that are in fundamental contradiction with the “disenchanting” ideology of the Western mainstream, built on double standards. From the standpoint of the mainstream, the observed strengthening of non-market and undemocratic social regulation, the revival of national sovereignty can only be described as archaic, deviation, pathology and a return to the past. However, the scientific discourse of the West itself increasingly appears only as a historical analogy of unconvincing moral justifications of the feudal order, which at one time was abolished by bourgeois revolutions. The newest version of Russian Modernity can become tempting and convincing for the global world if it ensures the leveling of double standards and clear-cut principles of a new social harmony within Russian society.