History is our past. She talks about all the events and facts that accompanied our ancestors. This is a science that studies past events, the reasons why they happened, and clarifies the truth. Basic data and results are obtained from stored documents that describe specific incidents.
The historical process, according to V.O. Klyuchevsky is a combination of successes, conditions and the course of human life or the life of mankind as a whole in its development and results.
The word "process" itself is a sequential change of states during the development of a phenomenon.
The basis of the historical process, of course, are events. It is in them that any activity of people and humanity as a whole is embodied. Also noted here are political, economic, social, cultural ties and relationships between individuals.
The subjects of the historical process are personalities or organizations of people who directly participate in certain events. Such organizations may be social communities that live on the same territory and have the same mentality, culture and traditions. The result of their activities will be the creation of common material and spiritual values for each individual.
Social groups may differ in age, sex, professional, religious grounds, but they must also have signs that unite them. Such groups are, for example, estates, states and various classes of the population.
Subjects can also include individuals who directly participated in historical events. Most often they are considered politicians, monarchs, kings, presidents. A huge contribution to the historical process is made by figures of culture, art and science.
From the point of view of K. Marx and F. Engels, the historical process should be regarded as a doctrine of socio-economic formations, which are the steps of this process. The decisive factor in the development of society is the
mode of production. That is, the ratio of the development of production forces and
production relations. Whereas the
structure of politics and spiritual development are just a superstructure, which depends on the methods of production. Separate facts and events are the results of a
social revolution that arose in a clash of opposing interests between classes. K. Marx and F. Engels viewed the historical process through the prism of communism, which acts as the ultimate goal.
Adherents of the theory of post-industrial society also talk about the stepwise development of mankind from pre-agrarian to post-industrial society.
Based on the theory of modernization, society has developed as a result of the transition from specific traditional relations to formal-rational. The most important features of society include individual freedom of the individual, freedom of economic activity, the inviolability of human rights, the rule of law and
political pluralism.There is also the opposite formational,
civilizational approach. Adherents of the linear-stage theory advocate defining the criterion of stage-stages in the system of cultural values.
According to the
theory of local civilizations (one of the branches of the civilizational approach), the periodization of the historical process cannot be based on the identification of stages and stages. The founder of this trend is A. Toynbee. In his scientific works, he divides world history into the history of individual civilizations, each of which individually goes through all stages (from occurrence to breaking and decomposition). And only their combination is the global historical process.