P. CHAUNU. De Vhistoire a la prospective. Paris. "Robert Laffont". 1975. 398 p.

The French bourgeois historian, professor of the Sorbonne Pierre Chaunu belongs to the direction of the so-called "quantitative" or "serial" history. Since 1964, he has headed France's first research center for "quantitative" history at the University of Caen. The most famous of his works are "The Atlantic and Seville" (12 volumes, 1955-1960), "The Civilization of Classical Europe" (1956), "European Civilization in the Age of Enlightenment" (1971). "From History to the Future" is one of the last books of Shonuh, in which he, as well as the author of the book, wrote the following works: in the previous monograph " History, Social Science "(1974), he refers to the methodological aspects of historiography. His works to a certain extent characterize the state of modern French bourgeois historiography, the results of many years of efforts of a number of its representatives to overcome the limitations of positivism of "event" history and to find some "new" methodological approach outside of Marxism.

Perhaps the main direction of this search, both in French and in the whole of bourgeois historiography, lies in the application of quantitative methods. Shonyu's book is also significant as an example of the contradictory attitudes generated in the West by the profound socio-economic upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s, which were reflected in the social sciences, in particular in history. Reflecting on the fate of historical science in the "atomic era", Chaunu again raises a problem that worried French scientists, especially those who were at the origins of the Annals school, and above all M. Blok: why do we need history?

As Shonyu writes, recreating life in the spirit of L. Ranke in the modern era is an unacceptable luxury (p. 73). He calls for overcoming the vices of traditional positivism, which did not allow us to look at history as a whole process with its inherent laws. A truly scientific history is possible for him only on the basis of quantitative estimates of various indicators (a series of statistics-hence the term "serial" history) of material and spiritual culture. Technically, this is what the "cybernetic revolution"allows us to do. Such" quantitative "or" serial "history, says Shonyu," explains the past by means of models, connects it with the present and allows us to foresee the future" (p. 13). He declares foresight to be the main task of modern historical science.

Shonyu considers the main task of "quantitative history "to be solving problems related to the" crisis of civilization " caused by overpopulation, depletion of earth's resources, raw materials, and food. The author notes that the analysis of this complex of problems is usually carried out by economists, mathematicians, sociologists - in a word, specialists in their field, but "prisoners of short time", almost powerless to predict the future, because the laws of human development can only be revealed by studying history throughout its entire length. Until recently, historians had little interest in futurology, and this led to the fact that its conclusions were based on criteria that were accurate for other sciences, but false for history, Shonyu regrets. In particular, he opposes the tem that has been fashionable in the West since the early 70s-

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The "zero growth" theory, for example, is opposed to the report of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in 1972, entitled "Stop growth!". Shonyu is convinced that the "crisis of civilization" can be overcome, but not by slowing down growth, but by continuing it and even accelerating it. Humanity, despite appearances, has no choice, he writes, there is no alternative to growth, its cessation would mean the death of Earth's civilization (p. 91).

Shonyu's thoughts on the future are full of optimism. His reasoning is based on the widely accepted idea in modern science of accelerating progress as a law of global development. In Shonyu, this idea is concretized by the concept of a "multiplier", which implies "growth and the ability, observed for at least two centuries, to accelerate this growth" (p. 90). Its "multiplier" is an absolute category that subordinates all material and spiritual culture to its logic: the population size, the amount of food, tools, consumer goods, communications, and the amount of information. By a quantitative comparison of these and other factors in different historical epochs, he comes to the conclusion that civilization arose in conditions of "horizontal growth", that is, when development was mainly characterized by the expansion of the geographical space mastered by mankind. Thus, the European ecumene, according to Shonyu, the oldest existing one on the planet, originated in the Mediterranean and then spread to the entire continent in concentric circles along the south-east - north-west axis. The second hotbed was formed in China (younger than Europe, from the author's point of view) and covered all of Asia. The true flourishing of the "horizontal type" culture is possible only when the minimum population density is reached-30-40 people per 1 square kilometer. Europe was more quickly populated. This is due to the most favorable combination of climate, terrain and space size.

Illustrating his methods of "serial" statistics, Shanyu argues that the centers of ancient civilizations geographically exactly coincide with the data of botany on the best growing places for food crops. "In the history of wheat - the history of civilization" - this idea, expressed by F. Braudel, Shonya shares completely. "Horizontal" growth, from his point of view, ended in the 30s of the XX century. From now on, outstanding scientific and technological achievements have transformed the spatial boundary that has reached the limit into a "technological" one, moving it far forward. Infinite linear growth, as imagined by J. A. Condorcet, is impossible. Sooner or later, there is an inevitable technological leap and "breaking of structures", although the very idea of progress put forward in the Enlightenment era is still the only true one, the author concludes (pp. 43, 212, 286).

Any" mutation " of cultures, according to Shonyu's calculations, was accompanied by a sharp increase in the population, which, in his opinion, is an absolute condition for the development of civilization during the recovery phase. Like the human brain, he argues, a rising culture must have some minimum of intellectual energy so that the accumulated amount of knowledge over the centuries can be fully assimilated. Otherwise, the civilization seems to suffocate, regress and die out. "The psychosis of the fear of life," writes Schonuh," the apocalyptic mood that governments succumb to, has caused a slowdown in the birth rate in European civilization, where it was not desirable " (p.337). During the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, in 7 thousand years, humanity increased, according to Shonyu's calculations, 250 times (p. 305). He explains the death of ancient American civilizations by isolation, lack of communication and population. By making the level of civilization directly dependent on population size and density, Shonyu argues that hunger in developing countries is not the result of overpopulation, but of an insufficient population, as a result of which the cultures of these regions stagnated in past historical epochs (p.259). And today, in his opinion, it is far from populated to the" norm " of space. Shanu cites the following figures: in Africa, the average population density is 11 people per square kilometer, in Latin America-21 people instead of the 30-40 necessary for the prosperity of civilization (p. 324). However, he believes that today there is "the formation of a homogeneous culture, the Europeanization of all cultures" within the framework of" a technical and industrial civilization dating back to the Enlightenment " (p.133).

Although Shonyu claims that historical science begins with the study of the past, which is at least 50 years away from the historian, in his further presentation:

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There is a clear influence of the concept of "industrial society", which operates mainly in the modern era. The "European system of civilization", to which the author refers Western and Eastern Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union, is, in his opinion, an advanced culture. According to him, it has reached the highest level in the United States, where the "cybernetic revolution" contributes most to the expansion of technological borders (p. 268)." America is our future, the laboratory and hope of Europe " - this is how the French professor assesses the United States (p. 226). However, he also calls on Europe to critically use the experience of America, which was ahead of it, and not to repeat "philosophical mistakes", that is, mainly not to succumb to calls to slow down the development of industry. "Zero economic growth will perpetuate inequality between people and nations," the author writes (p.355).

Thus, Shonyu connects the prospect of high rates of economic development with the solution of social problems. But as the years of the "industrial boom" in capitalist countries have shown, rapid growth cannot reduce the income gap between the poor and the rich. Moreover, the views of many "zero growth" advocates reflected frustration with progress when it became apparent that equality in an" industrial society " was impossible, no matter how many consumer goods were produced. This truth is now recognized in the West even by those who are far from Marxism. Guided by his formal criteria of "quantification", taking them apart from specific social content, Shonyu sees" genuine socialism " in the United States with its relatively high per capita income per year (p. 338). The author simply ignores statistics on the distribution of this income by class and stratum. While verbally denying any involvement in the ideological considerations of "short time", Shonyu in fact firmly defends the political idea of Atlanticism, calling for US cooperation with Europe, excluding the Soviet Union, although he refers to the USSR as a "European system" (p. 226).

In the" scientific "history of the" long time", Schoen has no place in analyzing the plunder of colonies and dependent countries, but rather portrays colonialism as "a much more positive than negative process" (p. 148). He justifies the colonization of Asia and Africa by claiming that "the Europeans brought ten times as much as they took from there" (p. 150). Shonyu expresses concern about the crisis of the Christian Church "as the guardian of traditions and foundations" and calls on Christians "to realize their greatest share of responsibility for the common fate of humanity" (p. 383). For him, Christian values are the pinnacle of spiritual culture. Shonyu's desire to combine essentially materialistic principles of quantitative evaluation with Christian dogmas is the main methodological flaw of his concept.

As a result, in the views of Shonyu, who tries to identify the patterns of historical development in the "long time", there is no place for class struggle; socio-economic contradictions reflecting the dialectic of the historical process remain undisclosed. But, rejecting the Marxist theory of social formations, he wants to oppose certain "wave" patterns to successive changes in production methods. The desire to understand history as a single, natural process, the result of the "relationship between man and nature" encourages him to introduce some positive materialistic elements in his analysis, for example, to establish a link between population density and the level of culture, the age at which women marry, and the productivity of social labor. However, in general, attempts to construct a global "structure of Earth's civilization" based on quantitative estimates cannot hide the philosophical basis of the author's views, which are rooted in Christian ideology.

Shonyu's views are fairly typical of recent Western historical scholarship. Increasingly proclaiming "quantitative" methods not only in special applied research, but also in the study of long-term historical processes, bourgeois historiography seeks to overcome the deep crisis of its methodology. Objective trends in the field of cognition also contribute to this, namely, the strong influence on the history of other social sciences, already armed with mathematical methods, and the inevitable interpenetration of sciences. But, as Shonyu's book shows," quantification " alone is unable to solve the methodological, let alone philosophical, problems of historiography. Speaking out against neo-Malthusian slogans, Shonyu objectively makes a number of positive changes-

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to understand individual problems. But in general, by emasculating living history and social dynamics in the "long time", ot takes a step back in this sense, even in comparison with many representatives of traditional bourgeois-liberal historiography in France.

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