Moscow: Vostochny Universitet Publ., 2006, 416 p.

The book under review is practically one of the first Russian textbooks on the sociology of the modern East. Among the previous scientific studies on the problems of social evolution of the East (and more broadly, all developing countries), we can mention such works as "Social Structure of Developing Countries" (1978) by A. I. Levkovsky, collective monographs of IMEMO scientists - "Developing Countries: Patterns, Trends, Prospects" (1974) and "Economic Growth and social development". progress" (1983), the Institute of Oriental Studies "Foreign East and Modernity "(1st ed., vol. 1-2, 1974; 2nd ed., vol. 1-3, 1980-1981) and, finally, " The Social Image of the East "(1999). headed by R. G. Landa.

The monograph is intended as a textbook for students of the Eastern University. It is also of interest to students of the social sciences departments of the humanities, as well as other universities, because sociology is now studied even in technical institutes. An in-depth study of the Eastern society, which is connected with the most urgent problems (I will mention, for example, the question of Islam and Islamism, of which R. G. Landa is a great expert, who published the book "Political Islam: Preliminary Results" in 2005), is undoubtedly useful for anyone who is interested in the modern East.

The monograph can be divided into two parts. The first section provides an overview of the views of leading foreign and Russian sociologists that are important for understanding the sociology of the modern East, as well as the main concepts of economic and social development of the Eastern countries that existed in Russian Oriental studies in the 1960s-1980s. The second part examines the structures and categories that determine the uniqueness of Eastern society, the specifics of rural and urban societies; analyzes various social classes and strata in almost all areas of the East; examines the influence of an external factor on Eastern society.

In the first part, the views of the founders of Western sociology - Auguste Comte, Emile Durkheim, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber-are analyzed rather briefly, but very succinctly. (I will note in parentheses that Western sociologists themselves attribute Karl Marx to the founders of their discipline.) M. Weber's works, as the author notes, are important for the sociology of the modern East, primarily on the role of religion and its connection with economic life, as well as bureaucracy. The article also examines the works of historians and geographers of great importance for the sociology of the East, in particular Arnold Toynbee and Lev Gumilev. (This might also include Fernand Braudel, who is mentioned in the book in connection with the thesis on the "resistance of cultures" and his work on the Mediterranean.)

The list of authors whose views were analyzed in the book is very wide - Tugan-Baranovsky, Chayanov, Mechnikov, as well as Marx, Engels and Lenin. The analysis of the views of the latter is quite justified. If we move away from the "rejection syndrome" (p.389), which was active in Russia in the 1990s not only in relation to everything related to the USSR, but also in relation to the works of these ideologists, we cannot help noticing that these works are often mentioned in the works of modern Western sociologists.

In contrast to the" economism " (excessive absolutization of the significance of the economic factor) of Marx-Lenin, the desire to see class struggle in everything and always (and not solidarity, as in E. Durkheim), the author gives preference not to any one factor, be it the economic basis or the class struggle, but to a multi-factor analysis, following in this respect for the American classic of sociology, Russian by origin, Pitirim Soro-

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According to R. G. Landa, he stands out from a number of others "by the level of his erudition, knowledge of history, including the history of sociology, and many other sciences" (p.82).

In chapters 4 and 6, the author summarizes the results of scientific discussions in Russian Oriental studies on the concepts of socio-economic development of the Eastern countries in the 1960s and 1980s. Listing the main works of the participants in these discussions, the author, unfortunately, does not mention the collective monograph "Foreign East and Modernity", in which A. I. Levkovsky took part, N. A. Simonia, L. I. Reisner, V. G. Rastiannikov, and R. G. Landa himself. The author analyzes the concepts of general approaches to the study of developing countries: multiformity (A. I. Levkovsky), multiformity with a formative structure (V. G. Rastyannikov, V. V. Krylov), dependent development (a team of scientists from IMEMO headed by V. L. Tyagunenko), "dualistic economy" (G. K. Shirokov, V. A. Yashkin, V. G. Rastiannikov, R. N. Andreasyan, A. G. Dinkevich), "social synthesis" (L. I. Reisner, N. A. Simonia). He comes to the conclusion that all these approaches "do not deny either its (Eastern society - N. C.) transitivity or its multiculturalism, for the simple reason that multiculturalism is one of the main expressions and a sure sign of transitivity. In fact, they do not contradict each other in describing the main features of Eastern society and differ only in understanding how and where it goes, which mechanisms in its evolution are the main ones, which are secondary. These approaches can be considered as complementary" (pp. 113-114).

R. G. Landa notes the role of A. I. Levkovsky (1924 - 1985) in the formation of Russian sociology of the modern East, who considered the basis of the transitional character of Eastern society to be multi-structure, defined as its internal conflict, "an indicator of the great collision of opposite trends in social evolution" (p.135). The author points out that " a multi-layered society is not one-dimensional, but multidimensional, not one-linear, but multi-threaded, does not stand still, but develops, but is even more contradictory, conflicting and diverse than a normal European-type society." It is particularly emphasized that "the time has come to raise the question of the persistent diversity that accompanies the entire process of historical development of the East (italics by N. - N. Ts.) since its exit from the primitive communal state" (p.137).

The author's thesis on the duality and complexity of the sociology of the East is also important. The duality of the sociology of the East is that it seems to fall into two parts: the study of traditional society and the study of modern trends in the life of Eastern societies, especially modernization. Along with this, in reality (and this can be seen in many sections of his book), both traditional and modern are often intertwined. The complexity is due to the fact that the sociology of the East is an integral part of "Oriental studies as a long-established complex of disciplines that study the economy, history, politics, culture and spiritual life of Afro - Asian society in their inseparable unity and closer mutual influence than in the West" (pp. 99-100).

The features of formation and civilizational processes in the East highlighted in the monograph are also of great theoretical importance for a specific analysis of Eastern realities: "1) the duration of transitional inter-formation epochs is longer than in the West; 2) the mixed, "impure" nature of any social system and its persistent multi-structure; 3) the special role of the "resistance of cultures"factor 4) civilizational and ethnic heterogeneity that is completely different from the situation in the West; 5) the hypertrophied importance of the state and religion, which gives rise to equally hypertrophied privileges and influence of the bureaucracy and clergy; 6) the contradictory and multifaceted role of colonialism; 7) the heterogeneity, ambiguity and enclave of the development of capitalism" (p.145).

It is precisely these features that determine the originality of Eastern society, and not some exotic, "feminine", emotionality of the culture of the East, as opposed to" masculinity", intellectuality of the culture of the West (p.105). Especially if we consider, for example, that medieval Western Europe was largely due to the development of such sciences as mathematics, astronomy, as well as alchemy (which became the progenitor of chemistry), medicine, philosophy, and translations of the works of Arab scientists (who in turn borrowed a lot from Indian scientists). Moreover, through the Arabic East, through translations from Arabic, the works of many ancient Greek thinkers, including Aristotle, also came to Europe. R. G. Landa's entire book is imbued with deep respect for the civilizations of the East, irreconcilability to Eurocentrism and "Orientophobia".

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The second part of the book begins with chapters that analyze the structures and categories that are important for understanding the characteristics of Eastern society. These are ethnonational structures (Chapter 7), religions, confessions, beliefs (Chapter 8), and traditional social communities (Chapter 9). These chapters are interesting because they summarize a huge amount of factual material. The connection between ethno-confessional and social problems is successfully traced, and the ethno - social stratification that often exists in the East, when some ethnic groups are assigned higher roles, and others-lower ones, is shown. The special role of the religious factor in modern Eastern society and the religious situation in the main Eastern countries are vividly characterized. Special attention is paid to such topical issues as the role of Islam, the roots of Islamism, and the peculiarities of the Islamist movement in different countries. Such "detective" questions as the question of Sufi fraternities and Ismailis are also considered.

Analyzing the question of "natural sociality" in the East, the author makes a very relevant remark that " the experience of Chechnya, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and many regions of Asia and Africa indicates the need for scrupulous consideration of ethnic, confessional, tribal, class, caste, and other patriarchal ties of natural sociality, which at the same time are based on the following principles: Relations in the Eastern world are often dominated by class or other relations determined by purely economic or narrow political interests" (p. 200).

The book points out that for many countries of the East, the emergence of synthesized forms of entrepreneurship within the framework of medieval guilds and corporations (including fellow countrymen) was typical. Often in the eastern bazaar, small merchants are united according to the principle of community relations, while one community is engaged in trading one product, the other in another. The relations of hiring labor and relations within the clan and community are intertwined, and the hired labor force loses the features that are inherent in it in Western countries. In the East, multi-facedness and multifunctionality, duality of status and functions (peasant-entrepreneur, feudal lord-capitalist, feudal lord-bureaucrat) become typical.

As a result, in the East, we must always take into account the impact of traditional communities and ties on the most modernized forces and institutions. In many further sections, the author returns to the question of the intertwining of traditional and modern in the East. In the section on the middle strata, it is said that an eastern intellectual can combine a diploma from a western university with a commitment to some religious brotherhood or sect, a "holy" ascetic or a wandering dervish. Traditional community ties play an important role in the formation of bureaucracy (for example, the "tikritization" that took place in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a native of the city of Tikrit).

The village of the East, with the entire conglomerate of social strata that make up rural society, is the subject of discussion in Chapter 10. An important feature of rural society is its multi-structure, the interweaving of various types and models into a single complex fabric, which generates multi-faceted and multi-functional transition categories, layers and individuals in social terms. The lower strata of the village - the landless, unemployed and semi-unemployed, often acting as unpaid family workers, "extra mouths", form a reserve for exodus to the city, where they replenish the urban lower classes.

The City of the East as a whole is the subject of Chapter 11. Here again we can trace the very important idea today (with the increasing role of the East) that the center-periphery relationship is not something unchangeable, frozen, the roles (as well as social roles in the interaction of people in public collectives) sometimes change to diametrically opposite ones. The book contains information from the works of Russian Orientalists that in 1300 in the largest city in Europe, Paris had 250 thousand inhabitants, in Europe, large, more than one hundred thousand cities could be counted on one's fingers. And in China alone, there were at least four cities with a population of 300 thousand inhabitants. At the end of the 16th century, 68% of the world's population lived in the East. In the 17th century, the East accounted for more than 77% of the production of finished goods (manufactured goods). Europe seemed to the Easterners to be a poor and backward part of the world. The chapter discusses different types of cities and classifies them. The question of the history of the Moriscos Moors (Arabs)is also very interesting Spain, who were forced to emigrate by their "Catholic majesties", literally driving them out of the country; the Moriscos were forced to settle in some countries.-

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Africa and the Middle East. Their history literally lies at the intersection of religious, economic, and socio-cultural problems.

The following chapters are a review of a kind of "anatomy of Eastern society". They separately characterize the main classes and social strata that make up the eastern urban society (rural society is analyzed mainly in the chapter on the eastern village).

When analyzing the various strata that make up the bourgeoisie, the entrepreneurial strata of the Eastern countries, much attention is paid to such a special social category as the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, a product of the fusion of power and property. The author introduces a number of categories: the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, feudal-bureaucratic capital (the oil-democracies of the Persian Gulf), military-bureaucratic capital (Thailand, Indonesia), and even the bourgeois comprador bureaucrats (a number of countries in Tropical Africa) and the democratic capital that opposes them, the lower strata of the national bourgeoisie (not to be confused with the petty bourgeoisie!). In the conditions of the East, it is not uncommon for different strata of the same class of the bourgeoisie to be on opposite sides of the barricades. Democratic capital, which since the 1970s has been growing mainly "from below" - from non-bourgeois and even semi-proletarian labor strata - and is based on a small-capitalist system, advocates a different development option than large national capital and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie, or military-bureaucratic capital, or feudal-bureaucratic capital, and even more so bourgeois bureaucrats- compradors, fights them and the bureaucracy. As shown, these contradictions were particularly acute in a number of Arab countries, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia. However, I should note that given the development of subcontracting relations between small-scale production and large-scale production, often with the same TNCs, especially in NIS (in particular, in Singapore, South Korea), as well as in India, the lower strata are often associated with partnership relations with large capital, and the contradictions between them do not go beyond contradictions between partners.

Particularly interesting is the author's analysis in the chapter on entrepreneurship (12) and in the chapter on the external factor (14) of the issue of foreign capital in Southeast Asia and in the Arab countries. The chapter on class differentiation of urban society (13) analyzes in detail the social strata and conglomerates of layers of the eastern city.

A special place is occupied by the problem of bureaucracy, the bureaucratic elite and, more broadly, the managerial elite (R. G. Landa is the author of a book on the managerial strata in the countries of the East). The hypertrophied role of the state not only in political but also in economic life largely determines the omnipotence of the bureaucracy. The ruling elite of the Eastern countries consists of various combinations: the top bureaucracy, political and public figures, tribal leaders and ethno-confessional communities, leaders of religious fraternities and sects, authoritative spiritual and secular leaders. An important part of the bureaucracy is the economic technocracy that manages public sector enterprises. The prominent Russian Arabist historian N. A. Ivanov called the " middle layer of officials "" a kind of bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie". R. G. Landa quotes him as saying that in general, the bureaucratic bourgeoisie is inclined to unlimited concentration of power and power; it does not tolerate social pluralism. Hence its desire to monopolize politics and the economy, subjugating both the state apparatus and private capital. The book presents a lot of evidence-based data on the existing huge income gap between the top bureaucracy and ordinary public sector workers.

An important social category for the East is the middle strata, which include "persons who do not own the means of production, but have the education, knowledge and qualifications necessary to organize, orient and meet the needs of the economic and spiritual life of modern society" (p. 318; author's italics - N. Ts.). The characteristic is comprehensive, but In our opinion, it omits such a parameter as a fairly high ("average") level of income, which, of course, is not the same in different countries. The mere factor of education and qualification of employed professionals in transition countries, for example, may not guarantee a sufficiently high ("average") level of income. It is not for nothing that in recent years much attention has been paid in publications of international organizations to such a category as the" working poor "(and in some transition countries the word" state employees "has become a designation of the "working poor"). persons who can be classified as lower-class urban residents based on their income).

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Speaking about qualified technical specialists, the author provides information about a high proportion of those who received education in Western countries. Chapter 14 deals with Soviet aid to developing countries. But it could also be said that in a number of Afro-Asian countries, including those that have never belonged to the countries of social orientation and have always been distinguished by pro-Western policies, for example, in Senegal, there are many graduates of Soviet universities and professional educational institutions. If we are talking about mixed families, then often these families were created precisely by students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, who, after finishing their studies, left, taking their Russian wives with them to their homeland. Of course, getting an education in a foreign country is by no means a guarantee of maintaining warm feelings towards it, and sometimes quite the opposite happens (the same, by the way, applies to studying in the West, whose universities have raised many fighters against Western influence). In general, however, Russian-speaking graduates of Soviet universities in many countries retain a certain commitment to the post-Soviet countries.

A separate paragraph is devoted to the proletariat of the Eastern countries. A significant part of it consists of workers of relatively small enterprises of the small-capitalist system, the non-factory proletariat. The proletariat of Eastern countries is also divided into other categories: employees of public sector enterprises, employees of enterprises owned by foreign capital, branches of TNCs, employees of large enterprises owned by national capital do not always have common interests. An important part of this chapter is also devoted to such a topical issue as immigrants from Eastern countries in the labor market in the Persian Gulf countries, in Western Europe, in particular in France, where in November 2005 a wave of protest actions by immigrants swept through.

Last but not least, the segment of the urban population considered in this chapter, especially as a potential "fuel" for their participation in various protest movements , is the urban grassroots. Under the capital-intensive model of industrial development, a significant part of the labor force cannot find a place in modern production, it settles in the informal sector, in the service sector with its hypertrophied employment, which practically serves as a screen for hidden unemployment. The author shows the role of the urban lower classes, the "bazaar" in the Islamic revolution in Iran, and describes such a phenomenon as "political pauperization" on the example of the Palestinians.

Chapter 14 analyzes the impact of external factors on Eastern society - aid from Western countries, the USSR, foreign direct investment, and the overall impact of globalization, which is ambiguous and contradictory. The author comes to the conclusion that in the context of globalization, the contradictions and contrasts of the capitalist market are rising "to the interstate and intercivilizational level, which explains in many ways what has been growing more and more since the second half of the XX century. the aggravation of East-West relations, which goes back in some aspects to the confrontation between Islam and Christianity during the Crusades " (p. 413). At the same time, in the context of globalization, new prospects are opening up, for example, the prospect of an" East Asian "or" South Asian " impact on the social structure and social appearance of the Middle East and North Africa, which is different from what it was before.

There are some minor comments about the book under review. For example, the figures on the "brain drain" in the United States (p.330) seem to be underestimated; the data on the decline in the number of Asian countries receiving foreign investment are questionable (p. 397).

If the book was reprinted and reworked (I think it could be published under the general label of IVE RAS-Eastern University), then it would be desirable to increase the circulation and make a hard cover. It would be possible to highlight paragraphs and even just some paragraphs more clearly.

But in general, I would like to recommend that anyone who is interested in the East, get and read the necessary book by a prominent Russian orientalist R. G. Landa.

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