The significance of crisis in Florian Znaniecki’s reflection on civilization
Taking as its point of departure F. Znaniecki’s concept of culturalizm, the article analyzes the idea of crises not only as a negative category, but first of all as a kind of state of culture or an intellectual task that can be undertaken in the process of constructing the social order. Crisis is seen, according to F. Znaniecki’s notion of cultural innovation, as human action and is understood in relation to the cultural order which appears as a change of system that engenders the next changes. In this context civilization is comprehended as the process of becoming. In the opinion of F. Znaniecki, civilization at the beginning of the 1920s required cultural and social integration, which is why F. Znaniecki proposed the ideal model of Western Civilization, the basis of which is free creativity. The paper is an attempt to show how to use the ideal control of the nature the element of F. Znaniecki’s ideal model of the Western Civilization in reflection on the relation between quantity and quality in the situation of the cultural contradictions of capitalism in conditions of late modernity. It seems that quality may be the optimal axis of sustainable development of the modern civilization.