N.Ya. Danilevsky on War and Conflicts of Civilizations

The article discusses the views of Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822–1855) on the war and its historical purpose. The Russian philosopher used a new, civilizational and cultural approach to the analysis of world development and social phenomena, which later found a worthy application in the philosophical works on war of V.S. Solovyov and other Russian philosophers of the Silver Age of Russian Culture. Danilevsky considered war as an acute stage of the conflict of cultures, a clash of civilizations, the result of the struggle of different historical and cultural principles. According to Danilevsky’s civilizational theory, the origin of war is an expansion as an immanently inherent property of civilization, an element of its essential, intrinsically inherent natural state, which consists in the desire to expand cultural, political, and economic influence. The philosopher sees the world-historical meaning of the war in the struggle of the West with the East and fears European expansion against Russia, discussing this trend in detail. The author of the article draws attention to Danilevsky’s forecasts for the upcoming world wars and to the relevance of the provisions of his military-philosophical views for modern world development, in particular, to his justification for the strength of political alliances created on a civilizational and cultural basis. The article concludes that it was Danilevsky who initiated the formation of the tendency of the forecasting Russian military philosophical thought, manifested in the works of V.S. Solovyov and other Russian philosophers who reflected on the problems of war and the clash of world cultures-civilizations.

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