Society and social character

Abstract

Today, in the third decade of the 21st century, the entire social world is facing great challenges, which are mainly caused by political and economic transformations, ongoing conflicts and hostilities. While studying and analysing the modern social environment, one of the important issues is relations between society and personality, the problem of their opposition, which representatives of various sciences (political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, economists, culturologists, etc.) consider from different angles, thoroughly and deeply. The issue of society and personality is very actual. It belongs to the set of general human and international problems. Society is a group of people in multifaceted relationships. Society and personality are two interdependent and, sometimes, opposite sides of social reality. Person means a specific individual as a subject of activity, in the combination of his/her individual qualities and social roles. Personality is a social characteristic of an individual. Scientists, including sociologists, are interested not in an individual person, in particular, but a member of a certain society as a unified whole, which has some typical social features. A person does not exist in isolation from a specific society. It is formed as a result of socialization and is a product of the relations of society members. A person, at the same time, is both the subject and the object of social relations. At the same time, it is a constituent part of the social structure, social system. A person, as a part of a society, its constituent element, is determined by the whole, i.e. by the regularities of society. In the course of historical development, not only the widespread, prevailing social types of the person, their value system and orientations, but also the interrelationships between the society and the person itself change. Individuals, in addition to common values, are different and individual because they have unique life experiences, different values, interests and needs. Social character is a connecting link between society and personality. Multifaceted and profound study of social character is very important for determining the connections between society and personality. Social character is a set of typical value orientations characteristic of a person in a particular society. Every society forms a social character that is necessary for its normal functioning. Social character mainly has the function of contributing to the stability of society, but if the external conditions of the social system change in such a way that they no longer correspond to the traditional social character, a split occurs, as a result of which the social character becomes an element contributing to disintegration. Social character is a set of common/general signs and properties characteristic of the majority of members of the society, group. Our goal is to present typologies of social characters of different scientists in the paper (e.g. typologies of German-American philosopher, social psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm, American sociologist David Riesman, etc.). Abram Kardiner, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gordon Allport and others discuss the social character in their works. A. Kardiner and R. Linton uses the term "basic personality" instead of the term "social character", while sociologist A. Inkeles - the concept of "modal personality". Some Scientists distinguish local and cosmopolitans in the context of social organisations. In the paper, we race tried to determine what cosmopolitanism and locality are, in what and how each of them is manifested, who is the subject, for whom they are characteristic, what specificity characterizes them and what constitutes the immediate object for the subject - behaviour, consciousness or their combination. The term cosmopolitan is more descriptive of the lifestyle that today's global world has offered us. In this regard, cosmopolitanism is a moral category that is characteristic of the cultural sphere, it is conditioned by a global and collective consciousness. The history of the study of the concept "cosmopolitan" is long, starting from antiquity to the present day. Modern scholars use "cosmopolitan" to denote a citizen of the world. The term "local" is more recent and is used identically to local. Cosmopolitans see themselves as part of the whole world, and locals - as residents of their hometown. These orientations appear in relationships with each other. Accordingly, cosmopolitans are generally focused on relationships with people, their behaviours, and locals – on inhabitants/natives. A large number of researchers indicate just such a division (for example, W. Beck, E. Giddens, G. P. Martin, H. Shuman, etc.). We are mainly interested in the paradigm of dividing people working in organizations into locals and cosmopolitans.