THE END OF THE WEST? TOWARDS THE WORLD OF TOMORROW

(Lucian Boia, Sfarşitul occidentului? Spre lumea de mâine [The End of the West?

Towards the World of Tomorrow], Humanitas Publishing House,

Bucharest, 2013, ISBN: 978-973-50-4010-9, 124 pp)

Marţian IOVAN

Vasile Goldis Western University of Arad,

Faculty of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Arad, Romania

Tel: 0040 – 257 – 250599

E-mail: iovanm@uvvg.ro

Especially during the times of deep economic, social and political crises, of historical and structural changes, people wondered about the becoming of the society they lived in, where did the changes come from and who made them happen, where the society was going to evolve? This historical background was the soil for the occurrence of great civilisations theoreticians, prominent philosophers of the history and of the culture such as those from the beginnings of the modernity (Morus, Campanella, Bacon, Hobbes etc.), those from the age of Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel etc.) or those from the late modernity (Oswald Spengler, Arnold J. Toynbee, Nikolai Alexandrovici Berdiaev, Emil Cioran etc.) or even those from the contemporary times – probably in larger number than all the above. Their answers to such issues usually went into a paradigm that might reside in at least three ideas: „we cannot nu think and agree on an imminent end of the human world, of the human condition, but on a deep transformation of the existing culture and civilisation that is going to produce a deeply renewed society; the occurrence and consolidation of a new civilisation does not mean a total break related to the previous ones, which this is one comes from; the future civilisation is designed and outlined in a more or less prophetic style, putting into value a more or less deterministic methodology.