Where is capitalism? A big data analysis of the Russian language area in the XIX and XX centuries | South-Russian Journal of Social Sciences
Where is capitalism? A big data analysis of the Russian language area in the XIX and XX centuries
Vol. 19 (2018) No. 2, Sociological Interpretations
Vol. 19 (2018) No. 2
Sociological Interpretations

Where is capitalism? A big data analysis of the Russian language area in the XIX and XX centuries

Roth S.
La Rochelle Business School
Trofimov N.A.
Institute for the Study of Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
Mkrtichyan A.Ye.
Yerevan State University
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How to Cite Array

Roth S., Trofimov N.A., Mkrtichyan A.Ye. (2018) Where is capitalism? A big data analysis of the Russian language area in the XIX and XX centuries. South-Russian Journal of Social Sciences, 19 (2), pp. 6-26. (In Russian)
Submission Date 2018-01-20
Accepted Date 2018-02-25
Published Date 2018-06-07

Copyright (c) 2018 Стеффен Рот, Николай Александрович Трофимов, Артур Ервандович Мкртичян

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Foresights and futures studies critically depend on the adequacy of our knowledge of the present and the past. This article tests whether the Russian speaking world may be adequately described as secularised and capitalist language area between 1800 and 2000. We are using the Google Ngram Viewer to chart and interpret time series plots of combined frequencies of pertinent keywords in the largest Internet book corpus, the Google Books corpus. The results confirm a growing functional differentiation and suggest that the Russian language area is a secularised, politicised, and scientificised language area which has never been dominated by the economy. Since the First World War, politics became an absolutely dominating, hypertrophied function system. Science became increasingly important in the XX century, particularly in times of the Cold War, being the second most important system in the Russian language area, followed by mass media, law and economy by the end of the XX century. Economy was traditionally a marginal function system during the whole period before the Russian revolution, supporting the idea about a traditionally communitarian character of the Russian system of house-keeping (хозяйство) and house-building (домостроительство). The importance of economy increased only during socialism (particularly during 1950-s — 1980-s), ideologically antagonizing mercantilism of the West. Thus, the historical periods of divulgation of socialist views and criticism of capitalism and exploitation overlapped with periods of strengthening positions of this function system within the Russian language area, which alludes to a certain similarity of programmes, standing behind socialist and capitalist societies. We conclude that the sample period may not be characterised as a period with the predominance of political economy or capitalism if we associate capitalism or political economy with any form of over-average importance or even dominance of the economy. This finding contradicts popular commonsense statements, as well as statements memorized within the literature of the political economy and socialism regarding macro-social evidence of capitalism in Russia between 1800 and 2000.

Keywords

culturomics, secularization, Google Ngram Viewer, social systems, Luhmann, performativity

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