Сultural Heritage of European Civilization as a subject of scientific analysis

The article highlights existing approaches to the theoretical and methodological comprehension of the problems of researching the cultural heritage of European civilization. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main epistemological trends in the study of European civilization cultural heritage. The methodological basis of the article is a civilization analysis. The scientific novelty of the article is to systematize the conceptual achievements of various scientists who adhere to a civilization approach to the study of European cultural heritage. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, competition between the German-speaking and Slavic cultural areals intensified. M. Danilevsky in classical work «Russia and Europe» conceptualized the sociocultural differences between two European worlds. The author emphasized their equivalence in terms of historical development. The scientific approach of O. Shpengler is very original. He proved a pessimistic thesis on the decline of European culture, which is degenerate in civilization in the XX century, a civilization paradigm develops successfully. A. Toynbi, F. Brodel, I. Vallerstain expanded the theoretical and methodological principles of civilization research. These authors showed dialectics of mutual influences of global and local processes. Significant contribution to the methodology of comparative analysis of sociocultural values of civilization was made by the classic of sociological thought Max Weber. He developed a methodology and collected an interesting actual material for comparing the labor ethics of various world religions, which is still an urgent problem of historical social globalistics. The conclusions of the article state that in the early ХХІ century, the cultural legacy of European civilization became global. Not least this happened due to the long global domination of the British Empire. The Great Britain Exit from the European Union is not so much evidence of «Twilight Europe», as evidence of the Duality of the European Anglo-Saxon and Romano-Germanic cultural heritage of European civilization. For the further detailed study deserves the problem of careful development of a methodology for comparative analysis of socio-cultural features of various civilizations. It is also advisable to develop the theoretical principles of historical social globalistics and check them on specific historical and sociological materials. In particular, it concerns the analysis of social mechanisms that provide reproduction in the historical time of certain local civilizations, the pace of their development, the specifics of functioning and development