2013. vol. 12. No. 2

The paper deals with the conditions of the possible renewal of the “Constitutio libertatis” project on the basis of the 20th-century experience. The global political conflict, resulted in severe intellectual confrontation, produced the split of philosophy into two isolated  movements: the “continental” and the “analytical” movements, each promoting its own logic of thinking. The paper shows the influence of this fundamental philosophical schism on the key versions of the contemporary political philosophy. A new formulation for the main political problem emerges pointing to the mutual untranslatability of the languages of freedom and of justice. The two languages are traceable to the two competing philosophical logics, those of difference and of representation. The notion of “form of life” (“Lebensform”), used politically by Plato and analyzed logically by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, is introduced as a conceptual basis for a new political theory that should solve the main political problem. Finally, some basic propositions are discussed, that should be observed in trying to resume the project of the “Constitutio libertatis”. It is shown that the negative definition of the concept of freedom must be abandoned. Freedom has a certain logical form, but it does not logically imply that various forms of life, with their liberties expressed through various logical forms, inevitably come into mutual conflict. The foundation of the “Constitutio libertatis” is based on the autonomous “forms of life” and is justly distributed throughout a complex non-Cartesian texture of political reality.

In his famous paper John Rawls outlines a version of utilitarianism that takes into account the existing criticism of the utilitarian approach. Author shows that the traditional objections expressed in relation to two test cases of utilitarianism — punishment and promise-keeping — are based on the misunderstanding of utilitarian position, because they don’t make a distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it. In the case of punishment, there two justifications of it: the retributive view that presupposes that punishment is justified on the grounds that wrongdoing merits punishment, and the utilitarian view that holds that punishment is justifiable only by reference to the probable consequences of maintaining it as one of the devices of the social order. According to the author, utilitarian arguments are appropriate with regard to questions about practices, while retributive arguments fit the application of particular rules to particular cases. In the case of promising, truly utilitarian approach presupposes that promisor must weigh not only the effects of breaking his/her promise on the particular case, but also the effect which his/her breaking promise will have on the practice itself. Author thinks that the distinction between justifying a practice and justifying a particular action falling under it was neglected not only by the critics, but by the utilitarians themselves, due to the prevalence of the summary view of the rules. Rawls suggests his own, practical conception of the rules, that presupposes that practices are prior to particular cases of their application.

A preface to the dialogue of Oleg Kildyushov and Zinaida Peregudova.

The dialogue discloses the history and present condition of contemporary police reseaches which are the part of a specific discipline — policing studies in the broad sense. Drawing on the case of history of political security service interview provides a reconstruction of police studies history in the USSR and contemporary Russia. Specific attention is paid to the present condition of historiography on that topic. Even prominent scholars of that problem do not understand structure and real mechanics of law enforcement and state security activities in Russian Empire. Special attention is paid to organizing and functioning of Police Department — the chief agency of Internal Affairs Ministry and its interaction with other law enforcement bodies: general police, gendarmerie, etc. Dialogue discusses structural, ideological and personal aspects of law enforcement and state security activities in Russian Empire. The case of training for future policemen and state security agents is also being discussed against particular examples of how foremost Western police techniques influenced Russian police as well as attempts to reform it. The dialogue pays a lot of attention to Russian police reformation projects in the beginning of 20th century, especially to those prepared by count Ignatiev and Senator Makarov commission which acted within the so called “Special Deliberation Committee”. Interview compares these reformation projects with current attempts to reform contemporary law machinery of Russian Federation. Conversation is being concluded by discussing how perception of police by Russian society in general could be changed in some more positive way.

Carl Schmitt kept diaries throughout his life, several of which he specifically selected for academic publication. These are the recordings made in the early years after World War II, when Schmitt lost all his positions. After his release from the prison he returned to his home in small town of Plettenberg, where he remained until his death. Schmitt ordered these diaries to be published only after his death, because, even several decades after the war, they remained ideologically dangerous. In this issue we continue to publish fragments of translation of the “Glossarium”. In the fragments prepared for present publication, Schmitt argues on several important topics. First, he writes about utopia — paradise located in a remote, but achievable future. The ability to think future located at long distance decreases in modern times. Therefore, in the 19th century they have to move from utopia to positive science. Those who write on future must say that heaven can come tomorrow. Schmitt goes further to compare the utopian ideas of Thomas More with the utopias of the 19th century. More was not a cleric; he was just a clerk, an intellectual, a writer, not a priest. Schmitt questioned the rightfulness of the canonization of More and compared him with another Catholic thinker of that time, Fr. Vitoria. Another important topic — the problem of legality and legitimacy. Schmitt once again handles it in connection with the events in Czechoslovakia in 1948. These events he contrasts with the situation in Germany in 1929-1932.

In this paper we publish the letters of I. S. Aksakov to Countess M. F. Sollogub. These letters contain rich and versatile information about political and social views of Aksakov and his social circle, including the informal sides and methods of support of its influence in imperious spheres. Letters contain detail comments and brief introduction.

The paper is aimed at the analysis of the latest approaches to research in the social sciences including  mobility paradigm, the transnational perspective and the gendered approach to the study of social phenomenа. The research problem addressed in the paper is the possibility of examining these innovative approaches to social phenomena in a dialectical nexus. The paper draws from the analysis of secondary theoretical sources backed up by the findings of a multi-cited field research focused on the study of gendered implications of Ukrainian labour migration using a mixed-method approach. The paper illustrates the possibilities of applying the transnational paradigm to migration and mobilities studies, placing special emphasis on its advantages. It traces existing approaches to the research on transnational family and cross-border parenthood, using the Ukraine as the case in point. The heuristic and social relevance of the paper consists in casting light on the specificities of gendered approach to the study of economic mobility and labour migration in Ukraine, in outlining the effect of migration and transnationalism on families of Ukrainian trans-migrants, in showcasing the specificity of independent female migration in the context of global care chains, and in examining its gender effect on the transformations of mentality and identities of Ukrainian labour migrants.

The paper focuses on Emile Durkheim’s philosophical-anthropological views, particularly on the structure of his argument in “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions”, and traces the development on his views on the relationship between the individual and the collective with respect to the problem of human nature. Despite Durkheim’s open despise for metaphysical theories of human nature, his sociological project clearly contains philosophical-anthropological content. It was Durkheim’s intention to provide firm scientific sociological grounds for the dualistic conception of man. In his early oeuvre, Durkheim aims to explain the relation between the collective and the individual in human with his theory of solidarity. Unlike Ferdinand Toennies, Durkheim holds that their social evolution does not essentially change its substratum, since conditions of solidarity are the same for all societies whether they are based on mechanical or organic solidarity. However, the conception of organic solidarity contains several fundamental contradictions that make it unable to play the political role that Durkheim assigned to it and also drew extensive criticism in sociological theory. Eventually, Durkheim abandons this solution and his late work puts the experience of communion at the center of any collective life and describes the internal dynamics of this experience that fluctuates along with an unstable relationship between the collective and the individual within human being. Durkheim’s anthropology can be regarded as a call for science that would be capable of developing the viewpoint suitable for analyzing this changing relationship, and this paper questions the potential of Durkheimian sociological project in fulfilling this task.

This paper briefly summarizes Durkheim’s theory of the dual nature of man suggested earlier in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It is characteristic of human beings that two opposite principles confront each other within them: soul and body, concept and sensation, moral activity and sensory appetites. Although this inherent inconsistency of man has been long recognized by philosophical thought, no doctrine explanation to it has been provided to date. While empiricist monism has proved to be unable to explain how concepts emerge from sensations and disinterestedness develops from self-interest, absolute idealism, on the contrary, cannot deduce sensations from concepts. Although theories suggested by Plato and Kant do not bypass the problem of dualism, they only rephrase it and make no progress in solving it. According to Durkheim, dualism of human nature stems from the fact that all religions are founded on dividing all things into the sacred and the profane. This division, in turn, is explained by coexistence of collective and individual origins in the human being. Sacred things arise out of the collective origin that enables individual consciousnesses to fuse into communion. Collective origin does not act with constant strength, but intensifies during the periods of effervescence, when it subdues the individual origin. Since the importance of the social aspect of man increases over time, there is no reason to believe that complete consent between individual and society is possible that would endow man with internal harmony.

The paper considers a problem of plagiarism in dissertation text. Using a particular case — the dissertation in religious studies, that contains a big portions of the borrowed text — it is shown that analysis of plagiarism will be deficient without understanding of the mechanisms of local textual order production. This constitutive order of dissertation text presupposes a particular ways of text’s organization with respect to by whom, under what circumstances, and in which ways it will be read. The possibility of the successful defense of the dissertation containing plagiarism is connected not so much to the properties of the social context of dissertation text, as to the practices of competent reading that underlie scientific expertise. It is demonstrated that dissertation’s author faces a number of contradictory requirements: firstly, he/she has to provide an original text, that simultaneously satisfies some formal requirements; secondly, he/she has to show his/her individual scientific contribution, indicating, at the same time, how it is connected to the previous studies; and thirdly, he/she has to display his/her knowledge of specific area and literature that nobody knows as good as him/her, but his/her text must, at the same time, make it possible to be evaluated by the competent colleagues. To reconcile these requirements, author creates text which should be credible, but which thereby opens a room for plagiarism. Plagiarism in dissertation text, in this case, can be understood as a way of using a number of constitutive expectancies underlying scientific communication and distribution of scientific knowledge.

Review of Grammatika mnozhestva: k analizu form sovremennoj zhizni [A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life]by Paolo Virno (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2013).