2013. vol. 12. No. 3

The article examines various aspects of a “police state” — a historically unique phenomenon which originally appeared in German absolutist states of the XVIII century (Prussia being the first of such states). Such states were characterized by a developed discourse of state administration (cameralistics) coupled with intensive state interference into social and economic life of its citizens by means of police control. First, brief introduction into the problematics of a police state is given. We point out the inadequate contemporary reading of a “police state”, exclusively viewed in the light of latter bourgeois law-based states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The heuristic value of such social order analysis for general modern theory and particular theories of political power is also considered. The paper continues with a brief digression into the case history of the term “the police”. The main semantic changes of the term are traced, beginning from its appearance in ancient Greece, and concluding with the absolutist epoch. The main part of the paper deals with the traditional police state as a historical phenomenon representing an attempt to implement an intentional utopia as an administrative practice and as a frame mercantilist concept of public good developed in cameralistics. Then, “police science” (“Polizeywissenschaft”) of the eighteenth century is examined as the police state’s own political discourse. The problematics of “police state” are applied to the Russian administrative experience in the conclusion.

This is an introductory article to the translation of Fr. Vitoria’s lecture “On Civil Power”, consisting of some biographical notes about Vitoria, as well as several of his lectures and considerations of his political theory. Although Vitoria did not give any clear definition of civil power in the text of this Relectio, he marked its three principal causes (finalis, efficiens, materialis), according to Aristotelian methodology. The appearance of power is a result of the nature of human society and, consequently, by the nature of the human himself. Following the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, Vitoria declared the social and political nature of a human being that calls him to live in society. In turn, in order to develop into the perfect community, such a society needs some vis directiva, i.e., the power. Only this power can stimulate the birth of a Commonwealth, although not belonging to the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, in turn, can create the King but can not give him the power (because power belongs only to God and can not be divided) but transfers authority (authoritas) to the king. Therefore, the King stands over all of his citizens and the entire Commonwealth while being responsible for his actions only before God.

This lecture of Fr. de Vitoria is dedicated to the problems of genesis, essence and forms of the civil power (naming this power civilis Vitoria contrasts it with the ecclesiastical one). He analysed consequently the necessity of the civil power and its causality examining them in the context of four causes elaborated by Aristotle and developed by the medieval Aristotelians. Vitoria described and explained the ultimate supremacy of a monarchy over the other forms of government (although he permitted an existence of other good forms such as republic or the aristocracy), considered the legislative function of the civil power. According to him the secular law could oblige a man not only in foro externo, but also in foro interno, that proves the divine nature of the political power. The appearance of a power is caused by the nature of human society and, consequently, by the nature of a human himself. Following the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Vitoria declared the social and political nature of a human being that calls him to live in the society. In turn, such society, in order to become the Commonwealth, needs a power. The Commonwealth can create the King, but can not give him the power (because it belongs only to God and can not be divided into parts) and transfers to him the authority (auctoritas). Thereby the King stands over any of his citizens and, at the same time, over all Commonwealth, being responsible for his acts only before God.

This is a translation of the afterword of Legality and Legitimacy (1932), rewritten by Carl Schmitt in 1958 for his collection Verfassungsrechtliche Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1924–1954. In the afterword, Schmitt once again describes the situation in Germany in the early 1930’s, and argues against the influential German lawyers who rejected his interpretation of the Weimar Constitution. He rejects the wide-spread opinion that he wanted a state of emergency in Germany to be introduced, and insists that this book was his final attempt to rescue the presidential republic of Weimar Germany. Schmitt then demonstrates the weakness of legal positivism and specifically stops at the several key points in his argument. First, according to Schmitt, the positivists did not know that legality, an unopposed form of the manifestation of legitimacy, had originally been an essential part of Western rationalism. Second, it is necessary to distinguish between the law and the sanctions because of their different legal statuses. This distinguishing is important because the legislative state was gradually becoming the administrative state. As a result, the governing institutions are more powerful than the parliamentary laws. Any parliamentary decision providing executive bodies relevant authority cannot be executed without an effective parliamentary majority. Thirdly, Schmitt explores the question of the so-called “premiums” for the legal possession of power. The afterword concludes with a brief overview of the situation at the end of the January 1933. The Publication includes the translator’s preface providing an overview of the main provisions of Schmitt's book, Legality and Legitimacy.

This paper uncovers the problem of the sociological understanding of culture and the concept of representative culture by German sociologist Frederick Tenbruck. The paper focuses on the conceptual underdevelopment of the concept of “culture” in sociology as compared with the concept of “structure", or “society”, which is the central concept of structural functionalism. Turning to intellectual history, Tenbruck traces the trajectory of these concepts, defining the various functions in the social dictionary of the 19th–20th centuries. The dictionary also fixes notions of culture as developed in the approaches of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, demonstrating the use of the reduced concept of culture in Parsons’ sociology as a universal normative sphere. The paper justifies the role of representative culture in the structuring and innovation (openness) of actual socio-cultural processes, achieved by the relative autonomy of culture (contents). The paper develops the thesis that an adequate study of the sociology of culture requires a return to the notion of ‘representative culture’ that had been lost during the process of segmentation of this discipline, as well as the segmentation of the history of culture. Cultural sociology is presented as a self-reflexive, meta-paradigmatic approach to the analysis of the institution of (social) science and its critical and constructive role in modern society.

The article deals with the interpretation of the city as a cultural form. Rapid social changes led to the problematization of personal certainty; in the attempt to define their own identity, people turn to the most obvious classifications, such as territorial ones. This search for personal certainty actualizes the problems of urban identity. The peculiarity of the city as a social entity is the absence of unambiguous patterns for identification within the urban community. The contemporary “information society” only enhances the existing diversity of urban residents and communities. Therefore, instead of the traditional interpretation of urban identification, it is proposed to consider urban identity in the logic of the concept of the “imagined community”. The bases of urban identity are the ideas about the city itself, not about the community. In the search for a theoretical apparatus to describe the contents of these ideas, the author refers to the concept of cultural form as used by L. Ionin in his concept of “cultural staging”. The “classic” sociological model argues that cultural patterns are formed from objective social interests that becomes the bases for corresponding behavior. In a society undergoing a profound transformation where the usual identification model had lost its meaning and the “interest” is reduced to the necessity of survival, such a model is unlikely to work. The concept of cultural staging offers an explanation for the formation of cultural identities as the deployment of the patterns which had been latent for some time, but not currently embodied in social practice.

The main object of this interdisciplinary paper is examining fan fiction as a social practice and a literary experience. Its conclusions draw upon the results from two years of field research conducted in the Russian Harry Potter female fan fiction Internet community. Reading communities play a crucial part in this new type of literary communication, even though these communities are completely ignored by the literature industry. These online communities strongly support the readers’ writings, provide an exchange of experiences, encourage the rethinking of different contexts of literary and social behavior, foster the development of literary and social imagination, and so on. While analyzing and theorizing fan fiction in detail as a literary experience, the author draws upon Uses of Literature (2008) by Rita Felski and her concept of the “modes of textual engagement”. The author comes to the conclusion that fan fiction uses even more “modes of textual engagement” compared to institutionalized literature, while minimizing all the factors leading to the rejection of a reader — which helps to understand the reasons for fan fiction’s enormous popularity and the practices of extensive reading. Apart from the four general functions of literature Rita Felski deals with (recognition, enchantment, knowledge and shock), fan fiction is based on two additional functions of the correspondence with “canon”, and the correspondence on pornography. All these modes of textual engagement saturate the fan fiction reader’s experience with intensity, corporeality and efficiency. This ethnographic research is complemented with theoretical questions about the changing role of a reader and a writer in amateur online literary communication.

This is an extensive memorial obituary for prominent Russian sociologist Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya (1927–2013). The brief chronicle of her academic career and the list of Zaslavasky's major scientific works are supplemented with some existential reconstructions of the major events in her life, of which Zaslavskaya also paid great attention to in her autobiographical memories. A brief chronicle of her scientific career includes her studies at the Moscow State University, her work at the Institute of Economics, the Russian Academy of Science, and the Novosibirsk Academgorodok, her active part in Perestroika as the first head of the All-Union Center for Public Opinion Research, and finally, her work as the president of the Interdisciplinary Center for Social and Economic Sciences (Intertcentre) near the end of her life. Zaslavsky always stressed the importance of her senior teachers, G.G. Kotov, A.V. Sanina, V.G. Venzher, and I.A. Kronrod, with love and respect. Much of the attention in her autobiographical reflections is occupied in the studies of the interactions between the villages and towns of Russia and the USSR. Zaslavasky also considered ideological socio-political conflicts which provoked the Soviet party leadership around several scientific projects Zaslavskaya was involved in. The obituary emphasizes that Zaslavskaya was characterized as a scientist motivated by social activism and by her desire to contribute to the improvement of the research of Soviet and Russian society. Additionally, Zaslavskaya possessed modesty, humility, curiosity and naivety, the inherent qualities of a true scientist worthy as one of the classic examples of academic intelligence in the world.

The publication presents the letters of a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Tatyana Ivanovna Zaslavskaya spent the first ten years of her academic life at the Novosibirsk Academgorodok. In 1963, Tatyana Zaslavskaya transferred from the Institute of Economy of the RAS to the Laboratory of Economics and Mathematical Research (LAMY), created by Abel Aganbegyan at the Institute of Economics and Industrial Engineering of the RAS-Siberian branch. With her family, she moved from Moscow to Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. Her addressee, Tamara Kuznetsova, was a junior research fellow of the Institute of Economy in this period, and prior to the departure of Tatyana Zaslavskaya to Akademgorodok, worked as Zaslavskaya’s “junior” assistant in the sector of the political economy of socialism led by Y. Kronrod. Letters reveal many sides and issues of Zaslavskaya’s life; her everyday life, her relationships with her colleagues, the political situation at LAMY and nature of her work there, the state of agriculture in the USSR, the socio-political situation in the country, etc. But the main subject these letters clarify is Tatyana Zaslavskaya herself, as an extremely pure, honest, sincere, smart, talented person, and a wonderful friend.