2016. vol. 15. No. 4

In modern society, friendship seems to be relegated to the private realm. When friendship enters the public space, it is usually associated with corruption. This is particularly the case when speaking about friends in politics, where friendship is part of informal politics which is focused on accessing or keeping political power. This relational aspect of political friendship must be distinguished from a more structural and institutional aspect of political friendship, which political philosophy presents in terms of civic friendship. This is the very meaning of the political, where a public space exists with the conditions that must be guaranteed for conflictual political communication or collective political action. In this sense, the idea and the theory of civic friendship points to the relational and organizational aspects of collective action, as well as to those shared norms that are expressed and negotiated in the public sphere. No serious sociological theory can ignore the fact that, nowadays, democracies in many regions of the world are put into question because it is no longer clear where the boundaries of trust, and therefore of citizenship are, or what holds people together, particularly in the context of globalization and immigration. In relation with the theories of trust, civic friendship is civil society, the civic and political culture about the practices and expectations in society about how to live, how to work together, how to communicate politically in order to influence politics, or how to change things. Finally, the political theory of friendship is also a warning against the abuse of power and the reintroduction of unity and enemies in a society based on the differences and multiplicity of perspectives.

The article considers trust as one of the most teasing and vague notions in sociology for it is widely used in both everyday language and scientific discourse as taken for granted and not presuming any special interpretations or situational definitions. In the first section the author identifies key elements of the sociological study of trust (causes and effects; determinants and practical implications of different “types” and “levels” of trust; the prevailing definition of trust as a means of coping with uncertainty, etc.). The second and the third sections consider the empirical study of trust within quantitative and qualitative approaches pointing briefly to their focus of interest, which is social and political trust measured in large-scale surveys, often in the comparative perspective, in the former case; while the latter seeks to understand what trust means for people and why they prefer to speak about trust using specific words in particular situations. The fourth section discusses the discursive construction of trust; the author believes that narrative analysis is a perfect methodological decision (provided there is enough “quantitative” and “qualitative” data to contextualize its findings for correct interpretation) to identify the typological discursive constitution of trust in everyday practices; and illustrates such a potential of narrative analysis on a small example of semi-structured interviews with the Russian rural dwellers. The article ends with a few concluding remarks to summarize key findings and challenges of the trust re-search for now, which is justly enough considered to be at the crossroads.

This article explores sexuality and intimacy in a women’s penal colony in Russia. Russian researchers rarely focus on the Russian prison system as a whole, or on women’s experiences in colonies, female identities, and punishment practices in particular. These topics therefore remain marginalized, out of the spotlight of critical public debate and sociological research. The present article contributes to the current debate on the meaning and consequences of close relations in women’s colonies, varying in context from friendship and love to exploitation under the tough control of the gender regime from both the prison administration and the informal system of power typical of a prison hierarchy. The female body becomes an additional mechanism of supporting the repressive nature of a penal colony, strengthening patriarchal traditions, and maintaining a high level of homophobia in Russian society as a whole. Based on the analysis of 33 in-depth interviews including biographical elements with women between 18 and 55 years old convicted for various crimes, I argue that the gender regime in correctional facilities for women becomes an additional mechanism aimed at strengthening discipline, control, and the patriarchy in a patriarchal society. Whilst the regime is not prescribed by law, it becomes the law because of the extreme objectification of women, the female body, and the status of the female.

Today we cannot but notice the sequence of the considerable changes in the present-day social and cultural order through the obvious process of its invasion by certain semiotic constructs, possibly described as political myths, and nearly all of them closely connected with the issue of past/present/future glory. This glory could be lost (e.g., the col-lapse of the USSR), or gained anew (e.g., the joining of Crimea in 2014). The concepts of glory and victory in Russian political discourse are bound up with each other so closely that it is difficult to divide them. Besides, glory and victory are being gradually possessed by the establishment. At the same time, political myths are the means and the aim of this process. Myth comes forward as a universal code, and moreover, as a universal social-cultural matrix which contains patterns of ethics that are to be installed into the society. Besides, myth is a structure based upon the category of shap-ing the reality in which people may believe, not the category of belief. In the sphere of the media, myth broadcasts itself mainly through memes, using them both as instruments and as a certain communication channel. The structure of a meme is semiotic, while there is still a communicative difference between a meme and a myth. The idea of political glory is closely connected with the sphere of myth and with the concepts of time and space. This kind of integration makes up what Bakhtin called a “chronotope.” Three main myths of historical glory in present-day political discourse can be distinguished: the myth of Byzantium and the so-called “The Fifth Empire,” the myth of the “Polite People,” and the myth of “Panfilov’s Twenty-Eight.”

In antiquity, the phenomenon of friendship became the object of steadfast attention from philosophy. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle connects the political existence of man with friendship since he believes the city (polis) can be built in analogy with friendly unions. Cicero also saw a social prototype in friendship. A gradual change in such a representation resulted in a romantic concept of friendship that is understood as the subjective, sensual bringing together of individuals, but is only accessible to few. Kant and Hegel also adhered to the romantic concept. Russian religious philosophy, on the one hand, is formed under the influence of German romanticism and the understanding of friendship peculiar to it, but, on the other hand, it returns immediately to the concept of friendship as a social construct. Khomyakov believes that friendship is first of all established between the power and the people, and this friendly union distinguishes Russian culture from the West European culture. However Russian religious-philosophical thought is distinguished by the aspiration to understand the phenomenon of friendship not in itself, but in its connection with the concepts of enmity and brotherhood. There is an image of brotherly unity emanating from a Far Eastern civilization which Vl. Solovyov posits as the main threat to Christianity, whereas N. Fyodorov, believes that a brotherly unity and an unspoken pledge of rescue from “the not brotherly” West that has remained in the Russian and in the Chinese agrarian communities. The relationship between the concepts of friendship and brotherhood becomes clearer in 20^th century Western European thought, particularly in the representations of the “mystical acosmism of brotherhoods” by the sociologist and philosopher M. Weber and the political philosopher H. Arendt.

The paper will examine Bertrand de Jouvenel’s account of political authority and its relation with the question of trust. Jouvenel’s work offers a provocative and unique account of political authority, viewing it first and foremost as a type of instituting regular and reliable social relations between different members of a social community. As part of his thesis, Jouvenel distinguishes between two major types of political authority, which are referred to in the course of his writings as “power” and “authority.” While power, generally speaking, proceeds through the containment of individual agency in given fields, primarily through an appeal to personal interests or direct coercion, authority is manifested primarily in a charismatic or informal type of leadership influencing the agent’s behavior at a more implicit level. The distinction between power and authority, as Jouvenel emphasizes, implies a double conception of trust as an ethical and epistemic principle. While power provides the necessary regularity by means of mediated information which is normally embedded in certain bureaucratic organization, authority provides a more immediate type of regularity by instituting “hubs” of social regularity, especially through the quality of personal character. The relation between the two types of political authority can be seen as involving a type of equilibrium. While power deals with reducing the externalities and risk that are encompassed in human interaction and allows for basic subsistence, authority allows for a wider array of human choices, while at the same time keeping power from overwhelming the social fabric. The main focus of Jouvenel’s political theory is the conservation of the elusive and implicit social tie which allows authority to play its unique role, while keeping it distinct from the more mediated forms of political power at the same time.

This article discusses Gadamer’s conception of friendship as a part of his draft of a conception of practical philosophy. His starting point is Greek philosophy, specifically Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on friendship. He adds significant nuances to the understanding of friendship that were first laid down in his doctrine of philosophical hermeneutics. It allows him to place the notion of friendship in the context of modern philosophical debate and social criticism, and thus to make an original contribution to the discussion. Gadamer understands friendship as a necessarily reciprocal struc-ture. He emphasizes the fact that only reciprocity or a kind of relation to someone other than “me” can serve as a suffi-cient basis for the explanation of the possibility of a community, as opposed to neo-Kantian and a phenomenological adherence to self-consciousness. The notion of friendship is closely connected to the notion of solidarity. The first one is considered as a more universal and thus grounding type of interpersonal communication, whereas natural solidarity is a specific kind of bond that can grow into the true friendship. Furthermore, friendship is seen as an accession of being (Zuwachs an Sein) from a teleological point of view, i.e., the true friendship is a contribution to and the realization of life. The outcome of this practice cannot be differentiated from its process.

In this article I will analyze the central categories of Thomas Aquinas’s social thought, such as a people (populus), multitude (multitudo), and Commonwealth (respublica). The next article (Part 2) will contain an investigation of the categories of a community (communitas), communication, and society (societas). I stress the immediate readiness of the question in existing Thomistic literature. Despite the active investigations of Aquinas’s political theory, the social theory remains almost forgotten. The works of Ignatius Th. Eschmann, Yves Congar, and Jeremy Catto represent some exclusions from this assertion, but not one of them has paid enough attention to the terminological peculiarities of Thomistic thought. Between the main results of this work, it is worth to focus on the next aspects of the dissipation of the people’s concept, its equalization with the multitude, and the break of the connection between the notions of a peo-ple and a Commonwealth. The populus in Thomas’s theory loses its political nature ascribed to it by Cicero and Au-gustin. Having lost its subjectivity, the People convert into an organized multitude united by common territory and the same mode of every-day life. Aquinas ignores the creation of the Commonwealth by the People and establishes a con-nection of another type between these concepts. According to him, the People is a kind of Aristotelian “materia,” while the Commonwealth is the “form.” In compliance with the precedential assertion, the Respublica becomes eternal and unchangeable, where only the content—i.e., the People or the multitude—can change. In effect, Aquinas formulates the concept of the proto-State here.

The article employs theoretical perspective of religious market to discuss the gap between the indicators of religious identification (69%) and indicators of engagement in religious practices (3%) in contemporary Russian society and the linked issue of insignificant influence of religiosity on population values and behavior according to mass surveys data. As the subsample of practicing Orthodox Christians demonstrates that religiosity has a very strong influence on values, marriages and reproductive behavior, rates of social diseases, etc. (I. Zabaev, E. Prutskova, D. Oreshina), the absence of religiosity effects in mass surveys data demands deeper investigation. Majority of studies interpret the gap between religious identification and participation in religious practices in the perspective of the secularization theory. We suggest reinterpretation of religious processes in Russia within the framework of the religious supply-side model. On the basis of the theory of religious economy (R. Stark, W. S. Bainbridge, R. Finke, L. Iannaccone, and others) we develop model of the religious market in the countries with religious monopoly. Depending on the average time spent on the confession, we model different evaluations of the religious market supply-side. Our analysis reveals that religious supply in Russia is significantly restricted by inaccessibility of given population of priests for regular participation in confession. The model of religious supply suggests the alternative to mainstream secularization discourse hypothesis for the explanation of the gap between Orthodox Christian identification and participation in confession and communion practices in contemporary Russia.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with married Russian fathers, this paper focuses on the gender contracts and father-hood models of the middle class of contemporary Russia. It shows that while the ideal of fathers heavily involved in day-to-day parenting is widespread, the reality is somewhat different despite the active participation of Russian mothers in the labor market. Still, for most Russian men, fathering as a set of everyday practices of engaging with their children has more value than for the generation of their fathers. The research shows that modern Russian society can be characterized by the co-existence of egalitarian and traditional tendencies in gender relations. On the one hand, the practices of involved fathering are evolving, and on the other hand, the traditional patterns of masculinity are enforced, excluding fathers from the sphere of parenthood. Economic factors and rigid notions about the family gender contract are the main obstacles which prevent Russian men from “doing” involved fatherhood. The liberal phenomenon of “new fatherhood” which appeared in Western countries turned out to be much more conservative in Russia. The modern family is still the “space of struggle,” and this struggle is counter-directed: it can be a fight for survival, or for power, or for an egalitarian gender order, against the discrimination of men as secondary parents, against old-fashioned traditional views on the father’s and the mother’s roles in the family, or for the preservation of those views.