http://sociologica.hse.ru en-us Copyright 2025 Sun, 29 Jun 2025 12:05:29 +0300 https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061964796.html The author seeks to justify the possibility of conceptualising an event as unique, while showing its place in the system of causal relations. The article considers the contradiction between the treatment of an event as an atom of social life, an element of a cluster and an event as a turning point that divides what happens into ‘before’ and ‘after’. The basis for the operation of qualification could be causality, the properties of the event or the role of the observer; the event, being an element of a class, can be included in causal series and act as a manifestation or justification of some universal regularities, and the social order can be considered as an order of unequal probability of events. However, this line of thinking does not allow the comprehension of specific events, those that change the social order, and also limits the analysis of causality only to the context of universal regularities. The second approach, which emphasizes the unique aspects of the event, levelling these shortcomings, makes it impossible to comprehend the place and role of a particular event in causal chains and to identify any regularities, and the absence of the figure of the observer makes it difficult to comprehend the event as a social one. These shortcomings can be overcome by the narrative approach. The event in the narrative has significance in itself, but is linked to the narrative, i.e. it is possible to talk about the event in the system of cause-and-effect relations, preserving the idea of the significance of a single event; the temporality of the narrative allows us to comprehend aspects of the interaction of agency, social structure and dynamics, continuously occurring in time. In contrast to Ricoeur’s interpretation, and in accordance with D. Carr’s ideas, narrative has no author and represents the experience of time, and the narrative nature is characteristic not only of texts, but also of reality itself; this thesis allows us to talk about social events, the significance of which is determined not by the figure of the observer, but by the narrative nature of reality. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061964979.html One of the important issues of contemporary political thought is the complex relationship between truth and politics, the combination of which can lead to the depoliticization of the community under the “tyrannical” influence of truth or, on the contrary, the substitution of truth with politically advantageous lies. A relevant context emphasizing the dangerous consequences of the conflict between truth and politics is the spread of post-truth as a phenomenon expressing the alarming state of the modern public sphere. The article is devoted to comprehending the crisis of political life associated with the emergence of the phenomenon of post-truth, as well as the possibilities of resolving the modern conflict of truth and politics. The theoretical basis of the study comprises the philosophical ideas of H. Arendt and L. Strauss, which substantiate the incompatibility between truth and the world of human affairs. The author analyzes Arendt’s main ideas related to the tyrannical nature of truth, as well as the interpretation of these ideas by modern post-truth researchers. It is found that Arendt’s theory lacks a normative dimension important for understanding the nature of post-truth, and its interpretation by contemporary critics of post-truth contains an unfounded assumption about the possibility of the political legitimization of truth. On the basis of Strauss’s “On Tyranny”, alternative views to Arendt’s on the contradiction between truth and politics are reconstructed. The author proposes to rethink modern conceptions of post-truth and to present it as an ethico-political phenomenon caused by the lack of moral responsibility of political subjects for the search and defense of truth and for the preservation of political life from its tyrannical influence. The key danger of post-truth is the concealment of the value content of political life, and the practical means of overcoming it can be to ensure a value-pluralistic approach to the public sphere, and to raise the question of the virtue of participants in political life. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061965071.html This article addresses the problem of studying the rules, in adherence with which members of queues conduct their behavior. The article shows that the existing body of research concerning queue rules does not pay sufficient attention to the turn-taking organization of the studied instances of the queue. Drawing on a relatively small corpus of conversation analysis-inspired inquiries into non-vocal turn-organized activities (such as pool-skating, couples’ dancing jams, pétanque, hopscotch, and board games), the article suggests a re-specification of the problem of studying the rules of the queue. This re-specification involves the shift of the focus of inquiry from the queue to various kinds of turn-organized activity, with queueing as one of the possible methods of turn pre-allocation being available to the participants of said activity. The article formulates a theoretical frame of reference which can be used in empirical research of turn-organized activities as a minimal conceptual vocabulary, allowing the researcher to describe the methods for turn distribution used by the participants of such activities. The concluding section formulates several suggestions which can facilitate the description of the observed methods for turn distribution. Such a description is viewed as a possible method of studying the architecture of intersubjectivity in interaction. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061965147.html This paper explores the phenomenon of physical queues through an ethnomethodological framework, analyzing how social order is generated, maintained, and altered in the context of waiting. While most sociological studies focus on established social orders, the queue offers a unique opportunity to observe the real-time emergence of order through the actions and interactions of participants. Drawing on research conducted from 2000 to 2024, the paper examines the diverse forms, organization and configuration of physical queues.The study emphasizes the spontaneous and fluid nature of queue formation, highlighting how participants actively engage in creating and enforcing rules that govern their behavior while waiting. Through non-verbal communication, mutual observation, and informal negotiations, individuals construct a shared understanding of order within the queue. The paper also investigates how social norms, including concepts of fairness and need, influence the behavior of queue participants, and how status and hierarchy affect the distribution of resources within the queue.Furthermore, the paper addresses the influence of environmental factors on queue organization, such as spatial arrangements and the physical context in which queues form. The study also identifies gaps in literature, suggesting directions for future sociological research on physical queues and the construction of social order. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976128.html The post-city, in the context of co-spatiality, is a meta-assemblage. Post-urban assemblage can be represented as a meta-geo-culture, whose local singularity turns out to be constantly transforming. The ontologies of post-urban geo-cultural assemblages (PUGCA) are reproduced as “floating” fields of the corresponding cartographies of the imagination. The post-city represents a pulsating cross-border mobile settlement of an assemblage nature. The inherent transborder nature of the PUGCA “erases” any possible exclusion/inclusion, transcending political meanings as co-spatial. Geo-cultural co-existence in the post-urban reality can be considered as the inclusion of any other post-urban geo-culture. Post-urban detournement as a contingent process leads to the formation of floating post-urban environments, whose images in an ontological sense cannot be accurately fixed. The formation of the PUGCA (in/of) Northern Eurasia may have an impact on the development of continental cartographies of the imagination of a planetary nature. It is necessary to talk about the long-term geo-cultural archetypes of urban environments (in/of) Northern Eurasia, which were formed on the territories of Russian states and became the basis for the development of specific, “North Eurasian” PUGCA. One of them can include a specific cross-border vernacular. The hybrid geo-cultural vernacular is a mental and material network of attitudes, discourses and images associated with the prevailing type of urban environments in Northern Eurasia. The North Eurasian variants of the hybrid geo-cultural vernacular can be a nutritious “soil” for the development of new forms of settlement. The cross-border nature of the North Eurasian hybrid vernaculars is associated with extensive limitrophic zones where large-scale civilizational platforms interact. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976313.html The subject of this article is the problematic situation in the life of parish communities of the Russian Orthodox Church. On the one hand, the community is considered by various church actors to be an important component of church and social life, on the other hand, according to sociological research, a very small number of Russians actively participate in parish life. The question is, what is the cause of the situation?Today, the Church has a well-established idea of what a community is, namely a social entity characterized by horizontal connections between participants and their help either to each other or to someone outside. This understanding prevents comprehension of the source of the problem: people who come to church bring their ideas of good and right into religious life, which makes it possible to consider the parish community not as spontaneously emerging aid networks, but as a sum of actors taking different moral and practical stands. Their positions need to be correlated with each other in order to make relationships between people in the community productive. We assume that it is this need that marks the community limits: people will leave it if these ideals prove impossible to either reconcile or accept.Relations between people can be built through a reflexive correlation of moral and practical positions: a decision made about a particular problem or situation can be objectified and applied to another situation (this would usually be a decision about the establishment of a just social order). However, actors may also refuse to work out an objective and fair solution to avoid conflict here and now. This situation is very common in the Orthodox Church and is marked with the words “humility”, “patience”, “forgiveness”. A problematic situation turns out to be one in which actors move from a position of “having ideals and agreeing on them” to a position of “humility.” In the first case, we are talking about an Orthodox solution to the problem of justice; in the second case, we see the refusal to resolve the conflict through the search for a just solution. If the actors repeatedly have to move from the first position to the second and back, then the second position begins to be perceived as a concealment of injustice, unfair behavior, etc. We assume that these frequent movements in many cases may explain leaving communities.It is possible that the Orthodox Church has its own implicit theology of justice, but so far this ideal has been poorly reflected. This also adds to fluctuations between the two aforementioned positions. Our hypothesis is that in order to increase the number of community members and strengthen their solidarity, the Orthodox Church should work out a solution to this problem. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976403.html The article examines the genesis of the concept of novelty and argues that modern difficulties in defining and identifying the new are a symptom of a semantic crisis, which is based on the loss of strategic normativity of novelty in modern culture. Three historical-semantic models of novelty are identified and analyzed: cyclical (characteristic of prehistoric societies), invented (peculiar to the modern era), and routine (reflecting modern trends). In the cyclical model, novelty and the ways of representing time were subject to strict control, and the future was interpreted through ritualized myth. The invented novelty model, which combined two perspectives on the origin of novelty — reproduction and combination — affirmed the value of rationally constructing the future. The routine model of novelty is characterized, on the one hand, by the algorithmization of the generation of the new, on the other hand, by the normativization of novelty in all spheres of modern man’s activity. The paper demonstrates how, in the context of digital culture, there is a transformation in the ways of identifying the new through discretization, combinatorics, and externalization of psycho-social existence in “aesthetically charged environments.” Particular attention is paid to the analysis of algorithmic forecasting which, unlike statistical prognostics, does not so much predict as shape the future. The research shows that the semantic crisis of novelty reflects fundamental changes in the temporality of contemporary culture and requires rethinking the role of novelty in the digital age. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976510.html The analysis of modernization theory in contemporary sociology presents significant difficulties. If we analyze a number of contemporary publications on modernization, we can conclude that there is an attempt to return to the provisions of the classical modernization theory of the times of Talcott Parsons and Samuel Huntington in Russia. Several modern publications, whose authors criticize later versions of modernization theory from the position of universality of the development of the country of Western Europe, as a rule, contain calls for a return to their own roots, which actually means a break with the approach of Shmuel Eisenstadt. If we present various versions of criticism of this interpretation, one of the classical theorists whose teachings contradict the very idea of universal development as such was Werner Sombart (1863-1941). Analyzing the influence of the needs of the ruling elites in the countries of New Age Europe, the German sociologist described the unpredictable role of various factors in the complex process of economic transformation, not the least of which was the desire for luxury. Thus, it is Sombart who can now be seen as the key theorist of historical arbitrariness of western modern development, within which the desires and needs of elites become one of the fundamental determinants of social development. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976650.html This article examines the works of German sociologist F. Tönnies and his contemporary, anarchist G. Landauer. The problem that determines the study is related to the fact that sociology as an academic discipline and anarchism as a socio-political thought hardly share common points. However, in our view this is not entirely fair. Anarchist ideas can add a lot to the sociological discourse. For example, they might deepen the understanding of the formation of the discipline. Moreover, today researchers try to reconstruct “anarchist sociology” in the writings of Proudhon, Bakunin or Kropotkin. Since it is impossible to cover all authors and ideas in one study, we will focus on the key themes of sociological theory. This topic is connected to the conceptual pair Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society), proposed by F. Tönnies in his work. The sociological reading of these concepts is well known. Without this construction, it is impossible to understand the development of social thought in the works of G. Simmel, M. Weber, H. Fryer and other classics. However, this conceptual pair played a major role not only in classical works. Specifically, if we focus on Landauer’s texts, we will find that he also used these terms. This fact raises the question about the commonalities and differences between this conceptual construct in Tönnies’ and Landauer’s works. In our opinion, these topics are rather new and hardly studied in detail, so the current article will try to provide preliminary answers to these questions. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976756.html The Russian People’s Council’s Decree “The Present and the Future of the Russian World”, adopted at the XXV World Russian People’s Council, proclaims Russia as the “one that withholds”, which fits perfectly into the Russian theological and philosophical tradition of understanding katechon. In our view, it seems relevant to analyze the concept of “katechon” and the related concepts of “legitimacy” and “state of emergency” in the context of the social doctrine of Russian Orthodoxy. In the “Fundamentals of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, modern states are defined as secular, free of religious obligations. Thus, the Church views the modern legal system as imperfect, since human law will never match the wholeness of the divine law. What is more, such a situation creates the premises for a state of emergency, which, in our opinion, correlates in the Russian Orthodox social doctrine with the possibility of declaring civil disobedience by the Church in cases where secular laws conflict with the divine ones. This means that the Church acts as a sovereign, capable of passing a verdict on the legitimacy/illegitimacy of existing legal regulations, and therefore of the state itself. Hence, we cannot define any state entity as a katechon from the viewpoint of the Moscow Patriarchate social doctrine. A modern state can become a katechon if the goals and objectives of the Church and the state coincide both in worldly tasks, and the salvific mission of the Church. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061976867.html The view is here advanced that war is a political institution in process-an institution whose function has not been defined, whose structure is not yet fixed. The attempt to put war into a biological category errs not so much from a failure to distinguish between social and biological aspects of war as from failure to distinguish between competition and conflict as different aspects of the “struggle for existence.” Competition may be regarded as an individuating or analytic process; conflict as an integrating process. Wars have provided the necessity for an organization of society which, for the purpose of collective action at least, has become immeasurably superior to the primitive horde. The state not only had its origin in war, but its chief function continues to be preparation for and execution of war. Where no common interests or “constitutional understandings” exist to make compromise possible, wars seem inevitable. Ideological wars turn out to be struggles for land because political control and sovereignty of territory is necessary to maintain the different ways of life represented by the parties to these conflicts. The function of war has been (i) to extend the area of peace, (2) to create within that area a political power capable of enforcing it, and(3) to establish an ideology which rationalizes and a cult which idealizes the new political and social order. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061977120.html In this publication, Max Weber responds to a renewed series of critical articles by the German historian Felix Rachfahl. At the heart of their heated scholarly debate was Weber’s groundbreaking work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). In May-June 1910, Rachfahl produced a second cycle of four articles, continuing the fierce polemic against the founding father of sociology that had begun a year earlier.Although Weber had already addressed Rachfahl’s sharp invectives at length in his First Reply, published the same year (1910) in his journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, he deemed it necessary to issue another substantive reply in the same publication. Weber’s text comprises the first part of his Second Reply mercilessly dismantling Rachfahl’s arguments.Weber regretfully acknowledges the excessive and ethically questionable prolongation of this heated dispute, explaining it as a duty to counter all contrived objections and unfair accusations that distort the true meaning of his pioneering work in the sociology of religion. At the same time, he deliberately uses this public conflict as an opportunity to reiterate and elaborate his own position.This paper has significant value not only as a key document in the history of classical sociology but in intellectual history as well — particularly as an example of the agonistic culture of scholarly debate of the time. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061977183.html Review of the book: Collins R. (2025) Violence. Microsociological Theory / Translated from English by N. Protsenko. Moscow: New Literary Review. — 1008 p. ISBN 978-5-4448-2809-0 (In Russian) https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061988144.html Book Review: Pettit P. (2023) The State, Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. https://sociologica.hse.ru/en/2025-24-2/1061988217.html Review of the book: Scott James (2025) In Praise of Floods. The Untamed River and the Life It Brings, Yale University Press.