¹ 2, 2015
“The Splendors and Miseries” of Political Rituals
The article attempts to analyze political rituals in the light of distinguishing between conventional-indicative and unconventional-symbolic meaning of politics. The author documents ontological difference and communicative similarity between religious and political rituals, shows that the mechanism of everyday ritualization contributes to the increasing importance of less substantive components of political action, reveals the role of rituals in transition moments of political life and considers specific features of such political rituals as sacrifice, holidays and anniversary celebrations. His research shows that, although the direct inspiring impact of rituals is nothing more than a “contract illusion” of a symbolic effect, which can be destroyed by unconventional and perlocutionary “Theking is naked!”, the importance of rituals for modern communities should not be underestimated because due to their complex nature they perform the function of stabilizing the social order.
¹ 3, 2011
MODERN SOCIALIST UTOPIA: FROM CRITICAL ANALYSIS TOWARDS MOBILIZATION THROUGH NEGATION
In the article the author looks into the theoretical prospects of socialist utopia rebirth as the so called horizon line that is impossible to cross, but easy to see as if it were reachable. The author shows that post-Fordism capitalizing and alienating nonmaterial labor has become a real problem for the radical negation in the framework of neo-Marxist utopia since under such conditions any social alternative is in danger of becoming a part of the capitalist reality. Such disciplinary power of the modern capitalist logic generates rejection of the political action as it is rather than a protest. In this situation radical Marxist utopia comes down to the affective negation that cannot become a subject to reflection. Its creators and proponents do not want to find themselves in the capitalist present, aspiring in their expectations into the future that will not grow out of the modern capitalism and will never be capitalism in principle.
¹ 3, 2010
Upon analyzing the political processes occurring during the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, G.Musikhin posits that the popular idea about the supremacy of professional managers in politics over demagogues speculating with mass’ political aspirations conceals an attempt by the power holders to get rid of the axiological rationale for the political hegemony. He concludes that when the governmental policy is supported by the voters’ will rather than sovereign power per se, the ideological discourse becomes of fundamental importance since support is lent to someone who can present his ideological position as a majority’s goal. The debate within the political space is built around an ability to offer to the society a more attractive political (to be more precise, ideological) prospect rather than detailed mechanisms of how to govern society (that are largely universal).
¹ 4, 2009
POPULISM: STRUCTURAL CHARACTERISTIC OF POLITICS OR “FLAWED IDEOLOGY”?
Based on the analysis of the key components of populism through the lens of ideologies functioning the author convincingly proves that the researchers who denies populism the right to be called ideology due to its ambiguity and lack of the key features simply do not notice that it is such ambiguity (to be more precise, fragmentariness) that is its main characteristic. According to G.Musikhin, the inability of populism to exist as an independent complex ideology that makes it use not only specific recommendations, but also the conceptual core of other ideologies by no means implies that populism is not recognizable as a special ideological movement with its own framework characteristics. Therefore, conducting research on the ideological reality we should not confine ourselves to revealing populist features in the activity of one party or political leader or another. It is much more important to determine whether a political actor we are interested in employs populist techniques, but stays in the framework of some complex ideology, or we are dealing with the ideology of populism “sticking” like a virus to the conceptual core of such ideology.
¹ 2, 2008
DEMOCRACY’S CONCEPTUAL DEFECTS AS A PROBLEM OF GLOBALIZATION
In many works devoted to globalization the authors see the root causes of contemporary problems in globalization and not in the designs of Modernity that it allegedly opposes. Having thoroughly analyzed the challenges confronted by democracy that seems to be nearly “the most unquestionable” of these designs, G.Musikhin has convincingly proven that the main present-day problem does not consist in globalization but, instead, in the fact that contemporary political community cannot survive unless it solves the problem of globalization in a democratic fashion. According to his conclusion, the point is not a particular modus of democracy but, rather, its ability to justify its actual or desirable state. G.Musikhin sees the outcome from the prevailing situation in reconsidering the content of legitimacy and sovereignty and in setting them free from their substantial territoriality. He believes that unless reconsidered in this way, democracy will inevitably turn into antiquity.
¹ 3, 2007
The urgent issue faced by the world community is what should be the attitude of a constitutional rule-of-law state to those who are not always in line with the commonly recognized social norms of everyday living. Should it protect human rights up to suppressing "anti-modern sectarianism and obscurantism" or should it express maximum tolerance to different forms of social and individual activity that does not fit into the tough frameworks of the Modernity project? In the first case the ending might be the "dictatorship of humanism", in the second case the rule-of-law state turns into the indifferent witness of personal liberty oppression. According to G.Musikhin it is the principle of individual autonomy that opens the way to getting beyond this dilemma. He concludes that the real value pluralism and liberal democracy tolerance should be based on the supremacy of individual autonomy leaving space for collective values that do not always meet the principles of constitutional liberalism.
¹ 3, 2006
The object of analysis in the article is the notion of authority, which is one of the main substantial categories in the definition of power. The author emphasizes that authority acquires a special meaning at crucial moments, when power has to demonstrate its capacity to govern, i.e. prove itself adequate in the surrounding historical context.
Having compared the historical experience of Russia and Germany, G.Musikhin concludes that both countries have seen an intellectual authority (authority of competence) to exist independently of the institutional one (authority of power) for a long period of time. Subsequently, power in Russia did not possess an intellectual authority, whereas in Germany a universally recognized intellectual authority did not enjoy real support and recognition from power. In both cases extremely excessive claims were put forward: power wanted the public political thought to serve it, whereas political philosophy demanded political power to correlate with its intellectual constructs.
DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2006-42-3-49-66
Pages: 49-66
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Musikhin Gleb
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