Shvyrkov Alexander

About Moral of Revolutuonaries (but not Revolutionary Moral)

Political Science, as a rule, considers revolution in isolation, or abstraction, from moral qualities of those people who make it. Moreover, even when political scientists view revolution through the lenses of moral categories, i.e., whether “revolution is good or bad”, whether it “brings maximum benefit to a maximum number of people” etc., moral of revolutionaries per se, or their personal, everyday moral, their moral as people, is still overlooked. A.Shvyrkov believes it is high time this topic should be addressed and outlines a number of possible approaches to its development.

DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2017-87-4-123-132

Pages: 123-132

POLITICAL THEORY, DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY

On the basis of the analysis of the relationships between political theory and political discourse, A.Shvyrkov comes to the conclusion that such relationships can be best described using the metaphor of generation: although it is true that theory generates discourse, discourse is not equal to theory, and changes in theory do not necessarily lead to changes in discourse (at least, immediate and direct changes). In other words, theory and political discourse that it generates can develop quite independently of each other. Exploring the problem of ideology in this context, the author makes a distinction between ideology and ideological statement and formulates a hypothesis about the retrospective nature of the notion “ideology”, which is filled with the real content only when the change of an epoch occurs.

DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2016-80-1-33-42

Theory of Democracy as Analogue of Scientific Research Programme

The article justifies the possibility of applying I.Lakatos’ theory of the scientificresearch programmeto the array of theories referred to as the theory of democracy. Having convincingly demonstrated that, despite all the differences between the humanities and the natural sciences, the corresponding array of democratic theories can be viewed as analogous to what Lakatos refers to as thescientificresearch programme, A.Shvyrkov identifies and describes the hard core of this array, its positive and negative heuristics, and a belt of auxiliary hypotheses. The author's analysis leads him to conclude that the theory of democracy as an analogue of the scientificresearch programmehas passed the peak of its development and entered a phase of stagnation.

DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2015-78-3-37-49

ABOUT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICAL THEORY AND REALITY

This article is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between political reality, political theory and political facts. If condensed, the author's logic unfolds as the following. Political facts emerge only with the advent of political theory. Multiplying the number of theories always means multiplying the number of facts. Political facts are drawn from political reality. The latter is incomprehensible, infinite, and inexhaustible. The key point in the relationship between theories and facts is that theories embrace the existing plethora of facts only to a negligible extent. As a result, there is almost never real competition between theories; the analysis of the majority of political processes requires application of several theories at once; the construction of facts in the form of causal chains is difficult or impossible. According to the author's evaluation, it is the specific features of the origin of political theories that allow them to exist to a certain extent separately from political reality.

DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2014-75-4-71-85

UKRAINE: PATTERNS OF COLLAPSE

The article attempts to look at the processes that unfold in the post-Soviet states, especially in Ukraine, from the viewpoint of a paradigm that can be figuratively called a paradigm of collapse. In contrast to the paradigm of development that has dominated the European science during the recent centuries, according to which humanity is moving towards increasingly greater perfection, this paradigm assumes that each successive state of society is more primitive than the previous one. Starting with the hypothesis that the collapse of the Soviet Union has not ended yet (and is probably far from ending), A.Shvyrkov analyzes the Ukrainian realities showing that all the processes occurring in the economic, political and social spheres of the country, including those that, as it may seem, could be interpreted as processes of development, are not only incapable of “replacing” the process of collapse, but in some sense represent a part of this collapse.

DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2014-73-2-34-47

Why Societies are Ruled by Immoral People

The article is devoted to the discussion of the problem, the essence of which in the first approximation is reduced to the question of why societies are ruled by people whose moral qualities are of significantly lower level than “average” for a given society. In search for an answer to this question A.Shvyrkov examines mechanisms of formation of power pyramid and lays out a number of hypotheses linking the immorality and aspiration for power as an end in itself with the presence of certain human psychological “defects”.

DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2013-70-3-119-130