Articles

The subject of this article is the genesis of the socio-philosophical interpretation of the concept of the spectacle, known from the book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by the French philosopher and fi lmmaker Guy Debord. The author presents an analysis of an array of Debord’s texts from different years, with the goal of distinguishing and examining the main stages of the formation of the concept and the transformation of its meaning. The study goes from the implicit presence of the concept in the avant-garde practices of the representatives of the Letterist artistic movement (including Debord himself) to the first, purely esthetic and cultural interpretation of the concept, presented in works by Debord in 1957–1960 — and further, to the semantic extension of the concept presented in Debord’s 1960 article “Preliminaries Toward Defi ning a Unitary Revolutionary Program,” and to the completed socio-philosophical concept as presented in two books, The Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. The article also examines the events of Debord’s political and artistic biography which formed the context of the process under study.

This study presents a comparative analysis of three different methods of measuring the quality of deliberation by their ability to resolve the main contradictions in the concepts of impartiality, equality and the common good in Jürgen Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. The analyzed methods — M.R. Steenbergen’s Discourse Quality Index (DQI); the DQI variant of André Bächtiger et al.; and the method used by Simon Niemeyer and John Dryzek — differ from the point of view of orientation toward the process / result of deliberation, which allows one to give a complex assessment of the effectiveness of one or another method of measuring the quality of discourse. The author concludes that each method contributes to the solution of deliberative theory’s problems of impartiality, equality and achieving the common good from different angles. Nevertheless, the question of uniting these methods into a single compromising instrument is still open, promising and relevant.

This article analyzes three problem groups: problems of neo-corporatism — both “classical” (the erosion of stable classes and groups and the transition of social practices to the meso-level) and new ones that have emerged in the 21st century; problems of the further fragmentation of consensual practices; and the complications of consensus-building in the context of fairly closed and non-public real management structures and the erosion of stable social strata. The article addresses different political science approaches to solving socio-economic problems within the neo-corporatist framework as well as socio-psychological arguments — in particular those related to specifi cities of contemporary political behavior and political differentiation — that also demonstrate the diffi culty of a neo-corporate model. The author points to some drawbacks of description and of prescriptions for the development of Russian neo-corporatism that exist in Russian scholarship owing to the lack of attention to new problems of neo-corporatism and to an orientation toward European corporativist practices of the beginning of 1990s.

This article examines the classifi cation of a number of intergovernmental associations of economic and fi nancial orientation that arise as the result of a crisis. Intergovernmental associations with an international legal identity are divided into two main types: international organizations and interstate associations of the “club” kind. The article pays special attention to the institutionalization of the business community in the framework of the structures under consideration. The author acknowledges the special interest due the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Group of Twenty (G-20) as representatives of two types of associations with a universal mandate and criterial membership that are capable of dealing with various diffi cult issues, from political and economic questions to matters relating to ecological safety, by marshalling for this purpose the available power, fi nancial and analytical resources of the member states. The author emphasizes that in comparison with other international associations examined, the format of the business community’s participation in the work of the OECD and the G-20 is the most institutionalized.

This article analyzes the relationship between the national, cultural, civic and civilizational identity types. The originality of the relationships among them in Russia is compared to Western civilization. For Russia, because of the vastness of its spaces, its specifi c geopolitical position between East and West and the multinational composition of the population, the processes of collective self-identitifi cation have always been extremely complicated. The authors lay out the thesis that the national-cultural, civil, and civilizational types of identity in Russia correlate hierarchically and noncontradictorily with each other. Moreover, without one another, none of these types of identity could be either comprehended holistically or consistently implemented practically. The article further demonstates that Eurasian civilizational identity makes it possible to accentuate the positive aspects — those that unify peoples and nations — in the processes of forming national-cultural and civic identity. The example of the Altai region is used to show that Eurasian civilizational identity also allows for the formation of an adequate representation of regional identity as well.