Rakityanskiy Nikolai Mitrofanovich

This essay’s part contains two relatively independent sections. At the beginning of the text, the authors discuss the mental and civilizational mission of Christianity in England, in particular the Catholic and Celtic churches. The mental and civilizational foundations, as well as the distinctive statehood of the future British nation, were laid in the process of their multidimensional interaction. The second section describes the stages of the transition from impersonal, undogmatic, autochthonous polymentality to the formation of a subjective, dogmatic, monotheistic mentality among the inhabitants of the British Isles. The fundamental political and psychological result of the Christianization of the British elites was the emergence of new mental properties. First of all, subjective identity as awareness of the exclusivity of one’s potential, and also the ability to political refl ection and to identify oneself with the goal of political activity. The British elite’s uniqueness is due to the peculiarities of the historical development and formation of their subjectivity, which gave rise to a special ruling regime and original political culture.

In this article’s second part, the authors consider the results of the activities of the predecessor of English (insular) Protestantism, the theologian and philosopher William Ockham, who at the beginning of the 14th century formulated the basic postulates of a political phenomenon later to be called British imperialism. Occamism gave rise to individualistic liberalism as the foundation of bourgeois law; the idea of “human rights”; voluntarism as the primacy of will over reason; and the emphasis on empirical knowledge as a belief in progress and as a principle of utilitarianism. The authors describe the programming infl uence of Occamism on the formation of the mental foundations of the ruling estates and demonstrate the mental and political dynamics of British elites in the period of national history before the Reformation of 1534. The sustaining mental references of the British elites — including individualism, voluntarism, pluralism, skepticism, relativism, messianism, political expansionism — are also discussed. Finally, the structure of the mental-evaluational resource base of the elites is presented, featuring nominalism, imperial-patriotic liberalism and liberal law, conservatism, traditionalism, the law of the strong, hegemonism and the awareness of exclusiveness.

The article attempts to provide a systematic analysis of the phenomenon of dogmatic thinking explaining its signifi cance for political and psychological research. The publication contains four relatively independent sections. First, the author discusses the dogma and dogmatic thinking concepts, their content, meanings, and functions. Dogmas have integrative properties and are considered as a factor of socialization, able to form a systemic model of the world in mass consciousness. The second part of the article deals with the “law of context,” the psychological mechanisms of contextualization, decontextualization, refl ection, and their importance in understanding political problems. The third part develops the thesis that dogmas can be seen as the dominant contextual system, a building block for the formation of mental matrices and the main paradigm of political thinking. Finally, the last part investigates the essence of dogma as the basis of political mentality. The author concludes refl ecting on the heuristic potential of the dogmatic principle in the study of global mental-political systems.