Political Culture or the Culture of Politics? Polemical notes on a trivial topic

The author’s idea of revising the dictionary of modern Russian political science is a reaction to the mismatch of international and domestic discursive practices. The article deals with a critical attitude to “political culture”. This concept was introduced into circulation by scientists at that moment when political theory was in the stage of formation. The problem is that a concept designed to reflect the objective nature of politics is unambiguously related to the nature of culture. Meanwhile, culture and politics are the universal forms of human activity, each of which has its own specificity. Accordingly, the areas of social science also differ. To determine the specifics of political knowledge, the author suggests answering simple questions. What exactly does a political scientist measure: culture by politics or politics by culture; a political element in culture or the cultural (conscious, value, semantic) content of politics? Since the answers reflecting the subject priority of politics for a specialist in this field of knowledge are obvious, it is proposed to use the concepts of “culture of politics”, “cultural dimension of politics” and “cultural-political” instead of the concept of “political culture”. These expressions neutralize the formalism of the problem of “primary” and “secondary” in relations between culture and politics, politics and culture. From the perspective of the practical realities of Russian politics, the article examines such topical cultural and political aspects of modernity as the crisis of culture, the image of the future, the problem of distinguishing between transcendental and immanent political ideals. According to the author, a common theme for the modern domestic culture of politics should be an orientation towards a citizen as an immanent goal of the development of Russian statehood.