Naturalism and political science: adaptation to the non-classical world picture

. One of the greatest achievements of the humanity is obviously the recognition of the systematic unity of the natural and social knowledge. However, this recognition was not constant. The emergence, development and history of political sciences reflected it rather evidently, tending to go from one extreme to another – from identifying its methods with those of positive science to pretending to be unique or even universal. All these questions acquired special importance in the new non-classical world, but the adaptation of political sciences to a new type of thinking meets considerable difficulties. Methods of study . The main method of the study is comparative analysis of the variations to connect philosophical and substantive (ontological and epistemological) tools with political and applied ones of researching political and international political processes and phenomena. Moreover, the authors also used the interpretation approach. Results . The analysis of the most significant approaches towards the political and international processes demonstrate that the acceptance of the new postulates of non-classical and post-nonclassical pictures of the world is quite complicated. Simultaneously with the preservation of the pure mechanistic, approach some of the elements of the new world pictures were taken from quantum physics, biology. The chance factor and the rejection of the casual relationships were also taken into consideration. Nevertheless, it is better to speak not about the transfer of the methods and approaches from natural to political sciences, but about the attempts to build “weak” theories or analogues of theories (for instance, quantum-like theories). Nevertheless, generally speaking, political as well as other social sciences tend to be developing capturing the zeitgeist. Discussion and Conclusions . The adaptation of political sciences to new scientific pictures of the world is inevitable, but limited by definition: for all unity of knowledge as such, their methods and tools are very different and even undergo such significant changes and simplifications in the process of adaptation that they often retain only the names and imitations of the methodologies of other sciences. And yet, at least we have to go in parallel. But some caution here would not hurt at all.