[1] Studying the political thought as verbal one, it would be prudent to quarrel its historical forms, including ideological ones; these forms require not an external assessment, but rather "a response to the need to understand the world" [2, p. 67]. C. Geertz, speaking ironically about the contemptuous attitude to the ideology that prevailed in 1930-1950ss., noted that “we may wait for the end of ideology as long as the positivists used to wait for the end of religion. Just as militant atheism was a response to militant religious fervor of intolerance (and to the expansion of knowledge about nature), so the hostility against ideology is also a response to political hecatombs of the last half-century (and to the expansion of knowledge about the society)” [7, p. 192].

 

Towards the teleology of political project. One of the non-replaceable concepts of political thought, which has an obvious effect of its meta-scientific dominants and its historical and axiological-projective attitude, can be considered the concept of civic consciousness. This concept is obviously artificial; it is impossible to believe in it as in some kind of absolute giveness of political thought; however, its value cannot be excluded, even if doubting its cultural and historical authenticity. The civic consciousness means to follow a certain ideal of participation in political action – the ideal, which is interpreted at the cultural and historical boundaries of political knowledge, within a certain evaluative range between ethical and political knowledge. Romantically-personal pathos of this concept goes back to the age of Enlightenment; however, the axiological principle of this ideal took its meta-scientific conceptual form when it became possible to think of it beyond the specific revolutionary practices of citizenship in the late XVIII century, after the Enlightenment, during the skeptical, science-and-historism-cultivating XIX century. This concept has emerged as an artifact of the secular theoretical and political thought, ready to ideological creativity and aware of its autonomy and ready to prescribe the conditions of political action in the imperative-cognitive manner. Understanding of the civil status of the participants of the political process, their special social and political dignity happened, of course, much earlier; Roman corona civica, composed of oak leaves, was for those who risked themselves in military mess, saved their co-citizens; we can find bright replica about civic consciousness as a moral problem in “Spirit of the Laws” by C. Montesquieu, which served as the basis, at the request of revolutionary France in the end of the XVIII century, for the law of citizenship – civisme – loyalty to the revolutionary government. However, the concept of civic consciousness indicated already a special consciousness of civil actions, their clarification in political science of the XIX century – the science of the spirit, distinguished as a significant cognitive and volitional principle of civic consciousness, civic consciousness or public spirit, as a special scientific and stylistic point of political thought [see: 15; 6]. In the history of Russian thought a special understanding of civic consciousness as an integral, purposeful state of political thought of an educated person is associated with the name of A.N. Radishchev, and the politically engaged intellectuals-Decembrists, “worthy sons of the Motherland” N.A. Nekrasov and N.G. Chernyshevsky, etc. Encyclopaedist V.I. Dal pointed to civic consciousness as “a state of civil community; the concept and the degree of education required for the formation of civil society” [5, p. 390], marking thereby not only a meaningful traditional, but also relevant by the middle of the XIX century design and teleological citizenship status, its axiological-normative moment [see: 11; 13, p. 155-159 et al.].

Meta-scientific, axiological-normative intensity of the concept of civic consciousness asserts itself throughout the entire XX century. At the very beginning of the last century, P.A. Stolypin recorded an observation where he captured epistemologically free nature of this concept, its secular and projective didacticism: “First of all, we should create a citizen ... and when this task will be performed, the civic consciousness will be established in Russia. Citizen first, and the civic consciousness thereafter. And we usually do it quite opposite” [20, p. 69]. The similar thought by I.A. Ilyin is extremely filled with anti-didactic pathos: “Both science, and life still have a dominant formal understanding of the state, which perverts its nature and corrupts deeply in souls all the basic principles of civic consciousness. Following this understanding, people build public life as if it came down to the known, mechanically performed, external actions, detached from the inner world and spiritual roots of the human ...” [9, p. 259]. A century has passed; changes in Russian politics are ahead of the development of political reflection; the current political thought uses the concept of civic consciousness as a non-replaceable, indefinable or poorly definable through another undefined notion of a set, such as “a set of attitudes and beliefs, which, on the one hand, involves a high degree of independence of individual judgments in a society, and on the other hand, a strong social solidarity, which is reflected in the participation of the person in society” [12]; there is also a regret about no “precise scientific justification of ‘civic consciousness’ being given yet” [12].

Civic consciousness is the basic design value of modern Russian political thought; it is its inherency as its meta-scientific dominant, its hidden cognitive sense. It is worth to think about it epistemologically, not objectifying the civic consciousness as a kind of a long intellectual passion, an external historic moral requirement, but keeping it in a certain historical unity of political thought, which has no external guarantees of its autonomy and understands the civic consciousness as a sine qua non of its scientific and cognitive efficiency.

Thinking historically. A little more than two centuries ago, in March 1811, N.M. Karamzin presented to Emperor Alexander I a secret report – “Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia in its political and civil terms”. In this report, Karamzin discussed axiological principles of Russian political thought, objecting to the practice of political reforms by M.M. Speransky and formulating a protest aphorism: “We have become the citizens of the world, but we’re no longer, in some cases, the citizens of Russia” [10, p. 35]. This aphorism has been furiously discussed for decades, often simplified and ideologized as some practical advice on the manipulation of public opinion given by the ruler of the minds to a reigning monarch. However, Karamzin, being the ideologists of contemporary European theorists, never was an ideologue. His protest was a protest of an experienced historian, who noted in the history of Russia not only the action of political interests, but also the fact that these interests could not include, namely the rallying axiological principles of political reality, rooted in the experience of political self-experience. The Russian political thinking always had a place for sober and historical awareness of the harmonic nature of political acts done by people in close contact with their entire life system. To think politically in Russia has always meant to think with some teleological precision, knowing the autonomy of political thought both in its abstract realness and its truth – think axiologically, thoroughly, and act, coordinately considering the thinking itself, its individuality and uniqueness as thought in terms of its highly political, life alter. “Blessed is he who laid down life for his friends” (John 15: 13). This attitude to political thought, evangelic and ultimately epistemological, was sometimes limited to enthusiasm of unthinking scientific and political action and led then to monstrous aberrations of political thought. However, being understood with life prudence by the “citizens of Russia” straying away from thinking abstractly and impersonally, as the “citizens of the world”, it was quite triumphant in terms of political care and protection of all life-close and valuable-immutable value things. Successes of Russian policy were always the stronger, the more they were associated with the conservative distrust of political thinking to itself, with trust in the immutable axiological principle, with respect to which the open completeness of the Russian political thought manifested itself. Experience of such trust has been half-remembered; a century later, Russian political thought rediscovered itself. It will be a shame if this rediscovery is a repetition of intellectual and ideological predilections; happily, if it takes place within the horizon of the new challenges of political epistemology – in the long term of design strategies of political thought, verifiable to the extent of their axiological credibility already visible in the analytical tradition of Western political thought [comp.: 14, pp. 65-90].

 

This paper was prepared with the support of a RFH grant, project No. 13-03-00336 “The conceptual framework of cultural-historical epistemology and modern trends in the methodology of humanitarian research”.