Опубликовано в журнале Неприкосновенный запас, номер 3, 2002
DEBATES ON POLITICS AND CULTURE
№3(23)of Debates on Politics and Culture is mainly devoted to the theme of liberalism and reforms. The Liberal Heritage section features excerpts from a book by Pierre Rosanvallon, the French historian and political philosopher. Under the heading Utopian Capitalism, Rosanvallon argues that liberalism is not an ideology legitimising 19th century style capitalism, but a fully-fledged philosophical blueprint for the organisation of society, as utopian in its ambitions as its spiritual heir, Marxist socialism. The editorial introduction briefly outlines Rosanvallon’s role in French political and intellectual life.
Literary historian Andrei Zorin, the magazine’s columnist, reflects upon the shift of interest from the “danger of the Far Right” to the football World Cup in recent West European public opinion. Analysing both these topics in detail, he interprets them as different manifestations of the erosion of national sovereignty. Zorin goes on to point out the loss of importance of national symbols in both football and the far-right skinhead movement in Russia, and suggests inviting a foreigner to train the Russian national football team — a proposal that was heeded shortly before this issue went to press. (Shall We Call In the Varyags?)
The Culture of Politics section introduces two articles on legal reform. Kim Lane Scheppele, a specialist on the US constitutional law, shows how the Cold War-era increase in presidential prerogatives is being used by George W. Bush in the aftermath of September the 11th to dodge constitutional norms and issues of civil rights and democracy (The Shadow of the Soviet Union in American Constitutional Law: Reflections on the War on Terrorism). Russian judge Sergei Pashin (Reforming the Courts in Post-Soviet Russia) gives a highly critical overview of legal reforms since Perestroika.
The first thematic section is entitled Reforms and Reformers; it opens with an article by economist Neil Robinson The Power of the Winners and the Fiscal Crisis: the State and Economic Reforms in Russia, where the author challenges the popular view that the Russian “oligarchs” are responsible for the shortcomings of economic reform in the 1990s. Next, David White, an expert in Russian politics, compares the two main reformist parties in “Yabloko” and the Union of Right Forces: Two Roads of Liberalism in Post-Communist Russia. Finally, Axel Kaehne engages in detail with the thought of economist Yegor Gaidar and political philosopher Alexander Akhiezer in Russian Conceptions of Statehood and Western Political Theory.
Sociologist Alexei Levinson (A Sociological Memorial to the Reforms) dedicates his column to popular perceptions of reform in the 1990s, charting how reforms of different areas of the state attract widely differing levels of attention.
The second thematic section is devoted to economic reform and features a round table discussion on the current economic situation organised by the “Liberal Mission” Foundation: Post-Growth Stagnation or Stable Growth?
The Politics of Culture section presents discussions of different aspects of the Moscow metro. Yevgeny Dobrenko discusses the general role of the metro in Between History and the Past, while Michael O’Mahoney (Notes From the Underground) focuses on depictions of sports in the decor of the first stations built in the 1930s. Historian of cinema Birgit Beumers shows how the image of the metro in Soviet and Russian movies has changed from boundless enthusiasm about the new transportation system in Stalin’s times, to its use as a gloomy setting for scenes of crime and madness in the 1990s (Travels Underground. The Metro on Screen).
The third thematic section deals with 19th century liberalism. Guido Carpi, an expert in Russian literature, draws attention to long-neglected parallels between the Russian Slavophiles, generally seen as a rather conservative movement, and West European liberals of the same period. He argues that despite, or possibly due to, the Slavophiles’ roots in the social stratum of the great landowners, they were not opposed to reform but tried to control it so as to avoid destructive democratisation in a Rousseauist vein (Were the Slavophiles Liberals?). Not dissimilarly, Ruslan Khestanov, a specialist in political philosophy, discusses the relationship between Alexander Herzen and philosophical liberalism (The Instrumentalisation of Freedom: Herzen and the Liberals). While nowadays Herzen is sometimes depicted as the forefather of Russian liberalism, Khestanov draws a more balanced conclusion, stressing both similarities and differences between Herzen’s worldview and that of classical liberalism. The very notion of a “classical” liberalism, however, is challenged by Mischa Gabowitsch (Multi-Faced Liberalism: The 19th Century and Contemporary Views of “National Peculiarities”), who draws on contemporary German and French historians’ debates on their countries’ liberal traditions to question the idea that there is a single, undisputed liberal creed to which each “new recruit” to this ideology has to adapt.
The Morals and Mores section features an article by Vladimir Uspensky entitled Habitual Twists, which discusses the roots and significance of certain unintended linguistic mistakes and imprecisions.
The issue ends with a presentation of the Franco-Russian Centre for the Social Sciences in the New Institutions section, a review of recent books on globalisation, and the first instalment of a new section of journal and magazine reviews, which presents three pan-European networks of cultural magazines and features a review of French intellectual journals.