Опубликовано в журнале Неприкосновенный запас, номер 3, 2004
Debates on politics and culture
The social sciences, their methods and the question of their autonomy from politics and other spheres of society, are the main topic of NZ No. 35. Our Liberal Heritage section features the text of a recent lecture by social theorist Laurent Thévenot entitled, in an allusion to Hannah Arendt, ‘A Science of Living Together in the World’. In his survey, which NZ is the first to publish, Thévenot takes stock of recent innovations in the social sciences, and relates them to the defining moments in the history of those sciences, pointing out especially their continuity with moral philosophy. He recalls sociology’s break with political philosophy, the beginnings of its quest for realism, and its thirst for system-building. He then goes on to discuss the crucial problems of values, reality, and scale in the sociological project, and argues that rather than concentrating solely on the issue of their own autonomy, social scientists should re-establish the connection with moral and political philosophy and focus on the study of ▒the art of living together’. In our editorial introduction to this text, we invite readers to reflect on the perspectives for a sociology which is liberal not in the sense of serving ▒liberal’ political interests but in the more classical sense of laying the bases for the fullest and richest development of individuals’ potential.
Under the Politics of Culture rubric, economist Geoffrey Hodgson asks, Are Universal Economic Principles Enough?, and argues that English-speaking economic science’s lack of attention to the heritage of the German historical school has made it oblivious to the importance of historical factors in economic reality, and over-confident in the application of generalisations that are of little explanatory value.
The central piece of the discussion is Topic 1, entitled A Debate on Methods, taking up Hodgson’s and other authors’ references to the German-Austrian Methodenstreit that started in the 1880s. Introduced by NZ’s editor-in-chief, Mischa Gabowitsch, the debate is ▒launched’ by Viktor Voronkov, director of the Centre for Independent Social Research in Saint Petersburg, with an impassioned attack on quantitative methods entitled This crazy, crazy, crazy quantitative world, in which he accuses quantitative studies of being subservient to State interests and obscuring, rather than furthering our understanding of social reality, of the life-worlds of people in society. Voronkov therefore proposes to ban quantitative methods from sociology altogether.
Seven Russian social scientists from different backgrounds reply to Voronkov. Inna Deviatko, the co-author of a well-known article critical of quantitative sociology published in 1994, argues that Voronkov’s charges against quantitative methods could just as easily be levelled against qualitative sociology, which has no greater claim to autonomy and objectivity than, say, public opinion research. Olga Shevchenko agrees with this and proposes to shift the debate from quantitative vs. qualitative methods to subjectivity vs. objectivity, although she admits that quantitative studies’ greater need for large-scale funding more easily propels them towards positivism. Sergei Ouchakine compares the present discussion to a 1967 debate between literary scholars Yury Lotman and Vadim Kozhinov on the use of mathematics in the humanities and argues that, just like semiotics learned mathematics back then, sociology should now learn from linguistics and literary studies. Yury Kachanov points out the common origins of objectivism and subjectivism in scientific practices harking back to early modern times. In his view, the main debate is not about the respective merits of subjectivism or objectivism, but about whether we are prepared to objectivate the practices of the social sciences as part of our quest for truth, or are content to accept research methods as unquestionable, self-grounding doctrines. Anton Oleinik draws attention to the pressures from schools of thought and funding bodies social scientists are exposed to, but also to the temptation of siding with their objects of study. His conclusion is that scholarly independence demands a Stoic attitude of detachment which many researchers may not be able to muster. Alexander Filippov argues that the social sciences need to fulfil the same standards of universality and replicability of their results as other scientific disciplines, and that applies to both quantitative and qualitative methods. He concludes gloomily that the absence of debates on methods in Russian sociology is not due to a hardening of battle lines, but to the fact that most Russian sociologists’ quest is for funding rather than truth. Finally, historian Nikolai Kopossov places the debate in a historical context, interpreting Thévenot’s, Hodgson’s and Voronkov’s contributions from the points of view of the specific experience they are rooted in, and proposing to take Thévenot’s text as a starting point for a much broader discussion on the future of the social sciences as a social practice.
In the Morals and Mores section, Stanford professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht provides an ▒external’ view on Russian debates by commenting on a discussion on the scientific nature of the social sciences and humanities at a recent conference in Moscow, and comparing some Russian analysts’ ▒rustic’ belief in scientific method to the more catholic US model of Humanities and Arts (How Scientific Should the Humanities Be?). Finally, our columnist Yevgeny Saburov devotes his column to economists’ use of the figure of the social agent (Bring Out the Actor!).
Our second topic is devoted to the politics of radio, prompted by recent changes in the programming of the US-funded Radio Liberty’s Russian service. Ethnologist Ilya Utekhin looks back upon the part Radio Liberty played in Soviet times, and discusses the uses different generations of Russian listeners make of its unique programmes (Time of Un-Liberty). This is followed by an interview with Kevin Klose, president of the USA’s National Public Radio, on NPR’s role in the US media landscape and the public’s renewed interest in serious analysis and high-quality reporting since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
Under the Politics of Culture rubric, we publish an essay by Lev Usyskin which argues that many of Russian liberalism’s current woes stem from its inattention to PR and an inability to counter distorted representations of its successes in the 1990s. In a short comment on Usyskin’s text, Mischa Gabowitsch argues that, rather than talking about how to polish up their image, Russian liberals should more seriously engage in internal debate in order to identify the shortcomings of their ideology and policies.
Our next big topic, sports, is introduced by columnist Alexei Levinson in his Sociological Notes, devoted this time to The Body Cult and the Leadership Cult. Levinson compares the taboo that used to surround the bodies of Soviet leaders with post-Soviet Russians’ interest in the athletic side of their presidents.
Topic 3, entitled O! O! O! O! O!, presents a range of views on the contemporary, and historical, significance and fortunes of sports. In The Form of Violence: In Praise of Aesthetic Beauty, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht maintains that finding sports beautiful does not need intellectual justifications, that it can be an immediate aesthetic experience, and one which, in team sports at any rate, is intrinsically linked to the enjoyment of violence channelled into beautiful forms. Philosopher Hans Lenk, in The Ethics of Sports as a Culture of Fairness: Fairness in Competitions and the Structural Dilemma, shows how in both sports and society at large, the spirit of informal fairness which has always been an important supplement to formal ▒rules of the game’, has been replaced by a spirit of existential grimness. Athletes and other citizens are now often torn between the demands of fair play and strong social and institutional incentives to win at all costs. Lenk argues that this situation places new responsibilities upon institutions and their representatives. Historian Mikhail Prozumenshchikov takes a look Behind the Party Curtain of the Sports Superpower, and shows how the Soviet party apparatus applied its logic of economic planning and bureaucratic control to high-performance sports, and provides a rich array of examples of the often conflicting pressures to which this exposed athletes. Finally, classical philologist Vadim Mikhailin compares Competition Sports in the Ancient Greek and Modern Traditions, and shows that although the classical and modern Olympic ideas could not have been more different from each other at their outset, both eventually degenerated along the same lines, turning athletic competitions into displays of the individual athlete’s hubris.
The New Institutions section presents the Youth Human Rights Movement, a network NGO based in Voronezh which co-ordinates human rights campaigns across much of the former Soviet Union and beyond.
Our Journals Review section features a review of recent issues of Russian journals, focusing on journals covering politics and society, and a survey of the landscape of cultural and intellectual periodicals in the Czech Republic by Alexander Bobrakov-Timoshkin.
Finally, the New Books section contains a dozen reviews of Russian and English books on topics ranging from the Russian human rights movement and the life of Nikita Khrushchev to the history of arts, with special focuses on ethnology and images of Russia in the West and vice-versa.