Emergent vs Imposed Order of Social Life: The Modes of Interaction and Transformations

Head: Filippov, Alexander F.

The project has been carried out as part of the HSE Program of Fundamental Studies.

Goal of research: The subject of the research project is to provide methods of theoretical understanding of new social situations that arise throughout the world due to the fact that the preservation and redefinition of political order steps forward again on the agenda.

Methodology: The purpose of the research is the study of the micro-causality in macro-processes and of macro-conditions for micro-interactions. The research problem is a meaningful review of the basic sociological problems of social order at various levels – from the basic level of the interaction up to the international law

Results of research: To achieve this goal a theoretical study has been undertaken. As a result, we managed to get, in the first place, philosophically significant results that have value for the basic sociology, i.e. sociological interpretation of basic interactions. The significant progress in understanding the phenomenon of trust, recognition, habits, power and authority has been made. Secondly, it became possible to relate the theoretical question of the police as a way of imposing order with the descriptions of micro-interactions. Thirdly, the important result is the application of the «police state» concept, on the one hand, to the particular research case (the February Revolution in Russia), and on the other hand – to the macro-theory of social order. By the usual way it would have to mean a complete alteration of the research optics, however, due to the wide use of the Foucaultian conceptual apparatus and the tentative development of the concepts of recognition and trust, the research context has changed its results. Police and state police are not transitory, historically conditioned modes of the state power functioning, they deeply penetrate into the social life as the universalia of the social interaction. Fourthly, the theoretical work on the trust, recognition and habit was related with a large sub-project on the history of ideas. The notion of «police state» has been developed in Germany, but it can be properly understood only looking at the history of its development and change. The final point of this history is the notion of the “political” by Carl Schmitt, which confers the ultimate expression to the concept of raison d’etat, directly linked to a police state. This is, unfortunately, still rarely taken into account both – by police investigators and by the researchers of rich Schmitt’s heritage. The appeal to the history of German conservatism and the thematization of «trust» as legitimacy in Schmittean theories allowed fixing up this deficiency. Only now familiar categories of Schmittean political theory get the right lighting and require the operational meaning.

The theoretical results of the research can be used to create and to enrich the resources of descriptions and to solve  social and political problems of the modern Russian society.