Polyphony, Historicism and Relativism: Russian Philosophyand Contemporary Analytical Political Philosophy

Abstract

This article is a study of the main directions of the contemporary analytical polit­ical philosophy in the context of the idea of polyphony (pluralism) and related problems of historicism and relativism. This approach, on the one hand, solves the problem of embedding Russian philosophy into the global semantic context, on the other, it allows to identify the philosophical foundations of Western liberal theories of the second half of the twentieth century, the main metaphysical as­sumption of which is diversity. The article analyzes the commonality of world­view positions of the key directions of the analytical political philosophy and the Russian philosophical tradition. It is shown how the combination of Western and domestic conceptual attitudes allows representatives of modern philosophy to understand traditional socio-philosophical problems in a new way: rational disagreement, pluralism of values, the problem of manipulation, the basis of moral judgments, the problem of political justification and consent. J. Gray’s concept of ‘temporary agreement’ is analyzed in the context of polyphony and pluralism. The impact of antinomianism of the Russian thought on the neo-Hobbesians D. Gauthier and K. Baier is examined. The main points of the con­cepts of ‘collective rationality’ by C. McMahon, D. Schmidtz, J. Waldron, P. Pet­tit, and S. Hurley are revealed in the context of the problem of intersubjectivity (M. Bakhtin). J. Habermas’s political and philosophical ideas – public discourse, justification, and deliberation – are studied in the context of the value conflict problem. A comparative analysis of the ‘public justification’ (G. Gaus), of the ‘objective horizon of values’ (I. Berlin), of the concept of ‘Other’ (Bakhtin) is conducted. In the context of historicism, which is expressed in the understanding of the man as a historical, self-creating being, whose needs changed along with changes in self-consciousness, the author analyzes the relationship among A. Kojève’s, M. Bakhtin’s, I. Berlin’s ideas, deliberative democracy and justifi­able liberalism. Historicism manifests itself in a constant conversation with a personified addressee or ‘second subject’ within which the ideas of the histo­rian of philosophy and the positions of the political philosopher are formulated.