№ 5 - 2003
Fyodorova M.M.
Metamorphoses of the “Free Individual” (Notes on the Formation of the Problem Field of Political Philosophy in the 19th Century)

Stating the crash of the edifice of Marxist-Leninist ideology, that had been, for a period of seventy years, raised with such thoroughness, and pointing to the vacuum of its kind, which yawned instead and which artificial ideological constructions began to fill, the author concerns herself with the question of whether sharp upheavals in the social structure of society should necessarily lead to a change of the paradigm of political philosophy. In search of the answer, she turns to the experience of the development of political thought in late 18th to early 19th centuries and to the changes that came over it under the influence of the Great French revolution. Thorough analysis of the “work” done by political philosophers of the 19th century to reconstruct their own problem field, brings her to the conclusion that productive critique of political findings and ideas of the 17th to 18th centuries resulted in an essential change of accents and in cardinal rethinking of a series of problems and of methods of their solution, which, however, was not accompanied by paradigmatic upheavals in political philosophy. This allows her to affirm, summarizing her reflections, that political theory that has lost, under the conditions of a revolution, its adequacy, is possessed of the ability to find within itself the means for immanent critique and renovation.