№ 1 - 2005
Kaspe S.I.
Apologia of the Center: On a Forgotten Methodological Resource of Political Science

The motif of the article by S.I.Kaspe is search for an alternative to the program dominating the recent decades’ humane sciences, i.e. to the “decentering program” within which the researchers' attention is focused above all on borderland phenomena and on network structures. Far from refusing to admit fruitfulness of this program, and far from claiming universal nature of his theses, the author deems, nevertheless, manifestly premature any denial of “centers and hierarchies” as objects of attention in political science. Considering as necessary the study of the functioning of the metaphors of center and of vertical in descriptions of political reality, as well as the study of the existence of the entities represented by these metaphors, in political reality itself, S.I.Kaspe points to the appreciable and not quite utilized potential of E.Shils’ sociology presenting a valuable set of analytical instruments for the solution of this class of research problems.