№ 5 - 2005
Sulimov K.A.
To Paradoxical Character of Modern Political Knowledge

There are no pretensions in K.A.Sulimov’s article to exhaustive description of the phenomenon of paradox either in general or in political knowledge in particular. Nor does it claim the role of a manual or commentary on the subject of “how to avoid paradoxicalness”. Making distinctions between, on the one hand, such paradoxes which are unavoidable in principle, and, on the other, those that have been brought about by incompleteness of knowledge and by logical errors, the researcher qualifies striving for perfect removal of the first-type paradoxes as naive. In political science seen as dimensional entity of relations presuming inseparable interconnection and interdefinability of a subject and an object, he holds, such paradoxes are inevitable. They are called into being by the very urge towards universality: a statement claiming to be universally significant and true, must apply also to itself, otherwise it will cease being universally significant and true. In corroboration of his thesis, Sulimov analyzes articles by two classics of political science – G.Sartori and G.Almond – and demonstrates that their alleged uncontradictoriness happens to be the result of a set of contrivances enabling the authors to overlook the paradoxicalness of their constructions.