№ 5 - 2013
Krasin Yu.A.
The State and the Society: Shifts in the Power Field

An overall social upheaval is now taking place in the world (globalization and technological breakthrough) – upheaval that means transition of civilization toward a new, innovative type of development. It initiates changes in the power field’s configuration. The rapidly growing networks of creative life activity require cardinal innovations providing for combining the management of social processes with mechanisms spontaneously arising from the said processes: mechanisms of self-government, of self-organization and of self-regulation. Hence the tendency to redivision of the power functions between the state and the civil society. It may be assumed that the new social practices of power relations revitalize direct democracy, direct influence of the permanently reflecting society on political processes, and that there occurs formation of a new, higher form of people’s power, under which a policy is sunk into the milieu of public reflection. But realization of the outlined possibilities will require quite a period of transformation both of political institutions and of social consciousness.