Exploring Politological Ideas: Politics and Modern Society

1. LECTURE 5 • Stages of world politological ideas development

2. Тhemes: • Politics and Modern Society. • Politology in the system of social sciences • Stages of world politological ideas development

3. Politics and Modern Society. • Politics is a process by which groups of people make decisions. The term is generally applied to behaviour within civil governments, but politics has been observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions

4. Ideology • The word "ideology" was coined long before the Russians coined "intelligentsia", or before the adjective "intellectual" referred to a sort of person (see substantive), i.e. an intellectual. Thus these words were not around when the hard-headed, driven Napoleon Bonaparte took the word "ideologues" to ridicule his intellectual opponents.

5. Ideology (2) • Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction • Karl Marx proposed that a society's dominant ideology was a part of its superstructure.

6. Karl Marx • Karl Marx proposed an economic base/superstructure model of society. The base refers to the means of production of society.

7. Louis Althusser •  Louis Althusser proposed a materialistic conception of ideology, which made use of a special type of discourse: the lacunar discourse.

8. Feminism as critique of ideology • Naturalizing socially constructed patterns of behavior has always been an important mechanism in the production and reproduction of ideologies. Feminist theorists have paid close attention to these mechanisms.

9. Ideologies of parties • A political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to what ends it should be used. Some parties follow a certain ideology very closely, while others may take broad inspiration from a group of related ideologies without specifically embracing any one of them.

10. Political ideologies Political ideologies have two dimensions: • Goals: How society should work (or be arranged). • Methods: The most appropriate ways to achieve the ideal arrangement.

11. Epistemological ideologies • There are critics who view science as an ideology in itself, or being an effective ideology, called scientism. Some scientists respond that, while the scientific method is itself an ideology, as it is a collection of ideas, there is nothing particularly wrong or bad about it.

12. Ideology and semiotic theory • According to the semiotician Bob Hodge, ideology "identifies a unitary object that incorporates complex sets of meanings with the social agents and processes that produced them. No other term captures this object as well as ‘ideology’.

13. Politology in the system of social sciences • The social sciences are the fields of scientific knowledge and academic scholarship that study social groups and, more generally, human society

14. History of the social sciences • The history of the social sciences begins in the roots of ancient philosophy. In Ancient history, there was no difference between mathematics and the study of history, poetry or politics. Significant contributions to the social sciences were made by Muslim scientists in the Islamic civilization during the Middle Ages.

15. The Social Sciences • Anthropology • Biology • Business studies • Communication and media studies • Demography • Development studies

16. The Social Sciences (2) • Economics • Education • Geography • History • Industrial relations • Law

17. The Social Sciences (3) • Linguistics • Marxism • Medicine • Methodology • Philosophy

18. The Social Sciences (4) • Political science • Political theory • Psychiatry • Psychology • Social problems and Criminology • Sociology

19. Anthropology • Anthropology is the holistic "science of man". The discipline deals with the integration of different aspects of the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Human Biology.

20. Economics • Economics is a social science that seeks to analyze and describe the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. The word "economics" is from the Greek οἶκος [oikos], "family, household, estate," and νόμος [nomos], "custom, law," and hence means "household management" or "management of the state."

21. Education • Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgement and well-developed wisdom.

22. Geography • Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main sub fields: human geography and physical geography.

23. History • History is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the study of all events in time, in relation to humanity. There is much debate over history's classification of academe

24. Law • Law in common parlance, means a rule which (unlike a rule of ethics) is capable of enforcement through institutions. The study of law crosses the boundaries between the social sciences

25. Sociology • Sociology is the study of society and human social action. It generally concerns itself with the social rules and processes that bind and separate people not only as individuals, but as members of associations, groups, communities and institutions

26. Psychology • Psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behavior and mental processes. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental illness.

27. Stages of world politological ideas development • One of the most widespread themes in various discussions about the reasons of the long time Russian- Chechen military confrontation is the attempt to find out which was the more guilty party in the beginning war and who is interested in its continuation.

28. The problem of separatism • As to the problem of separatism it perhaps was never so actual as nowadays. The Chechen people are so destitute and destroyed, the social, economic and political problems are so enormous, that even if Russia was smitten with love for Chechnya and wanting to facilitate its fate there would little it could do.