The Thinking Reed

What interests me in this matter is not the ‘cultural sphere’ in its entirety (philosophy, art, to some extent science and learning, traditions, and so on) but only what in Western sociology is linked with the concept ‘political culture’.2 This means that the ‘cultural sphere’ as such will consequently be looked at from a definite, narrow standpoint.3 Archie Brown, who has written interestingly on this subject, says that ‘political culture’, in the true sense of the term, ‘is not divorced from a “culture” in the widest social sense. On the contrary, it is closely related to cultural values and orientations more generally.’4 It is quite natural, therefore, to consider political culture as a part of culture in general, and political ideology as a part of the total spiritual life of our society — and, contrariwise, to study general-cultural processes in the context of political conflict. ‘Political culture’, writes the American historian R. Tucker, means ‘politics as a form of culture, and political activity related to the larger culture of a society’, and this might

be taken as the central subject-matter of the discipline. Instead of treating political culture as an attribute of a political system, we would then view the political system of a society in cultural terms, i.e., as a complex of real and ideal cultural patterns, including political roles and their interrelations, political structures, and so on.5

Such an approach seems to be highly productive when studying certain processes which have taken place in our society, but unfortunately Western experts (1) analyse political culture as something fairly stable and static, paying less attention to how it evolves, and (2) are much more interested in the culture of the official upper circles of our society than in the oppositional and semi-oppositional trends. For this reason I think it appropriate to use — instead of the Western expression ‘political culture’, which is associated with studies of that sort — the expression ‘cultural-political process’. By this I mean the whole process of spiritual life, in which politics forms a natural constituent element.

Art, criticism, philosophy, history and politics do not exist in isolation from each other. They constantly come into contact and interpenetrate. At the same time they can be regarded, in the broad sense, as constituting a single process of spiritual life and, in the narrow sense, as a cultural-political process.

In my view the different forms of legal — and to a considerable extent also illegal — ‘dissent’ (as the Anglo-American theoreticians call it) belong to the sphere of cultural phenomena, and (still more importantly) a number of processes in legal art, philosophy, history, criticism and the ‘cultural sphere’ in general become politically significant in our country. This ‘political culture’ of the Russian intelligentsia — together with the ‘cultural opposition’ as a whole — deserves systematic study. And although works on this subject also exist in substantial numbers (in their time they helped me considerably), the subject cannot be seen as having been exhausted.

The importance of politics as an object of reflection, as a world-view and as an objective factor in spiritual life has increased steadily since, perhaps, the epoch of the Reformation. There is nothing surprising about this, for society itself has become politicized. This has been particularly marked in the twentieth century. George Orwell wrote:

This is a political age. War, fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship your thoughts will be about sinking ships.6

In theory there can be two ways out of this conflict. Either, in a totalitarian society, politics absorbs and completely subjects to itself all forms of spiritual life; or, in a society of democratic socialism, politics itself is, in the last analysis, dissolved in the general ‘ideological’ process (I do not, of course, refer to political ideology in the narrow sense). For Marx, already, political activity, both theoretical and practical, was a kind of applied philosophy.