The article offers comments on the book The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, to which was dedicated a symposium held on April 6, 2021. It took place at the Library of Russian Philosophy ...and Culture “The Losev House” in cooperation with the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. It considers the topic of Christian humanism, the main position of which can be defined as the possibility of improving a person in his unity with God. It is noted that Christian humanism took the form of personalism for some Russian philosophers. The theme of Christian humanism is considered taken as an example the work of the outstanding philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and his followers: Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev and Semyon Frank.
The personalization of politics (the process of politicians’ strengthening at the expense of political parties) has long been studied. This study focuses on online personalism in the consumption of ...political parties and their leaders on Twitter and Facebook and aims to find its explaining factors. Following the normalization/equalization debate, it sets hypotheses regarding the relationship between variables from offline to online personalized politics. Using multilevel analysis of Facebook and Twitter data of more than 140 parties from 25 democracies, it finds that the leaders’ position significantly affects online personalism in most of the consumption aspects of social media. It also shows that country’s offline personalization, leader’s tenure, party populism, party age, party’s governmental status, vote share, and the leadership selection method have effects on some of the indicators for online personalism on the consumption side. It concludes that offline political power is reflected online.
The paper is an overview of the connections between scientific psychology and religion. The thesis that scientific psychology, which deals with empirical research of all manifestations of ...spirituality and religiousness within the different principles and contexts of culture, cannot refer to the doctrine of religion, but it should take into account in its research the cultural aspects of the religion without valuing them at the individual human level (personalistic psychology) and their influence on the "fate" of the world (e. g. cultural psychology), is being discussed. Conclusion: Against the background of the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon psychology, based on the positivist paradigm, there is no place on the basis of valid methodological canons for building a direct relationship between scientific psychology and religion.
How can the growing personalization of power be identified and measured ex ante? Extant measures in the authoritarian literature have traditionally focused on institutional constraints and more ...recently on individual behaviour – such as purging opposition members from (and packing allies into) government bodies. This article offers a different strategy that examines leaders’ individual rhetoric. It focuses on patterns of pronoun usage for the first person. The author argues that as leaders personalize power, they are less likely to use ‘I’ (a pronoun linked to credit claiming and blame minimizing) and more likely to use ‘we’ (the leader speaks for – or with – the populace). To test this argument, the study focuses on all major, scheduled speeches by all chief executives in the entire Chinese-speaking world – that is, China, Singapore and Taiwan – since independence. It finds a robust pattern between first-person pronouns and political constraints. To ensure the results are not driven by the Chinese sample, the rhetoric of four other political leaders is considered: Albania's Hoxha, North Korea's Kim Il Sung, Hungary's Orbán and Ecuador's Correa. The implications of this project suggest that how leaders talk can provide insights into how they perceive their rule.
Research has suggested social media might not be an ideal place to get social support. This study examined how publicness of support seeking might influence the quantity and quality of received ...support by testing six potential underlying mechanisms. We conducted a 3 (publicness: private, medium, public) X 2 (problem severity: mild vs. severe) between-subjects online experiment with 196 college students. Participants were shown a screenshot of a fellow student’s message about a recent adverse experience that was either delivered as a public post, a post visible to friends, or a private message. Compared with public support seeking, private message led to higher likelihood to help among observers, more effort in helping, and higher quality of supportive messages. Specifically, publicness increased attribution to social validation goal when the problem was not severe, reduced attribution to support-seeking goal when the problem was severe, reduced favorable perceptions and perception of personalism, which all contributed to the failure of support seeking.
•High publicness fosters attribution to social validation goal, reduces attribution to support seeking goal.•High publicness reduces support seeker’s social attraction and personalism.•High publicness leads observers to perceive helping as a social norm to conform to.•Private messages lead to more favorable support-seeking outcomes in terms of quantity and quality.
Contemporary research has shown that authoritarian regimes are not static. At the same time, gradual changes are often difficult to detect and the literature has not yet developed convincing tools to ...identify autocracy-to-autocracy transitions outside the visible ruptures of coups, power transfers, and opposition victories. Building on fieldwork in Tanzania, we show that patterns of rule shifted significantly under Magufuli. Once the model case of a party-based system in Africa, we argue that Tanzania should be reclassified as a party-personalist regime for the time of his presidency. The basis for his success lies in the increasing factional tensions within the CCM which gave him the power to act as the arbiter and to manipulate party institutions and nominations to his favour. Beyond providing a thick description of a single case, we address the theoretical and empirical challenges of correctly classifying authoritarian regimes.
The aim of this paper is to re-read the criticism of the Russian intelligentsia, which was made by authors of Landmarks (“Vekhy”, 1909) and Out of the Depth (“Iz glubiny”, 1918), in the context of ...the support given to the Russian invasion on the Ukraine in 2022 by the large part of Russian intellectuals. Instead of perceiving the current “rapprochement” of the Russian intelligentsia to the Putin government as a kind of “aberration” and a departure from its “moral mission”, the author would like to show the arguments concerning long duration of the tradition of their acceptance of the anti-liberal and authoritarian course of the Russian government. This tradition was unveiled by such outstanding Russian liberals and religious thinkers as, among others: Nikolai Berdyaev, Petr Struve, Bogdan Kistyakovski, Iosif Pokrovsky and Sergei Kotlyarevsky. They believed that the susceptibility of the intelligentsia to revolutionary slogans was caused not only by hostility to the Old Regime, but by their instrumental attitude to the state and law. They claimed that the Russian intelligentsia had much more in common with the representatives of Tsarist autocracy than would result from the hostility felt towards it. A common feature of both was “legalnihilism” – a point of view that assumed a distrustful attitude towards rational law. The only way to overcome this distrust was therefore instilling Kant’s personalism and raising the authority of natural law among the broad strata of the Russian intelligentsia.
Much of John Zizioulas’ treatment of the human being as a person revolves around four crucial concepts: being, otherness, ontology, and freedom. Our critical appraisal of Zizioulas’ concept of human ...personhood emphasizes the importance of creative tension between (ontological) freedom and contingency as understood within the frame of reference of the human being’s intrinsic contingency as a finite, created being. According to this concept, the other (another distinct embodied personhood) is neither an object nor competition but rather a gift for one’s self who reminds me of one’s limitedness, dependence, and deep relatedness. Thus, the other helps the human self realize his/her potential in a mutual sharing of love. We examine Zizioulas’ critical stance to the modern notion that ‘otherness is necessary for freedom to exist’ against the background of his treatment of ‘otherness’ and ‘nature,’ as well as ‘otherness’ and ‘new being,’ ‘Logos,’ and ‘new nature.’ Finally, we lay out Zizioulas’ mature ontology of human personhood as a profound albeit mystical account of what it means to be human in our fragmented age.
Study after study has found that regime type has little or no effect on states' decisions to pursue nuclear weapons. We argue, however, that conventional approaches comparing the behavior of ...democracies to that of nondemocracies have resulted in incorrect inferences. We disaggregate types of nondemocracies and argue that leaders of highly centralized, "personalistic" dictatorships are particularly likely to view nuclear weapons as an attractive solution to their concerns about regime security and face fewer constraints in pursuing nuclear weapons than leaders of other types of regimes. Combining our more nuanced classification of regime type with a more theoretically appropriate empirical approach, we find that personalist regimes are substantially more likely to pursue nuclear weapons than other regime types. This finding is robust to different codings of proliferation dates and a range of modeling approaches and specifications and has significant implications for both theory and policy.
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