REQUIEM FOR THE STATE — SOCIETY PARADIGM

R. Koselleck laid down and developed the foundations of understanding history as a process in the plural. Begriffsgeschichte is not just a history of concepts. Conceptual history suggests research work, which is based on the theory of historical times and vice versa, the theory, constantly tested by specific historical research. From these positions, the author of this article emphasizes the irrelevance of the evolutionist and teleological paradigms used within the framework of the positivist approach to studying history. It is noted that already from the first third of the 19th century the study of the history of each country was carried out in the context of the “state — society” opposition. This led to the transformation of the concepts formed in the era of modernity into analytical categories for reading earlier sources and modern interpretation of the distant past. There are two reasons for the existence of such a view of history: 1) political — aimed at artificially creating a long genealogy of the state, which was used by dictatorial regimes that want to give themselves a strong historical legitimacy; 2) epistemological, which is the result of an incorrect identification of word and concept. This confusion is based on the assumption that words represent ideas which contain a permanent semantic core, that is, ideas can adapt to change, but the core does not change. This attitude, according to the author, leads to a cognitive impasse. A vivid illustration of this situation is the use of the phrases “feudal state” or “state of the Middle Ages”, in the time of which the very word state (estado, état) meant “dignity”, “status” and could have other connotations, but did not have the meaning it acquired when it became a concept meaning a legal and political order based on popular sovereignty, representation, equality and other phenomena born of the French Revolution. In Russia, the meaning of the concept of “state” changed at the end of the 18th century with the simultaneous coexistence of the previous patrimonialist semantics inherent in both the term “sovereign” and the actual functioning of the Russian Imperial system. This traditional semantics was also present in the 20th century both in the imperial family and among the people. Consequently, the historian must take into account both the repeatability of structures and the uniqueness of events. The author comes to the conclusion that it is necessary to identify the coexistence of different temporalities, the modernity of what is not modern, and to avoid division into diachrony and synchrony. It is this approach that best reflects the main heuristic value of Koselleck’s theory of historical times for concrete historical research.