PHILOSOPHICAL “LEXICON” OF POPULISM. “REALISM” BY P.N. TKACHEV

Abstract

The relevance of the problem under study is determined by the fact that the ideological heritage of populism has not previously been considered in such a perspective - in the unity of socio-philosophical, sociological and linguistic and cultural aspects. Meanwhile, the identification of certain semantic dominants makes it possible to more accurately understand the cognitive nature of the populist doctrine, which is a compilation of very diverse components of "objective knowledge" (positivism, sociology and political science, scientific socialism, etc.). The purpose of the work is a textual analysis of the contradictory "system" of one of the founders of populism P. N. Tkachev, framed at the categorical and conceptual level by the corresponding characteristic "language substrate"; one of the key concepts is the broadly understood "realism" (thinking, evaluating, acting). The result of the study is the proof of the conceptual significance of rationalism in the choice of a conditionally "Marxist" methodology of populist sociological research (in the justification of the "economic principle" in the life of society), as well as an anarchist political program (the provision on the possibility of a "revolution without a people"). It is stated that the "positive" attitude to the idea of progress was paradoxically combined in the works of the Narodniks with a radical rejection of the bourgeois state and the existing "imperfect" social system. Thus, the philosophical "lexicon" of populism reflects the search for a renewed "language of science" (in philosophy, sociology and political thought, in aesthetics and literary criticism) in fierce public disputes about the ways of development of Russia in the post-reform period of the 1860s-1880s.