The concept of political economy developed in the framework of political anthropology is considered. The key aspects of political economy in terms of political entrepreneurs, primitive money, power-property, social contracts are defined. The prospects of using the political economy methodology in the analysis of the Ukrainian political process are outlined. Political anthropology examines the pre-state pre-capitalist polity and economy. And that is why it can be a source of promising analytical tools for the analysis of post-Soviet, Ukrainian in particular, political (...) process characterized by the weakness of the national institutions of the state and oligarchic distortion of the market economy. One of such advanced analytical tool is the concept of political economy. Political economy can be defined in three dimensions. First, it is a set of institutions by which political elites withdraw and convert resources for their own financing. Second, political economy is a field of struggle between political elites - ambitious political entrepreneurs that compete for power and resources and form different proto-state polity. Third, political economy can be defined by specific social contracts that elite conclude with a subservient population about the rules on withdrawal the resources and funding political apparatus. The concept of political economy can serve as a methodology for the analysis of post-Soviet political systems. Within this concept we can organize and analyze a number of fundamental issues of our political and economy. (shrink)

The article considers the problem of actions–beliefs link. As author shows, the widespread approach in social science, those origins can be traced back to Hume and Mill and which tries to reveal the causal relations between beliefs and actions, is mistaken. It is mistaken because it proposes that, firstly, beliefs and actions are distinct and separately identifiable social phenomena and, secondly, causal connection consists in constant conjunction. MacIntyre, instead, proposes, taking as a starting point the distinction between physical movement and (...) human action, to consider the actions–beliefs link in terms of the descriptions which the action should correspond to. If we, on being asked for an explanation of what we have done, refer it to an antecedent condition of a Humean kind, we precisely remove it from the class of actions and assign it to, most probably, the class of physical movements. To explain behavior as a genuinely human action, an explanation must refer to the customarily recognized rules of a particular social order. This presupposes that action must fall under some description which is socially recognizable as the description of an action; an action must fall under a description and my actions under a description available to me; and agent can do only what he/she can describe. As an illustration of his approach, author examines the role of Stalin’s philosophical work “Dialectical and historical materialism” in the process of the ideological “closing” of Soviet society. (shrink)