DEMOCRACY AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL PHENOMENON: THE UNITY OF THE COMMON AND THE SPECIAL

Abstract

Ideas about democracy are formed at different levels of consciousness and in different social environments. We are used to the academic format of understanding democracy and conceptualizing knowledge about democracy, so we consider this source of knowledge to be authoritative and practically irreplaceable. However, there is a huge array of ideas about democracy, which, although it does not correspond to such canons of the scientific type of knowledge as apodicticity, verifiability and discursiveness, nevertheless has a number of its own advantages – in particular, it is harmonious in its syncretism, complex and even more systematic than scientific conceptualism of a narrow profile. In this case, we are talking about the socio-cultural format of ideas about democracy, about its advantages and disadvantages, about the determinability and insignificance of various signs and options of democracy. The socio-cultural load of ideas about democracy is not a categorical antipode and antagonist of the scientific type of knowledge, because to a large extent it is latently inherent in scientific epistemology as well. But if for the scientific field of knowledge, socio-cultural loading is only sporadic and to a large extent marginal, then for the field of mass consciousness of socio-cultural environments, such a feature is not only attributive, but also imperative: it represents a mosaic symbiosis of automatisms of world perception, which forms an optical prism of vision of any phenomena and processes – in particular, democracy. An important specific feature of the socio-cultural format of the perception of democracy is the routinized status of such ideas: since they are formed on the basis of long-term accumulation of knowledge from various spheres of life, for the bearers of these ideas they are «obvious», which means that they do not require argumentative support and verification procedures, which are typical of the scientific type of knowledge. Although this type of ideas about democracy, understanding of democracy and knowledge about democracy does not correspond to the canons of scientific knowledge, it should not be ignored by the research environment – in particular, and primarily of a social and humanitarian profile.