Vol 22, No 3 (2022)

The author considers the latest challenges for the sustainable development as determined by ‘modern evil’. Its essence is not limited to specific sanctions or war: it is multifaceted - expressed in simulacra and fakes, ‘non-events’ and post-truth; producing ‘moral blindness’, neonationalism, xenophobia and Russophobia, ‘cultural racism’, and ‘normal traumas’ in the society and nature. Actually, ‘modern evil’ embodies a parallel entity in the form of a new Antichrist acting among us on behalf of a ‘higher reason’ and ‘progressive humanity’, while introducing chaos and instability into people’s life worlds. The author uses interdisciplinary methods to examine specific manifestations of ‘modern evil’: temptations of novelty, hyper-consumption and ‘conspicuous consumption’, global, pragmatically oriented digitalization, which spreads destructive content. These manifestations of ‘modern evil’ should be replaced by the sharing of goods and services, movement towards the ethics of modesty and national-sovereign digitalization. The demand for cooperation of representatives of scientific and theological knowledge for the sake of new forms of sustainable development meets the requirements of the realities of global complexity and nonlinearity. Such cooperation can become a driver of the humanity’s active production of good and humanism - as the main factor of movement to the ‘sane society’ functioning in harmony with humanized scientific-technological innovations and authentic nature.

The article considers a little-known topic in the history of the social thought, which has regained relevance under the pandemic - the discussion between the outstanding philosophers of the German idealism on the conceptual interpretation of police as an earlymodern form of biopolitical control. In the introductory part, the author argues that the critique of the science and practice of policing by the classics of the German idealism is paradigmatic for the present-day study of the new/old functions and powers of the sanitary-police state concerning the modern civil society’s self-reflection. In the first part, the author describes the tension between the Enlightenment philosophy and the ‘science of policing’ developed by the Cameralists of the 17th-18th centuries, and emphasizes the significant intellectual contribution of the Enlightenment thinkers, primarily Kant’s legal doctrine, to the radical innovations in the political semantics at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries. Such innovations became the philosophical basis for the rule of law which questioned the discourse of the absolutist state control over its subjects’ welfare by means of police. In the second part, the article presents a brief reconstruction of Fichte’s attempts to combine the old Cameralist ideas with the new modern principles of individual freedoms at the end of the 18th-century era of the science of police - after Kant’s explicit criticism of the state care unauthorized from below. The third part of the article focuses on Hegel’s critique: in the history of the political thought he was often considered an apologist of the authoritarian Prussian state, but questioned the very possibility of the police-scientific idea of the total biopolitical control over social and economic activities of free modern-type individuals. The author reconstructs Hegel’s argumentation of the absurdity of the total sanitary-police regulation as suggested by Fichte, and insists on the relevance of these thinkers, concepts and thematic fields for reconsidering the failure of the Early-Modern biopolitical utopia under the current intersections of lockdowns and sovereignty.

The article considers new trends in the value system of the Belarusian society. Based on the data of the international sociological surveys conducted as waves of the European Values Study and World Values Study, the authors identify changes in the value orientations of the Belarusian society over the past thirty years. The authors use the methodological approach to identifying the system of value orientations that was developed by R. Inglehart and K. Welzel. The study of fundamental trends in the changing value world of the contemporary society is of practical importance for understanding internal factors of the current socialpolitical processes and for assessing prospects for the further sustainable development of socialpolitical institutions. The article aims at identifying the main directions in the transformation of the value orientations of the Belarusian society since the acquisition of state sovereignty. The authors conclude that the Belarusian society moves from the values of survival to the values of development and self-expression. In the project, the authors conducted an analysis of the demographic structure of the Belarusian society in terms of value priorities and found out that the demographic base of secular-individualistic and self-expression values consists of highly educated residents of large cities of younger (under 30) and middle (up to 49) age. Given the growth of the share of population with higher education and the second wave of urbanization (the outflow from small towns to large cities), we should expect an expansion of this demographic base and, accordingly, the further spread of these value orientations. In this situation, the education system acts as a source of the ongoing changes and develops the value matrix of the coming social reality.

The article considers the features of students’ educational trajectories as depending on how they entered the university. A distinctive feature of the Russian system of higher education is various grounds for the educational transition “school-university”: the results of the Unified State Exam, school Academic Olympics in key subjects, employer-sponsored education, and quotas. These grounds seem to affect the further education of students and the quality of training and professional trajectories. At the same time, the resistance of the higher education system to external challenges, its sustainable competitiveness, modernization and the search for new forms and models of work with the talented youth are priority development tasks of the national higher education system. The article presents the results of the comparative analysis of the students’ motivation for learning, educational achievements, ideas about possible professional and educational trajectories. The analysis is based on the data of the Russian students survey conducted by the Center for Educational Development Strategy of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and RUDN University in November-December 2021 (N = 37457). The research findings show that at the stage of the transition from school to university, there is a very heterogeneous student inflow by quality and forms of training, individual abilities and inclinations, motivation and requests to the higher education. There is a special group - prize-winners of school Academic Olympics - of the most talented and promising applicants. The admission companies show that variable grounds for entering universities lead to certain conflicts and contradictions in the higher education system.

The author conducts the analysis of the field of legal translation in contemporary Russia and focuses on translation agencies specializing in the languages of the peoples of the postSoviet states. The theoretical framework of the research is the sociological approach to the study of legal interpreters and Bourdieu’s theory including his analysis of the juridical field. Today some concepts of Bourdieu’s sociology can be found in the studies of the activities of legal interpreters, but his theory is still insufficiently applied. The main empirical method of the research is semistructured interviews with legal interpreters, heads of translation agencies, investigators and lawyers. The relational and dynamic perspective of Bourdieu’s theory allowed the author to analyze the formation and transformation of the boundaries of the professional group of legal interpreters as a result of competition between actors with different forms of capital. The article reveals the role of ethnic capital in the functioning of translation agencies. The author makes a conclusion that the recruitment of legal interpreters largely depends on the requirements of institutional actors of the juridical field; identifies factors affecting the working conditions of court interpreters - the rarity of their language, ability to establish reciprocal relationships with the head of a translation agency, and permanent working relationships with the law enforcement bodies personnel. The article proves the advantages of Bourdieu’s approach in the study of the translation agencies structure, and shows how the changes in interpreters’ habitus and formal position influence the development dynamics of translation agencies and the field of legal translation as a whole. The research results allow to make a conclusion that actors of the juridical field exert a decisive influence on positional struggle within the field of legal translation.

The article considers the dynamics of health indicators and health risk factors in Russia, including in comparison to the OECD countries. The study is based on the Russian statistical data, OECD data, and Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE). The key public health indicator - the life expectancy (years of life at birth) - shows the negative dynamics in 2020 (71.54), while some other health indicators, on the contrary, show the positive dynamics, such as the self-rated health (the share of population aged 15+ in poor health deceased). 10.8 % of Russian adults consider themselves to be in poor health, which is higher than in the OECD countries. The share of people who assess their health as good and very good has increased over the 25 years of the study: the share of women has doubled (17.5 % in 1994 and 35.1 % in 2020); the share of men has increased by 13.2 % (34.4 % and 47.6 %). The share of people who drink alcohol and of men who smoke has decreased. However, there are negative trends that accompany risk factors: early initiation of smoking (8.5 % started smoking at 13 years and earlier, the majority (78.3 %) started smoking at puberty - at 18 and earlier; half of smokers smoke more than 15 cigarettes a day). The majority (66 %) of the RLMS participants at least occasionally drink alcoholic beverages, including beer (69.6 % of men and 55.3 % of women); never drink alcohol 34 % (30.4 % and 44.7 %). Every tenth respondent (11.9 %) tried an alcohol for the first time at the age of 14 or earlier; 77.9 % - at 18 and earlier. Over 25 years, the share of people with normal weight has decreased: 57.3 % of men and 43.4 % of women in 1994; 43.8 % and 40.5 % - in 2020. The share of overweight people has increased from 40 % of men and 51.9 % of women in 1994 to 53.5 % and 55.7 % in 2020.

The development of human capital in Russia is rather controversial and is characterized by both significant achievements and serious challenges. Russian regions differ in terms of the accumulated human capital, and many Siberian and Far Eastern territories are the most vulnerable in this perspective. Based on the analysis of the statistical indicators (more than 40) and the results of sociological research, the authors present a model of the main dimensions of social security in their relationship with the development of human potential in the border regions of Russia, with a focus on the regions of the Siberian and Far Eastern Federal Districts. According to the statistical data, the human development index is closely related to security in the labor sphere and the characteristics of the social-economic development, which determine, among other things, the features of the functioning of the social security system. The authors identified the statistically significant but less strong links of the human development index with the level of the social infrastructure development and environmental security. The results of sociological studies in five border regions (Altai Region, Amur Region, Khabarovsk Region, Omsk Region, and Altai Republic: N = 2802) show a subjective assessment of the efficiency of human capital and its relationship with social-structural factors, institutional environment and quality of social relations. The authors conclude that human capital in the border regions depends not only on economic factors, but also on broader social conditions: the human capital estimates depend on the institutional and generalized trust, social representations, and perceived discrimination. The development of human capital varies by region, which reflects the specifics of its accumulation and functioning in different contexts and conditions.

The article focuses on the social functions of rural farmers. The significance of this perspective is determined by the possibilities of revaluating social processes in the contemporary Russian countryside. Features of rural life predetermine various options for rural farmers to support villagers. The article aims at identifying those social groups and communities that can take an active part in everyday rural life, thus, changing the value system of the village and affecting the consequences of alienation and disunity. The theoretical analysis allowed the author to define rural farmers are a social-professional group with specific value priorities which lead to its active participation in the life of rural society. Such an involvement in solving the problems of rural settlements is of both social-economic and moral nature (help, support, responsibility). The article considers the heuristic potential of the concept ‘social function’ in assessing the role of farmers in the daily life of Russian villages. The author conducted semi-structured interviews with farmers in the Altai Region - to identify the key social functions associated with the activities of the representatives of this social-professional group. The author interviewed 66 male farmers of different age to assess their actions for consolidating the villagers, supporting people in difficult life situations, and expanding cooperation with the local government to solve the most important tasks of rural settlements. Based on the empirical data, the author identifies a number of social functions of farmers, which explain the features and directions of their activities in the development of Russian villages.

This article is a result of its authors’ participation in the round table “Justice and Lawmaking” of the subproject “Ethics and Law: Mechanisms of Mutual Influence” of the HSE project “Applied Ethics” in the State Duma on December 1, 2021. The article considers social issues associated with the justice institutions, which are conditionally named institutional traps (an economic term). The authors focus on how these ‘traps’ work in contemporary Russia and how it is possible to get out of them. The article presents the contemporary discourse on social justice, which is characterized by a variety of concepts and a wide thematic field, and provides a definition of the institutional trap modified for the article’s tasks - a combination of social institutions, which being implemented leads to the results radically different or even opposite to the expected when designing such institutions. The authors argue that a trap is a result of the institution or a combination of institutions created to ensure justice of a certain kind or in accordance with a certain idea, when such an institution or combination leads to both justice (or other comparable public good) and clear injustice. This is a trap for society, because its expectations are deceived, and for the state, because it gets new social problems to be solved. The authors believe that what makes institutions an institutional trap is not only the fact that they do not cope with their tasks, but also do not meet social expectations determined by the system of previous values or inherited from it. The authors conclude that institutional solutions (creation of new institutions, modernization of existing ones) do not guarantee the desired result; we need a single educational program for promoting justice and mercy (taking into account cultural differences), which would explain their fundamental importance for society and its every member.

In the pre- and early post-reform Russian urban sociology, the works of T.M. Dridze, a prominent Russian sociologist and psychologist, are of a great importance. Her concepts of urban development, social participation and urban environment reflect the democratic approach to urban development and urban social management. Under the dominant liberal, market-oriented urban regulation, this approach was considered almost marginal. However, after the adoption in 2016 of the federal project for developing a ‘comfortable urban environment’, the rhetoric of ‘environment’ and ‘participation’ started to prevail in both society and urban social sciences. The question is whether the ideas and theoretical models of the democratic urban planning started to determine the contemporary urban development. To answer this question, the author clarifies the content of the basic terms used by T.M. Dridze and her interpretation of the relationships between the environment, society and participatory technologies; reveals the methodological role of social participation and defines it as a scale of social practices - from the grassroot ‘activism’ to the ‘participation from above’ initiated by the authorities. The author conducts a conceptualterminological analysis to compare three strategies of urban development: urban construction, urban regulation and urban arrangement, and only the last one seems to be consistently democratic. The analysis of the texts and methods of the federal project allows the author to make conclusions about the certain qualities of this project. Thus, the project replaces the democratic socialenvironmental type of social participation in urban development - planning, implementation, assessment of results - by the improvement of urban areas as controlled by the authorities. This means that the works of T.M. Dridze are still relevant for the democratic urban studies and urban development.