Approaches to Identifying and Conceptualizing Latent Sphere of Politics

Abstract

The article deals with hidden (latent) phenomena of politics, which may influence process of actors’ involvement into political interaction and taken by them decisions, as those remain to be not enough studied in modern science. Once consider a wide variety of academic papers from previous decades and different spheres of social science, it gets quite clear that there was rather permanent research interest for discovering the real role and various forms, through which the mechanisms for latent influencing state and its institutions can evolve. The factor of publicity, which turns to be on the one hand a key attribute for modern political reality, and on the other hand an element of social legitimizing relevant political actors’ intentions and efforts, causes some kind of watershed between a widely studied public sphere and a usually left aside from the positivistic-bound social knowledge latent sphere. The article analyses widely used notions of informality, unpublicity, shadow character of the taken within political dimension actions, which may be involved for describing corresponding facts appearing out of the immediate social control. Specific attention is paid to arguing the terminology of latency, which author finds more appropriate to characterize as a whole all the relations resulted from the close interests and their fulfilment among political actors as well as predetermined regeneration for the specific sphere of their (actors) secret interacting — the latent sphere of politics. On the basis of comparing different approaches appearing in actual theoretical discourse to rendering not proclaimed goals and mechanisms for political self-presentation by participants of modern power relations it develops some basic parameters to distinct latency, latent phenomena and latent sphere in modern political reality.