The Obsolescence of Political Definitions
3rd June 2026
In the early days of the failed Moscow coup, one was bombarded by writing wherein the “conservatives” from the KGB and communist party wanted to block the path to a market economy and parliamentarianism. Many outlets that were once marked “Stalinist” or “orthodox communist” were attacked as “conservative,” blithely referred to as such often on the same page as political figures such as Reagan or Thatcher, Bush or Kohl. Thus the naïve reader, who wants to take the printed word at its nominal value, logically infers a common attitude and purpose among the previously named Western politicians and the soviet enemies of perestroika. Common sense could protect the sane man from such an absurdity, but this runs out of answers in the face of the schizophrenia of political vocabulary, proving insufficiently idiosyncratic; he seems to have resigned himself without grumbling. The common retort is that conservatives are defenders of the status quo, whatever that may look like in the particular case, so conservatives living in very different societies, unsurprisingly, advocate very different and even contradictory programs. But if political classifications are not backed by political substance, then these classifications must be grounded in psychological or anthropological factors, common attitudes towards life. Should one, in good conscience, impute commonalities among Helmut Kohl and the Russian putschists, this interpretational hypothesis brings little light to the concrete situations—because in such situations it is always about the implementation of particular matters or goals thereby defined, in view of the makeup of a national or international collective, wherein the friend-foe groupings are determined by the positions of each agent with respect to these matters and goals. The legitimation of political struggle often takes place by appeal to anthropological presumptions; political analysis, on the other hand, can infer no concrete substance from formal and inherently abstract anthropological constants without falling into bad metaphysics.