The dissertation research is dedicated to examining the phenomenon of socio-political action in the context of contemporary understandings of the concept of humanitarian security. The dissertation explores the theoretical-methodological, conceptual, axiological, political, and security dimensions of the socio-political action phenomenon in correlation with the concept of humanitarian security. Special attention is paid to the complications of the problematic field of social philosophy, philosophy of politics, sociology, political science, social psychology, and mass communication theory, connected with the emergence of the virtual dimension of social communication, reformatting of fundamental mechanisms of public consciousness, collective imagination, and public opinion, and the ways of their functioning under conditions of systemic crisis of democracies and the spread of cancellation culture, crisis of scientific expertise, technologies of mass consciousness manipulation as relevant factors in forming conceptualized representations and formalized knowledge about fundamental categories of the social.
Using civilizational, culturological, political science, pragmatist, axiological approaches, as well as theoretical methods of historical-cultural, phenomenological, hermeneutic, discursive, and comparative analysis, and other methods, the phenomenon of socio-political action and its conceptualization in contemporary philosophical discourse are analyzed.
An original conception of socio-political action as an important factor of humanitarian security is proposed, which allows for a holistic examination of this phenomenon.
The conducted examination of theoretical, historical-cultural, socio-praxeological foundations of the socio-political action concept allows us to assert that the latter is currently the basic format of forming and realizing human identity as a form of self-positioning in social reality, and also, in correlation with ideas about individual and collective security, is the space and means of implementing and establishing security at the level of social interaction between political and social actors, power, and political institutions. From this perspective, socio-political action can be considered one of the defining elements of the socio-political structure of society. At the same time, socio-political action can serve as a functional sense-generative model of culture, particularly political culture, and condition political consciousness, imagination, mythology, and ideology. In such an examination of socio-political action, the problem of security can acquire not only formal structural-functional characteristics at the level of society and state, but also explicate existential-semantic, worldview dimensions of social interaction and communication.
As a result of studying the development trends of social and socio-political action concepts in the Western historical-philosophical tradition, we can conclude that the focus of philosophical thought on the problems of social interaction of people in a broader context of their activity is inherently characteristic of social-philosophical thought of antiquity. The philosophy of classical antiquity not only initiates the analytics of social activity from the perspective of ethical knowledge as life-meaningful and lays the foundation of the contemporary collective West as a citadel of democracy, but also forms the intentions of social and political thought based on understanding social and political action as attributive to humans and immanent to the human world. In the process of forming the Western historical-philosophical tradition, essential stages of comprehending social and political activity were: the stage of classical antiquity (primarily Plato's dialogism and Aristotle's metaphysical monographism); patristics (ideas of Augustine); Renaissance and modern teachings with their Christian personalism (M. Cusanus, B. Spinoza, R. Descartes, G. Leibniz); German classical philosophy (I. Kant, J. Fichte, F. Schelling, G. Hegel, L. Feuerbach) with their utilitarian, transcendentalist, pan-logical and other models of explaining the social act.
The further development of the philosophical-theoretical understanding of the conceptualization of social and socio-political action is characterized by a focus on the subject matter of specialized discourses in sociology, psychology, and social philosophy. A classic example here is the interpretive sociology of M. Weber and the associated general theory of action by R. Simmel. Among modernist theories, we include T. Parsons’ functionalist systematics of action, J. Habermas' normative-instrumental approach to action, G. Mead's symbolic interactionism, A. Schütz's phenomenological vision of action and its constructivist interpretation by P. Berger and T. Luckmann.
