Political Actors as Subjects of Historical Responsibility

Abstract

The article looks at the issue of the role of political actors as subjects of historical responsibility. Based on the communicative approach elaborated by H. Arendt, the authors provide a distinction between the event, which is the subject of historical responsibility, and the act of establishing responsibility in the public space. It is suggested that such an act can be only the result of democratic procedures. Consequently, historical responsibility as a social phenomenon is possible only in a democratic society, even though attempts to establish it may take place under non-democratic regimes. Furthermore, the article claims that the case of Germany as an example of the establishment of negative responsibility cannot be characterized as universal. Indeed, it is also possible to speak about the establishment of positive responsibility as a duty of the community to preserve the memory not of guilt, but of the merits of the collective subject. Therefore, as a rule, the affi rmation of positive responsibility takes place in a context following a political crisis and the consolidation of moral resentment. An example of the constitution of a positive responsibility is the cult of victory in the Great Patriotic War within the Russian society of the 1990s, which followed the experience of the collapse of the USSR and the need for moral compensation. The characteristic features of historical responsibility include performativity, representativeness, normativity, manipulativeness. The role of political actors is not qualitatively shaping diff erent forms of responsibility, but rather aff ecting the specifi c procedures that consolidate it.

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