This book was born out of a dialogue between English-language and Russian-language political thought. Teaching political theory in the late 1990s and early 2000s - both at the European University in St. Petersburg and at leading American universities - the author was constantly faced with the problem of cross-cultural translation. How, for example, to explain to an American or Western European student what is the specificity of the Russian term "state" and the Russian phenomenon under the same name? Or how best to explain to a Russian student the hidden religious roots of Western concepts of civil society?