Political Identity and the Concept of the Political

The article represents comment by L.V. Smorgunov, a well-known Russian political scientist (St. Petersburg), to an academic scientific publication in two volumes: Political Identity and Identity Politics, comprising a dictionary of terms and concepts pertaining to the theme of political identity, as well as a collective monographic research of the chosen phenomenon in the context of modern socio-political transformations. The author of the article deliberates on political nature of the identity phenomenon and on problems of its conceptualization in political science.