The democratic state and society: transformations of interaction, meanings and values

The article examines interaction between democratic state and society in a changing world which experience institutional, technological and intellectual transformations affecting all spheres of human activity, their way of life and thoughts. The existing models of democracy, human rights, people power institutions, self-government, etc. are a reflection of the consistent change of their historically determined forms. The emergence and features of these forms are associated with the configurations of public authority at a particular historical stage. At the same time, the controversial nature of the basic concepts describing the nature of the interrelationships between democratic state and society forms their contradictory understanding, which entails the impossibility of a universal path of development of democratic systems. The article views some of the problems of the Western model of democracy and states that the liberal institutions of Western democracy function only in the absence of systemic crisis phenomena.