The political heritage of the outstanding Russian thinker of the early twentieth century, undeservedly forgotten in the Soviet years, M. Ya. Ostrogorsky has a very important component, which, by all its characteristics, refers to the system of philosophical ideas about politics, power and the state as a whole. Russian researchers have previously noted that the level of quality of his political science rises to the limits of philosophical understanding of political reality, allowing us to generalize and analyze the colossal empirical material he has collected. It is a philosophical understanding of reality that puts Ostrogorsky on a par with the outstanding Russian minds of that time. His contribution to the development of political theory has been undeservedly forgotten and is still underestimated. The given article analyzes his view of the development of political and philosophical thought regarding the essence of the subject of political power, having examined it through such categories as “democracy”, “elite”, “masses”, “political parties”, and “political leadership”. Ostrogorsky anticipated the appearance of many scientific theories that arose later than him, but which theoretically proceeded from the positions that were first formulated in his works.
