The notion of the political is considered in the article as an object of the New Time’s politico-philosophical reflection and as a serious theoretical problem engendering inner contradictions of political philosophy that are hard to overcome. Numerous attempts are traced, that took place all along for the 20th century, to conceptualize the notion of the political. Pointing to the increasingly contradictory character of the ideas of the nature of the political, that is observable in the West-European philosophical tradition, the author at the same time insists on irreducibility of the sphere of the political and on the necessity of recognizing the existence of specifically political rationality.