The author exposes the insufficiency of the methodology, now dominant in political science both in the West and in our country, for relevant analysis of problems of the formation of civil society and of citizen. Possibility of overcoming the one-sidedness of institutionalism implies methodology of socio-cultural analysis. This methodology helps synthesize the methods of synergetics, the conceptions of global history and of sociology of knowledge. As the basis of the synthesis comes the principle of mutual complementariness of the social and of the cultural, of the stable and of the variable, of the universal and of the local.