The article attempts to polemically challenge the main methodological approaches to the specification of politics and power, developed and promoted by the authors of the monograph “Domination versus politics: the Russian case. The effectiveness of the institutional structure and the potential of strategies for political change”, published in 2019 by the “Political Encyclopedia Publishers”. The assessment of this work is generally positive. At the same time, the authors of the monograph use the Aristotelian-Arendian paradigm, which carries visible signs of historical and theoretical fatigue, as a cognitive basis for characterizing the modern space of politics and power. As part of the polemic with the authors of the monograph, the article notes that the colonization of official structures and institutions of power in a modern state by informal networks of the ruling elite increasingly limits the tools of public policy in making state decisions. Assumptions are made about the main trends in the evolution of relations between the elite and non-elite strata in the modern state, and about the further narrowing of the social space for “citizens’ politics”.