Oleg Kharkhordin, ed., Druzhba van der Zweerde, Evert
Cahiers du monde russe,
2010, Letnik:
50, Številka:
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Book Review, Journal Article
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This book, the third volume in a series named “The Pragmatic Turn” published by the European University in Saint Petersburg, is a fine specimen of original and inspiring research currently done in ...Russia. The book consists of two parts: a more general discussion of friendship in the history of political thought and in sociology, and a more concrete part offering detailed investigations in the field of linguistics, sociology, history of (religious) ideas, and international relations, written b...
After a secularist period in the 20th century, religion is again playing an important role in politics. The relationship between politics and religion, state and church is complex and asymmetrical. ...The tension between the two dimensions and institutions can be disengaged only tentatively. A special case of this tense relationship is expressed in the basic principles of political theology in the Eastern church, such as Caesaropapism and Symphonia. From the Orthodox point of view, these principles are opposites, but they both exclude society as an independent third realm between state and church; therefore, they stand run counter to Western tradition. Adapted from the source document.
Jailing punks and merry students for singing a little song breeds hatred and heroes. The punks and students become revolutionaries and philosophers.Maksim Shevchenko, Russian state TV, 2012In early ...2014, President Putin distributed as New Year presents editions of three books: Solov’ëv's Opravdanie dobra Justification of the Good (1899) Solovyov 1988 / 2005, Berdiaev's Filosofiia neravenstva The Philosophy of Inequality (1923) Berdiaev 2004b / 2015 and Il’in's Nashi zadachi Our Tasks (1948–54) Il’in 1993 (Eltchaninoff 2015: 7; Laqueur 2015: 177). All along Russia's border, Europeans were eager to know what motivated the actions of the President of the Russian Federation. Michel Eltchaninoff's Dans la tete de Vladimir Poutine tried to meet this demand. Eltchaninoff saw continuity: ‘The USSR was not a country, but a concept. In Putin's hands, Russia is once again the name of an idea’ (Eltchaninoff 2015: 171 / 2018: 169). If this is true, then the quest for a new Russian idea that haunted Russian political philosophy in the 1990s has been answered by the current administration. In fact, the Russian government has several ideological constructions at its disposal: the Realpolitik framework of a regional power with global ambitions, the vision of a pan-Orthodox or pan-Slavonic world under Russian leadership that defends traditional values against Western liberalism, materialism and individualism, and the vision of a large Eurasian block between Europe, the Middle East and East Asia that acts as successor to the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.Having, in the 1990s, licked its post-Soviet wounds, but also feeling betrayed by an at first welcoming but then excluding West, Russia entered a new era around 2000. Politically, this was the beginning of the Putin(–Medvedev) presidency. Socio-economically, it meant a rapid increase in the standard of living and the development of a consumers’ society. Societally, it marked an improvement in services and public safety. Religiously, finally, it started with the ROC's affirmation of its position with a Social Conception (Osnovy 2000 / Thesing and Uertz 2001). Russia's current regime links an increasingly ‘vertical’ government, ‘managed’ civil society and ‘sovereign’ democracy with an economic oligarchy that fully participates in neoliberal global capitalism.
Yes, those were precious tears: with some of them I believed in Russia, with others in Revolution.Aleksandr Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (Herzen, PSS: IX, 127)The Russian thinkers of the nineteenth ...century, pondering over the destiny of Russia and its vocation, … believed that the Russian people will, in the long run, say its word to the world and reveal itself.Nikolai Berdiaev, The Russian Idea (Berdiaev 1992: 22)Anyone interested in Russia will come across two ‘eternal’ questions: ‘Kto vinovat Who's to Blame?’ and ‘Chto delat’?’ What Is to be Done?’. The questions are the titles of an 1846 novel by Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen (1812–70) and an 1863 novel by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevskii (1828–89). The second title was repeated for programmatic texts by Vladimir Il’ich Lenin in Chto delat’? (1902) and, with a variation, Lev Tolstoy: Tak chto zhe nam delat’? So what should we do? (1886). Such questions, expressing a sense of moral protest and practical urgency, dominated the scene in the nineteenth century. Also, given the lack of opportunities to participate in political affairs, the question of alternatives arises: one alternative is to make one's ideas public, which implies struggle with the censorship or tamizdat publishing abroad; another is to go underground and establish conspiratorial revolutionary organisations.Overall, nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals were obsessed by the question of political agency: in a situation of official autocracy, suppression of the political, exclusion of the opposition and absence of political participation, there is only one political authority and only one legitimate agent: the tsar. Consequently, the question as to whether a given tsar is a reformer or a reactionary, a liberal or a conservative, becomes crucial, and direct appeal to the tsar becomes an obvious political act. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin (1814–76) addressed the tsar (Nikolai I) in writing with his 1851 Confession Ispoved’ (Bakunin 1977). Herzen could count the tsar (Aleksandr II) among the readers of his underground journal Kolokol The Bell.
The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune.Karl Marx, Letter to Vera Zasulich, 1881 (Shanin 2018: 124; MEW: XIX, 243)It is ...impossible to discuss political philosophy in Russia without discussing Marxism, just as it is impossible to discuss Marxism without paying attention to Russia. It is not least in (connection to) Russia that Marxism took shape in the first place: ‘It was in Russia that Marxism had its greatest impact and produced some of the most well-known Marxist theoreticians: men like Plekhanov, Lenin, Bukharin and Trotsky’ (White 2019a: vi). Also, Russia urged Marx to specify his theory on significant points. In Russia, finally, socialism was never exclusively, or even predominantly, Marxist (until claimed as such by official Soviet Marxism–Leninism); nor was the impact of Marxism limited to revolutionary movements. Marxist political economy made its way into the university, and Russia was the place where Marxism was transformed into a dogmatic system of dialectical and historical materialism, combined with innovative theories of party and revolution.In the second half of the nineteenth century, Russia was quickly modernising, urbanising and industrialising, but the country remained predominantly agricultural (Hussain and Tribe 1983: 156). The abolition of serfdom in 1861 had liberated the peasants, but the uneven distribution of the land between peasants and land-owning gentry forced the former to work for the latter or seek work in mines and factories (Wirtschaftler 2008: 211). The results were striking: heavy and light industry increased annually by between 5 and 10 per cent, and the state-owned railway network grew from 917 km in 1855 to 50,881 km in 1905. Yet, at the same time, the Russian population remained largely rural and overall very poor. In all of this, the role of the state was very strong, warranting a qualification as ‘capitalism from above’ – which places this development in the tradition of top-down modernisation. State investment in heavy industry and infrastructure for economic and military purposes, the harsh repression of political opposition after the assassination of Tsar Aleksandr II in 1881, and an active policy of russification started by Aleksandr III mark this period.
From a wider point of view, that is on a longer historical perspective, proletarian coercion in all its forms, from executions to labour service, is … a method of creating communist mankind from the ...human material of the capitalist epoch.Nikolai I. Bukharin, The Politics and Economics of the Transition Period (1979: 165)Few topics in the world history of political philosophy are more paradoxical than that of the present chapter. On the one hand, it is difficult to find a theory that contains the three meanings of political philosophy distinguished in this book more explicitly than the Leninist brand of Marxism. Marxism–Leninism contains a clear, albeit reductionist, theory of the state, as well as an elaborate theory of revolutionary politics and party organisation. It also contains a clear philosophy of the political, explaining it, in the final analysis, in terms of class struggle. Finally, it contains a clear theory of the way in which philosophy can, and indeed must, itself be a political weapon. The truth contained in the Soviet claim that Marxism–Leninism was the only true and fully consistent continuation of the Marxist legacy is that, in order to offer a ‘true and fully consistent continuation’ of any philosophical legacy, one has to simplify and dogmatise it.On the other hand, these three meanings of political philosophy all vanished from Marxism(–Leninism) once it became the Legitimationswissenschaft of the new regime (Negt 1974: 7–22). The way in which the nascent Soviet order was framed as an application of Marxist theory excluded legitimate application of the critical potential of Marxist theory on that order itself. A theory of state and politics was rendered obsolete, as a matter of principle, by the dogma of the ‘withering away’ of the state that was implied in the long-term goal of a communist, self-determining society beyond class (Hoffman 1992). Practically, this was effected by the replacement of politics by bureaucratic public administration in a society guided by the Kommunisticheskaia Partiia Sovetskogo Soiuza (KPSS, Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
Liberalism in all its aspects developed in opposition to state power.Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas that Conquered the World (Mandelbaum 2002: 74)But regardless of the sphere in which we may move or ...the kind of law to which we may be subordinate, everywhere we are free beings, for liberty constitutes an inalienable characteristic of our spiritual nature.Boris Chicherin, ‘Property and State’, in Liberty, Equality, and the Market (Chicherin 1998b: 366)Liberalism has been the most consistently oppositional political philosophy throughout Russian history. This probably also explains why it has received so much attention from Western scholars, often not without a whiff of wishfulness. The common denominator of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberalism in Russia is a negative one: rejection of arbitrary autocratic rule and struggle against the widespread ‘legal nihilism’ that includes the radicals and terrorists, the socialists and Marxists, and the Christian thinkers with the exception of Solov’ev (Walicki 1992: 9–104). Russian political philosophers generally perceived the law as a mere instrument in the hands of state power, prioritised social justice and equality over individual civil and political rights, and rejected formal legality in the name of true, Christian morality. This contrasts with the undeniable progress of legal culture and penal law since the 1864 reforms, the development of the zemstvo practices of limited local self-government, reluctant moves towards popular representation and constitutionalism, and the increasing academic freedom that yielded ‘legal narodniki’, ‘legal Marxists’ and ‘legal liberals’ (Nethercott 2007; Medushevsky 2006).There is no generally accepted definition of liberalism. Following Chantal Mouffe, I identify three key principles of the liberal tradition: individual liberty, human rights and rule of law Rechtsstaat, pravovoe gosudarstvo, gospodstvo zakona (Mouffe 2000: 2). The distinctive feature of liberalism is not simply the understanding, however crucial, of the human being as inherently free (Kara- Murza and Zhukova 2019: 13), but the idea that this inherent freedom should be the main organising principle of socio-economic and political order. If one links those two orders, the economic and the political, the result is the classical liberalism of John Locke and Isaiah Berlin.
To become a real Russian, to become completely Russian, perhaps, means just (in the final analysis – bear that in mind) to become a brother to all people, a panhuman, if you like.Fyodor Dostoevsky, A ...Writer's Diary (Dostoevsky 1994: 1294 / 2017: 732)The very fact that subsequent regimes in Russia have deemed it necessary to control church life strongly suggests the presence of critical potential. Readers may think, at this point, that ‘Christian political philosophy’ is a double oxymoron. Did not modern political philosophy come into being only when the Christian theological framework was left behind by thinkers like Machiavelli? Does philosophy not become theology as soon as it becomes Christian? Is Christianity not quintessentially a denial of the political? Paradoxically, however, it is the very attempt to move beyond politics and to deny the political that makes Christian thought, theological or philosophical, political.From a traditional Christian point of view, history has, strictly speaking, secondary relevance: the historical time that humans live in is the period between the Fall and the End of Times. The modern discovery of historical progress, even if it develops dialectically, breaks with this tradition. A traditional position turns conservative when it finds itself in a historically developing, modernising world, and it becomes paradoxical when an established church finds itself subordinated to a regime that is a major agent of modernisation, secularisation and industrialisation. To an extent, this tension can be softened by emphasising the ‘symphonic’ division of labour between a church that is oriented on eternity, salvation and morality, and a state that has a monopoly over worldly politics. However, this extent ends where religious principles are felt to be applicable to society more generally and this particularly concerns the numerous burning issues indicated by the word vopros, which means both question and problem: the issues of national self-determination, for example, of the Polish people, of women's rights, of the position of Jews in the Russian Empire, of poverty and social inequality, and many more. As a result, the pol’skii vopros, zhenskii vopros, evreiskii vopros, sotsial’nyi vopros Polish, Women’s, Jewish, Social question and others were high on the agenda of the thinkers discussed in this chapter.
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