ВЗЛЕТ И ПАДЕНИЕ ТЕРМИНА «ПОЛИТИЧНЫЙ» В РОССИИ XVIII В.: К ПРЕДЫСТОРИИ ПОНЯТИЯ «ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИЯ»

Abstract

The article is devoted to the prehistory of the emergence in the Russian political language of such an important concept for the European culture of the Modern times as civilization. In view of the historiography, the article focuses on the adjective politichnyy. In the language of Muscovy in the 16th–17th centuries, the notion of barbarians was mainly used to mean “non-Christian peoples” for whom Christians were contrasted. In the second half of the 17th century, ideas according to which barbarism was associated with a lack of knowledge and science, as well as manners, were introduced to Russia and later adopted by the elite. From this position, Russia was seen, above all, as a barbarous country. With the successes of Peter the Great reforms and the advances in the European knowledge, Russia’s status as a politichnyy nation began to be recognized, which was officially proclaimed in 1721. By the first quarter of the 19th century, the adjective politichnyy stopped being used to describe the stage of a nation’s development which opposed to barbarism. Politichnyy was used to mean “courteous”. This was due to the fact that the politichnyy stage, perceived as external assimilation of manners and knowledge, was absorbed by the idea of enlightenment, which implied interiorization of assimilated knowledge and a corresponding change in human behavior.