Формирование российских интеллектуальных элит в эпоху Просвещения

Abstract

During the age of Enlightenment, the processes of national elites' formation in Western Europe somewhat differed from country to country. While in Britain, especially in Scotland, intellectuals constituted a fairly homogeneous group of literati, which included university professors, educated priests, civil servants, and enlightened nobles, in France the ideological attitudes might have been shared by clerics, university professors, and "free thinkers," primarily "encyclopedists." In Russia, the situation was peculiar. At the beginning of the 18th century, the structure of the intellectual elite changed. The clerical Orthodox elite became segregated due to the restrictive decrees of Peter the Great. After the founding of St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724 and Moscow University in 1755, an academic elite emerged, and a noble intellectual elite took shape. While European intellectual elites developed within a single paradigm and built their internal oppositions most often along the lines of ideological irreconcilability (for example clericals and encyclopedists in France), Russian intellectual elites were barely connected to each other. They were formed in the context of different educational trajectories, shared no common intellectual institutions or communication platforms (it is not by chance that Russian universities had no theology departments: theological education existed in the framework of separate church schools), and they appealed to different authorities. All this contributed to the parallel existence of very different intellectual models and philosophical systems. The situation became even more complex in the 19th century with the emergence of the intelligentsia as a social group in its own right.