Applying the Methods of the History of Concepts to the Study of 18th Century Russia’s Political History

Abstract

The article analyses an issue related to the methods underlying the study of the political thought and — broader — the political culture in 18 th century Russia. The author examines the methods of the “Cambridge school” of political history, which is represented by the works of Q. Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and estimates the possibilities of using these methods upon Russian soil. Combining Skinners’ conception of “cultural lexicons” with the research ideas of M. M. Bakhtin (the theory of speech genres), the author considers the opportunity to study 18 th century Russian political thought through the specification of certain communicative spheres — the court sphere and the public sphere. In the author’s opinion, the character of the political debate in each communicative sphere was defined by the relations between the addresser and the addressee within the process of communication. The court sphere was dominated by the panegyric, the manifesto and the report, which were all aimed at talking over different aspects of the absolutist vision of politics. In its turn, the public sphere, which started developing in the mid-18 th century — a domain of book and journal publishers — was a space suitable for the formation of alternative political discourses (including republican political thinking). In conclusion, the author suggests a reform of the history of political culture to make it a history of individual authors, talking about politics in different communicative spheres, using certain concepts to achieve pragmatic purposes, while simultaneously staying within the bounding context of a “cultural lexicon”.