Moralism and Monarchism: Visions of Power in 18th-Century Russia

Abstract

Moralism and MonarchismVisions of Power in 18th-Century Russia Konstantin D. Bugrov (bio) The time-honored tradition of writing the history of Russian political thought as the history of constitutionalism describes it as a sequence of reform projects, unsuccessfully trying to circumscribe autocratic power with the use of new theories and concepts exported from the West. Marc Raeff depicted modernization in Russia by emphasizing the contrasts between Anglo-Saxon liberal individualism and continental collectivist "state dirigisme," yet the attempts to construct an effective Polizeistaat were halted by the autocratic monopoly of personalized power.1 David Ransel has spoken of the "paradox of a would-be reformer" characteristic of the political culture of 18th-century Russia.2 Some researchers insist that the principal conflict within Russian political thought in the 18th century was between absolutist arbitrariness and legal, procedural limitation.3 If the history of Russian political thought revolves around the problem of the unlimited power of the autocrat, then its key problem is the juxtaposition of arbitrariness and law. As Elise Wirtschafter puts it, "in a society in which property rights carried no judicial or administrative authority beyond the family estate, the development of an educated populace capable of employing reason to make independent judgments produced an abstract philosophical form of politics, [End Page 267] concerned more with moral principles than with the routine functioning of institutions."4 Morals are here juxtaposed with politics. Yet "moral alienation" could also lead to "rebellion."5 Thus political processes in the Russian Empire were supposedly shaped by collisions over moral issues, in which the expectations of enlightened elites collided with the severe reality of an increasingly bureaucratizing machinery of power. In this article I seek to capitalize on Wirtschafter's concept of "moral monarchy," elaborated in The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater. I consider Wirtschafter's analysis of 18th-century Russian political culture convincing, and I might add that monarchist moralism existed in a variety of genres, enabling the Russian elite to discuss a broad range of issues. While Wirtschafter analyzed 18th-century dramatic pieces, I concentrate on a general study of political texts of the period, including panegyrics, odes, dramatic pieces, and administrative projects. This article does not attempt to describe the whole range of ideas and concepts of 18th-century Russian monarchism. Such a task is far beyond the scope of any journal article. What I am trying to do is provide a reflection on certain political lexicons (or, to use J. G. A. Pocock's expression, "conceptual vocabularies"), manners of speech that—I would argue—were used by the elites of 18th-century Russia to describe the empire's political order.6 These political lexicons overlapped, and the same author could borrow concepts and rhetorical figures from different manners of speech, while conceptual similarities of these vocabularies allowed them to fuse effectively. The second section of the article, however, aims to correct Wirtschafter's concept of moral monarchy to some degree. The tensions that led the Russian elite to "rebellion" were, in my mind, not hidden in the mechanism of moral monarchy, which constantly promoted reconciliation rather than revolution. Its praise of peace and desire to avoid conflicts (I mean, of course, the rhetoric of conflict, not the actual practice of social conflict) were the foundation of moralist monarchism. Thus a radical change in political culture was to be found in the development of alternative political lexicons that would emphasize conflict as a legitimate social regime. In the last section of this article I briefly investigate the example of such a lexicon: Machiavellian civic republicanism. [End Page 268] The Conceptual Lexicons of 18th-Century Russian Monarchism The first was the providential lexicon of church preachers and bishops. Religious legitimation was historically important. For example, Giovanni Maniscalco Basile, in studying the political ideology of 16th-century Russia, writes of an "elastic ideological structure," which established that "the ascendant justification of power (i.e., in the Zemskie Sobory between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century) but also the descendant one (from God to the car´) mix, expanding the (absolute) power of a car´, whose authority derives directly or indirectly from God."7 The...