“Providential Machine” Against “Mental Doing”: History of Governmentality, the Mistery of the Economy and Anthropology of Holiness

Abstract

The main topic of the article is religious genealogy of “governmentality”. The phenomenon of “governmentality” itself was described and analyzed by Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben investigated the theological background of “governmental” practices in modern Western culture. Agamben showed that liberal free market societies owe their birth to the work of theological “providential machine”. It was this machine that put the “economy” at the forefront, provided the triumph of the Western economical development. In Russian Orthodoxy, however, another model prevailed. In his work “Orthodox Ethics and The Matter of Communism” David B. Zilberman demonstrated that the Hesychast anthropology of holiness contributed not to autonomous development of economic sphere, but to the sacralization of political power.