The Flow of Ideas: Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to the Religious-Philosophical Renaissance (Eastern European Culture, Politics and Societies)
Andrzej Walicki, Cain Elliott
Language: English
Pages: 880
ISBN: B01K06GLPQ
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This history of Russian thought was first published in Polish in 1973 and subsequently appeared 2005 in a revised and expanded publication. The current volume begins with Enlightenment thought and Westernization in Russia in the 17th century and moves to the religious-philosophical renaissance of first decade of the 20th century. This book provides readers with an exhaustive account of relationships between various Russian thinkers with an examination of how those thinkers relate to a number of figures and trends in Western philosophy and in the broader history of ideas.
was to some extent a precursor of the Slavophiles, as Herzen was to point out. It is significant that Shcherbatov, like the Slavophiles, was strongly critical of the transfer of the capital from the old boyar stronghold of Moscow to the newly built St. Petersburg, which personified the supremacy of bureaucratic absolutism. The analogy between Shcherbatov and Slavophilism is, however, largely superficial and even unreliable. In his Discourse there is no antithesis between Russia and Europe; and
guiding principle of society and attempted to reduce the complicated network of social relationships to a simple mechanism of rationalized, contractual bonds.4 On the other hand, it was also a truly revolutionary conception that was directed not only against arbitrary and despotic government but also against all forms of traditionalism. The argument that society was founded on reason and selfinterest could of course be used to sanction rebellion against any forms of social relations that could
i.e., separated the “private” sphere from the “public” one, the latter being governed by the state. The first kind of autocracy collided with the elementary demands of evolution toward a “commercial society” – never in history had members of an enlightened, “commercial” nation accepted the status of slaves. But an enlightened, moderate version of absolutism was quite another story – it seemed acceptable, since the most urgent need of a modern man was individual, private freedom, best secured by a
and polyglot, settled in Paris in 1916 and set up an influential intellectual salon that was to remain for many years the center of polemical 18 19 representative of the third phase of Westernism was, according to Soloviev, Nikolai Chernyshevsky. See K. Dmitrieva, “Les conversions au catholicisme en Russia au XIX siècle,” Revue des Etudes Slaves, vol. 16, nos. 2-3, 1995. More about them in my book, Rosja, katolicyzm i sprawa polska, pp. 30-37. See also B. Mucha, Rosjanie wobec katolicyzmu, Lodz
submission to authority. Protestantism, on the other hand, abolished all outward symbols of the religious bond and became a religion of lonely individuals lost in an atomized society. For the materialistic rationalism of the Roman Church the Protestants substituted idealistic rationalism. Whereas Catholicism became set in reified concrete forms, Protestantism wasted itself in empty subjectivism; the Catholic spirit expressed itself most strongly in the anti-individualistic conservatism of de