Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary of Russian Concepts
- Timeline
- 1 The Origins of Political Philosophy in Russia
- 2 First Debates in Russian Political Philosophy – ‘What Is to be Done?’
- 3 Socialism and Marxism in Russia: The Peasant Commune is Dead – Long Live the Peasant Commune!
- 4 Christian Political Philosophy in a Modernising World – Preparing for God’s Kingdom
- 5 Russian Liberalism Revisited – Between a Rock and a Hard Place
- 6 The Long Russian Revolution – Signposts for a Roller Coaster
- 7 Soviet Marxism–Leninism and Political Philosophy – Never Mind the Gaps!
- 8 Christian Political Philosophy in Exile – Between Sobornost’ and Theocracy
- 9 Counter-Soviet Political Philosophy in Emigration – Beyond the Pale
- 10 Late Soviet and Early Post Soviet Political Philosophy – Licking the Wounds
- 11 Political Philosophy for a New Russia – New Wine in Old Bottles?
- Conclusion – Mediation Beyond Duality and Immediacy
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Christian Political Philosophy in Exile – Between Sobornost’ and Theocracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary of Russian Concepts
- Timeline
- 1 The Origins of Political Philosophy in Russia
- 2 First Debates in Russian Political Philosophy – ‘What Is to be Done?’
- 3 Socialism and Marxism in Russia: The Peasant Commune is Dead – Long Live the Peasant Commune!
- 4 Christian Political Philosophy in a Modernising World – Preparing for God’s Kingdom
- 5 Russian Liberalism Revisited – Between a Rock and a Hard Place
- 6 The Long Russian Revolution – Signposts for a Roller Coaster
- 7 Soviet Marxism–Leninism and Political Philosophy – Never Mind the Gaps!
- 8 Christian Political Philosophy in Exile – Between Sobornost’ and Theocracy
- 9 Counter-Soviet Political Philosophy in Emigration – Beyond the Pale
- 10 Late Soviet and Early Post Soviet Political Philosophy – Licking the Wounds
- 11 Political Philosophy for a New Russia – New Wine in Old Bottles?
- Conclusion – Mediation Beyond Duality and Immediacy
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Judge the Russian people not by those nasty things, which it so often does, but by those great and holy things, which it even in its meanness constantly longs for.
Mat’ Maria Skobtsova, ‘Dostoevsky and the Present’, 1929 (Skobtsova 2016: 86)
The yield of philosophy in twentieth-century Russia has been very rich. Mentioning Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Iurii Lotman and Lev Vygotskii should suffice to substantiate this claim. Important thinkers like Lev Shestov, Gustav Shpet, Aleksei Losev, Mikhail Lifshits, Ėval’d Il’enkov or Merab Mamardashvili are still in the process of being discovered, assessed and translated. The political-philosophical dimension of their thought, for obvious reasons a more politically sensitive field to which they did not relate explicitly, remains under-researched. Quite selectively, this chapter focuses on so-called ‘Russian religious philosophy’ [russkaia religioznaia filosofiia]. It has been received widely and positively, but mostly among theologians and religiously minded people, much less so among professional philosophers, and still less among social and political philosophers. This is regrettable because this current entails both a philosophy of politics, a philosophy of the political and a political awareness of philosophy itself. It is, at the same time, explicable: Christian overtones make it fit badly into twentieth-century political philosophy, particularly since World War II, when (explicitly) religiously inspired positions have been outshone by Marxist, structuralist and analytical positions that are, if not outright atheist, generally ‘secular’. Not accidentally, the reception of this current is largely confined to theological and ‘post-secular’ circles with scholars like Teresa Obolevitch, Kristina Stoeckl, Paul Valliere and Rowan Williams.
What can be the relevance of an explicitly religious, Christian political philosophy in a world where Christianity has moved to the margins of political-philosophical debate? There are four substantial reasons to highlight this thread. First, in our current, post-secular environment, religious standpoints are returning to the public sphere with renewed energy.
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- Russian Political PhilosophyAnarchy, Authority, Autocracy, pp. 129 - 146Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022