The Russian Variant of Enlightenment

For many years now, a range of historians have made the case for abandoning the idea of “the Enlightenment” as a monolithic concept. Not least in the light of postcolonial research, “the Enlightenment” is now seen instead as a collection of narratives based on the idea of progress and essentially held together by a new, self-reflexive understanding of the individual.

The Enlightenment hence no longer serves as an analytical category per se but instead is regarded as a polyphonic reaction to global questions by numerous authors in different parts of the world. This brings the different forms of reception of Enlightenment narratives from all over the globe into center focus and liberates the phenomenon from its long-predominant appropriation exclusively for the history of ideas in the West European context.

Gary M. Hamburg’s 900-page monograph Russia’s Path toward Enlightenment reflects this new direction in recent historiography. Hamburg sets out to comprehend Russia’s intellectual history of the early modern era and its reception of intellectual influences from Western Europe against the background of the initially Eastern Slavic, later Russian Orthodox political culture that had evolved over centuries and out of which the specifically Russian form of Enlightenment developed.

To say it right from the start—this is a great achievement. Not only in terms of its breadth, but in terms of its structure, it would be difficult to name a work of comparable stature in the literature on Russian intellectual history. Indeed, to find such a profound, text-based examination of the authors of political ideas in Russia pre-1800 with this kind of epochal sweep, one would need to go back to the prerevolutionary era and read Vladimir Val´denberg’s Old Russian Teachings on the Limits of Royal Authority, published in 1916. But even Val´denberg’s broad survey only covers the period up to 1700 and does not include the “classic epoch of the Enlightenment,” the 18th century. By extending the timespan to the early 19th century, Hamburg follows a more recent trend in Russian historiography, in which the Petrine period is no longer considered a watershed, and traces strong lines of continuity starting around 1500 and running right the way through the era of Peter the Great and beyond to the end of the reign of Paul I in 1801.

The enormous span of the period dealt with is all the more astonishing if we recall that the author, who teaches history at Claremont McKenna College in California, was previously known chiefly for his work on early Russian liberalism and for his contributions on the history of political ideas between 1700 and 1917. Contrary to what the title suggests, Hamburg does not begin in 1500 but instead uses writings from the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries as a basis for his analysis of works written in subsequent centuries. Framed by a brief introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into three parts and a total of 17 chapters. Indexes of people and subjects aid the reader in locating central authors and topics.

The longest period, from around 1500 to 1689, is covered by part 1, which takes up just under a third of the book and is divided into four chapters. Its analysis of Orthodox Christian writings on good governance and the power of the prince illustrates the strong link between Orthodoxy and political thinking in Rus´ or in what was gradually becoming Russia. It also addresses the extent to which Russian political thinkers conceded to subservient subjects a right to resistance in the case of tyranny (Agapetos, Iosif Volotskii, Domostroi, Ivan Peresvetov, Andrei Kurbskii, etc.).

Part 2 covers the period from 1689 to 1762, beginning with the era of Peter the Great and concluding with the end of Elizabeth’s reign. It consists of only two chapters and accounts for just under a fifth of the book. Here Hamburg discusses key figures and their works such as Stefan Iavor´skii, Feofan Prokopovych...