The Reforming Tsar: The Redefinition of Autocratic Duty in Eighteenth-Century Russia

Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia H. Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Mikhail Gorbachev ◽  
The People ◽  
Imperial Period

Don't lead the people to expect miracles. It is necessary to expunge from people's minds a belief in the "good tsar," in the assumption that someone at the top will impose order and organize change–Mikhail Gorbachev, 1988The idea of the "good tsar" originated in Muscovite times and obviously has since become a commonplace of Russian political culture. However, Gorbachev's statement does not really define a "good tsar" but what should instead be called a "reforming tsar," a term that more aptly characterizes the changed expectations of a ruler in the Imperial period of Russian history

The Concept of the Ruskaia Zemlia and Medieval National Consciousness from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Centuries*

1980 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles J. Halperin
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Russian History ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The People ◽  
Great Scholar

Any society sufficiently cohesive to evolve even the most rudimentary political structure will also, as a matter of course, develop a set of shared concepts about the nature of that society and a justification of its political structure. Scholars usually ascribe the word “Ideology” only to a set of values which is highly abstract, rational, and articulated in the form of theoretical treatises, so that in the modern period liberalism or Marxism is considered as an ideology, but this is not entirely warranted. Medieval states frequently expressed their social and political myths through the medium of ceremonial and symbol, hence the considerable attention to artistic evidence given by the great scholar of medieval political theology Ernst Kantorowicz or by his student Michael Cherniavsky, whose field was Medieval Rus',1 Even in medieval western Europe, but overwhelmingly in medieval Rus', much political thought, like our current symbolic respect for the “flag,” was expressed in extremely laconic terms. Phrases, concepts, and titles served in lieu largely of theoretical treatises, and ideologues demonstrated their creativity and originality in the manipulation of these phrases, concepts, and titles, not the elaboration of intellectual definitions of their significance. Such definitions were superfluous to contemporaries who all understood the shared vocabulary of political discourse, what we might call a political culture, but their absence compels the modern-day historian to rely upon his informed imagination to decode such social and political myths in order to establish their intended meanings. This is not to imply that modern political ideologies lack overarching myths. Indeed the very opposite is exactly the case; in Russian history the myth of the “people” (narod) in Populist thought and the myths of the proletariat or (later) the Party in Marxist/Bolshevik writings spring readily to mind. The lack of elaborate theoretical discussions of comparable myths in pre-Petrine history inevitably requires different methods of study from those one can apply to subsequent centuries.

scholarly journals Issues in Attribution and Expert Assessment of the Decorative Porcelain Objects

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Mikhailova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Brand Names ◽  
Expert Assessment ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Vital Importance ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Information Interpretation ◽  
Modern Russian

This paper explores the main issues in professional attribution and methodology for the expert assessment of decorative porcelain works. Expert assessment of such works consists of a range of examinations, including studies of technological peculiarities, marking of items, stylistic, heraldic and epigraphic analysis. The history of Russian porcelain is heavily influenced by various trends in European art, as well as events in Russian history. In each stage of development of locally produced porcelain, marks on the items were used in different way and presented a different range of information. Interpretation of these marks provides an important source of attribution and establishment of provenance and, therefore, is of vital importance for any professional working with Russian porcelain. This article provides information on the porcelain markings from the establishment of first porcelain factories in eighteenth-century Russia during the imperial period, before discussing markings on Soviet porcelain and, finally, giving examples of contemporary marks used by modern Russian factories. Keywords: attribution, expertise, porcelain, decorative plastic, sculpture, decoration, brand names, hallmarks, author’s signatures

Aristocracy about 1760: Theory and Practice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Rank ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
General Consensus ◽  
The People ◽  
Important Sense

This chapter considers the prevailing notion in the eighteenth century that nobility was a necessary bulwark of political freedom. Whether in the interest of a more open nobility or of a more closed and impenetrable nobility, the view was the same. Nobility as such, nobility as an institution, was necessary to the maintenance of a free constitution. There was also a general consensus that parliaments or ruling councils were autonomous, self-empowered, or empowered by history, heredity, social utility, or God; that they were in an important sense irresponsible, free to oppose the King (where there was one), and certainly owing no accounting to the “people.” The remainder of the chapter deals with the uses and abuses of social rank and the problems of administration, recruitment, taxation, and class consciousness.

scholarly journals Slaves and Peasants in the Era of Emancipation

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-520
Author(s):  
Padraic X. Scanlan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Labor Force ◽  
The People ◽  
Tenant Farmers ◽  
Plantation Labor ◽  
Plantation System ◽  
Low Wages

AbstractFrom the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.

Art and Archaeology

2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-179
Author(s):  
Nigel Spivey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Attractive Feature ◽  
Personal View ◽  
Subsistence Economy ◽  
Islamic School ◽  
The People ◽  
Annales School ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Of Greece

The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.

scholarly journals Political Theory of Populism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Urbinati
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Democratic Principles

Populism is the name of a global phenomenon whose definitional precariousness is proverbial. It resists generalizations and makes scholars of politics comparativist by necessity, as its language and content are imbued with the political culture of the society in which it arises. A rich body of socio-historical analyses allows us to situate populism within the global phenomenon called democracy, as its ideological core is nourished by the two main entities—the nation and the people—that have fleshed out popular sovereignty in the age of democratization. Populism consists in a transmutation of the democratic principles of the majority and the people in a way that is meant to celebrate one subset of the people as opposed to another, through a leader embodying it and an audience legitimizing it. This may make populism collide with constitutional democracy, even if its main tenets are embedded in the democratic universe of meanings and language. In this article, I illustrate the context-based character of populism and how its cyclical appearances reflect the forms of representative government. I review the main contemporary interpretations of the concept and argue that some basic agreement now exists on populism's rhetorical character and its strategy for achieving power in democratic societies. Finally, I sketch the main characteristics of populism in power and explain how it tends to transform the fundamentals of democracy: the people and the majority, elections, and representation.

TWO RENAISSANCES: URBAN POLITICAL CULTURE IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND RECONSIDERED

2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PHILIP WITHINGTON
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Urban Renaissance ◽  
The Social ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This review reconsiders the place and importance of urban political culture in England between c. 1550 and c. 1750. Relating recent work on urban political culture to trends in political, social, and cultural historiography, it argues that England's towns and boroughs underwent two ‘renaissances’ over the course of the period: a ‘civic renaissance’ and the better-known ‘urban renaissance’. The former was fashioned in the sixteenth century; however, its legacy continued to inform political thought and practice over 150 years later. Similarly, although the latter is generally associated with ‘the long eighteenth century’, its attributes can be traced to at least the Elizabethan era. While central to broader transitions in post-Reformation political culture, these ‘renaissances’ were crucial in restructuring the social relations and social identity of townsmen and women. They also constituted an important but generally neglected dynamic of England's seventeenth-century ‘troubles’.

scholarly journals Between Berlin and Moscow: Polish Western Thought in the Twenty-Year Interwar Period

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Masnyk
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Russian History ◽  
Imperial Period ◽  
Academic Publications ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The Russian Empire

This article deals with the professional discussion about the so-called “difficult questions” of Russian history that involves historians and teachers in the now independent republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Block. Both academic publications and teaching books are used as primary sources for the study. In the first section, the author studies several problems connected with the origin of Russian statehood, the Varangian question, and civilizational characteristics of East Slavic nations. The second section is devoted to the Russian imperial past and especially to the discourse on colonialism, which is often used as an explanatory model for the imperial period by historians and textbook authors in some of the post-Soviet countries. The third section is concerned with the conception of the 1917 revolution. The author emphasizes the fact that the conception of a continuous revolutionary process (1917–1922) has yet to be accepted by Russian secondary schools. In this part, the author considers several other factors significant for understanding the revolutionary process including issues such as the origins of the First World War and the developmental level of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. In the fourth section, the article discusses the conception of the 1930s Soviet modernization along with negative opinions about the Soviet period given by scholars of different former Soviet republics. In the fifth section, the author briefly observes contemporary studies of culture and everyday life. It is concluded that the history of culture is not represented well in Russian school textbooks, and it is also found that the studies on everyday life are often lacking in depth. Discussing various “difficult questions” of Russian history, the author highlights controversial historical ideas and opinions, formulated in the post-Soviet countries during the last decades.

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