The Once and Future Republic?

A Review on: Res Publica: Russian Republicanism from Middle Ages to the end of the 20th Century. A Collective Monography. Ed. by K.A. Solovyov. Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2021. 824 p.

Abstract

The review provides a thematic reading of the collective monography, which deals with intellectual history of Russian republicanism. The author of the review underlines that the book, although it is composed of ten separated and conceptually independent parts, could have a general reading in the optics of modern political philosophy’s problematics. This intention derives from the explicitly shown authors’ interest in actual republicanism theory, that started at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries regarding Ph. Pettit’s arguments. Then it is shown that research on the development of the idea of Russian republicanism has a normative model, which can be described as an interpretation of the methodology of Cambridge School of intellectual history. For Russian intellectual space the work with republicanism on the material of social-political thought investigation becomes a reference point, that allows to synchronize methods and subjects of actual philosophy with the global context. A common point for the collective monography is highlighting the inconsistency of the phenomenon of “republic” in Russian political language: being an important idea, although imported from other political tradition, the attempts to define its content and its importance were not always successful and influential enough. An important contribution of the work in the elaboration of political philosophy is clarification of many historical aspects, which results in the narrowing the space for mythologization of Russian political thought.