On December 15-16, 2023, EUSP hosted its annual all-Russian conference “Republicanism: Theory, History and Modern Practices”, organized by the Res Publica research center. This year, under the title “The Social and the Public as Political Forms: The Struggle of Traditions and Future Scenarios,” the participants discussed not only specific issues related to “society” and the “public,” but also various topics, “traditional” for this regular EUSP conference.
The first day of the conference opened with the panel “Political Theory: Social and Public Between the Past and the Future”. The first report was read by Tatyana Vaiser, who focused on the metaphors of “light” in the European tradition of conceptalizing “the public” and how their meanings change when applied to the Soviet version of this concept. Victor Kaplun focused on the Arendtian reading of Kant, an interpretation, from his point of view, more heuristically interesting (and consonant) for Russian culture during the period of its first experience of what could be called “publicness”. Ivan Naumov spoke about Bruno Latour’s compositionism, a political theory that involves finding a procedure for composing a common world as a composition of agents that could provide the maximum number of creatures inhabiting this world with the best possible conditions of existence.
The conference continued with a round table discussion titled “Fyodor Karpov and Classical Republicanism”. The participants—Oleg Kharkhordin, Konstantin Erusalimskii, Mikhail Krom and, as moderator, Pavel Lukin— discussed the political aspects of the work of this celebrated 16th century Russian thinker.
The third panel of the first day of the conference, “The Intellectual History of Russia in the 18th and 19th Centuries: the Birth of ‘Society’, the Birth of the ‘Public’,” was opened by Mikhail Kiselev, who reviewed the widespread view in historiography that Peter’s reforms were carried out in the name of “the common good,” and criticized it by turning to the original sources of such judgments. Victoria Istratiy identified the main meanings of the word “public” in Petrine texts, and followed how the words changed over time in meaning and frequency. Andrei Teslya spoke about the relationship between the concepts of “society”, “people” and “state” in the thought of the Slavophiles, and described the context that influenced these discussions.
The first day of the conference concluded with two presentations: a discussion of the Russian translation of J. Habermas’s book “The New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics”, M.: NLO, 2023 (Suhrkamp, 2022) and the latest, at that time, issue of the magazine “New Literary Observer” dedicated to the topic of Anthropology of (Non)violence in Russian Cultural History”, NLO, No. 184 (6/2023).
The second day of the conference opened with the second part of the panel “Political Theory: Social and Public Between the Past and the Future”. Alexander Marey's report was devoted to the development of the concept of “people” in ancient and medieval political thought, as well as the concepts of communitas and societas that replaced it. Oleg Kharkhordin noted that in Russian, due to the lack of influence of Roman law, the term for designating everyone living in a given country (“society”) was barely, if at all, influenced by the Latin term societas, a term that implies a joint venture contract. Furthermore, in Russia from the 19th century the meaning of “society” as koinonia (that is, not a contractual partnership, but an inherent commonality, commonness or a community) began to prevail. Anton Prokopchuk reconstructed the main features of the republican theory of James Harrington, and also documented his influence on the thinking of Abbé Sieyès and speculated on the possibility of reviving the classical republican tradition.
The sixth panel of the conference was entitled “Republicanism in the 17th Century”. The first speaker, Timur Shaipov, talked about Relazione della Moscovia by the Venetian diplomat Alberto Vimina. The work represents a didactic example of “positive barbarism,” a reflection of ideas about the “golden age” and the idea of “Muscovy” as part of the "European Indies." Dmitry Kozlov focused on James Harrington's thoughts on Ancient Israel and Sparta, and the discussions that arose among Harrington’s contemporaries regarding the appropriateness of using such historical examples. Pavel Knyazev spoke about the circle of “new republicans” and their attempts to rehabilitate the concept of the Commonwealth after the Glorious Revolution in England. Knyazev also spoke separately about Charles Davenant and pointed out vivid examples of concepts close to Republican vocabulary used in several of the Tory writer’s works.
The seventh panel of the conference, “Elements of Republicanism in Medieval Rus'?” was opened by Pavel Lukin. Lukin discussed how the terminology of the Novgorod political community evolved and described the existing historiographical discussions about the functions of these concepts. Lukin pointed out that in Novgorod at the end of the 14th century there was a clear idea of the political community and its collective unity, which required its own terminological expression. Sergei Gorodilin presented a study of the motivations and reasoning of the parties to the conflict of 1397-1398 between the Novgorodians and the Grand Duke over the Zavolochye region. Gorodilin noted some innovations in political language which are reflected in sources related to this subject. Andrei Vinogradov focused on several basic issues that help reveal the essence of the institution of electing bishops in pre-Mongol Rus'—both the procedure itself and the models that existed at that time and their differences.
The second part of the panel “The Intellectual History of Russia in the 18th and 19th Centuries: the Birth of ‘Society’, the Birth of the ‘Public’,” was opened by Denis Sdvizhkov. Sdvizhkov pointed out how war-related linguistic innovations, vocabularies and styles manifested themselves in everyday language. Sdvizhkov also discussed the emergence of a separate, war-related “public sphere.” Natalia Potapova described the public discourse on amputations (and national differences in its practice) among representatives of the “generation of fathers” (fathers of e.g. the Decembrists) who had served during the Napoleonic Wars. Potapova also discussed the formation of the prosthesis industry at this time, and highlighted several models of dealing with injuries among this circle of authors. The last report of both this section and the entire conference was a presentation by Victoria Frede. Frede spoke about the fact that in the middle of the 18th century, a new model of “virtue friendship” arose among civil servants of the Russian Empire, a concept which was borrowed from the Western Enlightenment and Antiquity .
Video recordings from December 15 are available here, from December 16—here
Mikhail Kurenkov