The Concepts of Power and State in Russian Political Thinking: On the Difficulties of the Comparative Approach

This article reviews a monograph by E. Sashalmi, a Hungarian Russianist, dedicated to the “transtemporal” reconstruction of the political thinking of Russian writers of the early modern period. The innovation of this book lies in the “contextual” and historical-comparative approaches. Comparing the political discourse of Muscovy with the Western Christian political thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the author does not find the concepts of “sovereignty”, “state”, or “politics” in Russian political thinking. E. Shashalmi connects the adaptation of the idea of a “modern sovereign state” in Russian intellectual discourse with Western Russian intellectuals of the second half of the seventeenth century and Feofan Prokopovich in the early eighteenth century. While appreciating the innovative character of the research goal and approaches, the reviewers evaluate the Hungarian historian’s conclusions as historiographic clichés about the immaturity of Russian culture and the political thought of pre-Petrine Rus’. In fact, E. Shashalmi’s research concerns the Westernisation of Russian political thought. The reviewers conclude that the main difficulty of such innovative historical and comparative studies is the problem of translatability of “concepts” from one culture to another.