Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path

by Laura Engelstein

Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life. Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.

Genres: History, Russian History

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2009

About the author

Laura Engelstein is an American historian who specializes in Russian and European history. She served as Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History at Yale University and taught at Cornell University and Princeton University.

Reviews

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

A desperate effort to inflate the value of legalistic liberal political tendencies in Russian history. Engelstein offers this peak horseshoe theory paradigm wherein moderate Western centrism stands as the sole ward against "extremism" of every variety. Yes, it is yet another book indulging in this Manichean opposition between the open society and enemies, only it is less excusable given that it is from 2009 rather than the 90s when those ideas were largely unchallenged.

Although the author has read enough Foucault and Gramsci to reject them, this book is at the same time profoundly un-selfaware, making all of these tacit assumptions about the nature of liberalism that are just presumed as these general normative truths: yes we are bad, but we can reform, and they can't. When they kill people its inherent to their ideology, when we do it its an accident.

Man is the measure of all things, we are assured, and Europe the measure of all civilizations.

There is some good information provided and good summaries of various moments in Russian history, but it is all bracketed in an apologia of Western enlightenment ideology so dogmatic and self assured it would make Lenin blush. Again we are told there is no alternative, again, that there can be no other idea... however, the frequency and insistence of this mantra feels more and more like the soothing self assurance of someone profoundly shook.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting thoughts about the (lacking) development of rule of law in Russia, perhaps far too philosophical at times and the discussion of theological works not particularly interesting to me or organized well enough