Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Despotism – Europe – History »

Comparative analyses traditionally have done Russian history no favors. Invidious comparisons have situated Russia firmly in a context of backwardness relative to the West. The term ‘medieval’ customarily applies to Russia until the era of Peter the Great, that is, until the early eighteenth century, and even the least condemnatory scholars point out similarities between Muscovite Russia of the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries and early medieval tribal formations of northern Europe. Along with ‘backwardness,’ comparative history has customarily found in Russia an example of extraordinarily oppressive autocratic despotism, while at the same time, and omewhat contradictorily, decrying the incompetence and rampant corruption of the central state apparatus. These and other unflattering comparative generalizations arose in the observations of Western travellers who recorded their impressions of Russia in the early modern period and have continued in the writings of scholars and journalists to this day.

Etienne Dumont became famous in the early nineteenth century for taking Jeremy Bentham's incoherent manuscripts and editing them into readable books which he translated into French. This article focuses on Dumont's earlier life, and specifically his Genevan background, to explain his work for Mirabeau in the first years of the French Revolution and his ultimate sense of the importance of Bentham's system of legislation. The article explains why Dumont's Genevan origins caused him to promote reforms in France intended to establish domestic stability and international peace. Dumont believed that states across Europe needed to combine free government with moral reform, in order to stifle the growth of democracy. The extent of the danger posed by popular government to modern societies was, in Dumont's view, the major lesson of the French Revolution. An alternative reform project to democracy was necessary, but one that did not entail a return to monarchical or aristocratic despotism. The characteristics of Dumont's planned reform became clear by adopting a comparative perspective on events in France. In developing a comparative perspective, Dumont argued that the history of Britain since 1688 needed to be in the foreground. He was perplexed by the French rejection of Britain's political and constitutional model, and explained many major developments at Paris in 1789 by reference to what he considered to be this peculiar fact. After the Terror, Dumont lost his faith in experiments in constitution building as a means of securing the independence of free states like Geneva. Bentham's great achievement was to have provided an alternative system of legislation that would transform national character gradually, making reform politics compatible with domestic and international peace. For Dumont, Bentham established a bulwark against the enthusiasm and democratic excess, and this was the key to utilitarianism as a moral reform project.

The article focuses on clarifying the role of names of Roman emperors in Dostoevsky’s calligraphic records in his notebooks of the late 1860s (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. Funds 212.1.6 and 212.1.7). One of the reasons for Fedor Dostoevsky’s invocation of images and themes from Roman history was the idea characteristic of the educated class of the mid-19th century, namely, that the history of Rome is a model of virtues and example of vices and atrocities, and is therefore essential to everyone who is not indifferent to the fate of humankind. Since the writer’s creative reflections mainly refer to Gaius Julius Caesar and the rulers of the first two centuries (and the first three dynasties) of the Imperial Period, the writer’s interest in the Roman Caesars must be correlated with his assessment of Imperial Rome in the I—II centuries as the time of strengthening the sole nature of the Emperor’s power and the spread of the Imperial cult, on the one hand, and the formation of Christianity, on the other. At the same time, Dostoevsky’s attention was drawn to Attila and Romulus Augustulus, whose names are associated with the final pages of the history of the Western Roman Empire. For Dostoevsky, Not only texts authored by ancient and Christian authors, but also images of Imperial Rome in contemporary literature and journalism became the sources of associations and motifs associated with the Roman Caesars for Dostoevsky. The most important nuances of meaning were born from the comparison of ancient Roman history with the new history of Western Europe and Russia. The evolution of the subject of calligraphic notes in The Idiot is significant: in the initial drafts of the novel the emphasis was placed on the despotism and monstrosity of the Roman rulers, while the notes for the final version concentrated on the reflection of the history of Imperial Rome and its fate in the Apocalypse.

The author raises in the article an important question of human civilization development: what contribution the East has made to the centuries-long evolution of society. The author emphasizes that, despite the low attention to the countries of the East in the World History books, it was the “Eastern” way that laid down by the great despotisms: Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, and was the main way of human development. Indeed the “Western path” did not appear immediately in Europe itself: both Minoan and Mycenaean Greece developed along the Eastern path, and only in Homeric Greece did the features of “Western” development begin to emerge, more clearly manifested in archaic Greece. The author concludes that such a “Western” emerged as a result of historical coincidence. The author turns to the similarities between the Eastern and Western paths of development, reinforcing them with examples from the history of Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and Ancient China. The author pays special attention to the ancient Chinese model of statehood as a special kind of transformation of the supreme power. Many scholars record the presence in Ancient China in the 8th–7th centuries B.C. of the socio-political and political-administrative system typologically like the one that existed in Western Europe in the 11th–13th centuries. Ryabinin asks the question: “Why did this socio-political and politico-administrative system in Ancient China cease to exist?”. By the 8th–7th centuries, the Chinese state practice during the time of confrontation with the barbarians developed a new model of the political system and mobilization economy which did not allow the Chinese society to rebuild and avoid the format of a despotic regime. According to the author, the concept of “feudalism” in terms of relations within the ruling stratum does not belong exclusively to Western Europe. “Feudalism” as a system of vassal-loyal relations, for example, can also be observed in certain areas of India. Accordingly, the uniqueness of the European way of developing political systems lies not in democracy but something else. The paper emphasizes that this peculiarity is the priority of the wealthy people associated primarily with the market. It was those people who determined the main direction of the development of ancient society both in Classical Greece and in Republican Rome.