Genealogy of the Idea of Monarchy in Post-Soviet Political Discourses of the Russian Orthodox Church

Abstract

This article focuses on the concept of monarchy with the emphasis on its traditional Russian “autocratic” model. The author inquires into the ways this concept is being used in today's Russian Orthodox Church and in the circles of religiously motivated intellectuals. Inspired by the “contextualist” tradition in conceptual history, this article traces the concept of “monarchy ” back to the pre-revolutionary and emigre thinkers and argues that the two understandings of it have been evolving throughout Russia's modern history: the tradition of “god-kingship” (tsarebozhie), now largely marginalized, and the Slavophil interpretation that made a substantial shift towards the idea of popular sovereignty and is now dominating the official and mainstream Orthodox political thought. This Slavophil concept of monarchy is internally contradictory and instable, what makes its usage problematic, but at the same time, it opens the possibility of a new and original theorizing.