The first part of this book is of necessity theoretical, since it is designed to acquaint the reader with my conception of the origin and nature of the Russian political structure. In this part I seek:
To give as precise as possible a description of "despotism" and "absolutism";
To give a description of "Russian autocracy";
To demonstrate that prior historiography known to me proceeds almost entirely from the bipolar model of political classification;
To show that, precisely for this reason, it is incapable of adequately describing the origin and nature of the Russian political structure.
It goes without saying that most Soviet authors reject with an offended air the very possibility that Russia might belong in the category of Asiatic despotism, and decidedly count it in the family of European absolutism, while most Western authors who are sensitive to theoretical issues are convinced of the opposite. For this reason, I will call the first, for brevity's sake, "absolutists," and the latter "despotists."
This chapter will be devoted to definitions. In chapter two, I will try to show how it comes about that the "absolutists" are unable to explain the origin and nature of the Russian political process. The third chapter will be devoted to the "despotists."
2. The Science of Despotology
Aristotle knew that in addition to the three regular and three irregular ("deviant") forms of political organization characteristic of the civilized oikumene, there existed beyond its boundaries, in the darkness of barbarism, yet a seventh—despotism. Outwardly, it resembles the tyranny well-known to the civilized world, which "is in essence the same as monarchy but implies only the interests of the ruler alone."[18]But this resemblance is only outward, because in the civilized world, tyranny is but one of the transitory forms in an ever-changing sea of political transformations, while despotism in the barbarian world is permanent.
The human mind is not capable of understanding how a people can tolerate tyranny on a permanent basis. For this reason Aristotle saw in despotism something inhuman. And this is not surprising if we remember that "barbarism" was, for him, only the external political dimension of the internal political condition of "slavery." Neither the slave nor the barbarian (the potential slave) could be considered a human being, since the first mark of a human being was, for Aristotle, participation in courts and councils—that is, in the administration of society. Man, for him, was a political animal. This, properly speaking, makes it understandable why he could not consider despotism as a political structure at all.
But Aristotle nevertheless does introduce a certain original element into what I would call the science of despotology. In fact, if we try to look at his theory of "deviations" from a modern point of view, we see immediately that he has in mind the problem of divergence between the goals of the social system and those of its administration. The regular forms, for him, are those in which the common goals of the system prevail over the goals of the administration. The irregular forms are those in which the administration subjects the system to the goals of the social elements it represents (or, what is of decisive importance for us, to its own autonomous goals). This, in Aristotle's terms, is the meaning of "deviation." Oligarchy, for example, subjects the system to the goals of the social "upper crust," and democracy, on the contrary, to those of the "lower depths." Tyranny subjects the system to the goals of the administration as such, which, in modern parlance, becomes an interest group in its own right. Thus, in Aristotle's opinion, social systems may exist which live not for their own interests, but exclusively for the interests of the "ruler alone," who personifies the administration of the system.
The remarkable variety of political forms characteristic of the Greek polis was historically short-lived. And it was by no means replaced by the ideal Utopian polity of which Aristotle dreamed, nor even by the republic of Plato, but by monarchy, which became the dominant form of political organization for centuries to come and, as Aristotle had predicted, constantly strove to "deviate" in the direction of tyranny, or even—as it seemed to its contemporaries—in the direction of barbarian despotism; that is, permanent tyranny.
Proceeding from the same Aristotelian tradition, European political thought has for centuries made extraordinary efforts to restrain monarchy—at least in theory—from this fateful "deviation." We can find the traces of this dramatic effort as early as the work of the English jurist of the first parliamentary period, Bracton, in the thirteenth century; in the Praise of English Laws of John Fortescue in the fifteenth century; in Jean Bodin, Andrei Kurbskii, and Du Plessy Mornay in the sixteenth century; Iurii Krizhanich in the seventeenth century; and Mikhail Shcherbatov and Mercier de la Riviere in the eighteenth. And finally, when tyranny had apparently become an irreversible fact in France, the lessons of this theoretical struggle were summarized by Charles de Montesquieu in his Spirit of the Laws.
Montesquieu was a pessimist and a conservative. He was convinced that the days of "moderate government" (as he called European absolute monarchy) were numbered, that the age-old struggle was approaching its political finale—its catastrophe. "As the rivers run to lose themselves in the sea, monarchies strive to dissolve themselves in despotism," he wrote.[19] The only one of all the wealth of "regular" political forms listed by Aristotle, the last heir of civilization—European absolute monarchy—was receding into the external darkness of political nonexistence, never to return.
If we do not forget that Montesquieu was the founder, so to speak, of the geographical approach in history, and that for him "moderate government" (as the result of a temperate climate) was identified with Europe, and despotism with Asia, we can see that we stand here at the sources of the bipolar model of political classification which has dominated the minds of modern historians.
Montesquieu was reproached by his contemporaries with not having been able to give an adequate political description of despotism, limiting himself to a brief aphorism: "When the savages of Louisiana wish to obtain fruit, they cut down the tree at the root and obtain it— here is the whole of despotic government."5 But this reproach is only partially justified. In fact, Montesquieu drew an important theoretical conclusion—second only to that of Aristotle—concerning the nature of despotism: its total inefficiency, the incapacity for political dynamism which conditioned its permanent stagnation.
Despite Montesquieu's pessimism, Europe, as we know, survived the eighteenth century. Moreover, it countered the threat of "deviation" toward despotism with the invention of modern democracy, which made possible the continued existence of civilization. And only in the middle of the twentieth century, when the total onslaught of despotism seemed fated to recur, was the third and decisive theoretical step in the description of this political phenomenon taken.
I do not at all mean to say by this that the phenomenon of despotism disappeared from the field of vision of European thinkers in the interim between Montesquieu and Wittfogel. John Stuart Mill introduced the term "Eastern society" to describe it, and Richard Jones that of "Asiatic society," not to mention the well-known comments by Hegel in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, from which we shall have occasion to quote. Unfortunately, the ideas of the remarkable seventeenth century Russian thinker Iurii Krizhanich have for various reasons (we shall speak of them later) not entered into universal despotology, though his conception of "moderate aristocracy" as the main bastion against despotism preceded the analogous observations of David Hume and Alexis de Tocqueville.