«A reward for virtue, and a penance for iniquity»: the problems of functioning of the legal political language in XVIII century Russian public thought

The paper deals with the issue of functioning of the legal political language in Russian public thought of XVIII century. The author demonstrates that for XVIII century Russian elites legal categories were inferior in comparison with the moral categories of the political analysis. The Russian political culture was dominated by the court communication sphere with panegyric, manifesto and report as its main genres and therefore was not sensitive to the theories of natural law and contractualism, staying closer to moralism of Leibniz rather than natural law jurisprudence of Pufendorf. However, in Russia the court political discourse also embraced the idea of miracle, a direct intervention of Providence into the political life, which reflected in the legitimation of several palace coups. The court elites were treating the law as a classification of administrative regulations and the necessity of punishing the vices and rewarding the virtues, just as Godly justice did. In turn, the growing public sphere also had little interest in the juridical glossaries, preferring to debate the moral, historical and economic texts. The author concludes that the weakness of the juridical doctrines in XVIII century Russia was conditioned by the specifics of Russian political system.