On the historicity of the concept of State: the case of Russia
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Abstract
Disregarding the «prejudice» according to which the statebuilding is the raison d'être of Russian history, this article sets out the semantic field (14th-20th cen turies) of Gosudarstvo (Tsar's patrimony, Empire, etc.), the Russian concept that is usually translated as «State». This word acquires on the second third of the 19th century a Hegelian meaning, which remained the monopoly of the cultured elite and has never been realised. In 1917, the soldiers immersed in the revolutionary present attribute to the word a completely new meaning from the revolutionary promises, but recalling at the same time the ancient meaning. The author suggests two conclusions: (a) to abandon the dominant interpretative paradigm (State versus society) of Russian and Soviet history; (b) based on the contemporary her meneutic (Gadamer, Ricœur, Koselleck), to understand the change in the history of concepts as a «presentification» of both the future and the past, which means to reject the notions of «continuity» and «discontinuity».
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