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The Third Rome and Russian Republicanism: A Comment on Oleg Kharkhordin “Power and Authority in Russia”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2021

Miguel Vatter*
Affiliation:
Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, miguel.vatter@deakin.edu.au

Abstract

This article brings to bear contemporary discussions on Machiavelli and republicanism on Kharkhordin's discussion of Russian republicanism and autocracy and its reception of models from Venice and Byzantium.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: Authority and Power in Russia
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1. Kaldellis, Anthony, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Cambridge, Mass., 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. See now Diamantides, Marinos and Schütz, Anton, Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal (Edinburgh, 2018)Google Scholar for an attempt at deconstructing Byzantium as a politico-theological paradigm of anarchy rather than sovereignty.

3. Hankins, James, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory 38, no. 4 (August 2010): 452–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See now Hankins, Virtue Politics. Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, Mass., 2019) for the full argument.

4. Miguel Vatter, “Republics Are a Species of State: Machiavelli and the Genealogy of the Modern State” Social Research 81, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 217–41.

5. For a discussion of the mixed constitution in Rome under this Machiavellian, plebeian perspective see Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (Dordrecht, 2000); John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (New York, 2011); Gabriele Pedullà, Machiavelli in Tumulto. Conquista, cittadinanza e conflitto nei “Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio” (Rome, 2011); and Camila Vergara, Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton, 2020). The insight that the Roman constitution was “mixed” because of its checks on power and authority is due to Kurt von Fritz, The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity (New York, 1954).

6. On the acclamation in this sense, see Kantorowicz, Ernst H., “The ‘King’s Advent’: And the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina,” The Art Bullettin 26, no. 4 (December 1944): 207–31Google Scholar, Agamben, Giorgio, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, 2011)Google Scholar, and Dean, Mitchell, “Three Forms of Democratic Acclamation,” Telos, no. 179 (Summer 2017): 932CrossRefGoogle Scholar.