Patriotism in the structure of the paradigmatic foundations of various trends in Russian Westernism in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Abstract

This author of the article, using a comparative historical method, identifies the historical and cultural preconditions for the genesis of patriotism and Westernism in Russia’s civilizational space. Through a historical and philosophical reconstruction, he identifies the specific ways in which the idea of patriotism, developed in Western European theory, was assimilated into the philosophical and political thought of Russian Westernism. It is demonstrated in the article that the phenomenon of patriotic Westernism in Russia, which origins date back to the 18th century, truly took shape in the 19th century due to the need to resolve the contradiction between the Eurocentric modernization of society and the cultural and historical foundations of its civilizational identity. It is argued that representatives of various philosophical and political currents within Russian Westernism, from revolutionary democratic to conservative, resorted to the rhetoric of patriotism. The characteristic features of patriotic Westernism are identified, such as a desire to strengthen Russia’s national and state sovereignty, a rational justification of the country’s political and socioeconomic status, as well as the directions and scale of borrowings from the West as the source and driving force behind the development of individual and societal civic consciousness. The article comes to the conclusion that the crisis of the paradigmatic model of patriotic Westernism that took place in the 20th century was largely provoked by the fundamental perception of Russia as merely a peripheral part of the Western system and, most importantly, due to the growing discrepancy between the Western understanding of patriotism and social (domestic political, axiological, and geopolitical) reality.