Absolute Monarchy and Usefulness: Feofan Prokopovich and Gottlieb Samuel Treuer

This article examines The Justice of the Monarch's Will (1722) by Feofan Prokopovich (1681–1736) as a political work of a transitional period. It combines innovative reasoning about monarchy based on natural law with arguments about God-given authority based on references to the Bible and theological texts. This makes it a political work of great significance for understanding the evolution of Russian political culture in the early eighteenth century. In accordance with the findings of S. V. Polskoi and E. Sashalmi, the pivotal ideological source of The Justice was the handwritten translation of the work of the German lawyer G. S. Treuer (1683–1743), Untersuchung nach dem Recht der Natur (An Inquiry according to Law of Nature), published in 1718, and this rationalistic argumentation was predominant in Feofan Prokopovich’s treatise. It is demonstrated that the manuscript of the translation was received by the Academy of Sciences only in 1742, and there is no evidence to support the assertion that it belonged to the library of Peter the Great. A comparative analysis of An Inquiry and The Justice shows that Treuer and Feofan Prokopovich had serious conceptual differences. According to Treuer, the emergence of absolute monarchy was associated with the low qualities of the subjects or their degradation, in connection with which the people ceased to be as an actor for him. In the view of Feofan Prokopovich, the advent of absolute monarchy was the result of a contract between the monarch and the people, who were motivated by self-interest and retained their agency even after the agreement. Nevertheless, it became evident that this subjectivity was constrained by the will of God, which was perceived as the authority of the monarch. In this section, the perspective of The Justice aligns closely with that of Ivan IV the Terrible, rather than with the ideas of European lawyers. This resulted in the establishment of a super-absolutist monarchy, in which theology held a primary position. It is probable that, because of this, the argumentation of The Justice did not undergo further development in post-Petrine Russia, where secular argumentation was given precedence.