XI International Conference of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia
10th-14th July 2023
Екатерина Махотина (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany), "Рождение "совести". Церковные и светские практики формирования общественной морали во второй половине XVIII века"
It was in Russia, as we know, that Jeremy Bentham wrote down his world-famous idea of the Panopticon. His brother Samuel had already been in Russia for ten years in the service of Prince Grigori Potemkin when Jeremy visited him 1786 from England. It was Samuel who invented a special construction for manufactories and factories on the Russian estate of Zadobras for Potemkin's industrialisation projects. Due to the start of the Russian-Turkish war, he was unable to begin construction, but his brother took over this plan for his tract Panopticon for the establishment of prisons, founded on the principles of parcelling, centralised supervision, a wide variety of methods of correction and education, supplemented by hospitals, workshops, schools.
Russian undergovernance was certainly one of the premises why Western scientists saw it as a grateful laboratory for experimentation; here one could develop the boldest projects, one was left alone, courted and appreciated by the aristocratic patrons. One of the central projects of interest to the absolutist power concerned prisons: their establishment, functions and logics of deprivation of freedom.
The paper will focus on the specifics of the Russian way of establishing prisons. It will be shown that the enlightened monarchy in the late eighteenth century not only relied on the writings of humanists such as Cesare Beccaria. The Orthodox Enlightenment, supported by the Russian clergy, played no less important a role. This in turn was highly influenced by German Pietism with its centre in Halle. This history of ideas-exchange brought about the emergence of the discourse of conscience in Russia: it became the central element in court practice, where the aim was to imprison people for one's transgressions. The practice of incarceration and surveillance had the aim of "cleansing" the conscience. But this modern logic was carried out through traditional, religious practice: monastic custody, vigilance, admonition and penance.
I will argue that in Russia the monastic internal logic as monasterium panopticum set the course for Bentham's panopticum model of vigilance.
