Abstract
‘Peter gave Russians bodies, and Catherine — souls’, declared a contemporary poet, thereby expressing in a personalised manner some of the differences between the two phases of absolutism. Peter’s emphasis was indeed on the practical and Catherine’s on the intellectual. The two phases may also be separated according to the major Western influences on them: Peter was struck mainly by the scientific movement and the rationalism of the late seventeenth century, while Catherine was more receptive to the somewhat more rarefied arguments of the eighteenth-century philosophes. At the same time, there was at least a little continuity between the two phases, as there was between the sources of their inspiration and between the problems that they aimed at overcoming.1
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© 1998 Paul Dukes
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Dukes, P. (1998). Enlightened Absolutism, 1761–1801. In: A History of Russia. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26080-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26080-5_7
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