THE ECONOMIC ETHICS OF RUSSIAN-ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY: PART I

Abstract

The paper, which follows Max Weber's `The Economic Ethics of World Religions' in form and spirit, tries to depict the motivations of economic activity in prerevolutionary Russia. This first part of the paper analyses, on the one hand, the patrimonial-bureaucratic Muscovite state with its system of liturgies and, on the other hand, the Russian-Orthodox Church which, in contrast to the Western development, became integrated in the patrimonial state, and finally the Russian-Orthodox religion which can be characterised by its three aspects as magical-traditional, ritual and mystical. It led to an attitude of world indifference rather than world domination and did not produce independent powers to break open the patrimonial state.