L'Etat quotidien. Administrer la Russie au 18e siecle

Description

Praised or decried, plethoric or invisible, public administration has become an almost indispensable daily contact for most of the world's inhabitants. But what are the processes by which a body of civil servants is formed, their vocabulary forged and practices established? How does a state, as we understand it in the West, come into being? To answer these questions, Anna Joukovskaia turns to Russia in the early eighteenth century, where these transformations were best observed. At that time, Peter the Great initiated a series of reforms aimed at breaking with the Muscovite administrative culture, which was ill-suited to his expansionist policy. He took as his model kingdoms such as Sweden and France, but it was on the ground that he had to find agents ready to implement his project. Through the life stories of a high-ranking court official, a sort of administrative entrepreneur, and a Cossack family spanning four generations, this book plunges us into the most concrete experience of the workings of Russian ‘bureaucracy’. It sheds new light on the history of Western elites and the genesis of the modern state, as those who wielded their pens for the Empire, turned their allegiance to the Tsar and their inventiveness into a powerful lever for social advancement.