Historical Psychology in Boris Mironov's "Russian Empire"

According to Vladimir Shkuratov, the contradictions in the development of historical psychology are associated with the fundamental methodological difference between the two modern disciplines of the humanities and social sciences: the historian works with the documents of the past, psychologists with instrumental and test data on living people. Combining the two cognitive systems into a sustainable system of scientific research has so far been unsuccessful. This explains Mironov's appeal in the book "Russian Empire" to the sociological classic of the second half of the 19th to the early 20th century - Durkheim's doctrine of collective representations. The latter is supplemented by the customary dichotomy of "primitive mentality"/"rational mentality" in the wording of L. Levy-Bruhl. Shkuratov notes that, in parallel with the initial thesis that the collective representations of peasants in the 18th to the first half of the 19th centuries conformed to the Christian ideal, an antithesis was formed about the mythological type of consciousness of rural and urban folk. "Mythologiques," according to L. Levy-Bruhl and C. Levi-Strauss, belong to primitive peoples, while Christianity is part of the genealogy of European rationality. Because of this, Shkuratov proposes a separation of traditionalism from the archaic and a consideration of the Russian mentality in the relationship of three or more socio-cultural orders. Evaluating Mironov's monograph as a whole, Shkuratov believes that the enormous historical and empirical material of the book confirms the idea of the forward movement of the economy, public administration, social structure, wealth, and Russian culture from the beginning of the 18th century to 1917.