Economics as a moral category in Russian religious philosophy

Abstract

The aim of the article is a philosophical analysis of the views of Russian religious thinkers of the 19th-20th centuries on the economic life of the society. The research is generally based on the analysis of the texts of V.S. Solovyev, S.N. Bulgakov, P.A. Florensky in comparison with the studies of business ethics by foreign scientists - M. Weber, W. Sombart, L. Erhard. The analysis showed that the Russian religious thinkers of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries argued that spiritual and moral values had determining influence on the economic life of the society and criticized the theories of economism and sociologism as manifestations of anti-human (technocratic) tendencies in the development of an individual and the society fetishizing production at the expense of personality development. As an alternative the Russian religious thinkers considered the idea of Christian socialism and proved that the Orthodox Christian ethics of economy should have been a foundation of Russia’s unique development, thus rejecting bourgeois-liberal and socialist options for social reforming. The authors of the article managed to find a new treatment of the problem of moral legitimacy of the market economy by combining pragmatic motivation with traditional ethics of service and reviewing the works of modern philosophers and economists.