The yield of philosophy in twentieth-century Russia has been very rich. Mentioning Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Iurii Lotman and Lev Vygotskii should suffice to substantiate this claim. Important thinkers like Lev Shestov, Gustav Shpet, Aleksei Losev, Mikhail Lifshits, Ėval’d Il’enkov or Merab Mamardashvili are still in the process of being discovered, assessed and translated. The political-philosophical dimension of their thought, for obvious reasons a more politically sensitive field to which they did not relate explicitly, remains under-researched. Quite selectively, this chapter focuses on so-called ‘Russian religious philosophy’ [russkaia religioznaia filosofiia]. It has been received widely and positively, but mostly among theologians and religiously minded people, much less so among professional philosophers, and still less among social and political philosophers. This is regrettable because this current entails both a philosophy of politics, a philosophy of the political and a political awareness of philosophy itself. It is, at the same time, explicable: Christian overtones make it fit badly into twentieth-century political philosophy, particularly since World War II, when (explicitly) religiously inspired positions have been outshone by Marxist, structuralist and analytical positions that are, if not outright atheist, generally ‘secular’. Not accidentally, the reception of this current is largely confined to theological and ‘post-secular’ circles with scholars like Teresa Obolevitch, Kristina Stoeckl, Paul Valliere and Rowan Williams.

What can be the relevance of an explicitly religious, Christian political philosophy in a world where Christianity has moved to the margins of political-philosophical debate? There are four substantial reasons to highlight this thread. First, in our current, post-secular environment, religious standpoints are returning to the public sphere with renewed energy.