Dmitri Furman
Dmitri Furman | |
---|---|
Dmitri Yefimovich Furman (
Background and early life
Furman was born in 1943, the only child from the first short lasting marriage of his mother and an artist
Academic career
Furman chose ancient history as his subject at university because the field was too arcane for much interference by officialdom. He also wanted to compare the theological disputes of early Christianity with the quarrels of the early RSDLP, whose minutes he was also reading. In 1968 he completed a dissertation on
Furman was able to transfer from the history to the philosophy faculty at
Work
In conditions of isolation, as Furman himself remarked, Russian thinkers of his generation were inevitably in some degree autodidacts, always liable to reinvent the bicycle. Furman was also, as his friend and best commentator Georgi Derluguian noted, by temperament a pragmatic researcher, little interested in intellectual genealogies or engagement with parallel bodies of work.
His first book, Religion and Social Conflicts in the USA (1981), focused on the role of Protestantism in American history and society. Furman’s book on the United States offered a detailed empirical sociology of American churches, denominations and sects in the 20th century. Its focus became the hallmark of his comparative work henceforward: the influence of religion on not the economic but the political life of society. Why, Furman asks at the outset, had France known four revolutions since the 18th century, and some 15 constitutions, and the United States just one of each? Bourgeois society in America, he argued, had from the beginning combined exceptional dynamism with extreme stability: a combination that could not be understood apart from the peculiar salience of Protestantism in its formation. America included both the unfettering of a drive for knowledge and a biblical respect for the immutability of the constitution. Though officially church and state were separated, the reigning ideology of the nation mingled religious rituals and symbols with secular forms and themes in a promiscuous potpourri whose very lack of clear divisions or borders was permissive of continual economic and social change.[3]
References
- ^ Introduction to Dmitri Furman
- ^ Furman, Dmitri (December 2008). "Imitation Democracies". New Left Review (54): 28–47.
- ^ Anderson, Perry (July 30, 2015). "One Exceptional Figure Stood Out". The London Review of Books. 37 (15): 19–28. Retrieved July 21, 2015.
External links
- Dmitri Furman at The New Times
- Furman, Dmitri (November–December 2008). "Imitation Democracy: The Post-Soviet Penumbra". New Left Review. II (54). New Left Review.