ABSTRACT
The debate about enlightened despotism has generated so much more heat than light that, as a trenchant recent study argues to trace its development in detail may well be unproductive. Catherine had stressed in article 154 of the Nakaz that the sovereign was the sole legislator, and also the sole authority empowered to interpret the law. Potential immigrants were assured that 'all our efforts and intentions have been aimed at ruling this State in such a manner that as a result of our concern for the common good. The philosophers were intrigued by cultural diversity from the moment that Montesquieu published his Persian Letters, a satire on European morals seen through the eyes of outsiders whose own despotic instincts were exposed in the course of their critique of France. By the end of 1788, according to Smagina, the leading Russian student of the subject, schools had been opened in twenty-six provinces of the Russian Empire.
