Why does the theory of law have such a significant role in Russian liberalism, and how is this related to the state of the legal system in Russia and to the public’s legal consciousness? This intro...

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within (...) often rapidly-changing institutional and international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law, and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party. The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR. The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism? (shrink)

In pre-revolutionary Russia, law was criticized from many points of view: in the name of Christ or the name of Marx, in defense of anarchism or of an idealized autocracy, on behalf of the "Russian soul" or of universal progress towards socialism. Examining the rich tradition of hostility to law, Walicki presents those Russian thinkers who boldly challenged this legacy of anti-legal prejudice by developing liberal philosophies of law, vindicating the value of human rights and rule of law. (...) He discusses six leading theorists--Boris Chicherin, Vladimir Soloviev, Leon Petrazycki, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Bogdan Kistiakovsky, and Sergius Hessen--all of whom viewed law in the context of wider philosophical and social problems. (shrink)

When this volume was first published by Oxford University Press in 1967, it was hailed as a superb historical study of an intellectual current that died in Russia with the defeat of the Constitutional Democratic Party and the ascendancy of the Bolsheviks, namely, the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinking of those Russian philosophers who championed the liberal values of democracy, individual rights, and a state based on the rule of law. Now reissued in a changed world by the (...) University of Notre Dame, the book takes on additional, highly contemporary significance: the destruction of Soviet totalitarianism has given new life to liberal values, and the ideas of these forgotten thinkers are now relevant to the most burning political issues of the day in Russia. Not surprisingly, a Center for the Study of Russian Liberalism has been established within the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a Russian translation of Walicki's book is in preparation. (shrink)

The Moscow Psychological Society, a learned society founded in 1885 at Moscow University, was the philosophic center of the revolt against positivism in the Russian Silver Age. In 1889 it began publication of Russia's first regular, specialized journal in philosophy, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology. By the end of its activity in 1922, the Psychological Society had included most of the country's outstanding philosophers and had played the major role in the growth of professional philosophy in Russia. ;While the (...) Silver Age mounted a broad-based revolt against positivism, neo-idealist philosophy in the Psychological Society was distinctive in the theoretical depth of its critique. For leading philosophers in the Society , neo-idealism was a compelling defense of the self against positivist reductionism and naturalism, a defense that took the form, moreover, of a modernized, theoretically explicit theism, in which the value of the person is rooted in transcendent being . In this, neo-idealism promoted not only the autonomization and professionalization of Russian philosophy but also the theoretical development of Russian liberalism. ;This dissertation argues: that a learned society of philosophers had special significance in Russia, where the frail social foundations of liberalism made its intellectual defense all the more imperative; that the Psychological Society, especially in its programmatic symposium, Problems of Idealism , was integrally involved in the Russian Liberation Movement; that the neo-idealist development of Russian liberalism drew heavily on Kant, in its substantiation of the possibility of personalism and in its critique of utopianism; and that the neo-idealist critique of utopianism, specifically in the responses of Psychological Society philosophers to their colleague, Vladimir Solov'ev, provides an excellent measure of the distinctiveness of neo-idealism relative to other currents in the Silver Age. (shrink)

This article analyzes the features of the intellectual and cultural environment in which the ideas of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century liberalism developed. Based on the assumption of l...

The chapter examines Russian political theorist Aleksandr Dugin’s (b. 1962) challenge to the Western liberal order. Even though Dugin’s project is in many ways a theoretical epitome of Russia’s contemporary attempt to profile itself as a regional great power with a political and cultural identity distinct from the liberal West, Dugin can also be read in a wider context as one of the currently most prominent representatives of the culturally and intellectually oriented international New Right. The chapter introduces Dugin’s (...) role on the Russian right-wing political scene and his international networks, Russian neo-Eurasianism as his ideological footing, and his more recent “fourth political theory” as an attempt to formulate a new ideological alternative to liberalism as well as the two other main twentieth-century ideologies, communism and fascism. Dugin’s fourth ideology, essentially meant as an alternative to a unipolar post–Cold War global hegemony of victorious liberalism, draws inspiration from the German conservative revolutionary movement of the Weimar era. In particular, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of history, with its thesis of the end of modernity and another beginning of Western thought, and Carl Schmitt’s pluralistic model of geopolitics are highlighted as key elements of Dugin’s eclectic political thought, which is most appropriately characterized as a form of radical conservatism. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of Russian literature, culture, and thought gives for the first time an extensive and detailed examination of the development of Russian thought during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic account of Russian thought in the second half of the 20th century. In doing so, he provides new insights into previously ignored areas such (...) as Russian liberalism, personalism, structuralism, neo-rationalism, and culturology. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy and culture has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian philosophical thought and cultural theory, now freed from the bonds of totalitarianism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of Russian thought, but also an opportunity to rethink our own intellectual heritage. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: List of contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction: the humanist tradition in Russian philosophy G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole; Part I. The Nineteenth Century: 1. Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the birth of Russian philosophical humanism Sergey Horujy; 2. Alexander Herzen Derek Offord; 3. Materialism and the radical intelligentsia: the 1860s Victoria S. Frede; 4. Russian ethical humanism: from populism to neo-idealism Thomas Nemeth; Part II. Russian Metaphysical Idealism in Defense of Human Dignity: 5. Boris (...) Chicherin and human dignity in history G. M. Hamburg; 6. Vladimir Solov'iev's philosophical anthropology: autonomy, dignity, perfectibility Randall A. Poole; 7. Russian panpsychism: Kozlov, Lopatin, Losskii James P. Scanlan; Part III. Humanity and Divinity in Russian Religious Philosophy after Solov'iev: 8. A Russian cosmodicy: Sergei Bulgakov's religious philosophy Paul Valliere; 9. Pavel Florenskii's trinitarian humanism Steven Cassedy; 10. Semën Frank's expressivist humanism Philip J. Swoboda; Part IV. Freedom and Human Perfectibility in the Silver Age: 11. Religious humanism in the Russian silver age Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal; 12. Russian liberalism and the philosophy of law Frances Nethercott; 13. Imagination and ideology in the new religious consciousness Robert Bird; 14. Eschatology and hope in silver age thought Judith Deutsch Kornblatt; Part V. Russian Philosophy in Revolution and Exile: 15. Russian Marxism Andrzej Walicki; 16. Adventures in dialectic and intuition: Shpet, Il'in, Losev Philip T. Grier; 17. Nikolai Berdiaev and the philosophical tasks of the emigration Stuart Finkel; 18. Eurasianism: affirming the person in an 'Era of Faith' Martin Beisswenger; Afterword: on persons as open-ended ends-in-themselves (the view from two novelists and two critics) Caryl Emerson; Bibliography. (shrink)

The article ventures a reading of Russian postcommunist politics from the perspective of the messianic turn in continental political philosophy, specifically Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the ‘end of history’. Taking its point of departure from a retrospective construction in the Russian political discourse of the 1990s as a period of ‘timelessness’, the paper argues that postcommunism may indeed be viewed as a paradoxical ‘time out of time’, a rupture in the ordinary temporality that entirely dispenses with the teleological (...) horizon of politics. While the problematic of the ‘end of history’ has been popularized by Francis Fukuyama’s liberal recasting of Kojève’s reading of Hegel, the Russian experience is entirely contrary to this complacent and self-gratifying account of the triumph of liberalism and accords, instead, with Agamben’s understanding of the end of history as the deactivation of the teleological dimension of politics as such. The effect of this deactivation is not a catastrophic disintegration of the social order but rather the opening of the possibility of an inoperative political praxis that is oriented towards the affirmation of existence in the pure present. The article proceeds with outlining the implications of this reading of Russian postcommunism for understanding the present conjuncture of Russian politics. (shrink)

This essay examines Isaiah Berlin's ambivalent relationship with the ideas and practices of Jewish nationalism and the ways in which this ambivalence shaped some of the key premises of his political thought. Drawing upon extensive archival research in his unpublished letters from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, this essay reconstructs Berlin's attempt to reconcile himself with the national idea. This attempt forced him to enrich his liberalism, and pushed him to develop and adopt the Jewish normalization discourse. In (...) the course of those intra-Jewish debates Berlin also began to conceptualize freedom as an opportunity concept, an idea that would later become central both in Berlin's famous negative concept of freedom and in his pluralism. Adopting a dual perspective, which considers Berlin as both a British liberal and a Russian-Jewish émigré intellectual, I therefore offer to see the Jewish Zionist writings as complementary rather than secondary to Berlin's enterprise. (shrink)

The question of the Russian man – his past, present and future – is the central one in the philosophy of history. Unfortunately, at present this area of philosophy is not suffciently developed in Russia. Partly the reason for this situation is the lack of understanding by researchers of the role played by Russian classical literature and its philosophizing writers in historiosophy. The Hunting Sketches, a collection of short stories by I.S. Turgenev, is a work still undervalued, not (...) fully considered not only in details but also in general meanings. And this is understandable because it is the frst systematic encyclopedia of Russian worldview, which is not envisaged by the literary genre. To a certain extent, Turgenev’s line is continued by I. Goncharov, L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky, A. Chekhov. This article examines the philosophical nature of The Hunting Sketches, its structure and content. According to author’s opinion, stories can be divided into ten groups according to their dominant meanings. Thus, in The Hunting Sketches the main Russian types are depicted: “natural man,” rational, submissive, cunning, honest, sensitive, passionate, poetic, homeless, suffering, calmly accepting death, imbued with the immensity of the world. In the image and the comments of the wandering protagonist, Ivan Turgenev reveals his own philosophical credo, which he defnes as a moderate liberalism – freedom of thought and action, without prejudice to others. (shrink)

Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously (...) liberal movement took shape, followed by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905. (shrink)

Milestones was a manifesto of rightwing, anti-revolutionary liberalism, according to which the political events of 1905 should have officially concluded the intelligentsia’s battle against autocracy and inaugurated the intelligentsia’s cooperation with Russia’s “historical rulers” to turn the country into an economically and culturally strong “state of law.” All the Milestones ’ authors agreed that Russia’s intellectual history was not identical with the traditions of the radical intelligentsia, and that there was need for a new intellectual canon focused on religious (...) thought and efforts to define the Russian national identity. (shrink)

Sensible people advise one not to expend one's strength on polemics. And sensible people are right, of course. But look at the history of social thought: there is no peace beneath the olives, and without the flames of social thought, even the pure light of science begins to flicker.

This paper focuses on the most recent period in the development of Russian thought (1960s–1990s). Proceeding from the cyclical patterns of Russian intellectual history, I propose to name it the third philosophical awakening. I define the main tendency of this period as the struggle of thought against ideocracy. I then suggest a classification of main trends in Russian thought of this period: (1) Dialectical Materialism in its evolution from late Stalinism to neo-communist mysticism; (2) Neorationalism and Structuralism; (...) (3) Religious Orthodox Thought; (4) Synthetic and Spiritualist Teachings; (5) Personalism and Liberalism; (6) Neo-Slavophilism and the Philosophy of National Spirit; (7) Culturology, or the Philosophy of Culture; (8) Conceptualism, or the Philosophy of Postmodernity. (shrink)

Using material from contemporary scholarly debate, the author shows that the term “early Russian liberalism” remains conceptually vague both in content and in its chronological sense. In the strict...

The author conducts a comparative analysis of the Russian Revolution developed by two prominent social-political thinkers of Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century—Max Weber and Peter Struve. The article focuses on their respective interpretations of the causes, course, and consequences of the Revolution as determined by their political ideals, i.e. a specific combination of nationalism and liberalism. The author pays special attention to Weber’s and Struve’s perception of the Russian Revolution, which, albeit for different reasons, (...) was rejected by both thinkers. (shrink)

The contemporary epoch has confronted our country with the problem of choosing its path of development and at the same time has placed the problem of liberalism at the center of political discussions. But at first glance there would not seem to be a problem here: since liberal principles played a decisive role in the genesis of Western society and form the basis of the modern world order, it would seem that we should accept these principles, which have passed (...) the fundamental test of history, without any reflection. However, such a straightforward answer leaves out of account two essential factors. The first of these is the specific nature of the Russian "mentality," the Russian public mind or, put more broadly, the specific nature of the whole of Russian social life. The fact that the idea of a "special way" for Russia is being actively exploited by various political movements with an overtly expressed nationalist shading should not blind us to the need for a profound and sober interpretation of what this idea really means. It is no accident that the assertion that Russia's historical development has a special character has been a commonplace in all currents of Russian social life. Even the ideologues of an extremely "Westernizing" bent accompanied their acceptance of the necessity of Russia's adopting a system of values traditional for Europe with a sharp criticism of Western European civilization itself . It turned out that, after adopting these values, Russia was to demonstrate to the West itself the true path of development, the true purport of the latter's intellectual achievements, which had been discredited by the realities of Western civilization. The difference between the "Westernizers" and the Slavophiles in this regard lay merely in their disparate understanding of the essence of Russia's "uniqueness" and in the disparate criteria they had chosen for assessing it; but neither current called into question this "uniqueness" itself. (shrink)

This article examines the criticisms that Chicherin directed at the classical Western liberalism that emerged from the works of John Locke, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, Baron d’Holbach, and Jean-Jacque...

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of (...) the Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

The present article is primarily concerned with the imagined community of liberal intellectuals, rather than the community that "objectively" existed. This imaginary community constructed notions of the collective identity of their own group as well as that of Russian society. For this purpose, they instrumentalized the notions of "progress," "backwardness," "culturedness" and "benightedness", thereby creating hierarchies in which the "constructors" of collective identities granted themselves the important role of intermediaries between state and society. Special attention is paid to the (...) prominent role Russia 's liberal historians played in this process insofar as historians possessed great power in nineteenthcentury Europe—the power to tell their states and societies about their past, present, and future—and this transformed them into professional producers of identities. Their work combined expert knowledge and ideological clichés in a highly complex manner. The central question posed is to what extent and in what respect the reality constructed by Russian intellectuals coincided with the actions of intellectuals in other European regions or, on the contrary, to what extent their discursive activities had a specifically local character. (shrink)

Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism. By Andrzej Walicki. A History of Russian Philosophy, Edited by Valery A. Kuvakin.

Could anyone shake nineteenth century Russia out of herphilosophico-juridical stagnation? Was there anyone whodared speak of rights, of freedoms based on vital principles?Was there anyone who had the courage to suggest that the lawof force be turned into recognition of the force of law, orwas bold enough to call for the revival of natural law onits idealist reading? Solov'ëv turned out to be the thinkerwho was able to do these things. An amateur in juridicalquestions, remote from the enlightenment rationalizations ofpolitical (...) liberalism, Solov'ëv set out to lay the basis forjuridical freedom in way that was unexpected philosophicallyand culturally. (shrink)

This paper considers the philosophical and political views of B. N. Chicherin. Chicherin was one of Hegel's better known followers in Russian philosophy. Chicherin transformed Hegel's ideas to such an extent that the main concept of his philosophy became the concept of the person, and the main problem was the description of the person's connection to the Absolute. Chicherin was also known as a representative of the liberal tradition in Russia. However, he criticized classical western liberalism for belittling (...) the value of the state. Chicherin's liberal theory was under construction in a dialectical combination of two principles: recognition of the absolute value of the person and its freedom and recognition of the necessity of a strong state for the solution of some general problems in the absence of which it will be impossible to realize the principle of freedom in all its completeness. (shrink)

While Russian leaders are clearly dissatisfied with the United States and the European Union, they are not inherently opposed to a liberal world order. The question of Russia's desire to change a liberal international order hangs on the type of liberalism embedded in that order. Despite some calls from within for it to create a new, post-liberal order premised on conservative nationalism and geopolitics, Russia is unlikely to fare well in such a world.

The fate of liberalism in Russia almost automatically brings to mind the image of something tragic, of something that perished in its very prime. The fate of the theoreticians and political leaders of liberalism, from B.N. Chicherin to P.A. Stolypin and P.N. Miliukov, reflects the fate of the movement itself—disgrace, exile, violent death. The Bolshevik October Revolution can be dated as the final ruin of the liberal movement in Russia. The lifespan of Russian liberalism thus dates (...) from the middle of the nineteenth century to 1917. (shrink)