Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: the human sciences and the fate of liberal modernity, 1880–1930, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2008, pp. ix, 229, £22.95, $45.00 (hardback 978-0-8014-4627-6).

Abstract

Renovating Russia is addressed primarily to historians well-versed in the current heated debates regarding Russian modernity and liberalism, as well as the continuities and ruptures across the revolutionary divide of 1917. Without clearly articulating it, Beer seeks to answer the eternal Russian question: “Who is to be blamed?” by searching for the intellectual roots of the Bolshevik regime. Historians have pointed variously to a number of western social theorists including Comte, Spenser, Nietzsche, and Freud (to say nothing of the Bolsheviks’ officially acknowledged debt to Marx and Engels) as the intellectual forbears of the Soviet regime. Beer adds to this list several new names: Benedict A Morel, the father of “degeneration” theory, Cesare Lombroso, the major proponent of the concept of the “born criminal”, and a host of European psychiatrists who developed the concept of “mental contagion” or “crowd psychology”. Beer argues that the ideas of “social deviance”, elaborated during the pre-revolutionary period by the Russian “liberal practitioners of human sciences” on the basis of these three concepts, furnished the Soviet regime with the “language of social excision and coercive rehabilitation” (p. 201) that informed, legitimized, and enabled the regime’s violent project of radical social transformation. The first two chapters of the book explore Russian scholars’ responses to Morel’s theory of “degeneration”. The third examines their attitudes to Lombroso’s concept of the “born criminal”. The fourth analyses their investigations into “crowd psychology” and “mental contagion”, and the last one deals with the “appropriation” of these responses, attitudes, and investigations by Soviet psychiatrists and criminologists.