Forgotten predecessors: The Russian conservative historians of the french revolution

Abstract

Long before the final collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting global political readjustment, the ideological trends of what could be called the post-Cold War era were visible. In the West most of these trends could be dubbed as a shift to the "right" or, to be more precise, toward "con? servatism." The American brand of this movement implied a more strict adherence to the basic premises of liberal free market capitalism and po? litical pluralism, a "conserving" of the philosophical principles of the found? ing fathers, the American variant of the Enlightenment. Moreover, the philosophy, a legacy of the eighteenth century, not only incorporated the traditions of rationalism, but it also supported a linear vision of history, which in a sort of oversimplified manner could be described thusly: The goal of all humanity is a march toward political pluralism ("freedom") and a market economy. One might suggest, then, that America more than any other country in the West had preserved the premises of the liberal phi? losophy of the eighteenth century and that its push to the right mostly implied a political "restorationism" rather than conservatism. However, the case in Europe, both West and East, was altogether dif? ferent. There, the push to the right implied not a movement toward liberal capitalism, but a movement toward authoritarianism in its various forms. Conservative thought in Europe was hardly a return to a universalist vision of history in the context of the philosophical legacy of the eighteenth cen? tury, but rather an absorption of the heritage of post-modernism, which at one time had leftist rather than rightist implications. Modernism and es? pecially post-modernism had already abandoned the universalist vision of history and the idea that there might be a cohesive pattern to political