Nineteenth-Century Russian Liberalism: Ideals and Realities

Abstract

Julia Berest, Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783-1840. 264 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0230111738. $95.00. Anton A. Fedyashin, Liberals under Autocracy: Modernization and Civil Society in Russia, 1866-1904. 282 pp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0299284343. $26.95. K. I. Shneider, Mezhdu svobodoi i samoderzhaviem: Istoriia rannego russkogo liberalizma (Between Freedom and Autocracy: History of Early Russian Liberalism). 230 pp. Perm: Permskii gosudarstvennyi natsional'nyi issledovatel'skii universitet, 2012. ISBN-13 978-5794418194. Liberalism in Russia has long been a topic of special interest among historians, perhaps most of all because of its direct bearing on the accursed questions of the fate of the tsarist regime and of the historical alternatives to autocracy, tsarist or communist. liberal alternative was thought to be clearly the better one even if it was historically unlikely, the one that ought to have been realized, even though it was not (and even if it could not have been). Underlying this contention is the claim that liberalism is normative and not merely another ideology. What is behind this claim to normativity? Liberalism is a political philosophy based on human rights. It maintains that the highest value of social and political life is the human person. intrinsic value of the human person is the principle of human dignity, the idea that every person is an end-in-itself who ought never to be treated merely as a means to other ends. Human dignity is the source or ground of natural or human rights. (1) Liberalism stipulates that such rights are to be guaranteed and protected by the rule of law, which limits the power of one person over another and the power of the state over its subjects. In the final instance, it is civil society (the body of citizens who recognize their own and one another's rights and who are able and willing to enforce such rights through civic action) which ensures that the state fulfills its purpose of enforcing, and not itself violating, the rule of law. premise that the individual human person is an intrinsic, insuperable value is what makes liberalism normative. On that premise, it has no contenders for our reasonable allegiance. Who would disagree with liberal purposes--the highest possible self-realization and fulfillment of every person? Yet the social, economic, and political structures and institutions that are compatible with or best promote those purposes remain matters of debate. (2) Liberalism took shape in the European Enlightenment. (3) French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen contains one famous formulation of the basic liberal principle: The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. When did liberalism begin in Russia, and who were the first Russian liberals? There are two basic sides to this debate. first finds the origins of Russian liberalism in the development of a set of ideas and values, while the second looks for intentional political programs or plans for reform that sought to transform liberal ideas into reality and that had some realistic prospect of accomplishing their aims. first--more philosophical--approach locates the beginning of Russian liberalism earlier, perhaps as early as the adoption of Enlightenment ideas by figures such as Nikolai Novikov and Aleksandr Radishchev, and certainly not later than the 1840s with the liberal Westernizers. second--more political--approach typically delays it, most plausibly to the accession of Alexander II and the era of the Great Reforms, or even later. Marc Raeff, for example, argued for a late start: We are able ... to discover the existence, analyze the nature, and trace the development of individual specific theoretical elements of liberalism (individualism, natural law, economic theories); but their existence did not make for liberalism as a political or social program. …