Sergei Kotliarevskii

Abstract

Sergei Kotliarevskii (1873–1939) was a philosopher of law and theorist of liberalism at Moscow University. He was an activist in the Russian Liberation Movement, a founder of the Constitutional-Democratic (Kadet) Party, and a deputy to the First State Duma. In August 1917, he became associate minister in the newly established Ministry of Denominations. In that capacity, he was a member of the All-Russian Council of Moscow of 1917–18. Arrested in August 1919, he reconciled himself to Soviet power and was able to continue teaching at Moscow University until the early 1930s. He also worked in the Commissariat of Justice. He was arrested in April 1938, executed a year later, and rehabilitated in 1956. Kotliarevskii was a philosophical idealist who believed that a liberal civic culture had its roots in a dynamic spiritual life. His most important work is Power and Law: The Problem of the Lawful State (1915), the most systematic Russian treatment of the concept of the rule-of-law state. In it he argued that moral-religious consciousness is the ultimate source of law, contrary to the thesis of legal positivism that state power is the source of law.