«The meaning of state»: the byzantine idea on the pages of the liberal journal

Abstract

The article considers the reaction in the Russian society on the piece by Vl. Soloviev «The Meaning of State» which was published by the liberal journal «The Herald of Europe» in December 1895. Special attention is paid on the causes of the indignation at this article in the left circles which were already peeved against the philosopher for his previous work of the same year - «The Meaning of War», and on the motives of the approval of «The Meaning of State» by the right publicists. It is stressed that the most important task for Vl. Soloviev in the period of writing his treatise «The Justification of Moral Good» was to demonstrate his allegiance to that ideas of his father, the prominent liberal historian S.M. Soloviev which could be seen, from the standpoint of the «fin de siècle» liberalism, as very conservative. The author formulates a hypothesis that the article “The Meaning of State” was destined to incorporate into the corpus of the ethical treatise by Vl. Soloviev but the specific way of polarization of Russian public opinion and the desire of philosopher to stay in the liberal circle determined his decision to exclude the predominant piece of this text from the book. It is stated that the article «The Meaning of State» was kept in memory for a long time as a strange and unique phenomenon of the appearance of the apology of Byzantine, autocratic state on the pages of leading liberal issue.