Solov'evbegan his intellectual life as a religious philosopher in the Slavophile tradition, yet he made two signal contributions to liberalism. First, in his remarkable Natsional'nyi vopros v Rossii (National Question in Russia, 188391), he made the case for setting nationality policy on a genuinely Christian foundation. He demanded that state officials take seriously the moral duties of Russia toward non-Russian groups by making a voluntary act of 'national self-denial' -that is, by renouncing the dangerous principle of Russian exclusivity and dominance over others. This self-renunciation would require Russians not only to tolerate non-Orthodox peoples, but to build a community in which they were equal members. His irenic interpretation of Christianity provided a theoretical basis for pluralism and equality among the empire's peoples. Second, he insisted that Christianity requires recognition of the individual's right to a dignified material existence. In his system of ethics, Opravdanie dobra (Justification of the Good, 1897), he argued against classical liberalism that private property must never be assigned an absolute ethical value, that the exploitation of nature must be limited by 'love of nature for its own sake', and that the freedom ofeconomic consumption must be subordinated to ethically defensible principles.
A distinguished historian and thoroughgoing positivist who accepted Auguste Comte's three-stage theory of human social development, Miliukov anticipated that the spread of science in Russia would mean the liberation of its people from religious prejudice and exclusive nationalism. His three-volume Ocherki po istorii russkoi kul'tury (Essays on the History of Russian Culture, 1896-1900) argued that critical social consciousness was gradually displacing national consciousness as the dominant force in Russia. The book implied that this historical evolution was creating the basis for popular representative government in the empire. Miliukov's political ideal was progressive social legislation and constitutional monarchy, wherein the monarch's authority would be balanced by an elected legislature. Under Russian conditions, he argued, that ideal might be attained through the practical co-operation of socialists and liberals. Repeatedly during the revolutionary crisis from 1904-7 he countenanced from the left 'direct action', including terrorism, for the sake of undermining the government. To counter Great Russian nationalism, he recommended the redrawing of internal administrative jurisdictions along ethnic borders, but he stopped short of advocating a federal solution to ethnic disputes. As his Istoriia vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii (History of the Second Russian Revolution, 1918-21) made clear, Miliukov lived to regret his alliance with the revolutionary left and also his attempts to encourage nationalist consciousness among minority peoples.
Not all Russian liberals in the duma period followed Miliukov's 'new liberalism' or his policy of'no enemies to the left'. In the anti-revolutionary polemic Vekhi (Signposts, 1909), Struve posited that the revolutionary gospel had led in practice to 'licentiousness and demoralisation'. Once a social democrat, Struve joined the right wing of the Constitutional Democratic party, declaring himself a partisan of Chicherin's theory of individual rights. In internal politics he defended the equitable treatment of national minorities but under the proviso that Great Russians remain the empire's dominant ethnos. In foreign policy he supported expansion of Russian influence in the Balkans, for the empire's destiny as a great power was in the south. The irony of a Russian liberal assuming a 'Pan-Slav' perspective on nationality and foreign policy could not be more striking. Struve's grand design was to reconcile Russian liberalism to a strong centralised state and to an assertive international policy - that is, to pursue a policy of national liberalism not unlike that adopted by the German national liberals in the Bismarck period.
Among Russian socialists there were three main currents of political thinking: populism, built on hostility toward capitalism, on the idealisation of the urban guild (artel') and of the peasant land commune (obshchina or mir); anarchism, focused on the abolition of state power; and social democracy, oriented toward the destruction of market relations and the eventual elimination of bourgeois democracy.
Among the populists the leading figures were the 'enlightener' (prosveti- tel') or 'nihilist' Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828-89), and the 'classical populists' Petr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823-1900), Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsii (1842-1904) and Petr Nikitich Tkachev (1844-86).
Chernyshevsky rejected traditional Christianity in the name of the new 'religion of humanity' that would establish earthly justice based on material equality and gender equity. His ethical system of 'rational egoism' judged the virtue of human actions according to the benefits they would bring not to the individual but to the majority of society. His novel, Chto delat'? (What Is to Be Done?, 1863), described the heroism of young people who, being rational egoists, emancipate themselves from slavery to social conventions. Superficially, the story was a narrative of consciousness-raising and women's liberation, but its meta-narrative posited a mysterious revolutionary elite whose sudden disappearances, commitments to outrageous actions (faked suicides, approval of euthanasia, vigilante justice) and deliberately obscure leadership hierarchy were meant to teach readers the ethics and modus operandi of revolutionary conspiracy. This elitism captured the imaginations of progressive readers, including the young Lenin, who confessed that the book 'ploughed a deep furrow' in him.
Lavrov's essay 'Ocherki teorii lichnosti' (Outlines of a Theory of Personality, 1859), contended that the most important aspect of human consciousness is free will, that critically thinking individuals express free will in society by seeking justice for all, and that social justice requires the abolition of property as an affront to human dignity. This ethical perspective constituted the skeleton of Lavrov's book, Istoricheskie pis'ma (Historical Letters, 1868-9), which identified the goal of history as 'the physical, intellectual, and moral development of the individual, and the incorporation of truth and justice in social institutions'.[120] Lavrov regretted that no existing society had fulfilled this formula, for everywhere critically thinking individuals were in a small minority, able to effect social change only on the margins. Even the existence of these few justice seekers had cost humanity dearly: 'Progress for a small minority was purchased at the price of enslaving the majority, depriving it of the chance to acquire the same bodily and mental skills which constituted the dignity of the representatives of civilization.'[121] Lavrov's argument that, in Russia, critically thinking individuals had a moral responsibility to the suffering masses helped mobilise 'repentant nobles' of the 1870s to join the socialist movement.
Mikhailovskii attacked Western industry for its dependence on specialised labour, which inhibited workers from developing all sides of their personality. In contrast, he noted, Russian communal peasants performed a variety of agricultural tasks, from sowing and reaping to constructing houses, in the process exercising their minds as well as bodies. Building on that simple juxtaposition, his article 'Chto takoe progress?' (What Is Progress?, 1869), elaborated his famous definition: 'Progress is the gradual approach to the integral individual, the fullest possible and most diversified division of labour among an individual's organs and the least possible division of labour among individuals.'[122] The article rejected Herbert Spencer's view that there is a positive correlation between modern technological sophistication and individual happiness, and it sided with Marx's moral critique of industrial specialisation and worker alienation.
120
P. Lavrov,
122
N. K. Mikhailovskii,