Chapter 2 - Progress, Contested

Summary

Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which liberal ideas of Western origin shaped Russian political theory during the period roughly between 1895 and 1903. The pan-European reassessment of many fundamental positivist assumptions after about 1890 inspired the Russian Silver Age, and occasioned a debate between liberally inclined thinkers about the proper philosophical assumptions on which to base their views of selfhood, freedom, and history. Neo-idealist liberalism thus developed as part of the search for new forms of understanding to accompany the social and cultural transformations that Russia was undergoing. The chapter argues that both positivism and neo-idealism contained the philosophical resources to support a moderate, pluralist view of human values, but not all of their variants were liberal.