Peasant Emancipation and Russian Social Thought
The Case of Boris N. Chicherin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4213708 |
|---|---|
| Authors | G M Hamburg (0000-0001-7021-159X, University of Notre Dame, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1991 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 890-904 |
| Publication date | 1991-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Slavic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0037-6779 • E-ISSN: 2325-7784 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2500470 |
| OpenAlex | W2331894715 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 8 |
The problem of abolishing serfdom preoccupied Russian social thinkers long before the Emancipation in 1861. In spite of more than a century of scholarship devoted to analyzing the peasant question, however, historians have reached no consensus on such fundamental issues as the origins and political implications of abolitionist thought. Did advocacy of peasant emancipation by members of the landed nobility spring from liberal altruism or from a selfish desire to defend seigneurial interests against revolutionary peasants and the peasants' spokesmen, the so-called "revolutionary democrats"? Can Slavophilism and westernism be classified simply as varieties of liberalism, which, whatever their minor differences, agreed on the necessity of avoiding peasant revolution and regarded Russian radicals as pernicious enemies? Before emancipation were Russian liberals sharply differentiated ideologically from more radical intellectuals, such as Aleksandr I. Herzen and Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii-a differentiation traceable to attitudes toward the peasant emancipation? Or did the definitive split between liberalism and radicalism come after the Emancipation? Scholars bring to these questions such disparate conceptions of Russian politics and of the nature of historical proof that achieving consensus may be impossible. Nevertheless, the Soviet historian Vera F. Zakharina has argued convincingly that certain facets of the larger questions can be illuminated by investigating the ideological assumptions in the letters and programmatic works of major social thinkers and especially by observing how these assumptions changed over time
Emancipation · Ideology · Liberalism · Nobility · Peasant · Political economy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Law · Russia and Soviet political economy · Soviet and Russian History
| Citations per year | 0.18 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2022 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |