The Liberalism of Russian Religious Idealism

This chapter examines the development of liberal theory among a group of Russian neo-idealist philosophers associated in the Moscow Psychological Society: Boris Chicherin, Vladimir Soloviev, Sergei Trubetskoi, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Pavel Novgorodtsev, and Sergei Kotliarevskii. They built a remarkably coherent body of liberal theory on the Kantian foundations of personhood, human dignity and rights, natural law, and human perfectibility (progress). This was a genuine innovation in Russian social thought, given the common association of idealism with religion and of religion with repression. They maintained that idealism offered a far more powerful defence of liberalism than positivism could. They did not shirk from their further conclusions that idealism, as a philosophical conception of human nature, entailed theism (hence their ‘religious idealism’) and that religion, if true to its highest principles, was itself liberal in the fundamental sense of promoting respect for human dignity. They were religious humanists. Their conception of liberalism rested on four main principles: personalism, freedom of conscience, natural law and justice, and human perfectibility or progress, the transcendent culmination of which the Russian neo-idealists imagined to be the Kingdom of God.