Catherine the Great and the culture of celebrity in the eighteenth century

Abstract

culture, and nationalism, Rampton identifies differences in the approaches of representatives of the liberal philosophical tradition to the constitutional experiment in revolutionary Russia and thus explores in more detail the variations of liberalism(s) among prominent Russian intellectuals. Chapters 5 and 6 complete the contradictory picture of late imperial liberalism(s) with four key liberal thinkers, namely Bogdan Kistiakovskii, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Maksim Kovalevskii, and Pavel Miliukov. Reconstructing the intellectual biographies of the four thinkers, who drew on different Western philosophical ideas, Rampton once again emphasizes the importance of transnational experiences for late imperial liberalism as well as the highly conflicting and competing nature of liberalism(s), which ultimately prevented the movement from taking a significant place during Russia’s post-imperial transformations. Thus, Rampton concludes that in the context of fin-de-siècle Russia, one cannot speak about only one liberalism. Since liberalism is “a persistent compromise between sometimes competing claims” (185), scholars should study numerous liberalisms that reflect how Russian thinkers perceived and comprehended various aspects of positive and negative freedoms. Liberal Ideas in Tsarist Russia draws a complex picture of the failure of the liberal movement in imperial Russia. Even though many prominent thinkers were involved in this movement, it failed to find broad social support during the revolutionary period. The main reasons for this failure were disagreements and contradictions among liberal intellectuals, fragile and shortlived alliances between them, and repressive measures against liberal actors that forced them to flee the country. Despite the similarity and even universality of the reasons for the failure of liberal movements in preand post-Soviet Russia, as Rampton shows, this is not evidence of a deterministic rejection of liberalism in Russia. On the contrary, the experiences of various liberal movements continue to offer a glossary and tools for adapting ideas of freedom and liberal practices even to seemingly hopeless political contexts.