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The Constitutional Democrats and the Russian Liberal Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Donald W. Treadgold
Donald W. Treadgold*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Extract

The search for a Russian liberal tradition may not appear rewarding if one thinks in terms of that aspect of Western liberalism which stood for maximum individual freedom and minimum state interference. Russian liberals admired rather than imitated Bentham or Mill; Adam Smith, for example, had an influence on Russian economists and politicians which was rather vague and transitory in nature. The stage of liberalism which postulated absolute natural rights, inviolability of private property, and economic laisser faire was simply bypassed in Russia. “Liberalism in Russia,” writes Miljukov, “connoted the idea of state intervention,” and since no Russian “liberal” thought had existed in laisser-faire days, it was free to become “more democratic, without being inconsistent with a former tradition.“

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , April 1951 , pp. 85 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1951

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References

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