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Law and the State in Boris Mironov's Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2001

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References

1. Mironov, Boris N., Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii (XVIII-nachalo XX v.): Genezis lichnosti, demokraticheskoi sem´i, grazhdanskogo obshchestva i pravovogo gosudarstva, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1999)Google Scholar; Mironov, Boris N., with Eklof, Ben, The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo., 2000)Google Scholar.

2. See Raz, Joseph, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue,” The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford, 1979), 210–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar