Chapter 5 discusses the work of two important neo-idealist theorists, Pavel Novgorodtsev and Bogdan Kistiakovskii, who stand out for their concern with the ongoing tensions within liberal history and theory, and their desire to place the experiences of Russia’s liberal movement in a broader historical context. In the aftermath of 1905, Novgorodtsev wrote two book-length studies explicitly concerned with the history of liberalism, while a number of Kistiakovskii’s long articles, including ‘In Defense of Law’ (1909), demonstrate the fluidity of the concept of liberalism. In the period under consideration, these thinkers, who had been intimately involved in elaborating a legal philosophy applicable to Russia, now distanced themselves from an optimistic theory of historical change, in favour of a much more nuanced view. Their respective intellectual trajectories demonstrate the value of their attempt to learn from Western liberal history, while simultaneously illustrating some of the difficulties they had in using its lessons for Russia.

Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which liberal ideas of Western origin shaped Russian political theory during the period roughly between 1895 and 1903. The pan-European reassessment of many fundamental positivist assumptions after about 1890 inspired the Russian Silver Age, and occasioned a debate between liberally inclined thinkers about the proper philosophical assumptions on which to base their views of selfhood, freedom, and history. Neo-idealist liberalism thus developed as part of the search for new forms of understanding to accompany the social and cultural transformations that Russia was undergoing. The chapter argues that both positivism and neo-idealism contained the philosophical resources to support a moderate, pluralist view of human values, but not all of their variants were liberal.