The Emergence of Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840

270 Pages·2011·1.95 MB·English

by  Julia Berest (auth.)

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The Emergence of
Russian Liberalism
Alexander Kunitsyn in
Context, 1783–1840
Julia Berest
THE EMERGENCE OF RUSSIAN LIBERALISM
Copyright © Julia Berest, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11173-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-29404-6 ISBN 978-0-230-11892-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230118928
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berest, Julia, 1976–
The emergence of Russian liberalism : Alexander Kunitsyn in
context, 1783–1840 / by Julia Berest.
p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in cultural and intellectual history)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr Petrovich, 1783–1840. 2. Kunitsyn, Aleksandr
Petrovich, 1783–1840—Political and social views. 3. Intellectuals—
Russia—Biography. 4. Law teachers—Russia—Biography.
5. Philosophers—Russia—Biography. 6. Liberalism—Russia—History—
19th century. 7. Natural law—History—19th century. 8. Russia—
Intellectual life—1801–1917. 9. Russia—Politics and
government—1801–1917. 10. Russia—History—Alexander I,
1801–1825. I. Title.
CT1218.K827B47 2011
947(cid:2).07092—dc22 2010045410
[B]
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: May 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Formative Years 13
2 Years in the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum 31
3 Kunitsyn in the Son of Fatherland 59
4 Kunitsyn and Nicholas Turgenev: “The Society of
the Year 1819” 85
5 The Natural Law Tradition in Russia 105
6 Kunitsyn on Natural Law 143
7 In the Midst of Conservative Reaction 161
Epilogue 185
Conclusion 193
Notes 199
Bibliography 245
Index 259
v

Acknowledgments
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Charles
Ruud from the University of Western Ontario, whose guidance dur-
ing my years as a graduate student made this book possible. He gen-
erously spent his time helping me, an immigrant scholar from
Eastern Europe, to adjust to the English-speaking academic culture. I
am also extremely grateful to Professor Eli Nathans, who provided
many valuable and insightful comments on selected parts of my
work. His knowledge and enthusiasm for intellectual history have
been a source of inspiration for me. Among my graduate teachers,
Professor Neville Thompson showed much support and kindness to
me. To David Murphy, Library Assistant at the Weldon Library
(UWO), I owe my debt of gratitude for helping me locate rare Russian
books in the libraries of the United States and Canada. Without his
help this book would have been much shorter. Ekaterina Budagova
from the Russian National Library at St. Petersburg also assisted me
with obtaining some pre-revolutionary Russian publications. I also
wish to thank Professor László Kontler from Central European
University, whose stimulating classes on comparative intellectual
history awakened my interest in Russian and European thought. Last
but not least, I am grateful to my parents and my husband, who have
supported me throughout the years of research and writing. Their
love is precious to me.
vii
Introduction
As a law professor and philosopher, Alexander Petrovich Kunitsyn had
an unusual career, which mirrored major progressive and conserva-
tive policies of the Russian government under Alexander I (1801–25).
A person of obscure social origin from a small provincial town, he
was one of the few Russian students selected to study at state cost at
St. Petersburg Pedagogical Institute and later Göttingen University as
part of the government project for creating the cadres of native teach-
ers in Russia. Upon graduation in 1811 Kunitsyn was appointed to
the position of professor in the elite Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum, where he
earned a reputation as a talented educator and a favorite teacher of
Alexander Pushkin, the greatest poet of Russia’s romantic age.
Taking advantage of the improved publishing opportunities,
Kunitsyn made himself known as a liberal-m inded publicist and an
author of one of the first Russian works on natural law, which, alas,
appeared at a time when Alexander I’s liberal era was already drawing
to an end. The first signs of the impending change began to appear
shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, but to Kunitsyn, a beneficiary of
the government’s educational policies, they did not become obvious
until much later. Kunitsyn’s intention to present his Natural Law to
Alexander I was indicative of the reformist hopes created by the tsar’s
liberal pronouncements during the early nineteenth century.
The government’s interest in promoting legal education in Russian
universities must have further encouraged Kunitsyn’s expectations.
Courses in natural law were first established in Russia by Peter the
Great, who sought to borrow from the West not only technical knowl-
edge but also the ideology useful for building a modernized version
of the autocratic state. German natural law in its Wolffian tradition,
which emphasized the ethos of public duties over individual rights,
appeared more suitable for the tsar’s purposes than any other vari-
ants of natural law.1 The ambition to improve legal education was
1
2 The Emergence of Russian Liberalism
intermittently kept alive by the Russian monarchs throughout the
eighteenth century, but it was not until the early years of Alexander’s
reign that the authorities made a concerted effort to seek out quali-
fied teachers and textbooks to meet the growing need for trained
government servants. Almost a dozen teaching manuals on natural
law, written mostly by German visiting professors, were published
during the first two decades of the nineteenth century—more than
in the whole period since the introduction of natural law in Russia. A
decision of the government to entrust universities with the function
of self-c ensorship in matters of academic writing was an important
liberal gesture, which spurred the development of the book market
and, with it, the interest in serious philosophical literature among
the reading public. The fact that the Ministry of Education recruited
some of the well-k nown German Kantians to teach in the newly
established Russian universities must have strengthened the impres-
sion that the government was in a liberal mood. Yet, the authori-
ties never intended natural law classes to become a training ground
for liberal thinking. By choosing German rather than French or
English professors, the government followed Peter the Great’s tradi-
tion, hoping to bring Russian education up to the modern standards
without, at the same time, exposing Russian students to undesirable
ideas. Indeed, German teachers in Russia, despite their self- professed
Kantianism, approached Kant in a selective manner, which diluted
much of his liberal thought. Kant’s most provocative ideas, including
his rejection of hereditary privileges and paternalistic government
as incompatible with the notion of personal autonomy, were invari-
ably ignored and often replaced with the principles going back to the
Wolffian tradition of absolutist ethics and politics. It was Kunitsyn’s
interpretation of natural law, with its emphasis on liberal individual-
ism, that changed the government’s attitude toward the discipline
of natural law and the principles of university autonomy. Based
largely on the synthesis of Kantian and Smithian ideas, Kunitsyn’s
Natural Law was more liberal than any other book on this subject
approved for use in Russian universities. In 1821 it became to the
Russian conservatives a standard of political unreliability by which
censors would come to judge other works on this subject available in
Russia. The same year the authorities banned Kunitsyn from teach-
ing, removed his book from all the libraries, and put the discipline
of natural law under intense scrutiny.
Kunitsyn’s “case” marked the eclipse of Alexander’s liberal era in
education, but it proved difficult to suppress altogether the spread