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Alexander Herzen—philosopher, novelist, essayist, political agitator, and one of the leading Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century—was as famous in his day as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. While he is remembered for his masterpiece My Past and Thoughts and as the father of Russian socialism, his contributions to the history of ideas defy easy categorization because they are so numerous. Aileen Kelly presents the first fully rounded study of the farsighted genius whom Isaiah Berlin called “the forerunner of much twentieth-century thought.” In an era dominated by ideologies of human progress, Herzen resisted them because they conflicted with his sense of reality, a sense honed by h...
In this thought-provoking book, an internationally acclaimed scholar writes about the passion for ideology among nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian intellectuals and about the development of sophisticated critiques of ideology by a continuing minority of Russian thinkers inspired by libertarian humanism. Aileen Kelly sets the conflict between utopian and anti-utopian traditions in Russian thought within the context of the shift in European thought away from faith in universal systems and "grand narratives" of progress toward an acceptance of the role of chance and contingency in nature and history. In the current age, as we face the dilemma of how to prevent the erosion of faith in ab...
"She shows how the view of freedom that Herzen shared with Chekhov and Bakhtin provides an antidote both to traditional absolutes and to the boundless relativism of much postmodern theory. As such it offers an answer to the question now besetting intellectuals in Russia and the West: how to ground morality after the collapse of ideological certainties."--Jacket.
Presents a new interpretation of the contradictions in Bakunin's p;olitical philosophy and of their general significance. It places Bakunin more clearly in the millenerian tradition of radical thought, and throws light on the varieties of self-deception practiced by intellectuals who seek to use mass movements for the realization of their frustrated aspirations.
The intellectual Alexander Herzen was as famous in his day as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Aileen Kelly presents the first fully rounded study of the farsighted genius whom Isaiah Berlin called the forerunner of much twentieth-century thought. For Herzen, history, like Darwinian nature, was an improvisation both constrained and encouraged by chance.
This volume is the sequel to Childhood, Youth and Exile. Isaiah Berlin called these memoirs "an autobiography of the first order of genius...a major classic, comparable in scope with War and Peace."
In this brilliant companion volume to her highly praised Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance, Aileen M. Kelly closely examines a humanist strand of Russian thought that has until now received little notice or understanding. She finds in the writings of Aleksandr Herzen, Anton Chekhov, and Mikhail Bakhtin a pioneering emphasis on the role of chance and contingency in nature and history. Their writing on this theme, she argues, establishes the importance of these humanists in the development of European thought. Herzen, the principal subject of the book, was among the first nineteenth-century thinkers to challenge the assumptions underlying doctrines of universa...
Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and political circumstances that produced such men as Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, 'the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world.'
In addition she provides critical essays examining each play in depth, a discussion of her approach to translating the plays, and a consideration of the genre of these dramatic pieces and their performability."--BOOK JACKET.
The writings of Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), like those of other major social thinkers of Russia’s Silver Age, were obliterated from public consciousness under Soviet rule. Discovered again after eighty years of silence, Bulgakov’s work speaks with remarkable directness to the postmodern listener. This outstanding translation of Philosophy of Economy brings to English-language speakers for the first time a major work of social theory written by a critical figure in the Russian tradition of liberal thought. What is unique about Bulgakov, Catherine Evtuhov explains in her introduction to this book, is that he bridges two worlds. His social thought is firmly based in the Western tradition...