Already before the revolutions of 1917, but especially after the 1922 Bolshevik victory in the Civil War, many Russian philosophers left their native land. Some of them found large audiences in the West; others are still in the process of being uncovered. All of them, however, were determined by their Russian background and by their opposition to the Soviet regime as it actually existed. In this sense, they can all be regarded as their determinate negation [bestimmte Negation], different in character but partly shaped by what they reject. This chapter focuses on four thinkers who, detached from their place of origin, reattached to it in various ways: first, Dunayevskaya, by developing a humanist Marxism that disqualified the official Soviet variant; second, Berlin, by coupling political philosophy to an investigation of the thinkers that inspired his fatherland, and Rand, by ranting persistently against any kind of ‘socialism’; and finally, Kojeve, by considering Soviet communism and Western capitalism as alternative ways towards a single future.

After 1922, the Soviet Union was a fact of life, and alternative perspectives on its reality and on the towering figure of Stalin had decisive and divisive effects on political philosophy. Up until World War II, the USSR established itself as one of two systems that were opposed to each other, as well as to the liberal-democratic system. For communists, fascism was the other side of the same bourgeois capitalist coin. For fascists, liberalism and communism were two variants of cosmopolitanism. For liberals, finally, communism and fascism were two variants of totalitarianism. After World War II, this triangle changed into a binary that resulted in the Cold War, in which each of the two sides had to deal with the other.

Liberalism has been the most consistently oppositional political philosophy throughout Russian history. This probably also explains why it has received so much attention from Western scholars, often not without a whiff of wishfulness. The common denominator of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century liberalism in Russia is a negative one: rejection of arbitrary autocratic rule and struggle against the widespread ‘legal nihilism’ that includes the radicals and terrorists, the socialists and Marxists, and the Christian thinkers with the exception of Solov’ev (Walicki 1992: 9–104). Russian political philosophers generally perceived the law as a mere instrument in the hands of state power, prioritised social justice and equality over individual civil and political rights, and rejected formal legality in the name of true, Christian morality. This contrasts with the undeniable progress of legal culture and penal law since the 1864 reforms, the development of the zemstvo practices of limited local self-government, reluctant moves towards popular representation and constitutionalism, and the increasing academic freedom that yielded ‘legal narodniki’, ‘legal Marxists’ and ‘legal liberals’ (Nethercott 2007; Medushevsky 2006).

There is no generally accepted definition of liberalism. Following Chantal Mouffe, I identify three key principles of the liberal tradition: individual liberty, human rights and rule of law [Rechtsstaat, pravovoe gosudarstvo, gospodstvo zakona] (Mouffe 2000: 2). The distinctive feature of liberalism is not simply the understanding, however crucial, of the human being as inherently free (Kara- Murza and Zhukova 2019: 13), but the idea that this inherent freedom should be the main organising principle of socio-economic and political order. If one links those two orders, the economic and the political, the result is the classical liberalism of John Locke and Isaiah Berlin.

Aristotle said that the only way to establish first principles is by dialectical argument. This book has presented an extended dialectical argument. We have seen how modern philosophers have tried to justify liberal institutions. Some did so by attaching a normative value to pleasure or preference satisfaction. Yet it is hard to believe that all pleasures or preferences are worthwhile. Some embraced what we have called a principle of universal concern: one must apply the same standard to others as to oneself. They had trouble explaining what that standard should be. Some attached a normative value to self-expression but then they had to explain why, in itself, self-expression is of value.

Chinese and Western classical thought began with the challenge of Confucius and Socrates to the way most people live their lives. They neglect what is “worthy.” They “undervalue the greater, and overvalue the rest.”

When asked why any life was worthy or of value, philosophers in both traditions said that normative standards are grounded in human nature. Yet if it is so, why do people neglect what is worthy and undervalue what is good? Why should human beings have any difficulty living the life that is natural to them? All human beings have desires and fears that are obstacles to living a good life. If these desires and fears also arise from human nature, they would seem to be part of that nature as much as inclinations toward good. Why would an evil life be any less human?

Rationalism flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As John Finnis and Germain Grisez noted,1 its metaphysics can be traced to the theologian Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). He was one of the last of the late scholastics.

Suárez, unlike Aristotle and Aquinas, believed that that the concepts of all things that are or could be are timeless and invariable. Consequently, so are the precepts of natural law. Moral knowledge is knowledge of these precepts. Moral action is conformity to them. In reaching those conclusions, he broke with the way human nature had been understood in the Aristotelian tradition. In these respects, he was followed by two of the most influential rationalist philosophers, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754).

In both classical traditions, human nature is a source of normative standards. Human nature is universal. Normative standards may not be the same for different individuals, in different times and places, or under different circumstances. Normative standards must be as invariable as human nature and yet they must vary. How is that possible?

The classical traditions that we will study began in China with Confucius, and, in the West, with Socrates, who was born less than thirty years after Confucius died.

Both had a sense of divine mission although neither said a great deal about the divine. Both regarded political life as one of the noblest of vocations yet neither of them held political office. They were teachers. The task they set for themselves was to help others acquire the moral qualities they needed to live a worthwhile life. Both believed that there was no better qualification for political life than the possession of these qualities.

In China, the classical tradition was eclipsed by the rise of those whom Chung-yin Cheng called the “later Neo-Confucians”: adherents of the School of Principle founded by Cheng Yi and Zhu Xi, and of the School of Universal Mind founded by Lu Hsiang-Shan and Wang Yangming. In the late Song dynasty, the School of Principle was declared to be the orthodox interpretation of Confucianism. The School of Universal Mind was its leading opponent. Nevertheless, “[it] is natural,” as Cheng said, to consider them a group apart. They both “deviated from Classical Confucianism in two important respects; First, they completely objectified human reason into a nonhuman order of things” – a doctrine that the School of Principle formulated and “Wang Yangming subjectivised” by identifying principle with the mind. “A second deviation concerned the status of human nature in relation to its ideal of perfection and development.”

In 1776, representatives meeting in Philadelphia as a congress “of the thirteen united States of America” unanimously adopted a Declaration of Independence, which stated that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

The former colonies fought and won a war for their independence, recognized by the Treaty of Paris in 1783. In that year, a group of officers of the Continental Army planned to march on Congress to demand their back pay and guarantees for the future. George Washington met with them and persuaded them not to do so. Later that year, he resigned as Commander-in-Chief. He did not impose a military government as Oliver Cromwell had done. He did not try to make himself king, which George III said marked him “as the greatest man in the world.”

Modern ethical, political, and legal thought finds itself navigating between two unacceptable alternatives. One is to regard moral standards as absolute, eternal, and invariable. The truth of such standards, however, is impossible to demonstrate. Those who claim a privileged knowledge of them are dangerous since they may try to force their views upon others. The other alternative is to regard moral standards as individual and subjective, and so imperil any real distinction between right and wrong, and just and unjust institutions. The two classical traditions that we will study were viable and enduring because they were not caught in such a dilemma. One was founded in China by Confucius and the other in Greece by his near contemporary Socrates. For centuries, they were the starting points for serious thought about ethics, politics, and law.