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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.
In European history, "humanism" originally denoted an intellectual and cultural movement, based on the study of Latin and Greek texts, that began in the Renaissance. There are secular humanists and religious humanists. The religious philosophers of the Russian Silver Age were humanists. Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii was a seminal thinker in the development of Russian religious humanism who posed many of its key themes. Merezhkovskii's search for a new faith began in the late 1880s and was an outgrowth of his loss of faith in Russian populism. The major tenets of Merezhkovskii's Christian humanism were the need for religious faith, the concepts of personhood and Godmanhood, the inadequacy of surrogate religions, and a forthcoming Third Revelation. Most religious humanists advocated an activist Christianity, one that would really transform the world. Many of them also linked human agency with creativity.
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