The History of Liberalism in Russia

Notes

331 foreword This originally appeared as the preface to the Russian edition, published by YMCA Press in 1979 and translated by Parmen Leontovitsch from the French edition. introduction 1. Translator’s note: “legal subject” is a literal translation of the German term Rechtssubjekt. This denotes the individual as the “subject of law,” not the object, i.e., an individual with rights and obligations in law. 2. Hauriou, Droit constitutionnel, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1929), p. 139. 3. Translator’s note: The author quotes the French in the original: “Le but de toute association politique est la conservation des droits naturels et imprescriptibles de l’homme” (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, Art. 2 [1789]). 4. De Ruggiero, Storia del liberalismo Europeo (Bari, 1925), p. 25. 5. Ibid., p. 57. 6. Hauriou, Principes de droit public (The Principles of Public Law), 2nd ed. (Paris, 1916), p. 386 7. We shall disregard here, of course, the meaningless distinction between civilization and culture. 8. Cf. Hauriou, Principes, p. 603ff. 9. Ibid., 601ff., 612. 10. Ibid., p. 610. This observation is particularly important for a correct understanding of some of the factors in the political and constitutional development of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. 11. Ibid., p. 612. 12. Sadly, I must refrain from dealing with a range of other extremely interesting aspects of constitutional government, e.g., that constitutional government reinforces the public nature of the state; that it allows public opinion to emerge as a new form of sovereignty; or that the adoption of a written constitution creates, in a way, a statute for the state, giving the latter the status of a legal person. 13. Cucumus’s observations can serve as an example of this view. In his work Lehrbuch des Staatsrechtes der konstitutionellen Monarchie Bayerns’ (Textbook on Constitutional Law in the Kingdom of Bavaria), which appeared in 1825, and thus at a time when unadulterated liberalism predominated, he wrote, “All citizens are entitled to enjoy civil liberty” (p. 130). (Significantly, Cucumus calls this a “requirement flowing directly from the aims of the state.”) Without, however, the existence of political freedom for the people, the former has no firm foundation or guarantee. noTES 14. Cucumus (Textbook, p. 86), e.g., highlights this in respect of the Bavarian constitutional declaration of May 26, 1818. He writes, “The Bavarian constitution does not directly set out to define the aims of the state. The statute as a whole, however, does contain an acknowledgment of the only possibility, which consists of the primacy of law and the security of the citizen. The introduction to the constitutional declaration already mentions the aims of the state in general, although more specific details are found in Section IV, paragraph 8, of the constitution, where it states, ‘The state guarantees each inhabitant the security of his person, his property and his rights.’ This text is sufficiently explicit about what this aim consists of, what the state strives to achieve, and what demands the governed can make of the state. This repudiates all those ridiculous demands made in brilliant but practically useless theories that actually promote despotism. Here is a practical acknowledgment that the state must manage the external conditions required for the development of national life, but that it should not intervene to control it.” Cucumus therefore asserts that the actual purpose of the state is to guarantee each citizen the security of his person, his property, and all his other acquired individual rights, and not to desire to determine the development of national life. This aim constitutes the internal limit to the exercise of legislative state power on the one hand and the political freedom of the citizens on the other. 15. Translator’s note: All the quotations translated into English of Rousseau’s “Contrat Social” are taken from the G. D. H. Cole translation, which is in the public domain. 16. I am indebted to Professor Otto Vossler for pointing out that it is possible to interpret the sovereignty of the volonté générale not to mean the sovereignty of decisions of the communaut é, but the sovereignty of the categorical imperative. I assume that this interpretation takes the abovementioned problem as its starting point. 17. Hauriou, Principes, p. 613. 18. Hauriou, Droit constitutionnel, p. 140. 19. It is one of Hauriou’s greatest achievements to have pointed out that the individualistic liberal social order does not depend just on the separation of...