Background
Kareev, Nikolai Ivanovich was born on December 6, 1850 in Moscow.
Kareev, Nikolai Ivanovich was born on December 6, 1850 in Moscow.
Studied History at University of Moscow.
1879-1884, Professor of History at the University of Warsaw. 1885-1899 and from 1907, Professor of History, University of St Petersburg. From 1929 Honorary Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Kareev was a distinguished historian whose work on the peasantry on the eve of the French Revolution impressed Marx and Engels. Although his own political stance was liberal, he was dismissed from the University of St Petersburg in 1899 following student unrest. He returned after the 1905 Revolution, and represented the Constitutional Democrats in the First Duma. Kareev’s philosophy of history was an extension of the subjectivism of the Populists Lavrov and Mikhailovsky. He combated any conception of historical development as a wholly objective process governed by universal historical laws; historical events, though subject to biological, psychological and sociological laws, are themselves individual and unrepeatable. His first main target was Hegelian historiosophy, although he went on to criticize Marxist and social-Darwinist approaches. Fundamental to his ‘personal principle in history' was an insistence that historical events are reducible to the actions and interactions of individuals- He believed that history should offer not only an objective survey of the phenomena of social and spiritual life, but also a subjective ethical evaluation of the meaning of the historical process. Although he rejected fictitious and one-sided notions of historical progress associated with belief in historical laws, the idea of progress in this subjective sense was central to his philosophy of history. In his work on ethics, Kareev expounded an ethical individualism which stressed the individual’s absolute value in the face of its depreciation by utilitarians, Hegelians and Marxists.