Background
Mikhailovsky, Nikolai Konstantinovich was born on November 15, 1842 in eschovsk, Kaluga province.
Mikhailovsky, Nikolai Konstantinovich was born on November 15, 1842 in eschovsk, Kaluga province.
Editor, Otechestvemye zapiski, 69-84. Since 1892, editor, Russkoe bogatstvo.
^lain publications:
869-70) ‘Chto takoe progress?’ [What is progress?], ^nalized in Otechestvennve zapiski [Notes of the Fatherland],
*1965) Russian Philosophy, Chicago. Quadrangle Books, vol.
2, pp. 170-98.
ls Chto takoe progress?’ helped inspire the ’to People’ movement of 1873-1874. From 1879 he as closely associated with the revolutionary a Pulist group Narodnaia Volia [People’s Will], Nd was exiled after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. From 1892, having renounced revolution, he edited the liberal populist journal Russkoe bogatstvo [Russian Treasury], After Lavrov’s emigration, Mikhailovsky became the leading theoretician of populism inside Russia. The influence of Lavrov's anthropologism is evident in his views: the centrality of the ‘integral personality’; subjectivism in history and sociology; and the tension between epistemological relativism and an ethical idealism based on the subjective consciousness of freedom. Unlike Lavrov, he was especially antagonistic to the division of labour and the social and cultural divisions which sprang from it; his own anthropocentric idea of progress involved the diminishing heterogeneity of society and the increasing heterogeneity of its members. Taking issue with Comte, he advanced a three-stage historical periodization, beginning with the ‘objectively anthropocentric’ outlook of primitive societies, followed by an ‘eccentric’ period of the suppression and fragmentation of the individual, and culminating in a ‘subjectively anthropocentric period’ when individual freedom is reconciled with the social solidarity exemplified in the peasant commune. Lavrov and Mikhailovsky directly influenced Viktor Chernov and the Russian Social Revolutionaries, and there are affinities in Kropotkin and Tolstoy. Negatively, they stimulated the invective of early Russian Marxists of all shades, including Plekhanov. Lenin and Berdyaev.