Background
Kovalevsky, Maksim Maksimovich was born on September 8, 1851 in - Khar’kov.
Kovalevsky, Maksim Maksimovich was born on September 8, 1851 in - Khar’kov.
1880-1887, Professor of Law, University Moscow: 1905-1916, Professor, University of St Petersburg.
Vucinich, A. (1976) Social Thought in Tsarist RussiaThe Quest for a General Science of Society, 18611917, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ch. 6 Walicki. A. (1979) A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hild-1 Andrews-Rusiecka, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 367-70. A leading representative of Russian positivismKovalevsky was a jurist, sociologist and historianwhose work on the peasant commune influence Plekhanov in his switch from Populism to Marxism. He spent many years in Western Europe, bot as a student and after losing his Chair in 1887 for Moderate opposition to the government. Having founded, with the Comtean Eugene de Roberty • 1843 1915), the Russian School of Advanced Social Studies in Paris in 1901, he returned to Russia in 1905. He founded the moderate liberal Earty of Democratic Reforms and was elected to the First Duma in 1906. Rejecting the ‘subjectivism’ of Lavrov and iikhailovsky, Kovalevsky predicated his own sociology on a Comtean belief in a universal ev°lutionary pattern of social development based °n the fundamental sociological law of progress. I*c saw the prospect of a world federation of states as each nation progressed towards democracy, Cosmopolitanism and economic interdependence. He described himself once as a disciple of Marx as well as a supporter of Comte, and held a compromise position on their opposing notions • conflict and consensus as the driving forces of S0.cal progress. Against Marx, he generally •ejected monocausal theories of social change, dressing instead the interaction of many factors, "•eluding the economic, demographic, legal, Political, scientific and artistic; single factors •Pay. however, dominate particular epochs or s°cial structures. Although opposed to class struggle and pathological revolutionary upheaais, he favoured socialism as a way of organizing e economy, and saw nothing contradictory in a So advocating constitutional or ‘popular’ monarchy as his preferred mode of democratic government.