Background
Lavrov, Petr Lavrovich was born on June 1, 1823 in Melekhovo, Pskov region.
Lavrov, Petr Lavrovich was born on June 1, 1823 in Melekhovo, Pskov region.
St Petersburg Artillery School, 1837-1842.
1844-1866, Professor of Mathematics, St Petersburg Artillery School.
Lavrov was turned down for Chair of Philosophy at University of St Petersburg in 1861, probably because of his radical affiliations. His participation in a secret revolutionary society led to hts arrest in 1866 and then to exile in northern Russia. He escaped to France in 1870, and joined the First International. He was active in the Paris Commune, befriended Marx and Engels, and was prominent among the Russian revolutionary migres, editing the populist journal Vpered! [Forward!] from 1873 to 1876 and the more militant Vestnik Narodnoi Voli [Herald of the People’s Will] from 1883 to 1886. Lavrov was the foremost ideologist of Russian populism, the main thesis of which was that the excesses of Western capitalism depicted by Marx could be avoided in Russia if socialism were achieved on the basis of existing popular institutions, notably the peasant commune. Lavrovs Historical Letters (1870), composed during his internal exile, posited ‘critically thinking individuals' as the driving force of historical progress, their message that the thinking minority was m the debt of the suffering majority inspired the ‘to the people' craze among radical youth during 1873-1874. Lavrov’s political views were underpinned by his philosophical ‘anthropologism • which pivoted on the active, goal-seeking, human personality and posited an inescapably subjectif dimension to all human knowledge. Kant s influence is evident in his phenomenalist rejection of metaphysics and his belief in human freedom as a necessary idealization in the pursuit of moral and social ideals. How much Lavrov owed to the negative elements of positivism is controversialAlthough qualified by Marx’s influence during his most radical phase in the 1880s, his subjectivist approach to historical and social phenomena was fully reaffirmed in his final works.