Natural Law Theory in Russia in the Late Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth Century

The aim of this thesis is to explore the Russian school of natural law of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century often called revived natural law, with its commonalities and peculiarities, and to analyze its role in the political and social life of the last decades of the Russian Empire. While building upon classical jusnaturalistic theories, this school criticizes and develops it further by rejecting the idea of natural law as eternal and unchanging, as well as incorporating the experience of positivism and the historical school of law. The central philosophical problem of the school in question is the correlation of law and morality. The theories are based on common principles and concepts, including justice, freedom, inalienable natural rights, and the concept of pravovoe gosudarstvo derived from the German Rechtsstaat (“law-bound state”), which still remains one of the founding principles of Russian constitutionalism. During the first years of the twentieth century, the ideas advocated by the revived natural law school were embraced by the Russian liberal movement and to some extent began to penetrate into legislation. The culmination of this influence was the Manifesto of 17 October 1905 and the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire of 23 April 1906, often called the first Russian Constitution, which provided for the establishment of the State Duma introducing, even if for a short period, a semi-constitutional monarchy in Russia. My hypothesis is that regardless of the prevalence of conservative and radical doctrines, in Russia during the 1905-1907, the original doctrine of the revived jusnaturalism began to penetrate into the Russian political and social spheres, and, most importantly, into the Russian legislation, proving liberalism to be a possible alternative to Bolshevism.