Кантовский сборник (Jan 2024)

Russian Political Kant after Liberalism: Sergey Hessen on 1924 Kant Jubilee

  • Modest Kolerov

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5922/0207-6918-2024-2-5
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 43, no. 2
pp. 152 – 159

Abstract

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Using the Kant jubilee in 1924 as a pretext, Sergey Hessen, a Russian émigré neo­Kantian, draws no direct political conclusions but sets forth a view of the great philosopher’s legacy from the position of a “legal socialist”, selecting from his heritage those parts of German socialist doctrines that to his mind experienced a departure from a recent flowering of Kantian ideas in Neo­Kantianism and the collapse of traditional liberalism in the wake of the First World War. The fact that the text was first published in the Berlin­based Russian liberal newspaper “Rul’”, gives us reason to see it not just as a formal jubilee tribute, but as an act addressed to the qualified liberal audience which witnessed thecollapse of liberalism in Russia.

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