Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 By Daniel Beer
Publisher: Cornell University Press 2008 | 229 Pages | ISBN: 0801446279 | PDF | 7 MB
Publisher: Cornell University Press 2008 | 229 Pages | ISBN: 0801446279 | PDF | 7 MB
Renovating Russia is a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics. In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering.