Radishchev, Aleksandr Nikolaevich (1749–1802)

views updated

RADISHCHEV, ALEKSANDR NIKOLAEVICH
(1749–1802)

Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev was the leading social critic and philosopher of the Russian Enlightenment. He was born in Moscow, the son of a prosperous landowner, and was educated in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, and, from 1766 to 1771, at the University of Leipzig. At Leipzig he studied under the Leibnizian Ernst Platner and read widely in current French philosophy. Upon his return to Russia he pursued a successful career in the civil and military service until 1790, when his radical work Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (St. Petersburg, 1790; translated as A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow ) aroused the ire of Catherine the Great and he was exiled to Siberia. Paul I permitted him to return to European Russia in 1796. After the accession of Alexander I, in 1801, Radishchev was appointed to a special legislative commission, but his egalitarian, libertarian proposals went unheeded, and in September 1802 he took his own life in St. Petersburg.

In the Journey, Radishchev employed the principles of natural law and the social contract to support a severe critique of Russian social institutions, serfdom in particular. Under the inspiration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Guillaume-Thomas-François de Raynal, and other French thinkers, he condemned serfdom as morally wrong and economically inefficient, criticized autocracy, and attacked censorship and other practices that violate men's natural rights to freedom and equality. He advocated immediate reforms to avert revolution and called generally for enlightenment and "naturalness" in social arrangements, manners, and morals.

In Siberia, Radishchev wrote his principal philosophic work, O cheloveke, o ego smertnosti i bessmertii (On man, his mortality and immortality; published posthumously, St. Petersburg, 1809), a close examination of the cases for and against personal immortality. In the end he rejected materialistic denials of immortality in favor of various arguments—from personal identity and the conservation of force, among others—that suggest the existence of an incorporeal soul that survives the body and passes into a more perfect state. In epistemology Radishchev adopted a realistic position and accepted experience as the only basis for knowledge but maintained that in addition to sensory experience there is "rational experience" of the relationships of things and that man "feels" the existence of a Supreme Being. He also maintained that things in themselves are unknowable, asserting that thought, like the verbal expression it employs, is merely symbolic of reality.

Radishchev's treatise O cheloveke was one of the first original philosophic works in the Russian language, and the influence his pioneering social criticism had on Alexander Pushkin, the Decembrists, and subsequent generations of Russian reformers and revolutionaries has led to his being regarded as the father of social radicalism in Russia. He was also a poet of considerable talent.

Bibliography

works by radishchev

Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete works). 3 vols. Moscow and Leningrad, 1938–1952.

A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Translated by Leo Wiener. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.

"On Man, His Mortality and Immortality." Selections translated by Frank Y. Gladney and George L. Kline in Russian Philosophy, edited by J. M. Edie, J. P. Scanlan, and M.-B. Zeldin. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965.

works on radishchev

Dynnik, M. A. et al., eds. Istoriia filosofii. 6 vols. Moscow, 1957–.

Lapshin, I. I. Filosofskie vzgliady A. N. Radishcheva (Philosophical views of A. N. Radishchev). Petrograd, 1922.

Zenkovsky, V. V. Istoriia russkoi filosofii. 2 vols. Paris, 1948–1950. Translated by George L. Kline as A History of Russian Philosophy. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953.

James P. Scanlan (1967)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy