Search Results

This chapter places Andrei’s understanding of gendered family roles and moral education in the context of European ideas about Romanticism, sentimentalism, and Enlightenment, as well as the intellectual landscape of Russian nineteenth-century conservatisms, examining how Andrei received these ideas and adapted them to suit his own purposes, and the purposes of the Russian provincial gentry. Exploring his reception of writers such as Bulgarin and Karamzin, as well as his disagreement with critic Nikolai Ogarev on the pages of the Moscow Provincial News, and his connection to Slavophilism, this chapter also addresses the degree to which Andrei Chikhachev can be seen as an embodiment of a “type” of provincial Russian landowner who much occupied thinkers of the period.

Where Westernizing thinkers blamed social systems and governments for social problems and injustice, Andrei blamed individuals for making poor or “lazy” choices, but believed they could be taught to behave differently. This chapter examines how Andrei furthered his reasoning about his duty toward his children to consider the moral duty of educated people toward the nation. Andrei’s conception of a rational (yet still pious) education was heavily marked by his Romantic and sentimental readings, and so he sought, as the goal of moral education, the ever greater understanding and betterment of one’s self and homeland (defined in local terms) as the best means of furthering a just basis for Russian society. In his mind, an Enlightenment-style, broad, rational education for all would bring about social progress (as he understood it) by enlightening people as to how to most usefully fulfill their God-given roles/duties, thus quixotically combining elements of Romanticism with Enlightenment.

This article examines the demise and discredit of the “history of ideas,” as advocated originally by Arthur Lovejoy, seeking to explain how it fell out of favor as a disciplinary and methodological practice. Focusing on two of the most forceful critiques of the history of ideas—that of Quentin Skinner and the Cambridge School and of Robert Darnton and the social history of ideas—the article argues that while this criticism was originally timely and productive, it did not do full justice either to Lovejoy or to the potential of his methods. The time is right, the article suggests, to revisit the history of ideas, and it offers some reflections on what intellectual historians working today may be able to take from it.

This chapter discusses the failure of imperial citizenship in Britain. The efforts of late Victorian and Edwardian imperial ideologues to articulate a concept of citizenship which could unite Britons at home and in the Empire ended in frustration because broader the public was not convinced of the necessity of a clearly defined imperial citizenship. All the imperial ideologues considered in this volume saw the social idea of citizenship as more important than the political idea and this was not acceptable to most Britons. It offended the prevalent belief in the superiority of the British race and it rejected the consensual notion of identity upon which contemporary ideas of citizenship were based.