New Book from Cornell in Slavic Studies
Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity,
1880-1930, by Daniel Beer
(cloth hardcover: ISBN 978-0-8014-4627-6, $45.00s).
For a full description, please check online at
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4842.
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.
Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed
with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They
came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures
against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression
that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization.
Renovating Russia thus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to
established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.
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