When Enlightenment science was first introduced in earnest into Russia as part of Peter I's programme of westernisation, the Orthodox Church's view of scientific truth remained the received wisdom and enlightenment science was looked upon as heretical, alien and un-Russian. After Peter's death the Church and other conservative forces in Russia attempted to reassert the traditional system of scientific belief, but Peter's vision had an energetic and enthusiastic supporter in the scientist and polymath MV Lomonosov, whose defence of Enlightenment science against such opposition is illustrated by particular reference to the Copernican Revolution. However, unlike scientists such as Benjamin Franklin in America, Lomonosov did not pursue Enlightenment values into the realm of social and political enquiry, but saw instead Enlightenment science as an instrument for the furtherance of Peter's model of the Russian autocratic state. The political and sociological writers discussed in connection with the Darwinian Revolution, Chemyshevsky, Pisarev, Mikhailovsky, Lavrov and Kropotkin, were all committed to scientific method, but their various responses to Darwinism were significantly coloured by the fact that the struggle for existence in nature described by Darwin seemed more of a piece with the conclusions of western Social Darwinists in favour of a competitive capitalist society, than with the sort of communal society that these Russian writers sought to justify in rational scientific terms. The specific Russian historical moment is of central importance: the Origin of Species appeared in Russia just at the time of the Emancipation, when a major concern of Russian radical thought was that Russian society should bypass capitalism and proceed directly to a socialist form of society. Both the scientific revolutions are examined in this study with reference to specifically Russian political and sociological issues arising from the particular Russian cultural and historical context into which they were received.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:301984 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Ellis, Jonathan Charles |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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