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Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–
1930, by Daniel Beer (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 2008; pp. 229. £22.95).
This book describes the influence on nineteenth-century Russian sociologists,
psychiatrists, pedagogues, physicians, and criminologists of biological theories
of social deviance. These include the related fields of social Darwinism,
degeneration theory, criminal anthropology, and social psychology (including
crowd psychology). Four chapters concentrate on the period from the Great
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Reforms of the 1860s to the end of the Tsarist regime in 1917; the last covers the
first thirteen years of the Soviet era. Beer describes how the Russian exponents
of such ideas adapted them to local circumstances and also to the changing
political situation in Russia. He does not focus on the inner workings of the
professions to which these experts belonged, but rather on the development of
their thinking, as expressed in published sources. These theories, as he shows,
were ambivalent: reflecting the widespread anxiety about the social effects of
modernisation, particularly under the stress of revolution in 1905, while at the
same time offering the hope of improvement.
Some of this territory, as Beer acknowledges, has been the subject of recent
scholarship. Beer’s contribution is to focus specifically on ideas of social
deviance and pathology and to trace the evolution of these ideas after 1917. He
uses the material to support an argument about the political character of
‘modernity’. Following theorists of coercive modernity such as Michel Foucault
and Zygmunt Bauman, and historians in the Russian field such as Peter
Holquist, Yanni Kotsonis, and David L. Hoffmann, Beer offers imperial Russia
as a case-study of the way in which modern states utilise the social sciences to
shape and control society.
Regardless of political ideology, according to this view, all such states are in
the business of social engineering, which by definition cannot avoid elements of
compulsion or even physical violence. Foucault indeed saw the social-science
disciplines as themselves inherently coercive and therefore in tension with the
liberating promises of the Enlightenment from which they derive. In fact,
despite these promises, the Enlightenment project does not result in freedom
but in new forms of constraint; liberalism itself is not liberal in the original sense
of the term. In this spirit, Beer shows how the same theories used by professionals
to criticise both the autocracy and the impact of the capitalism emerging under
the old regime helped to justify Soviet-style social engineering after 1917. Beer
does not examine the impact of such thinking on public policy before 1917, but
he demonstrates how these theories were invoked by the political authorities in
the years following the Revolution. A similar argument for disciplinary continuity
in the health professions has been made by John Hutchinson, as Beer notes.
To some extent, Beer frames his argument with reference to one which this
reviewer made fifteen years ago in an article on Foucault and the Russian case.
Engaging in genial and welcome polemic, he faults me for two things: first, for
thinking that liberals failed to achieve their political objectives in Russia;
second, for considering liberalism to be ‘an essentially benign, if naïve, political
force’ (p. 17). He argues, by contrast, that liberalism did not fail, but eventually
attained its goals in alliance with the Soviet regime, which promoted ideals of
social improvement derived from the same Enlightenment source. ‘Russian
liberalism in the late imperial period did not “fail”’, Beer writes, ‘rather, it
contained—precisely in its modernist [sic] preoccupations with science,
crisis, and solutions—a dangerous potential that could be radicalized and
implemented in unforeseen ways’ (pp. 207–8).
Yes, I do think liberalism in Russia failed, if by liberalism you mean a state
recognising the principles of civil rights, citizenship, and rule of law. My point
was not, however, that liberalism was innocent or naïve. My point was to argue
that ‘liberalism’ does not consist merely of theories, techniques, and disciplines;
that the political consequences of these human disciplines are shaped by the
institutional context in which they operate. That seems to be exactly what Beer
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himself has concluded. The desire to alter, through purposeful intervention,
the lives of people suffering from poverty, ignorance, disease, or madness can
legitimate or facilitate forms of tyranny, even mass murder; or it can motivate
what we would consider to be humane social policy. Some social theories have
greater potential for non-liberal applications than others: social Darwinism
and pseudo-scientific racism have justified the abuses of fascist regimes.
Euthanasia has been popular at times in democratic societies, which also
practise various forms of discrimination. But it is a far cry from the injustices
committed by democratic states, significant though they may be, to the mass
murders perpetrated by ideologically driven authoritarian regimes in the
modern era. As Beer himself notes, the social sciences offer the potential for
certain kinds of abuses; but they do not make them inevitable. Where is the
argument, then?
Laura Engelstein
doi:10.1093/ehr/ceq083
Yale University
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