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Scholars often argue that Russia's shift to liberal modernity never got off the ground because members of the professional classes, like lawyers and doctors, failed to seize authority as their Western counterparts had done: Russian lawyers and doctors were too entwined with the state and rejected bourgeois self-interest. Legal experts in particular drew power from both public opinion and moral rhetoric. In courts that had been opened to the public in 1866, they relied on fragile laws that were easily altered by the state as well as on fluid "social" and "folk" norms shaped by the press.
This situation turned judicial reform, which was tightly connected to the public via print media, into a stage for murky verdicts. Why did a sense of moral conscience come to wield such transformative power in this context—one that even the reformers themselves could not have anticipated? Borisova reveals how invoking moral conscience as a gauge for social norms offered a bold utopian fix: moralizing divisive state rulings permitted the curbing of radicalism in a fast-modernizing society. By granting the public moral sway through a "judgment of conscience,” judicial reforms aimed to defuse political strife. This presentation probes 1860s debates on what ethical judgments truly reveal about the Russian path to illiberal modernity.
SPEAKER: Tatiana Borisova
SOBESEDNIK: Emily Wang (Notre Dame)
