Moisey Yakovlevich Ostrogorsky was a politician, political scientist, historian, jurist and sociologist. Along with Max Weber and Robert Michels, he is considered one of the founders of political sociology, especially in the field of theories about party systems and political parties. Ostrogorski noted that loyalty to parties is often comparable to loyalty to one's religion. He was a member of the First State Duma of the Russian Empire representing the Hrodna province in 1906-1907.
Biography
Moisey Ostrogorsky was born in 1854 in the Grodno province of the Russian Empire, where he grew up. He studied law at Saint Petersburg State University and worked for the Russian justice ministry. He represented Grodno province in the First State Duma. In the 1880s, he went to Paris and studied at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, where he wrote his dissertation Les origines du suffrage universel . Whilst in France, Ostrogorski imbibed French political thought, which was distrustful of an all-powerful state, from thinkers such as Comte, Durkheim, Tocqueville, Saint Simon and Proudhon. He traveled to the United States and Great Britain. In 1902, he published Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties, which compared the political system of the two nations. After returning to Russia in 1906, he became the Duma representative for the Hrodna province as a member of the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party. He left politics after the Duma was dissolved during the Russian Revolution. As a political thinker, he was recognized in the West before he was in Russia. Ostrogorski has been influential on the political thought of the 20th century. After leaving politics, he taught at the Psychoneurological Institute in St. Petersburg. He died on 10 February 1921 in St. Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd.
Work on political science
Ostrogorski's main work is La democratie et l'organisation des partis politiques. He noted behavioural determinism in organisational structure: "As soon as a party, even if created for the noblest object perpetuates itself, it tends to degeneration", which influenced "the later researches of Max Weber, Robert Michels, and Andre Siegfried". Ostrogorski is also the author of a book that is about the equality of the sexes: La Femme au point de vue du droit public.
