Pavel Novgorodtsev


Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev was a Russian lawyer and philosopher.
Novgorodtsev graduated from Moscow University in 1888 with a degree in law. Following further study in Berlin and Paris he returned to Moscow University, completing his doctorate in 1903. from 1896 to 1911. He was a member of the Central Committee Constitutional Democrat Party and in 1906 he was elected as a deputy to the First State Duma. He was a signatory of the Vyborg Manifesto.
He was also appointed director and a professor at the Moscow Commercial Institute that year.
During the First World War he worked with the Union of Cities and was the Moscow Commissioner of the Special Meeting on Fuel.
During the Russian Civil War he sided with the Whites, 1918 and left the Crimea in 1920. After living in Berlin, 1922-1924, he moved to Prague where, shortly before his death, he became Dean of the Russian faculty of law at the Charles University there. Ivan Ilyin was one of his protégés.
Novgorodtsev is buried at the Orthodox cemetery at Prague's Olšany Cemetery.

His views

In 1903 he edited Problems of Idealism which included his essay "Нравственный идеализм в философии права". Novgorodtsev was a Neo-Kantian and considered natural law as providing a moral criterion for criticising and improving positive law. In The Crisis of Modern Legal Consciousness, he declared that all ideas for resolving modern social and moral contradictions were Utopian. He criticised the theory of scientific socialism. He rejected scientific socialism and viewed all proposals for resolving modern social and moral contradictions as Utopian.

Works