ABSTRACT
The attempt to understand liberty as a solution to a particular political constellation and to gauge the usefulness of the principle of personal freedom in history is necessarily tied into the process of understanding the circumstances of its emergence. Without a sense of the reasons and underlying motives of those who advocated the enhancement of individual liberty, there is little hope of being able to demonstrate liberty’s effects today. Historians can delineate the intellectual context that contributed to the genesis of a particular idea and its specific significance as it comes to capture people’s imaginations and possibly the political agenda of countries. Yet what is left to the theorist is to determine the coherence of the emanations of social and political thinking. What appears at first glance to be a modest task quickly turns out to combine historical and philosophical skills. One contemporary Russian thinker who took on this challenge is the political theorist B.G. Kapustin, who has recently developed what is certainly one of the most distinctive and profound approaches to the problem.
