ABSTRACT
The son of a village sacristan, Aleksandr Kunitsyn (1783–1840) was one of the founders of Russian liberalism and of the natural law tradition in Russia. From 1811 to 1820, he taught at the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée, where Alexander Pushkin was one of his students. Challenging the dominance of Christian Wolff’s scholasticism in Russia, Kunitsyn worked out a Kantian conception of natural law in a two-volume monograph, Natural Law (1818–20). Kunitsyn’s advocacy of human rights and freedom of conscience triggered controversy over the relationship between natural law and religion. A year after its publication, Natural Law was banned, and Kunitsyn was dismissed from his teaching position at St. Petersburg University. Thereafter, he held positions in the state bureaucracy, working primarily as a specialist on Russian law. In 1836, Kunitsyn completed a collection of modern Russian ecclesiastical law, but publication of the work was blocked by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kunitsyn’s respect for the freedom of the individual anticipated John Stuart Mill’s ideas in On Liberty (1859). His defense of the rights of disabled persons and of nomadic peoples threatened by European colonialism was virtually unparalleled in the nineteenth century.
