Introduction

Leon Petrazycki was born in 1867, in present-day Belarus, but what at the time was a part of the Russian empire. A constitutional democrat with liberal ideas, Petrazycki joined the Constitutional Democratic Party that advocated for a rule-of-law state in Russia. In 1918, Poland regained its independence and Petrazycki obtained Polish citizenship, settling in Warsaw. The Law School at the University of Warsaw created, especially for him and at his request, the country’s first chair in sociology. Petrazycki’s life and work were marked by the political events and intellectual currents of the last decades of tsarist rule. He held progressive views best described as those of a reform-minded center-right liberal. The Great Russian famine of 1891, a national disaster that the Imperial government could neither prevent nor manage, changed political thinking considerably. Russian intellectuals also incorporated into their work the theme of morality.