Lev Tikhomirov: overcoming the revolution and criticizing democracy

Abstract

The French Revolution, having raised the idea of “the people’s will” to its banners, for several centuries determined human society itself as the center of the application of human efforts. The European peoples, brought up in Christian idealism, with its absolute moral requirements, were reoriented to the social world, with its extremely limited possibilities for retribution of justice.

L.A. Tikhomirov systematically revised the views on democracy that had developed in European political philosophy. His thinking surprisingly combined both a critical perception of other people’s conclusions and the ability to build his own positive constructions. He could both introduce doubts into seemingly well-established postulates, and convince of the correctness of his positive political constructions.

Considering revolutionary ideas to be largely artificially introduced, L.A. Tikhomirov, argued that their influence in Russia is largely due to the “lack of Russian national intelligentsia”. The extreme lack of independence of the social sciences in Russia, unable to study their national political experience and give recommendations on the development of the country for the future. In his understanding of the evolution of social experiences, L.A. Tikhomirov, blamed the “new era” opened by the French Revolution of the 18th century for their futility. It is from her that he sees the violation of the spiritual balance that has put people on the path of fruitless chimeras.

Assuming that the hypertrophied individualism of liberalism, as a reaction to it, could be replaced by socialism with its all-consuming collectivism, L.A. Tikhomirov recognized this possibility only through revolutionary upheavals. He saw such a radical upheaval as useless and dangerous, due to the fact that in his criticism of democracy the main point was his denial of the possibility of building a society in which the Supreme Power can really and directly be the people’s will.