SOURCE: “Conservatism and Dissent: V. V. Rozanov's Political Philosophy,” in The Russian Review, Vol. 32, No. 3, July, 1973, pp. 241-53.

In the following essay, Stammler examines Rozanov's constantly evolving concept of politics.

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as Vasily Rozanov's political philosophy if by philosophy we understand a closely reasoned, tightly knit, logically consistent system of thought. In these terms Rozanov was not a philosopher at all. In fact, after the failure of his first ambitious philosophic venture entitled About Understanding,¹ which was a theory of the knowability of things, and after the premature death of his young philosopher friend, Fedor Sperk, he abandoned his former efforts to compete with the academic philosophers and contribute to professional journals. He is similar to Dostoevsky who confessed that he could not lay claim to the title of a philosopher in the technical sense of the term, but that throughout his...