Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin, a Russian philosopher, was educated at Moscow University, where he studied under both K. D. Kavelin and T. N. Granovskii. Until 1868 he was a professor at Moscow University; he also served briefly as tutor to the royal family and as mayor of Moscow (1881–1883). He was cautiously liberal in politics and, after an early period of agnosticism, devoutly Russian Orthodox in religion.

Chicherin wrote substantial critical studies of Vladimir Solov'ëv (1880) and Auguste Comte (1892), as well as several works on philosophy of law and on the state. His ethical individualism, like that of N. I. Kareev, was close to Immanuel Kant's, but, unlike Kareev, Chicherin was an orthodox Hegelian in logic, ontology, and philosophy of history. This eclecticism generated an unresolved tension in his thought. On the one hand Chicherin asserted that great men are merely "organs and instruments of...