Ivan Aleksandrovich Il'in was a Russian religious philosopher, legal and political theorist, philosopher of Russian national identity, orator, and publicist. Born in Moscow of a noble family, he studied law at Moscow University, from which he graduated in 1906. Deemed an extraordinary scholarly achievement, his dissertation on Georg Hegel (1770–1831) earned him at once master's and doctoral degrees in 1918. The two volumes of his published dissertation, Filosofiia Gegelia kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga i cheloveka (The philosophy of Hegel as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and man, 1918), have been described as one of the more significant commentaries on Hegel published in the twentieth century in any language (Grier 1997). As a resolute foe of the Bolsheviks, he was exiled from Soviet Russia under threat of execution. Il'in and his wife left Russia for Germany in 1922. He was a renowned...