Pëtr Lavrovich Lavrov was a Russian philosopher and social thinker, a major theoretician of Russian Populism and the leading exponent of a distinctive form of positivism in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy (also elaborated by Nikolai Mikhailovskii). Lavrov was born in Melekhov, the son of a landed gentleman and retired artillery officer. He was sent to the Artillery School in St. Petersburg in 1837 and received his commission upon graduating in 1842. In 1844 he joined the faculty of the Artillery School, and for more than twenty years (during which he rose to the rank of colonel), he taught mathematics and the history of science at military institutions in St. Petersburg. At the same time Lavrov read widely in philosophy and gained a reputation as a writer—first for his poetry and after 1858 for his scholarly essays in philosophy. In...