Aleksandr Nikolaevich Radishchev was the leading social critic and philosopher of the Russian Enlightenment. He was born in Moscow, the son of a prosperous landowner, and was educated in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, and, from 1766 to 1771, at the University of Leipzig. At Leipzig he studied under the Leibnizian Ernst Platner and read widely in current French philosophy. Upon his return to Russia he pursued a successful career in the civil and military service until 1790, when his radical work Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu (St. Petersburg, 1790; translated as A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow) aroused the ire of Catherine the Great and he was exiled to Siberia. Paul I permitted him to return to European Russia in 1796. After the accession of Alexander I, in 1801, Radishchev was appointed to a special legislative commission, but his egalitarian, libertarian proposals went unheeded, and in September...