Parkhomenko, R.N. State and law in the works of B. Chicherin.

Abstract: The article is devoted to the ideas of the renowned Russian thinker and legal scholar Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828-1904) on state, civil society and definition of law. Now, when one is to speak of the philosophical heritage of Boris Chicherin, the researchers point out the fact that he was at the very source of the formation of Russian political and legal science. Boris Chicherin wrote a number of works, which were directly or indiretly related to the legal issues, politics, history and theory of state. The cornerstone of his philosophy was the term of human individual as a free person, and his political credo was to combine the liberal state and the strong government, which he regarded as a specific feature of the Russian state. The method of this work was to study a number of little known works of Boris Chicherin, and the author also studied political philosophy and philosophy of law in Russia (the Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov) and in Germany (the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Tuebingen State University), which allowed him to understand the ideas of Boris Chicherin better and to evaluate them properly. As the result of the research, the author shows that Chicherin was trying to find a compromise between Slavophiles and pro-Western tendencies in the Russian philosophy of XIX – XX centuries, as well as between the ideas of anarchy and despotism. The philosopher also was trying to find a positive balance between the terms of freedom and equality. All of the above-mentioned matters lead him to the creation of the philosophic and legal concept, which one may now evaluate as liberal-conservative. The sphere of application of results of this study may be its use in the courses on history of political teachings and law, as well as in the scienctific research in the sphere of theory of state and law.

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