Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/222

 not find favour with those "Westerners" who supposed a general uniformity in the evolution of nations and set a high value on the influence of Western civilization upon Russian life; under Hegel's influence and Savigny's direction they insisted on the part played by the State in national development and preferred to study the history of institutions, fixing the main epochs of Russian history in accordance with these. Solovyev, although not quite indifferent to the Slavophile tendencies, belonged to the opposite school. Kavelin enlarged his predecessor's scheme and introduced between his two principal periods an intermediate stage characterized by the ascendancy of civil patriarchal institutions. Chicherin showed the scarcity of information concerning patriarchal society and divided the subsequent times, like Kavelin, into two periods—the period of "civil union," during which individual will predominated, and the period of "political union," during which public will prevailed and organized social life. This theory was accepted by Sergueyevitch; he distinguished in Russian history the two periods of Chicherin almost in identical terms and expected a third period, during which the opposed principles of the two former will be reconciled.

These conceptions were formed, in the main, before the scientific movement and "Great Reforms" of the sixties; but they had a great influence on subsequent historical writers. One of them, Klyuchevsky, a pupil of Solovyev and Chicherin, highly appreciated some of their conclusions, but could not accept them entirely; he elaborated his own "sociological" conception of Russian history. Klyuchevsky was not inclined to