Problems of formation of a civil society in the liberal discourse of Russia at the beginning of the XX th century (from the intellectual heritage of TSU professors)
The necessity to define common logical fundamentals in the constructing of a liberal model of a civil and political system as well as a role and place of a civil society concept in the system of ideological coordinates of home liberalism at the beginning of the XX th century dictates that we should study the intellectual heritage of TSU liberally-minded professors. Liberals perceived civil society as a synthesis of individual freedom and common wealth based on the recognition of the self-value and priority of a human personality. Possessing a high moral potential civil society, in liberals' opinion, should provide necessary conditions for a person to realize his abilities and creative potential. Law which is a basic tool to realize a state power was to play a role of an interaction regulator between personality and society. This is a law that was to provide a personality with freedom and the possibility to develop without any handicaps while giving at the same time guarantees of a stable order of a communal life. In this connection liberals paid special attention to a reforming of a Court on the base of independence. Understanding the contrast between Russian reality at the beginning of the XX th century and a liberal ideal of social order made an issue of necessary prerequisites and conditions for constructing the civil society especially urgent. In this connection political reforms designed to form legal society, on the one hand, and measures designed to increase in population's cultural level as well as development of social self-consciousness to provide social environment adequate to ideas of civil society, on the other hand, were considered to be main directions of liberal strategy. This strategy definitely assured orientation at evolutionary methods of solution to social problems. Reforms of social and political system based on principles of civil and political freedom and designed to provide a stable legal order, in the liberals' opinion, were supposed to open additional possibilities of a peaceful cultural work and create conditions for an all-round harmonic development of a personality. Analysis of TSU professors' ideas about perspective directions of social and political reconstructing of the Motherland at the beginning of the XX th century reveals the fact that they had a logically strict conception of a civil society that had not only a full characteristic of its fundamental principles and norms but also clear suggestions of how to form a civil society in Russia.