The Right to Living in Human Dignity in Political and Legal Thought of Russian Liberals: Key Ideas and Urgent Problems

The article considers basic approaches to understanding human rights to existence in human dignity formulated by representatives of Russian Liberalism of the second half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. The authors come to the conclusion that the articulation of the concept of the right to decent living standards by Russian liberal thinkers became a milestone in the development of human rights theory. At the same time, the problems studies by Russian liberals more than a century ago have not lost their topicality so far. With new challenges to human rights spreading, these problems are becoming more acute, which determines the necessity to refer to the historical memory and to comprehend political and legal heritage.