№ 2 - 2001
Pecherskaya N.V.
Metamorphoses of Justice: Historical-Etymological Analysis of the Notion of Justice as It Evolved in Russian Culture

The article retraces the evolution of the notion “justice” in Russian culture since late 17th till early 20th century. The author demonstrates that the word “justice” turned for those three centuries of its “Russian history” into a polysemantic notion. For the whole 19th century each of its meanings was being established and acquiring definite forms of existence as an independent, rationally substantiated system of ideas with its theoreticians, principles and criteria of the just and unjust. Step by step, the meanings were becoming ever more separated from one another, coming in confrontation with one another. That is why there exists no general universal notion of justice unifying all the meanings. Each of them was forming an independent “world of justice” -universal and self-sufficient.