Rather than treat Soviet dissidents as avatars of Western liberalism, or take their appeals to rights and legal norms as natural, Prof. Nathans’s talk investigates how, as products themselves of the Soviet order, dissidents arrived at a conception of law and human personality so at odds with official norms. Understanding this process – how orthodoxies contain the seeds of their own heresies, and how dissidents promoted the containment of Soviet power from within – promises to illuminate the broader problem of how citizens of authoritarian societies conceive and act on options for political engagement.
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