Maksim Kovalevsky

Maksim Maksimovich Kovalevsky (1851 to 1916) was a Russian jurist and the main authority on sociology in the Russian Empire. Born into a Ukrainian noble family near Kharkov, he studied at the Imperial Kharkov University and furthered his education in Berlin, Paris and London, where he met Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Herbert Spencer. From 1878 he lectured in law at the Imperial Moscow University and studied the Russian peasant commune and the legal institutions of Caucasian highlanders, until the minister Ivan Delyanov, who disliked his liberal views, had him expelled in 1886. He then lived in Western Europe, returned after the First Russian Revolution to lecture at the University of Saint Petersburg, was elected to the first State Duma and was appointed to the State Council. He served as vice-president and then president of the International Institute of Sociology, was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1914 and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. His historical method joined comparative legal analysis with sociological and ethnographic methods, and his disciples included Pitirim Sorokin and Nikolai Kondratiev.