T. H. Rigby on Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics

Stephen Fortescue

pp. 1-20

in: Stephen Fortescue (ed), Russian politics from Lenin to Putin, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

In a brief autobiographical sketch in a 1990 volume of collected writings T.H. Rigby described his early intellectual influences.¹ As an undergraduate and Masters student at the University of Melbourne immediately after the end of World War Two he was intellectually most stimulated by Karl Marx and Max Weber — although as he wrote: "I could never claim to be a real disciple of either". The influence of Marx was limited even at that early stage by Rigby's inability to accommodate Marx's views on property with what he knew of the social distribution of power and privilege in the USSR. The influence of Weber was far stronger. From the beginning Rigby was excited by the linkages that could be made between Weber's typologies of authority and legitimation and actual social structures, including those of the Soviet Union.

Cited authors

Weber Max

Marx Karl

Rigby T. H.