Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874—1948) was born in Kiev, Russia, on March 6, and became a leading critic of positivism and scientism among the Russian intelligentsia. Forced into exile by the Communists in 1922, Berdyaev (also transliterated as Berdiaev, with the first name often anglicized as Nicholas) died in Clamart, France, on March 23.

Berdyaev's religious philosophy emphasizes human freedom and the person as distinct realities, not reducible to the empirical forms of choice behavior or individualism as described in the partial perspectives of the social sciences. On the basis of his personalism, Berdyaev argues against superficial pseudoreligious faith in the power of science and technology, a faith that he finds expressed in the ideology of materialistic determinism prominent among Russian intellectuals during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In The Russian Idea (1946), Berdyaev examines this century-long history of revolutionary intellectual culture that culminated in the Communist Revolution during his own generation...