Vanessa Rampton is a Branco Weiss Fellow in the Institute for Health and Social Policy and Department of Philosophy at McGill University, Montréal. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich's Chair for Practical Philosophy. Trained as a historian of ideas, she has a long-standing interest in how empirical examples can challenge commonly held assumptions about ideologies.

Introduction: conceptions of liberalism in Imperial Russia; 1. Inside out: freedom, rights and the idea of progress in nineteenth-century Russia; 2. Progress, contested: positivist and neo-idealist liberalism; 3. Freedom, differently: liberalism in 1905 and its aftermath; 4. Liberalism undone: the loss of cohesion on the eve of 1917; 5. Conversations with Western ideas I: conflict between values; 6. Conversations with Western ideas II: progress and freedom; Conclusion.