Revisionist Views of Solzhenitsyn
An alternative and highly controversial view was offered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, drawing wide accusations of antisemitism. Solzhenitsyn, while not attempting to justify all the repressive aspects of the May Laws and other Jewish legislation, claims that they might have been motivated by a desire for social stability, rather than religious or racist anti-Semitism, and that they were not as repressive as they might have been. For example, he shows that the edict forbidding rural settlement only applied to new Jewish settlers, and claims that many villages were exempt. The edict itself was advocated by Count Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev not only on the grounds that "the inhabitants of the countryside may know the government is protecting them from the Jews", but also because "governmental power is unable to defend against pogroms which might occur in scattered villages." So, according to Solzhenitsyn, the May Laws may be interpreted also as a measure to protect Jews, rather than oppress them.
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“It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
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