About the book: year / Dobrolyubov’s review article is devoted to the criticism of liberalism, the problems of historical progress, and is a significant milestone in assessing the paths of development of Russia and the West by Russian revolutionary democratic criticism . Dobrolyubov shows the bourgeois nature of most of the transformations, reforms in Western Europe mentioned by Babst, reforms not in the interests of the “Western proletarian”; the critic clearly sees the continuity of forms of exploitation under feudalism and capitalism. Arbitrariness, violence, robbery under “enlightened capital” turn out to be essentially close to the autocratic system of Russia.