As an academic, Drahomanov was an economist, historian, philosopher, and ethnographer, while as a public intellectual he was a political theorist with socialist leanings, perhaps best known as one of the first proponents of Ukrainian autonomism.

[3] Mykhailo Drahomanov became an avid learner, enrolling at the Poltava Classical Gymnasium in 1853, where he was exposed to the works of the socialist Alexander Herzen and the historian Friedrich Schlosser.

[4] When he took the side of a fellow student against mistreatment by a school inspector, he was expelled from the Gymnasium before he could graduate, only managing to finish his secondary education following the intervention of the liberal pedagogue Nikolay Pirogov.

He quickly joined a radical student circle that participated in the early stages of the "Going to the People" campaign, establishing some of the first folk high school in Ukraine, before their suppression by the Russian government in 1862.

[11] In 1870, when Drahomanov defended his master's thesis about Tacitus and was nominated by the university council to become an assistant professor, his appointment was initially blocked by Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, which prevented him from receiving funds during his scholarly trip abroad.

In an attempt to combat this, he took to writing a number of progressive articles, in which he criticised the Galician political leadership, and established the Shevchenko Scientific Society, which became a center for Ukrainian scholarship in Lviv.

[17] Drahomanov's influence helped to stimulate political life in Galicia, especially through his articles in the student newspaper Druh, which formed the nucleus of what would become the Ukrainian Radical Party.

[22] In August 1881, Drahomanov became editor-in-chief for the journal Volnoye Slovo,[23] which attracted readers and correspondents from opponents of the Tsarist autocracy, due to its advocacy of the Zemstvo system of self-governance and its opposition to revolutionary terror.

Following the 1917 Revolution, the journal was discovered to have been financially supported by the Okhrana, due specifically to Drahomanov's opposition to Narodnaya Volya's terrorism, which Pavel Shuvalov hoped would split the revolutionary socialist movement.

The following month, Drahomanov was joined in Geneva by other Ukrainian radicals, who together drew up a federalist and democratic program for remodelling Eastern Europe: the Volny Soyuz (English: Free Union.

[25] At this time, Drahomanov also aided in the publication of a geographical study of Ukraine by Élisée Reclus and publicised the Russian imperial prohibition of the Ukrainian language to Western European audiences.

[29] Drahomanov's time in Sofia was largely spent lecturing on ancient civilisations and studying Ukrainian folklore and literature, although he still maintained his collaboration with the radical press in his "second homeland" of Galicia.

[32] With these principles in mind, he and his followers established the Ukrainian Radical Party, which helped spread and celebrate his ideas throughout Ukraine, despite the censorship of the Russian government.

[41] His other influences included Francesc Pi i Margall, John Stuart Mill, Édouard René de Laboulaye, Odilon Barrot, Charles Dupont-White [fr] and Benjamin Constant.

[44] He had a negative opinion of the French Republic, as he believed the centralising tendency of the Jacobins had been counterrevolutionary and had ultimately resulted in the suppression of workers' rights to freedom of association.

He believed that the idea of the "popular will" was diametrically opposed to political freedom, as the will of the people could be used to justify majority rule or even dictatorship, which endangered both individual and group rights.

[47] Drahomanov also tried to popularize his own orthographic reform of the Ukrainian language, based on a simplified and rationalised version of Panteleimon Kulish's phonetic orthography, which was adopted by the writers Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka.

[53] Drahomanov's ideas on multiculturalism influenced the constitution of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) by the Central Council, which extended autonomy and self-governance to national minorities when it declared the independence of Ukraine.

[54] As it grew, the Ukrainian government used Drahomanov's federal model to guarantee regional autonomy, even proposing the reorganization of the entirety of Eastern Europe into a confederation of independent nations.

In the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Drahomanov was denounced as a liberal and a nationalist during the Stalinist period, but his ideas found a renewed interest following de-Stalinization and especially after the independence of Ukraine.