Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

'Expliquez pourquoi a qu'il y a de plus honorable dons le monde au

jugement de tout le genre lzumoin sons exception, est le droit de vmer

innocemment le song innocent.?',l in rejecting all rationalist or

naturalistic answers, in stressing impalpable psychological and 'spiritual'

-and sometimes 'zoological' -factors as determining events, and in

stressing these at the expense of statistical analyses of military strength,

very much like Maistre in his dispatches to his government at Cagliari.

• Letters, I4 September I8u.

2 Alben Sorel, 'Tolstol historien', Revue bkue 4I (January-June I888),

46o-79· This lecture, reprinted in Sorel's Lectures bisturiqru:s (Paris, I894), has

been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct the views

of those (e.g. P. I. Biryukov and K. V. Pokrovskyin their works cited above [p. 15,

note I; p. 41, note z], not to mention later critics and literary historians who

almost all rely upon their authority) who omit all reference to Maistre. Emile

Haumant is almost unique among earlier scholars in ignoring secondary authorities, and discovering the truth for himself; see his Lil Culture frlmfllist en Rlmie (I700-I9oo) (Paris, I9Io), pp. 490-z.

J op. cit. (p. 6I, note I above), entretien 7, pp. Z l l-I J.

6:z

T H E HEDG E H O G AND T H E FOX

Indeed, Tolstoy's accounts of mass movements-in .battle, and in the

flight of the Russians from Moscow or of the French from Russiamight almost be designed to give concrete illustrations of Maistre's theory of the unplanned and unplannable character of all great events.

But the parallel runs deeper. The Savoyard Count and the Russian

are both reacting, and reacting violently, against liberal optimism

concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress: both furiously denounce the notion that mankind can be made eternally happy and virtuous by rational and

scientific means.

The first great wave of optimistic rationalism which followed the

Wars of Religion broke against the violence of the great French

Revolution and the political despotism and social and economic misery

which ensued : in Russia a similar development was shattered by the

long succession of repressive measures taken by Nicholas I to counteract firstly the effect of the Decembrist revolt, and, nearly a quarter of a century later, the influence of the European revolutions of 1 848-9;

and to this must be added the material and moral effect, a decade later,

of the Crimean debacle. In both cases the emergence of naked force

killed a great deal of tender-minded idealism, and resulted in various

types of realism and toughness - among others, materialistic socialism,

authoritarian neo-feudalism, blood-and-iron nationalism and other

bitterly anti-liberal movements. In the case of both Maistre and

Tolstoy, for all their unbridgeably deep psychological, social, cultural,

and religious differences, the disillusionment took the form of an

acute scepticism about scientific method as such, distrust of all liberalism, positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded secularism then influential in western Europe; and led to a deliberate

emphasis on the 'unpleasant' aspects of _human history, from which

sentimental romantics, humanist historians, and optimistic social

theorists seemed so resolutely to be averting their gaze.

Both Maistre and Tolstoy spoke of political reformers (in one

interesting instance, of the same individual representative of them, the

Russian statesman Speransky) in the same tone of bitterly contem�

tuous irony. Maistre was suspected of having had an actual hand in

Speransky's fall and exile; Tolstoy, through the eyes of Prince Andrey,

describes the pale face of Alexander's one-time favourite, his soft hands,

his fussy and self-important manner, the artificiality and emptiness of

his movements-as somehow indicative of the unreality of his person

and of his liberal activities-in a manner which Maistre could only

63

R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S

have applauded. Both speak of intellectuals with scorn and hostility.

Maistre regards them as being not merely grotesque casualties of the

historical process - hideous cautions created by Providence to scare

mankind into return to the ancient Roman faith-but as beings

dangerous to society, a pestilential sect of questioners and corrupters

of youth against whose corrosive activity all prudent rulers must take

measures. Tolstoy treats them with contempt rather than hatred, and

represents them as poor, misguided, feeble-witted creatures with

delusions of grandeur. Maistre sees them as a brood of social and

political locusts, as a canker at the heart of Christian civilisation which

is of all things the most sacred and will be preserved only by the heroic

efforts of the Pope and his Church. Tolstoy looks on them as clever

fools, spinners of empty subtleties, blind and deaf to the realities which

simpler hearts can grasp, and from time to time he lets fly at them

with the brutal violence of a grim, anarchical old peasant, avenging

himself, after years of silence, on the silly, chattering, town-bred

monkeys, so knowing, and full of words to explain everything, and

superior, and impotent and empty. Both dismiss any interpretation of

history which does not place at the heart of it the problem of the nature

of power, and both speak with disdain about rationalistic attempts to

explain it. Maistre amuses himself at the expense of the Encyclopedists- their clever superficialities, their neat but empty categoriesvery much in the manner adopt�d by Tolstoy towards their descendants a century later-the scientific sociologists and historians. Both profess

belief in the deep wisdom of the uncorrupted common people, although

Maistre's mordant obiter dicta about the hopeless barbarism, venality

and ignorance of the Russians cannot have been to Tolstoy's taste, if

indeed he ever read them.

Both Maistre and Tolstoy regard the western world as in some

sense 'rotting', as being in rapid decay. This was the doctrine which

the Roman Catholic counter-revolutionaries at the turn of the century

virtually invented, and it formed part of their view of the French

Revolution as a divine punishment visited upon those who strayed

from the Christian faith and in particular that of the Roman Church.

From France this denunciation of secularism was carried by many

devious routes, mainly by second-rate journalists and their academic

readers, to Germany and to Russia (to Russia both directly and via

German versions), where it found a ready soil among those who,

having themselves avoided the revolutionary upheavals, found it

flattering to their amour proprt to believe that they, at any rate, might

64

T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX

still be on the path to greater power and glory, while the west, destroyed

by the failure of its ancient faith, was fast disintegrating morally and

politically. No doubt Tolstoy derived this element in his outlook at

least as much from Slavophils and other Russian chauvinists as directly

from Maistre, but it is worth noting that this belief is exceptionally

powerful in both these dry and aristocratic observers, and governs

their oddly similar outlooks. Both were au fond unyieldingly pessimistic thinkers, whose ruthless destruction of current illusions frightened off their contemporaries even when they reluctantly conceded the truth of what was said. bespite the fact that Maistre was fanatically ultramontane and a supporter of established institutions,

while Tolstoy, unpolitical in his earlier work, gave no evidence of

radical sentiment, both were obscurely felt to be nihilistic-the humane

values of the nineteenth century fell to pieces under their fingers. Both

sought for some escape from their own inescapable and unanswerable

scepticism in some vast, impregnable truth which would protect them

from the effects of their own natural inclinations and temperament:

Maistre in the Church, Tolstoy in the uncorrupted human heart and

simple brotherly love-a state he could have known but seldom, an ideal

before the vision of which all his descriptive skill deserts him and usually

yields something inartistic, wooden and naive; painfully touching, painfully unconvincing, and conspicuously remote from his own experience.

Yet the analogy must not be overstressed : it is true that both

Maistre and Tolstoy attach the greatest possible importance to war

and conflict, b�t Maistre, like Proudhon after him,1 glorifies war, and

1 Tolstoy visited Proudhon in Brussels in 1 861, the year in which the

latter published a work which was called La Gu�rrt tlla paix, translated into

Russian three years later. On the basis of this fact Eikhenbaum tries to deduce

the influence of Proudhon upon Tolstoy's novel. Proudhon follows Maistre

in regarding the origins of wars as a dark and sacred mystery; and there is

much confused irrationalism, puritanism, love of paradox, and general

Rousseauism in all his work. But these qualities are widespread in radical

French thought, and it is difficult to find anything specifically Proudhonist

in Tolstoy's War and P�au, besides the title. The extent of Proudhon'a

general influence on all kinds of Russian intellectuals during this period was,

of course, very large; it would thus be just as easy, indeed easier, to construct

a case for regarding Dostoevsky- or Maxim Gorky-as a ProudAonisanl as to

look on Tolitoy as one; yet this would be no more than an idle exercise in

critical ingenuity; for the resemblances are vague and general, while the

differences are deeper, more numerous and more specific.

R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S

declares i t to b e mysterious and divine, while Tolstoy detests it and

regards it as in principle explicable if only we knew enough of the

many minute causes- the celebrated 'differential' of history. Maistre

believed in authority because it was an irrational force, he believed in

the need to submit, in the inevitability of crime and the supreme

importance of inquisitions and punishment. He regarded the executioner as the cornerstone of society, and it was not for nothing that Stendhal called him I 'ami du hourreau and Lamennais said of him

that there were only two realities for him-crime and punishment­

'his works are as though written on the scaffold'. Maistre's vision of

the world is one of savage creatures tearing each other limb from

limb, killing for the sake of killing, with violence and blood, which

he sees as the normal condition of all animate life. Tolstoy is far from

such horror, crime, and sadism : 1 and he is not, pace Albert Sorel and

Vogue, in any sense a mystic: he has no fear of questioning anything,

and believes that some simple answer must exist-if only we did not

insist on tormenting ourselves with searching for it in strange and