Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

1 So6r1111it so(Aiuflii 11 1rid1J111i lomdA (Co/JtmJ Wri1i11gs ;, TAirty

l'olumtr) (Moacow, 1 954-65; inde:r:es 1966), val. XI, p. 48. All subsequent

references to Herzen's works are to this edition, by volume and page, thus:

XI 48.

1 To G. Mazzini, 13 September 1 850.

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H E RZEN AN D BAK U N IN ON L I BERTY

genius, whose autobiography remains one of the great masterpieces

of Russian prose. As a publicist he had no equal in his century. He

possessed a singular combination of fiery imagination, capacity for

meticulous observation, moral passion, and intellectual gaiety, with a

talent for writing in a manner at once pungent and distinguished,

ironical and incandescent, brilliantly entertaining and at times rising

to great nobility of feeling and expression. What Mazzini did for the

Italians, Herzen did for his countrymen: he created, almost singlehanded, the tradition and the 'ideology' of systematic revolutionary agitation, and thereby founded the revolutionary movement in Russia.

Bakunin's literary endowment was more limited, but he exercised a

personal fascination unequalled even in that heroic age of popular

tribunes, and left behind him a tradition of political conspiracy which

has played a major part in the great upheavals of our own century.

Yet these very achievements, which have earned the two friends and

companions in arms their claim to immortality, serve to conceal their

respective importance as political and social thinkers. For whereas

Bakunin, for all his marvellous eloquence, his lucid, clever, vigorous,

at times devastating, critical power, seldom says anything which is

precise, or profound, or authentic-in any sense personally 'lived

through'- Herzen, despite his brilliance, his careless spontaneity, his

notorious 'pyrotechnics', expresses bold and original ideas, and is a

political (and consequently a moral) thinker of the first importance.

To classify his views with those of Bakunin as forms of semi-anarchistic

'populism', or with those of Proudhon or Rodbertus or Chernyshevsky

as yet another variant of early socialism with an agrarian bias, is to

leave out his most arresting contribution to political theory. This

injustice deserves to be remedied. Herzen's basic political ideas are

unique not merely by Russian, but by European standards. Russia is

not so rich in first-rate thinkers that she can afford to ignore one of

the three moral preachers of genius born upon her soil.

I I

Alexander Herzen grew up in a world dominated by French and

German historical romanticism. The failure of the great French

Revolution had discredited the optimistic naturalism of the eighteenth

century as deeply as the Russian Revolution of our own day weakened

the prestige of Victorian liberalism. The central notion of eighteenthcentury enlightenment was the belief that the principal causes of human misery, injustice, and oppression lay in men's ignorance and

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R U S S IAN TH I N K E R S

folly. Accurate knowledge of the laws governing the physical world,

once and for all discovered and formulated by the divine Newton,

would enable men in due course to dominate nature; by understanding

and adjusting themselves to the unalterable causal laws of nature they

would live as well and as happily as it is possible to live in the world

as it is; at any rate, they would avoid the pains and disharmonies due

to vain and ignorant efforts to oppose or circumvent such laws. Some

thought that the world as explained by Newton was what it was dt

facto, for no discoverable reason-an ultimate, unexplained reality.

Others believed they could discover a rational plan-a 'natural' or

divine Providence, governed by an ultimate purpose for which all

creation strove; so that man, by submitting to it, was not bowing to

blind necessity, but consciously recognising the part which he played

in a coherent, intelligible, and thereby justified process. But whether

the N ewtonian scheme was taken as a mere description or as a theodicy,

it was the ideal paradigm of all explanation; it remained for the genius

of Locke to point a way whereby the moral and spiritual worlds

could at last also be set i n order and explained by the application of

the selfsame principles. If the natural sciences enabled men to shape

the material world to their desire, the moral sciences would enable

them so to regulate their conduct as to avoid for. ever discord between

beliefs and facts, and so end all evil, stupidity and frustration. If

philosophers (that is, scientists), both natural and moral, were put in

charge of the world, instead of kings, noblemen, priests, and their

dupes and factotums, universal happiness could in principle be achieved.

The consequences of the French Revolution broke the spell of

these ideas. Among the doctrines which sought to explain what it

was that must have gone wrong, German romanticism, both in its

subjective-mystical and its nationalist forms, and in particular the

Hegelian movement, acquired a dominant position. This is not the

place to examine it in detail; suffice it to say that it retained the dogma

that the world obeyed intelligible laws; that progress was possible,

according to some inevitable plan, and identical with the development

of 'spiritual' forces; that experts could discover these laws and teach

understanding of the:n to others. For the followers of Hegel the

gravest blunder that had been made by the French materialists lay in

supposing that these laws were mechanical, that the univene was

composed of isolable bits and pieces, of molecules, or atoms, or cells,

and that everything could be explained and predicted in terms of the

movement of bodies in space. Men were not mere collocations of

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H E RZEN AND BAKUNIN ON L I B E RTY

bits of matter; they were souls or spirits obeying unique and intricate

laws of their own. Nor were human societies mere collocations of

individuals: they too possessed inner structures analogous to the

psychical organisation of individual souls, and pursued goals of which

the individuals who composed them might, in varying degrees, be

unconscious. Knowledge was, indeed, liberating. Only people who

knew why everything was as it was, and acted as it did, and why it

was irrational for it to be or do anything else, could themselves be

wholly rational : that is, would cooperate with the universe willingly,

and not try to beat their heads in vain against the unyielding 'logic of

the facts'. The only goals which were attainable were those embedded

in the pattern of historical development; these alone were rational

because the pattern was rational ; human failure was a symptom of

irrationality, of misunderstanding of what the times demanded, of

what the next stage of the progress of reason must be; and valuesthe good and the bad, the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly-were what a rational being would strive for at a specific stage

of its growth as part of the rational pattern. To deplore the inevitable

because it was cruel or unjust, to complain of what must be, was to

reject rational answers to the problems of what to do, how to live. To

oppose the stream was to commit suicide, which was mere madness.

According to this view, the good, the noble, the just, the strong, the

inevitable, the rational, were 'ultimately' one; conflict between them

was ruled out, logically, a priori. Concerning the nature of the pattern

there might be differences; Herder saw it in the development of the

cultures of different tribes and races; Hegel in the development of

the national state. Saint-Simon saw a broader pattern of a single western

civilisation, and distinguished in it the dominant role of technological

evolution and the conflicts of economically conditioned classes, and

within these the crucial influence of exceptional individuals-of men

of moral, intellectual, or anistic genius. Mazzini and Michelet saw

it in terms of the inner spirit of each people seeking to assen the

principles of their common humanity, each in its own fashion, against

individual oppression or blind nature. Marx conceived it in terms of

the history of the struggle of classes created and determined by growth

of the forces of material production. Politico-religious thinkers in

Germany and France saw it as historia sacra, the progress of fallen

man struggling toward union with God-the final theocracy-the

submission of secular forces to the reign of God on eanh.

There were many variants of these central doctrines, some Hegelian,

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R U SSIAN T H INKERS

some mystical, some going back to eighteenth-century naturalism;

furieus battles were fought, heresies attacked, recalcitrants crushed.

What they all had in common was the belief, firsdy, that the universe

obeys laws and displays a pattern, whether intelligible to reason, or

empirically discoverable, or mystically revealed; secondly, that men

are elements in wholes larger and stronger than themselves, so that

the behaviour of individuals can be explained in terms of such wholes,

and not vice versa; thirdly, that answers to the questions of what

should be done are deducible from knowledge of the goals of the

objective process of history in which men are willy-nilly involved,

and must be identical for all those who truly know- for all rational

beings; fourthly, that nothing can be vicious or cruel or stupid or

ugly that is a means to the fulfilment of the objectively given cosmic

purpose-it cannot, at least, be so 'ultimately', or 'in the last analysis'

(however it might look on the face of it)-and conversely, that everything that opposes the great purpose, is so. Opinions might vary as to whether such goals were inevitable-and progress therefore automatic;

or whether, on the contrary, men were free to choose to realise them

or to abandon them (to their own inevitable doom). But all were

agreed that objective ends of universal validity could be found, and

that they were the sole proper ends of all social, political, and personal

activity; for otherwise the world could not be regarded as a 'cosmos'

with real laws and 'objective' demands; all beliefs, all values, might

turn out merely relative, merely subjective, the plaything of whims

and accidents, unjustified and unjustifiable, which was unthinkable.

Against this great despotic vision, the intellectual glory of the age,

rev:ealed, worshipped, and embellished with countless images and

_.Rowers by the metaphysical genius of Germany, and acclaimed by the

profoundest and most admired thinkers of France, Italy, and Russia,

Herzen rebelled violently. He rejected its foundations and denounced

its conclusions, not merely because it seemed to him (as it had to his

friend Belinsky) morally revolting; but also because he thought it

intellectually specious and aesthetically tawdry, and an attempt to

force nature into a straitjacket of the poverty-stricken imagination of