Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

1 ibid.: VI 94·

H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LI BERTY

And most people do not like liberators; they would rather continue

in the ancient ruts, and bear the ancient yokes, than take the immense

risks of building a new life. They prefer (Herzen repeats again and

again) even the hideous cost of the present, muttering that modern

life is at any rate better than feudalism and barbarism. 'The people'

do not desire liberty, only civilised individuals do; for the desire for

freedom is bound up with civilisation. The value of freedom, like

that of civilisation or education-none of which is 'natural' or obtainable without great effort-consists in the fact that without it the individual personality cannot realise all its potentialities-cannot live,

act, enjoy, create in the illimitable fashions which every moment of

history affords, and which differ in unfathomable ways from every

other moment of history, and are wholly incommensurable with them.

Man 'wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the

unconscious midwife of the future'.1 He wants to live in his own day.

His morality cannot be derived from the laws of history (which do

not exist) nor from the objective goals of human progress (there are

none such -they change with changing circumstances and persons).

Moral ends are what people want for their own sake. 'The truly free

man creates his own morality.'2

This denunciation of general moral rules- without a trace of

Byronic or Nietzschean hyperbole-is a doctrine not heard often in

the nineteenth century; indeed, in its full extent, not until well into

our own. It hits both right and left: against the romantic historians,

against Hegel, and to some degree against Kant; against utilitarians

and against supermen; against Tolstoy, and against the religion of

art, against 'scientific' ethics, and all the churches; it is empirical

and naturalistic, recognises absolute values as well as change, and is

overawed neither by evolution nor socialism. And it is original to an

arresting degree.

If existing political parties are to be condemned, it is not, Herzen

declares, because they do not satisfy the wishes of the majority, for

the majority, in any case, prefer slavery to freedom, and the liberation

of those who inwardly still remain slaves always leads to barbarism

and anarchy: 'to dismantle the Bastille stone by stone will not of

itself make free men out of the prisoners'.3 'The fatal error [of the

1 'Letter on the Freedom of the Will' (to his son Alexander): XX 4-37-B.

z 'From the Other Shore': VI I 3 I .

3 ibid.: VI :z9.

95

RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S

French radicals i n 1 848] is . • . to have tried to free others before they

were themselves liberated . . . They want, without altering the walls

[of the prison], to give them a new function, as if a plan for a jail

could be used for a free existence.'1 Economic justice is certainly not

enough : and this is ignored, to their own doom, by the socialist 'sects'.

As for democracy, it can well be a 'razor' with which an immature

people-like France with its universal suffrage in 1 848-nearly cut its

own throat;2 to try to remedy this by a dictatorship ('Petrograndism')

leads to even more violent suppression. Gracchus Babeuf, who was

disappointed by the results of the French Revolution, proclaimed the

religion of equality-'the equality of penal servitude'.3 As for the

communists of our own day, what is it they offer us? The 'forced

labour of communism' of Cabet? The 'organisation of labour in

ancient Egypt a Ia Louis Blanc'?' The neatly laid out little phalansteries of Fourier, in which a free man cannot breathe-in which one side of life is permanently repressed for the benefit of others?& Communism is merely a levelling movement, the despotism of frenzied mobs, of Committees of Public Safety invoking the security of the

people-always a monstrous slogan, as vile as the enemy they seek to

overthrow. Barbarism is abominable whichever side it comes from:

'Who will finish us off, put an end to it all? The senile barbarism of

the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism? A blood-stained

sabre or the red Rag?'8 It is true that liberals are feeble, unrealistic,

and cowardly, and have no undetstanding of the needs of the poor

and the weak, of the new proletarian class which is rising; it is true

that the conservatives have shown themselves brutal, stupid, mean,

and despotic-although let it be remembered that priests and landowners are usually closer to the masses and understand their needs better than liberal intellectuals, even if their own intentions are less

benevolent or honest. It is true that Slavophils are mere escapists,

defenders of an empty throne, condoning a bad present in the name

of an imaginary past. These men follow brutal and selfish instincts,

or empty formulas. But the unbridled democracy of the present is no

1 ibid.: VI s • .

2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 584.

3 ibid.: XX 578.

4 'From the Other Shore': VI 472.

& 'To an Old Comrade': XX 578.

1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 1 .

H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

better, and can suppress men and their liberties even more brutally

than the odious and sordid government of Napoleon III.

What do the masses care for 'us'? The masses can hurl in the teeth

of the European ruling class, 'We were hungry and you gave us chatter,

we were naked and you sent us beyond our frontiers to kill other

hungry and naked men.' Parliamentary government in England is

certainly no answer, for it, in common with other so-called democratic

institutions ('traps called oases of liberty'), merely defends the rights

of property, exiles men in the interests of public safety, and keeps

under arms men who are ready, without asking why, to fire instantly

as soon as ordered. Little do naive democrats know what it is that

they believe in, and what the consequences will be. 'Why is belief

in God . . . and the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly

Utopias is not silly?'1 As for the consequences, one day there really

will be democracy on earth, the rule of the masses. Then indeed

something will occur.

The whole of Europe will leave its normal courses and will be

drowned in a general cataclysm . . . Cities taken by storm and looted

will fall into poverty, education will decline, factories will come to

a stop, villages will be emptied, the countryside will remain without

hands to work it, as after the Thirty Years' War. Exhausted and

starving peoples will submit to everything, and military discipline

will take the place of law and of every kind of orderly administration. Then the victors will begin to fight for their loot. Civilisation, industry, terrified, will Ree to England and America, taking with them from the general ruin, some their money, others their

scientific knowledge or their unfinished work. Europe will become

a Bohemia after the Hussites.

And then, on the brink of suffering and disaster, a new war will

break out, home grown, internal, the revenge of the have-nots

against the haves . . . Communism will sweep across the world in

a violent tempest-dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift; in thunder and

lightning, amid the fire of the burning palaces, upon the ruin of

factories and public buildings the New Commandments will be

enunciated . . . the New Symbols of the Faith.

They will be connected in a thousand fashions with the historic

ways of life . . . but the basic tone will be set by socialism. The

institutions and structure of our own time and civilisation will

perish -will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be liquidated.

You regret the death of civilisation?

1 'From the Other Shore': VI 104.

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

I , too, I am sorry.

But the masses will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave

nothing but tears, want, igrwrance and humiliation.1

It is prophecies of this type by the founding fathers of the New

Order that cause embarrassment to contemporary Soviet critics and

hagiographers. They are usually dealt with by omission.

Heine and Burckhardt too had seen nightmarish visions, and spoke

of the demons called into being by the injustices and the 'contradictions'

of the new world, which promised not Utopia but ruin. Like them,

Herzen harbours no illusions:

Do you not perceive these . . . new barbarians, marching to

destroy? . . . Like lava they are stirring heavily beneath the surface

of the earth . . . when the hour strikes, Herculaneum and Pompeii

will be wiped out, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust will

perish equally. This will be not a judgement, not a vengeance, but

a cataclysm, a total revolution . . . This lava, these barbarians, this

new world, these Nazarenes who are coming to put an end to the

impotent and decrepit . . . they are closer than you think. For it is

they, none other, who are dying of cold and of hunger, it is they

whose muttering you hear . . . from the garrets and the cellars,

while you and I in our rooms on the first lloor are chatting about

socialism 'over pastry and champagne'.l

Herzen is more consistently 'dialectical' than the 'scientific' socialists

who swept away the 'Utopias' of their rivals, only to succumb to

millennia! fantasies of their own. To set by the side of the classless

idyll of Engels in the Communist Manifesto let us choose these lines

by Herzen:

Socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own

extremes and absurdities. Then there will again burst forth from

the titanic breast of the revolting minority a cry of denial. Once

more a mortal battle will be joined in which socialism will occupy

the place of today's conservatism, and will be defeated by the

coming revolution as yet invisible to us . . . 8

The historical process has no 'culmination'. Human beings have

invented this notion only because they cannot face the possibility of

an endless conftict.

1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 5-17.

2 'From the Other Shore': VI 58-9.

a ibid.: VI uo.

H ERZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LIBERTY

Such passages as these have their analogues in savage prophecies by

Hegel and by Marx, who also predicted the doom of the bourgeoisie,

and death and lava and a new civilisation. But, whereas there is in

both Hegel and Marx an unmistakable note of sardonic, gloating joy

in the very thought of vast, destructive powers unchained, and the

coming holocaust of all the innocents . and the fools and the contemptible philistines, so little aware of their terrible fate, Herzen is free from this prostration before the mere spectacle of triumphant