Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

power and violence, from contempt for weakness as such, and from

the romantic pessimism which is at the heart of the nihilism and

fascism that was to come; for he thinks the cataclysm neither inevitable nor glorious. He despises these liberals who begin revolutions and then try to extinguish their consequences, who at the same time

undermine the old order and cling to it, light the fuse and try to

stop the explosion, who are frightened by the emergence of that

mythical creature, their 'unfortunate brother, cheated of his inheritance',1 the worker, the proletarian who demands his rights, who does not realise that while he has nothing to lose, the intellectual may lose

everything. It is the liberals who betrayed the revolution in 1 848 in

Paris, in Rome, in Vienna, not only by taking flight and helping the

defeated reactionaries to regain power and stamp out liberty, but by

first running away, then pleading that the 'historical forces' were too

strong to resist. If one has no answer to a problem, it is more honest

to admit this, and to formulate the problem clearly, than first to

obscure it, commit acts of weakness and betrayal, and then plead as

an excuse that history was too much for one. True, the ideals o( 1 848

were themselves empty enough; at least they looked so to Herzen in

1 869 : 'not one constructive, organic idea . . . economic blunders

(which] lead not indirectly, like political ones, but directly and deeply,

to ruin, stagnation, a hungry death'.2 Economic blunders plus 'the

arithmetical pantheism of universal suffrage', 'superstitious faith in

republics'8 or in parliamentary reform, is in effect his summary of

some of the ideals of 1 848. Nevertheless, the liberals did not fight

even for their own foolish programme. And in any case liberty was

not to be gained by such means. The claims of our time are clear

enough, they are social more than economic; for mere economic

1 ibid.: VI S3·

2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 576.

3 'My Past and Thoughu': XI 70.

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change, as advoated by socialists, unaccompanied b y a deeper transformation, will not suffice to abolish civilised cannibalism, monarchy and religion, courts and governments, moral beliefs and habits. The

institutions of private life must be changed too.

Is it not odd that man, liberated by modern science from penury

and lawless rapacity, has nevertheless not been made free, but has

somehow been swallowed up by society? To understand the entire

breadth and reality, all the sanctity of the rights of man, and not

to destroy society, not to reduce it to atoms, is the hardest of social

problems; it will probably one day be resolved by history itself; in

the past it has never been resolved.1

Science will not solve it, pact Saint-Simon, nor will preaching against

the horrors of unbridled competition, nor advocacy of the abolition

of poverty, if all they do is to dissolve individuals into a single, monolithic, oppressive community-Gracchus Babeuf's 'equality of penal servitude'.

History is not determined. Life, fortunately, has no libretto,

improvisation is always possible, nothing makes it necessary for the

future to fulfil the programme prepared by the metaphysicians.•

Socialism is neither impossible nor inevitable, and it is the business of

the believers in liberty to prevent it from degenerating either into

bourgeois philistinism or communist slavery. Life is neither good nor

bad, men are what they make themselves. Without social sense they

become orang-utans, without egotism, tame monkeys.3 But there are

not inexorable forces to compel them to be either. Our ends are not

made for us, but by us;' hence to justify trampling on liberty today

by the promise of freedom tomorrow, because it is 'objectively'

guaranteed, is to make use of a cruel and wicked delusion as a pretext

for iniquitous action. 'If only people wanted, instead of saving the

world, to save themselves-instead of liberating humanity, to liberate

themselves, they would do much for the salvation of the world and

the liberation of man.'6

Herzen goes on to say tha:t man is of course dependent on his

environment and his time-physiologically, educationally, biologically,

as well as at more conscious levels; and he concedes that men reflect

1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourth letter: V 6:z.

I 'From the Other Shore': VI 36, 9 I .

8 ibid.: VI I 30.

' ibid.: VI I 3 r.

6 ibid.: VI 1 19.

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their own time and are affected by the circumstances of their lives.

But the possibility of opposition to the social medium, and protest

against it, is nevertheless just as real; whether it is effective or not;

whether it takes a social or an individual form.1 Belief in determinism

is merely an alibi for weakness. There will always be those fatalists

who will say 'the choice of the paths of history is not in the individual's

power. Events do not depend on persons, but persons on events: we

only seem to control our direction, but actually sail wherever the wave

takes us. '2 But this is not true.

Our paths are not unalterable at all. On the contrary, they

change with circumstances, with understanding, with personal

energy. The individual is made by . . . events, but events are also

made by individuals and bear their stamp upon them- there is

perpetual interaction . . . . To be passive tools of forces independent

of us- . . . this is not for us; to be the blind instrument of fate-the

scourge, the executioner of God, one needs naive faith, the simplicity of ignorance, wild fanaticism, a pure, uncontaminated, childlike quality of thought.•

To pretend that we are like this today would be a lie. Leaders arise,

like Bismarck (or Marx), who claim to guide their nation or their

class to the inevitable triumph reserved for them by destiny, whose

chosen instruments they feel themselves to be; in the name of their

sacred historic mission they ruin, torture, enslave. But they remain

brutal impostors.

What thinking persons have forgiven Attila, the Committee of

Public Safety, even Peter the First, they will not forgive us; we

have heard no voice calling to us from on high to fulfil a destiny;

no voice from the nether regions to point a path to us. For us, there

is only one voice, one power, the power of reason and understanding.

In rejecting them we become the unfrocked priests of science,

renegades from civilisation.'

I V

I f this is a condemnation of Bismarck or Marx, it is directed more

obviously and expressly at Bakunin and the Russian Jacobins, at

Karakozov's pistol and Chernyshevsky's 'axe', sanctified by the new

young revolutionaries; at the terrorist propaganda of Zaichnevsky or

1 ibid.: VI 1 zo.

2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 588.

a ibid.

' ibid.: XX 588-9.

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of Semo-Solovievich, and the culminating horror o f Nechaev's

activity and the final perversions of revolutionary doctrine, which

went far beyond its western origins, and treated honour, compassion,

and the scruples of civilisation as so many personal affronts. From this

it is not far to Plekhanov's celebrated formula of 1 903, 'the safety

of the revolution is the supreme law', which sanctioned the suspension

of civil liberties; and so to the April Theses, and the treatment of

'inviolability of the person' as a luxury to be dispensed with in difficult

moments.

Th� chasm between Herzen and Bakunin is not bridgeable. And

the half-hearted attempts by Soviet historians, if not to slur over the

differences, at any rate to represent them as necessary and successive

stages in the evolution of a single process-necessary both logically

and historically (because history and the development of ideas obey

'logical' laws)-are melancholy failures. The views of those who, like

Herzen (or Mill), place personal liberty in the centre of their social

and political doctrine, to whom it is the holy of holies the surrender

of which makes all other activities, whether of defence or attack,

valueless;1 and, as opposed to them, of those for whom such liberty is

only a desirable by-product of the social transformation which is the

sole end of their activity, or else a transient stage of development

made inevitable by history-these two attitudes are opposed, and no

reconciliation or compromise between them is conceivable; for the

Phrygian Cap comes between them. For Herzen the issue of personal

liberty overshadows even such crucial questions as centralism against

free federation; revolution from above versus revolution from below;

political versus economic activity; peasants versus city workers;

collaboration with other parties versus refusal to transact and the cry

for 'political purity' and independence; belief in the unavoidability of

capitalist development versus the possibility of circumnavigating it;

and all the other great issues which divided the liberal and revolutionary

parties in Russia until the revolution. For those who stand 'in awe

of the Phrygian Cap', sa/us populi is a final criterion before which all

other considerations must yield. For Herzen it remains a 'criminal'

principle, the greatest tyranny of all; to accept it is to sacrifice the

1 'However low . . . governments sank,' Herzen once remarked about the

west in contrast to Russia, 'Spinoza was not sentenced to transportation, nor

Lessing to be flogged or conscripted' ('From the Other Shore': VI I s). The

twentieth century has destroyed the force of this comparison.

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freedom of individuals to some huge abstraction-some monstrosity

invented by metaphysics or religion, to escape from the real, earthly

issues, to be guilty of 'dualism', that is, to divorce the principles of

action from empirical facts, and deduce them from some other set of

'facts' provided by some special mode of vision;1 to take a path which

in the end always leads to 'cannibalism'-the slaughter of men and

women today for the sake of 'future happiness'. The Lttttrs to an Old

Comradt are aimed, above all, at this fatal fallacy. Herzen rightly held

Bakunin guilty of it, and behind the ardent phrases, the lion-hearted

courage, the broad Russian nature, the gaiety, the charm and the

imagination of his friend-to whom he remained personally devoted

to the end-he discerned a cynical indifference to the fate of individual

human beings, a childish enthusiasm for playing with human lives

for the sake of social experiment, a lust for revolution for revolution's

sake, which went ill with his professed horror before the spectacle of

arbitrary violence or the humiliation of innocent persons. He detected