Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

cannot occur in solitude, but is a form of reciprocity. I am free and

human only so far as others are such. My freedom is limitless because

that of others is also such ; our liberties mirror one another-so long

as there is one slave, I am not free, not human, have no dignity and

no rights. Liberty is not a physical or a social condition but a mental

one: it consists of universal reciprocal recognition of the individual's

liberties: slavery is a state of mind and the slaveowner is as much a

slave as his chattels." The glib Hegelian claptrap of this kind with

which the works of Bakunin abound has not even the alleged

merits of Hegelianism, for it contrives to reproduce many of the worst

confusions of eighteenth-century thought, including that whereby the

comparatively clear, if negative, concept of personal liberty as a

condition in which a man is not coerced by others into doing what he

does not wish to do, is confounded with the Utopian and perhaps

1 Quoted by A. Ruge in his memoirs of Bakunin, in Ntut Frtit Prtsu,

April/May r 876.

2 'Three Lectures to the Workers of Val de Saint-lmier', in J. Guillaume

(ed.), op. cit. (p. r o6, note 1 above), vol. 5, pp. 23 1-2.

8 M. Bakunin, 'The Knouto-German Empire and the Social Revolu tion',

Iz6rannyt Jochintniya, vol. 2 (PetrogradfMoscow, 192 2), pp. 2 3 5-6.

4 ibid., pp. 236-8.

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unintelligible notion of being free from laws in a different sense of

'law' - from the necessities of nature or even of social coexistence. And

from this it is inferred that since to ask for freedom from Nature is

absurd, since I am what I am as part of her, therefore, because my

relationships with other human beings are part of 'Nature', it is

equally senseless to ask for freedom from them-what one should

seek is a 'freedom' which consists in a 'harmonious solidarity' with

them.

Bakunin rebelled against Hegel and professed to hate Christianity;

but his language is a conventional amalgam of both. The assumption

that all virtues are compatible, nay, mutually entailed by one another,

that the liberty of one man can never clash with that of another if

both are rational (for then they cannot desire conflicting ends), that

unlimited liberty is not only compatible with unlimited equality but

inconceivable without it-; reluctance to attempt a serious analysis of

either the notions of liberty or of equality; the belief that it is only

avoidable human folly and wickedness which are responsible for

preventing the natural goodness and wisdom of man from making a

paradise upon earth almost instantaneously, or at least as soon as the

tyrannical state, with its vicious and idiotic legal system, is destroyed

root and branch-all these naive fallacies, intelligible enough in the

eighteenth century, but endlessly criticised in Bakunin's own sophisticated century, form the substance of his st"rmons urbi et orbi; and in particular of his fiery allocutions to the fascinated watchmakers of La

Chaux-de-Fonds and the Valley of Saint-lmier.

Bakunin's thought is almost always simple, shallow, and clear; the

language is passionate, direct and imprecise, riding from climax to

climax of rhetorical evidence, sometimes expository, more often

hortatory or polemical, usually ironical, sometimes sparkling, always

gay, always entertaining, always readable, seldom related to facts of

experience, never original or serious or specific. Liberty-the wordoccurs ceaselessly. Sometimes Bakunin speaks of it in exalted semireligious terms, and declares that the instinct to mutiny-defiance-is one of the three basic 'moments' in the development of humanity,

denounces God and rays homage to Satan, the first rebel, the true

friend of freedom. In such 'Acherontic' moods, in words which

resemble the opening of a revolutionary marching song, he declares

that the only true revolutionary element in Russia (or anywhere else)

is the doughty (likhoi) world of brigands and desperadoes, who, having

nothing to lose, will destroy the old world -after which the new will

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H E RZ E N AN:p BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY

arise spontaneously like the phoenix from the ashes.1 He puts his

hopes in the sons of the ruined gentry, in all those who drown their

sorrows and indignation in violent outbreaks against their cramping

milieu. Like Weitling, he calls upon the dregs of the underworld, and,

in particular, the disgruntled peasants, the Pugachevs and Razins, to

rise like modern Samsons and bring down the temple of iniquity. At

other times, more innocently, he calls merely for a revolt against all

fathers and all schoolmasters: children must be free to choose their

own careers; we want 'neither demigods nor slaves', but an equal

society, above all not differentiated by university education, which

creates intellectual superiority and leads to more painful inequalities

than even aristocracy or plutocracy. Sometimes he speaks of the

necessity for an 'iron dictatorship' during the transitional period

between the vicious society of today with its 'knouto-German' army

and police, and the stateless society of tomorrow confined by no

restraints. Other times he says that all dictatorships tend inevitably to

perpetuate themselves, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is

yet one more detestable despotism of one class over another. He cries

that all 'imposed' laws, being man-made, must be thrown off at once;

but allows that 'social' laws which are 'natural' and not 'artificial'

will have to be obeyed-as if these latter are fixed and immutable and

beyond human control. Few of the optimistic confusions of the

eighteenth-century rationalists fail to make an appearance somewhere

in his works. After proclaiming the right- the duty-to mutiny, and

the urgent necessity for the violent overthrow of the state, he happily

proclaims his belief in absolute historical and sociological determinism,

and approvingly quotes the words of the Belgian statistician Quetelet:

'Society . . . prepares crimes, criminals are only the instruments necessary for executing them.'2 Belief in free will is irrational, for like Engels he believes that 'freedom is . . . the inescapable end result of

natural and social necessity'.3 Our human, as well as natural, environment shapes us entirely: yet we must fight for man's independence not of 'the laws of nature or society' but of all the laws, 'political,

criminal or civil', imposed on him by other men 'against his personal

1 See his pamphlet of 1 869, 'A Statement of the Revolutionary Question',

in M. A. Bakunin, Rtclli i t�oxzt�aniya (Moscow, 1906), pp. 2J S-H·

2 V. A. Polonsky (ed.), Mattrialy dlya 6iografii M. Baltunina, vol. 3

(Moscow, 1928), p. 43·

3 ibid., p. 12 I .

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convictions'.1 That i s Bakunin's final, most sophisticated definition

of liberty, and the meaning of this phrase is for anybody to seek. All

that clearly emerges is that Bakunin is opposed to the imposition of

any restraints upon anyone at any time under any conditions. Moreover he believes, like Holbach or Godwin, that once the artificial restraints imposed upon mankind, by blind tradition, or folly, or

'interested vice', are lifted, all will automatically be set right, and

justice, virtue, happiness, pleasure, and freedom will immediately

commence their united sway on earth. The search for something

more solid in Bakunin's utterances is unrewarding.a He used words

principally not for descriptive but for inflammatory purposes, and was

a great master of his medium; even today his words have not lost their

power to stir.

Like Herzen he disliked the new ruling class, the 'Figaros in

power', ' Figaro-bankers' and ' Figaro-ministers' whose livery could

not be shed because it had become part of their skins. He liked free

men and unbroken personalities. He detested spiritual slavery more

than any other quality. And like Herzen he looked on the Germans

as irredeemably servile and said so with insulting repetitiveness:

When an Englishman or an American says ' I am an Englishman', 'I am an American', they are saying ' I am a free man'; when a German says ' I am a German' he is saying ' I am a slave, but my

Emperor is stronger than all the other Emperors, and the German

soldier who is strangling me will strangle you all' . . . every people

has tastes of its own-the Germans are obsessed by the big stick of

the state.3

Bakunin recognized oppression when he saw it; he genuinely rebelled

against every form of established authority and order, and he knew

an authoritarian when he met one, whether he was Tsar Nicholas

and Bismarck, or Lassalle and Marx (the latter triply authoritarian,

in his view, as a German, a Hegelian and a Jew).' But he is not a

serious thinker; he is neither a moralist nor a psychologist; what is

to be looked for in him is not social theory or political doctrine, but

1 ibid., pp. I 22-3.

I Her zen, in a letter to Turgenev of 10 November 1 862, justly called

it 'fatrtu bakuninskoi demagogii' ('Bakunin's demagogic hotchpotch').

B M. Bakunin, 'Statism and Anarchy', in A. Lehning (ed.), Arclzif!�l

Balou11i11�, vol. 3 (Leiden, 1967), p. 3 58.

' ibid., p. 3 17.

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an outlook and a temperament. There are no coherent ideas to be

extracted from his writings of any period, only fire and imagination,

violence and poetry, and an ungovernable desire for strong sensations,

for life at a high tension, for the disintegration of all that is peaceful,

secluded, tidy, orderly, small scale, philistine, established, moderate,

part of the monotonous prose of daily life. His attitude and his teaching

were profoundly frivolous, and, on the wholf", he knew this well,

and laughed good-naturedly whenever he was exposed.1 He wanted

to set on fire as much as possible as swiftly as possible; the thought of

any kind of chaos, violence, upheaval, he found boundlessly exhilarating. When in his famous Confession (written in prison to the Tsar) he said that what he hated most was a quiet life, that what he longed

for most ardently was always something-anything-fantastic, unheard

of adventures, perpetual movement, action, battle, that he suffocated

in peaceful conditions, he summed up the content as well as the

quality of his writings.

VI

Despite their prima facie similarities-their common hatred of the

Russian regime, their belief in the Russian peasant, their theoretical

federalism and Proudhonian socialism, their hatred of bourgeois

society and contempt for middle-class virtues, their anti-liberalism and

their militant atheism, their personal devotion, and the similarity of

their social origin, tastes, and education -the differences of the two

friends are deep and wide. Herzen (although this has been seldom

recognised even by his greatest admirers) is an original thinker,

independent, honest, and unexpectedly profound. At a time when

general nostrums, vast systems and simple solutions were in the air,