Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the Germans and the unexpended German language with its

pristine purity and the young, unwearied German nation, directed

as it was against the 'impure', Latinised, decadent western nations,

was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm. Moreover, it

stimulated a wave of social idealism which began to possess all classes,

from the early 20s of the century until well into the early 40s. The

proper task of a man was to dedicate himself to the ideal for which

his 'essence' was intended. This could not consist in scientific rationalism (as the French eighteenth-century materialists had taught), for it was a delusion to think that life was governed by mechanical laws. It

was an even worse delusion to suppose that it was possible to apply a

scientific discipline, derived from the study of inanimate matter, to

the rational government of human beings and the organisation of

their lives on a world-wide scale. The duty of man was something

very different-to understand· the texture, the 'go', the principle of

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life of all there is, to penetrate to the soul of the world (a theological

and mystical notion wrapped by the followers of Schelling and Hegel

in rationalist terminology), to grasp the hidden, 'inner' plan of the

universe, to understand his own place in it, and to act accordingly.

The task of the philosopher was to discern the march of history, or

of what was, somewhat mysteriously, called 'the Idea', and discover

whither it was carrying mankind. History was an enormous river,

the direction of which could, however, only be observed by people

with a capacity for a special kind of deep, inner contemplation. No

amount of observation of the outer world would ever teach you where

this inward Drong, this subterranean current, led. To uncover it

was to be at one with it; the development both of your individual

self as a rational being, and of society, depended upon a correct assessment of the spiritual direction of the larger 'organism' to which you belonged. To the question of how this organism was to be identified what it was-the various metaphysicians who founded the principal romantic schools of philosophy replied differently. Herder declared

this unit to be a spiritual culture or way of life; the Roman Catholic

penseurs identified it with the life of the Christian Church; Fichte

somewhat obscurely, and after him Hegel unequivocally, declared it

to be the national state.

The whole notion of organic method militated in favour of supposing that the favourite instrument of the eighteenth centurychemical analysis into constituent bits, into ultimate, irreducible atoms, whether of inanimate matter or of social institutions-was an inadequate

way of apprehending anything. 'Growth' was the great new term new, that is, in its application far beyond the bounds of scientific biology; and in order to apprehend what growth was, you had to have

a special inner sense capable of apprehending the invisible kingdom,

an intuitive grasp of the impalpable principle in virtue of which a

thing grows as it does; grows not simply by successive increments of

'dead' parts, but by some kind of occult vital process that needs a

quasi-mystical power of vision, a special sense of the Row of life, of

the forces of history, of the principles at work in nature, in art, in

personal relationships, of the creative spirit unknown to empirical

science, to seize upon its essence.

I V

This is the heart of political romanticism, from Burke to our own

day, and the source of many passionate arguments directed against

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liberal reform and every attempt to remedy social evils by rational

means, on the grounds that these were based on a 'mechanical' outlook

-a misunderstanding of what society was and of how it developed.

The programmes of the French Encyclopedists or of the adherents of

Lessing in Germany were condemned as so many ludicrous and

Procrustean attempts to treat society as if it were an amalgam of

bits of inanimate stuff, a mere machine, whereas it was a palpitating,

living whole.

The Russians were highly susceptible to this propaganda, which

drew them in both a reactionary and a progressive direction. You

cauld believe that life or history was a river, which it was useless and

perilous to resist or deflect, and with which you could only merge

your identity-according to Hegel by discursive, logical, rational

activity of the Spirit; according to Schelling intuitively and imaginatively, by a species of inspiration the depth of which is the measure of human genius, from which spring myths and religions, art and

science. This led in the conservative direction of eschewing everything analytical, rational, empirical, everything founded upon experiment and natural science. On the other hand, you might declare that you felt within the earth the pangs of a new world struggling to be

born. You felt-you knew-that the crust of the old institutions was

about to crack under the violent inner heavings of the Spirit. If you

genuinely believed this, then you would, if you were a reasonable

being, be ready to risk identifying yourself with the revolutionary

cause, for otherwise it would destroy you. Everything in the cosmos

was progressive, everything moved. And if the future lay in the

fragmentation and the explosion of your present universe into a new

form of existence, it would be foolish not to collaborate with this

violent and inevitable process.

German romanticism, in particular the Hegelian school, was

divided on this issue; there were movements in both directions in

Germany, and consequently also in Russia, which was virtually an

intellectual dependency of German academic thought. But whereas

in the west ideas of this kind had for many years been prevalenttheories and opinions, philosophical, social, theological, political, had since the Renaissance at feast, clashed and collided with each other

in a vast variety · of patterns, and formed a general process of rich

intellectual activity in which no one idea or opinion could for long

hold undisputed supremacy-in Russia this was not the case.

One of the great differences between the areas dominated by the

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eas.:em and the western Churches was that the former had had no

Renaissance and no Reformation. The Balkan peoples could blame

th'e Turkish conquest for their backwardness. But the case was little

better in Russia, which did not have a gradually expanding, literate,

educated class, connecting-by a series of social and intellectual stepsthe most and the least enlightened. The gap between the illiterate peasants and those who could read and write was wider in Russia

than in other European states, in so far as Russia could be called

European at this time.

Thus the number and variety of social or political ideas to be heard

if you moved in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow were nothing

like so great as you would find in the intellectual ferment of Paris or

Berlin. Paris was, of course, the great cultural Mecca of the time. But

even Berlin was scarcely less agitated with intellectual, theological,

artistic controversies, despite the repressive Prussian censorship.

You must therefore imagine in Russia a situation dominated by

three main factors: a dead, oppressive, unimaginative government

chiefly engaged in holding its subjects down, preventing change

largely because this might lead to yet further change, even though its

more intelligent members obscurely realised that reform-and that of

a very radical kind- for instance with regard to the serf system or

the systems of justice and education-was both desirable and inevitable.

The second factor was the condition of the vast mass of the Russian

population-an ill-treated, economically wretched peasantry, sullen

and inarticulately groaning, but plainly too weak and unorganised to

act effectively in its own defence. Finally, between the two, a small,

educated class, deeply and sometimes resentfully influenced by western

ideas, with minds tantalised by visits to Europe and by the great new

social and intellectual movement at work in the centres of its culture.

May I remind you again that there was in the air, as much in

Russia as in Germany, a romantic conviction that every man had a

unique mission to fulfil if only he could know what it was; and that

this created a general enthusiasm for social and metaphysical ideas,

perhaps as a kind of ethical substitute for a dying religion, that was

not dissimilar to the fervour with which philosophical systems and

political Utopias had, for more than a century, been acclaimed in

France and Germany, by men in search of a new theodicy uncompromised by association with some discredited political or religious establishment. But in Russia there was, in addition, among the

educated classes, a moral and intellectual vacuum due to the absence

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of a Renaissance tradition of secular education, and maintained by

the rigid censorship exercised by the government, by widespread

illiteracy, by the suspicion and disfavour with which all ideas as such

were regarded, by the acts of a nervous and often massively stupid

bureaucracy. In this situation, ideas which in the west competed

with a large number of other doctrines and attitudes, so that to become

dominant they had to emerge victorious from a fierce struggle for

survival, in Russia came to lodge in the minds of gifted individuals

and, indeed, obsess them, often enough simply for lack of other ideas

to satisfy their intellectual needs. Moreover, there existed in the capital

cities of the Russian Empire a violent thirst for knowledge, indeed

for mental nourishment of any kind, together with an unparalleled

sincerity (and sometimes a disarming naivety) of feeling, intellectual

freshness, passionate resolve to panicipate in world affairs, a troubled

consciousness of the social and political problems of a vast country,

and very little to respond to this new state of mind. What there was,

was mostly imponed from abroad-scarcely one single political and

social idea to be found in Russia in the nineteenth century was born

on native soil. Perhaps Tolstoy's idea of non-resistance was something

genuinely Russian-a restatement of a Christian position so original

that it had the force of a new idea when he preached it. But, in general,

I do not think that Russia has contributed a single new social or

political idea: nothing that was not traceable, not merely to some

ultimate western root, but to some doctrine discoverable in the west

eight or ten or twelve years earlier than its first appearance in Russia.

v

You must conceive, therefore, of an astonishingly impressionable

society with an unheard of capacity for absorbing ideas- ideas which

might waft across, in the most casual fashion, because someone