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
,,
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