oppose the stream was to commit suicide, which was mere madness.
According to this view, the good, the noble, the just, the strong, the
inevitable, the rational, were 'ultimately' one; conflict between them
was ruled out, logically, a priori. Concerning the nature of the pattern
there might be differences; Herder saw it in the development of the
cultures of different tribes and races; Hegel in the development of
the national state. Saint-Simon saw a broader pattern of a single western
civilisation, and distinguished in it the dominant role of technological
evolution and the conflicts of economically conditioned classes, and
within these the crucial influence of exceptional individuals-of men
of moral, intellectual, or anistic genius. Mazzini and Michelet saw
it in terms of the inner spirit of each people seeking to assen the
principles of their common humanity, each in its own fashion, against
individual oppression or blind nature. Marx conceived it in terms of
the history of the struggle of classes created and determined by growth
of the forces of material production. Politico-religious thinkers in
Germany and France saw it as historia sacra, the progress of fallen
man struggling toward union with God-the final theocracy-the
submission of secular forces to the reign of God on eanh.
There were many variants of these central doctrines, some Hegelian,
as
R U SSIAN T H INKERS
some mystical, some going back to eighteenth-century naturalism;
furieus battles were fought, heresies attacked, recalcitrants crushed.
What they all had in common was the belief, firsdy, that the universe
obeys laws and displays a pattern, whether intelligible to reason, or
empirically discoverable, or mystically revealed; secondly, that men
are elements in wholes larger and stronger than themselves, so that
the behaviour of individuals can be explained in terms of such wholes,
and not vice versa; thirdly, that answers to the questions of what
should be done are deducible from knowledge of the goals of the
objective process of history in which men are willy-nilly involved,
and must be identical for all those who truly know- for all rational
beings; fourthly, that nothing can be vicious or cruel or stupid or
ugly that is a means to the fulfilment of the objectively given cosmic
purpose-it cannot, at least, be so 'ultimately', or 'in the last analysis'
(however it might look on the face of it)-and conversely, that everything that opposes the great purpose, is so. Opinions might vary as to whether such goals were inevitable-and progress therefore automatic;
or whether, on the contrary, men were free to choose to realise them
or to abandon them (to their own inevitable doom). But all were
agreed that objective ends of universal validity could be found, and
that they were the sole proper ends of all social, political, and personal
activity; for otherwise the world could not be regarded as a 'cosmos'
with real laws and 'objective' demands; all beliefs, all values, might
turn out merely relative, merely subjective, the plaything of whims
and accidents, unjustified and unjustifiable, which was unthinkable.
Against this great despotic vision, the intellectual glory of the age,
rev:ealed, worshipped, and embellished with countless images and
_.Rowers by the metaphysical genius of Germany, and acclaimed by the
profoundest and most admired thinkers of France, Italy, and Russia,
Herzen rebelled violently. He rejected its foundations and denounced
its conclusions, not merely because it seemed to him (as it had to his
friend Belinsky) morally revolting; but also because he thought it
intellectually specious and aesthetically tawdry, and an attempt to
force nature into a straitjacket of the poverty-stricken imagination of
German philistines and pedants. In Ltttn-s from Franct and Italy,
From the Othn- Short, Lttttrs to an Old Comrade, in Opm Lettn-s to
Michelet, W. Linton, Mazzini, and, of course, throughout My Past and
Thoughts, he enunciated his own ethical and philosophical beliefs. Of
these, the most important were: that nature obeys no plan, that history
follows no libretto; that no single key, no formula can, in principle,
86
H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
solve the problems of individuals or societies; that general solutions
are not solutions, universal ends are never real ends, that every age
has its own texture and its own questions, that short cuts and generalisations are no substitute for experience; that liberty-of actual individuals, in specific times and places- is an absolute value; that a minimum area
of free action is a moral necessity for all men, not to be suppressed in
the name of abstractions or general principles so freely bandied by the
great thinkers of this or any age, such as eternal salvation, or history,
or humanity, or progress, still less the state or the Church or the
proletariat-great names invoked to justify acts of detestable cruelty
and despotism, magic formulas designed to stifie the voices of human
feeling and conscience. This liberal attitude had an affinity with the
thin but not yet dead tradition of western libertarianism, of which
elements persisted even in Germany- in Kant, in Wilhelm von
Humboldt, in the early works of Schiller and of Fichte-surviving in
France and French Switzerland among the Id�ologues and in the
views of Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville and Sismondi; and remained
a hardy growth in England among the utilitarian radicals.
Like the early liberals of western Europe, Herzen delighted in
independence, variety, the free play of individual temperament. He
desired the richest possible development of personal characteristics,
valued spontaneity, directness, distinction, pride, 'paS.sion, sincerity, the
style and colour of free individuals; he detested conformism, cowardice,
submission to the tyranny of brute force or pressure of opinion,
arbitrary violence, and anxious submissiveness; he hated the worship
of power, blind reverence for the past, for institutions, for mysteries
or myths; the humiliation of the weak by the strong, sectarianism,
philistinism, the resentment and envy of majorities, the brutal arrogance of minorities. He desired social justice, economic efficiency, political stability, but these must always remain secondary to the
need for protecting human dignity, the upholding of civilised values,
the protection of individuals from aggression, the preservation of
sensibility and genius from individual or institutional bullying. Any
society which, for whatever reason, failed to prevent such invasions
of liberty, and opened the door to the possibility of insult by one side,
and grovelling by the other, he condemned outright and rejected with
all its works-all the social or economic advantages which it might,
quite genuinely, offer. He rejected it with the same moral fury as that
with which I van Karamazov spurned the promise of eternal happiness