and make no apologies . . . " •a
It is a singular irony.ofhistory that Her.ten, who wanted individual
liberty more than happiness, or efficiency, or justice, who denounced
organised planning, economic centralisation, governmental authority,
because it might curtail the individual's capacity for the free play of
fantasy, for unlimited depth and variety of personal life within a wide,
rich, 'open' social milieu, who hated the Germans (and in particular
the 'Russian Germans and German Russians') ofSt Petersburg because
their slavery was not (as in Russia or Italy) 'arithmetical', ·that is,
reluctant submission to the numerically superior forces of reaction,
but 'algebraical', that is, part of their 'inner formula' -the essence of
their very being8- that Henen, in virtue of a casual phrase patronisingly dropped by Lenin, should today find himself in the holy of holies of the Soviet pantheon, placed there by a government the genesis of
which he understood better and feared more deeply than Dostoevsky,
and whose word� and acts are a continuous insult to all that he believed
and was.
Doubtless, despite all his appeals to concreteness, and his denuncia-
tion of abstract principles, Henen was himself, at times, Utopian
1 Letter to N. P. Ogarev, 1-:z May 1 868.
I 'My Past and Thoughts': XI 3 5 1 .
3 'On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia': VII 1 5. Arnold
Ruge was outraged by this and protested vehemently in his notice of the
enay in I 8 S4 when he received the German edition. See ArnDIJ Rugts
Briifwulutl unJ TtJgt6uclz6/iiJJtr tJus Jtn ]tJizrtn rBzs-rBBo, ed. P. Nerrlich
(Berlin, 1 886), vol. :z, pp. 147-8.
H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON L I B E RTY
enough. He feared mobs, he disliked bureaucracy and organisation,
and yet he believed in the possibility of establishing the rule of
justice and happiness, not merely for the few, but for the many, if
not in the western world, at any rate in Russia; and that largely
out of patriotism: in virtue of the Russian national character which
had proved itself so gloriously by surviving Byzantine stagnation, and the Tartar yoke and the German truncheon, its own officials, and through it all preserving the inner soul of the people
intact. He idealised Russian peasants, the village communes, free
ortels; similarly he believed in the natural goodness and moral nobility
of the workers of Paris, in the Roman populace, and despite the
increasingly frequent notes of 'sadness, scepticism and irony . . . the
three strings of the Russian lyre',1 he grew neither cynical nor
sceptical. Russian populism owes more to his ungrounded optimism
than to any other single source of its inspiration.
Yet compared to Bakunin's doctrines, Herzen's views are a model
of dry realism. Bakunin and Herzen had much in common : they
shared an acute antipathy to Marxism and its founders, they saw no
gain in the replacement of one class of despotism by another, they did
not believe in the virtues of proletarians as such. But Herzen does at
least face genuine political problems, such as the incompatibility of
unlimited personal liberty with either social equality, or the minimum
of 90Cial organisation and authority; the need to sail precariously
between the Scylla of individualist 'atomisation' and the Charybdis of
collectivist oppression; the sad disparity and conRict between many,
equally noble human ideals; the nonexistence of 'objective', eternal,
universal moral and political standards, to justify either coercion or
resistance to it; the mirage of distant ends, and the impossibility of
doing wholly without them. In contrast to this, Bakunin, whether
in his various Hegelian phases, or his anarchist period, gaily dismisses
such problems, and sails off into the happy realm of revolutionary
phraseology with the gusto and the irresponsible delight in words
which characterised his adolescent and essentially frivolous outlook.
v
Bakunin, as his enemies and followers will equally testify, dedicated
his entire life to the struggle for liberty. He fought for it in action
1 'The Russian People and Socialism: Letter to Monsieur ]. Michelet':
VII 330.
1 05
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
and i n words. More than any other individual in Europe h e stood for
ceaseless rebellion against every form of constituted authority, for
ceaseless protest in the name of the insulted and oppressed of every
nation and class. His power of cogent and lucid destructive argument
is extraordinary, and has not, even today, obtained proper recognition.
His arguments against theological and metaphysical notions, his
attacks upon the whole of western Christian tradition-social, political,
and moral- his onslaughts upon tyranny, whether of states or classes,
or of special groups in authority-priests, soldiers, bureaucrats, democratic representatives, bankers, revolutionary elites-are set forth in language which is still a model of eloquent polemical prose. With
much talent and wonderful high spirits he carried on the militant
tradition of the violent radicals among the eighteenth-century philosophes. He shared their buoyancy but also their weaknesses, and his positive doctrines, as so often theirs, turn out to be mere strings of
ringing commonplaces, linked together by vague emotional relevance
or rhetorical afflatus rather than a coherent structure of genuine ideas.
His affirmative doctrines are even thinner than theirs. Thus, as his
positive contribution to the problem of defining freedom, he offers:
'Tous pour chacun et chacun pour tous.'1 This schoolboy jingle, with
its echo of The Three Musketeers, and the bright colours of historical
romance, is more characteristic of Bakunin, with . his irrepressible
frivolity, his love of fantasy, and his lack of scruple in action and in
the use of words, than the picture of the dedicated liberator painted
by his followers and worshipped from afar by many a young revolutionary sent to Siberia or to death by the powe.- of his unbridled eloquence. In the finest and most uncritical manner of the eighteenth century, without examining (despite his Hegelian upbringing and his
notorious dialectical skill) whether they are compatible (or what they
signify), Bakunin lumps all the virtues together into one vast undifferentiated amalgam: justice, humanity, goodness; freedom, equality ('the liberty of each for the equality of all' is another of his empty
incantations), seience, reason, good sense, hatred of privilege and of
monopoly, hatred of oppression and exploitation, of stupidity and
poverty, of weakness, inequality, injustice, snobbery-all these are
represented as somehow forming one single, lucid, concrete ideal, for
which the means would be only too ready to hand if only men were
1 'Letter to the Committee of the Journal L'Egt�litl', Oeuf!f'ts, ed. J.
Guillaume, vol. S (Paris, I9I I), p. I S ·
I o6
HERZEN AND BAK U N I N ON LIBERTY
not too blind or too wicked to make use of them. Liberty will reign
i n 'a new heaven and a new earth, a new enchanting world in which