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 .
1 09
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
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.
1 1 0
H E R Z E N AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
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,
preached by the disciples of Hegel, of Feuerbach, of Fourier, of
Christian and neo-Christian social mystics, when utilitarians and
neo-medievalists, romantic pessimists and nihilists, peddlers of 'scientific' ethics and 'evolutionary' politics, and every brand of communist and anarchist, offered short-term remedies and long-term Utopiassocial, economic, theosophical, metaphysical- Herzen retained his incorruptible sense of reality. He realised that general and abstract
1 'By nature I am not a charlatan,' he said in his letter to the Tsar, 'but the
unnatural and unhappy predicament (for which, in point of fact, I was
myself responsible) sometimes made me a charlatan against my will.' V. A.
Polonsky (ed.), op. cit.(p. 109, note z above), vol. 1 (Moscow,,r 9z 3), p. I S9·
I l l
R U S S IAN TH I N K E R S
terms like 'liberty' o r 'equality', unless they were translated into
specific terms applicable to actual situations, were likely, at best,
merely to stir the poetical imagination and inspire men with generous
sentiments, at worst to j ustify stupidities or crimes. He saw-and in
his day it was a discovery of genius-that there was something absurd
i n the very asking of such general questions as 'What is the meaning
of life?' or 'What accounts f;r the fact that things in general happen
as they do?' or 'What is the goal or the pattern or the direction of
history?' He realised that such questions made sense only if they were
made specific, and that the answers depended on the specific ends of
specific human beings in specific situations. To ask always for 'ultimate' purposes was not to know what a purpose is; to ask for the ultimate goal of the singer in singing was to be interested in something
other than songs or music. For a man acted as he did each for the