with a clarity to which there is uo parallel. Any comforting theory
which attempted to collect, relate, 'synthesise', reveal hidden subst.rata and concealed inner connections, which, though not apparent to the naked eye, nevertheless guaranteed the unity of all things-the
fact that they were 'ultimately' parts one of another with no loose
ends-the ideal of the seamless whole-all such doctrines he exploded
contemptuously and without difficulty. His. genius lay in the perception of specific properties, the almost inexpressible individual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely different from all
others. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle;
that is, the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single
purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive
bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world. 1 Li�e all
1 B. M. Eikhenbaum, Uv Tokwy (Leningrad, 1918-6o), vol. 1, pp. 11 3-4.
1 Here the parado:r: appeara once more; for the 'inlinitesimals', whose
... s
THE H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
very penetrating, very imaginative, very dear-sighted analysts who
dissect or pulverise in order to reach the indestructible core, and justify
their own annihilating activities (from which they cannot abstain in
any case) by the belief that such a core exists, he continued to kill
his rivals' rickety constructions with cold contempt, as being unworthy
of intelligent men, always hoping that the desperately-sought-for
'real' unity would presently emerge from the destruction of the shams
and frauds- the knock-kneed army of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury philosophies of history. And the more obsessive the suspicion that perhaps the quest was vain, that no core and no unifying principle
would ever be discovered, the more ferocious the measures to drive
this thought away by increasingly merciless and ingenious executions
of more and more false claimants to the title of the truth. As Tolstoy
moved away from literature to polemical writing this tendency
became increasingly prominent: the irritated awareness at the back
of his mind that no final solution was ever, in principle, to be found.
caused Tolstoy to attack the bogus solutions all the more savagely
for the false comfort they offered-and_ for being an insult to the
intelligence.1 Tolstoy's purely intellectual genius for this kind of
lethal activity was very great and exceptional, and all his life he looked
for some edifice strong enough to resist his engines of destruction
and his mines and battering rams; he wished to be stopped by an
immovable obstacle. he wished his violent projectiles to be resisted
by impregnable fortifications. The eminent reasonableness and tentative methods of Professor Kareev. his mild academic remonstrance.
were altogether too unlike the final impenetrable. irreducible, solid
bed-rock of truth on which alone that secure interpretation of life
could be built which all his life he wished to find.
The thin. 'positive' doctrine of historical change in War and Ptact
is all that remains of this despairing search. and it is the immense
superiority of Tolstoy's offensive over his defensive weapons that
integration is the task of the ideal historian, must be reasonably uniform to
make this operation possible; yet the sense of 'reality' consists in the sense of
their unique dilferences.
1 In our day French existentialists for similar psychological reasons have
struck out against all explanations as such because they are a mere drug to
still serious questions, shortlived palliatives for wounds which are unbearable
but must be borne, above all not denied or 'explained'; for all explaining is
explaining away, and that is a denial of the given-the existent-the brute facts.
49
RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
has always made his philosophy of history-the theory of the minute
particles, requiring integration-seem so threadbare and anificial to
the average, reasonably critical, moderately sensitive reader of the
novel. Hence the tendency of most of those who have written about
War and Peace, both immediately on its appearance and in later years,
to maintain Akhsharumov's thesis 'that Tolstoy's genius lay in his
quality as a writer, a creator of a world more real than life itself; while
the theoretical disquisitions, even though Tolstoy himself may have
looked upon them as the most important ingredient in the book, in
fact threw no light either upon the character or the value of the work
itself, nor on the creative process by which it was achieved. This
anticipated the approach of those psychological critics who maintain
that the author himself often scarcely knows the sources of his own
activity: that the springs of his genius are invisible to him, the process
itselflargely unconscious, and his own oven purpose a mere rationalisation in his own mind of the true, but scarcely conscious, motives and methods involved in the act of creation, and consequently often a mere
hindrance to those dispassionate students of an and literature who are
engaged upon the 'scientific' -i.e. naturalistic-analysis of its origins
and evolution. Whatever we may think of the general validity of such
an outlook, it is something of a historical irony that Tolstoy should
have been treated in this fashion; for it is virtually his own way with
the academic historians at whom he mocks with such Voltairian irony.
And yet there is much poetic justice in it: for the unequal ratio of
critical to constructive elements in his own philosophising seems due
to the fact that his sense of reality (a reality which resides in individual
persons and their relationships alone) served to explode all the large
theories which ignored its findings, but proved insufficient by itself
to provide the basis of a more satisfactory general account of the facts.
And there is no evidence that Tolstoy himself ever conceived it possible
that this was the root of the 'duality', the failure to reconcile the two lives
lived by man.
The unresolved conflict between Tolstoy's belief that the attributes
of personal life alone were real and his doctrine that analysis of them
is insufficient to explain the course of history (i.e. the behaviour of
societies) is paralleled, at a profounder and more personal level, by
the conflict between, on the one hand, his own gifts both as a writer
and as a man and, on the other, his ideals-that which he sometimes
believed himself to be, and at all times profoundly believed in, and
wished to be.
so
THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX
If we may recall once again our division of artists into foxes and
hedgehogs: Tolstoy perceived reality in its multiplicity, as a collection
of separate entities round and into which he saw with a clarity and
penetration scarcely ever equalled, but he believed only in one vast,
unitary whole. No author who has ever lived has shown such powers
of insight into the variety of life-the differences, the contrasts, the
collisions of persons and things and situations, each apprehended in its
absolute uniqueness and conveyed with a degree of directness and a
precision of concrete imagery to be found in no other writer. No one
has ever excelled Tolstoy in expressing the specific flavour, the exact
quality of a feeling-the degree of its 'oscillation', the ebb and flow,
the minute movements (which Turgenev mocked as a mere trick on
his part) -the inner and outer texture and 'feel' of a look, a thought,
a pang of sentiment, no less than of a specific situation, of an entire
period, of the lives of individuals, families, communities, entire nations.
The celebrated life-likeness of every object and every person in his
world derives from this astonishing capacity of presenting every
ingredient of it in its fullest individual essence, in all its many dimensions, as it were; never as a mere datum, however vivid, within some stream of consciousness, with blurred edges, an outline, a shadow, an
impressionistic representation : nor yet calling for, and dependent on,
some process of reasoning in the mind of the reader; but always as a
solid object, seen simultaneously from near and far, in natural, unaltering daylight, from all possible angles of vision, set in an absolutely specific context in time and space-an event fully present to the senses
or the imagination in all its facets, with every nuance sharply and
firmly articulated.
Yet what he believed in was the opposite. He advocated a single
embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many
levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level-in War and
Peact, to the standard of the good man, the single, spontaneous, open
soul: as later to that of the peasants, or of a simple Christian ethic
divorced from any complex theology or metaphysic, some simple,
quasi-utilitarian criterion, whereby everything is interrelated directly,
and all the items can be assessed in terms of one another by some
simple measuring rod. Tolstoy's genius lies in a capacity for marvellously accurate reproduction of the irreproducible, the almost miraculous evocation of the full, untranslatable individuality of the individual, which induces in the reader an acute awareness of the
presence o.f the object itself, and not of a mere description of it,
5 1
RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S
employing for this purpose metaphors which fix the quality o f a
particular experience as such, and avoiding those general terms which
relate it to similar instances by ignoring individual differences-'the
oscillations of feeling'-in favour of what is common to them all. But
then this same writer pleads for, indeed preaches with great fury,
particularly in his last, religious phase, the exact opposite: the necessity
of expelling everything that does not submit to some very general, very
simple standard : say, what peasants like or dislike, or what the gospels
declare to be good.
This violent contradiction between the data of experience from
which he could not liberate himself, and which, of course, all his life
he knew alone to be real, and his deeply metaphysical belief in the
existence of a system to which they must belong, whether they appear
to do so or not, this conflict between instinctive j udgment and theoretical conviction-between his gifts and his opinions-mirrors the unresolved conflict between the reality of the moral life with its sense
of responsibility, joys, sorrows, sense of guilt and sense of achievement
-all of which is nevertheless illusion; and the laws which govern
everything, although we cannot know more than a negligible portion
of them-so that all scientists and historians who say that they do
know them and are guided by them are lying and deceiving- but which
nevertheless alone are real. Beside Tolstoy, Gogo! and Dostoevsky,
whose abnormality is so often contrasted with Tolstoy's 'sanity', are
well-integrated personalities, with a coherent outlook and a single
vision. Yet out of this violent conflict grew War and Peace: its
marvellous solidity should not blind us to the deep cleavage which
yawns open whenever Tolstoy remembers, or rather reminds himselffails to forget-what he is doing, and why.
I V
Theories are seldom born i n the void. And the question of the roots
of Tolstoy's vision of history is therefore a reasonable one. Everything
that Tolstoy writes on history has a stamp of his own original personality, a first-hand quality denied to most writers on abstract topics.
On these subjects he wrote as an amateur, not as a professional; but
let it be remembered that he belonged to the world of great affairs:
he was a member of the ruling class of his country and his time, and
knew and understood it completely; he lived in an environment
exceptionally crowded with theories and ideas, he examined a great
deal of material for W or and Peace (though, as several Russian scholars
52
THE H E D G E HOG AND THE FOX
have shown,1 not as much as is sometimes supposed), he travelled a
great deal, and met many notable public figures in Germany and
France.
That he read widely, and was influenced by what he read, cannot
be doubted. It is a commonplace that he owed a great deal to Rousseau,
and probably derived from him, as much as from Diderot and the
French Enlightenment, his analytic, anti-historical ways of approaching social problems, in particular the tendency to treat them in terms of timeless, logical, moral, and metaphysical categories, and not look
for their essence, as the German historical school advocated, in terms
of growth, and of response to a changing historical environment. He
remained an admirer of Rousseau, and late in life still recommended
Emile as the best book ever written on education.2 Rousseau must have
strengthened, if he did not actually originate, his growing tendency to
idealise the soil and its cultivatCJrs-the simple peasant, who for Tolstoy
is a repository of almost as rich a stock of'natural' virtues as Rousseau's
noble savage. Rousseau, too, must have reinforced the coarse-grained,
rough peasant in Tolstoy with his strongly moralistic, puritanical
strain, his suspicion of, and antipathy to, the rich, the powerful, the
happy as such, his streak of genuine vandalism, and occasional bursts
of blind, very Russian rage against western sophistication and refinement, and that adulation of 'virtue' and simple tastes, of the 'healthy'
moral life, the militant, anti-liberal barbarism, which is one of
Rousseau's specific contributions to the stock of Jacobin ideas. And
perhaps Rousseau influenced him also in setting so high a value upon
family life, and in his doctrine of superiority of the heart over the head,
of moral over intellectual or aesthetic virtues. This has been noted
before, and it is true and illuminating, but it does not account for
Tolstoy's theory of history, of which little trace can be found in the
profoundly unhistorical Rousseau. Indeed in so far as Rousseau seeks
to derive the right of some men to authority over others from a theory
of the transference of power in accordance with the Social Contract,
Tolstoy contemptuously refutes him.
We get somewhat nearer to the truth if we consider the influence
1 For example, both Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum in the works cited above
(p. 26, note 3, and p. 4-B, note 1 ).
1 'On n'a pas rendu justice l Rousseau . . . J'ai lu tout Rousseau, oui,
tous les vingt volumes, y compris le Dictionnairt tit musiyue. Je faisais mieux
que }'admirer; je lui rendais une culte v�ritable . . .' (see P· s6, note I below).
5 3
R U S SIAN T H I N K E R S
upon Tolstoy o f his romantic and conservative Slavophil contemporaries. He was close to some among them, particularly to Pogodin and Samarin, in the mid-6os when he was writing War and Ptatt,
and certainly shared their antagonism to the scientific theories of
history then fashionable, whether to the metaphysical positivism of
Comte and his followers, or the more materialistic views of Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, as well as those of Buckle and Mill and Herbert Spencer, and the general British empiricist tradition, tinged by French
and German scientific materialism, to which these very different
figures all, in their various fashions, belonged. The Slavophils (and
perhaps especially Tyutchev, whose poetry Tolstoy admired so deeply)
may have done something to discredit for him historical theories
modelled upon the natural sciences, which, for Tolstoy no less than
for Dostoevsky, failed to give a true account of what men did and
suffered. They were inadequate if only because they ignored man's
'inner' experience, treated him as a natural object played upon by
the same forces as all the other constituents of the material world, and
taking the French Encyclopedists at their word, tried to study social
behaviour as one might study a beehive or an ant-hill, and then
complained because the laws which they formulated failed to explain
the behaviour of living men and women. These romantic medievalists
may moreover have strengthened Tolstoy's natural anti-intellectualism
and anti-liberalism, and his deeply sceptical and pessimistic view of the
strength of non-rational motives in human behaviour, which at once
dominate human beings and deceive them about themselves-in short
that innate conservatism of outlook which very early made Tolstoy
deeply suspect to the radical Russian intelligentsia of the 50s and 6os,
and led them to think of him uneasily as being after all a count,
an officer and a reactionary, not one of themselves, not genuinely
enlightened or rlvolti at all, despite his boldest protests against the
political system, his heterodoxies, his destructive nihilism.
But although Tolstoy and the Slavophils may have fought a common
enemy, their positive views diverged sharply. The Slavophil doctrine
derived principally from German Idealism, in particular from Schelling's
view, despite much lip-service to Hegel and his interpreters, that true
knowledge could not be obtained by the use of reason, but only by a
kind of imaginative self-identification with the central principle of the
universe-the soul of the world, such as artists and thinkers have in
moments of divine inspiration. Some of the Slavophils identified this
with the revealed truths of the Orthodox religion and the mystical
54
T H E H E D G E H O G A N D T H E F O X
tradition of the Russian Church, and bequeathed i t to the Russian
symbolist poets and philosophers of a later generation. Tolstoy stood
at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient
empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this
knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the
truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and
nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are
inspired vehicles of the divine affiatus. There is a hard cutting edge
of common sense about everything that Tolstoy wrote which automatically puts to Right metaphysical fantasies and undisciplined tendencies towards esoteric experience, or the poetical or theological
interpretations of life, which lay at the heart of the Slavophil outlook,
and (as in the analogous case of the anti-industrial romanticism of the
west), determined both its hatred of politics and economics in the
ordinary sense, and its mystical nationalism. Moreover, the Slavophils
were worshippers of historical method as alone disclosing the true
nature- revealed only in its impalpable growth in time-of individual
institutions and abstract sciences alike. None of this could possibly
have found a sympathetic echo in the very tough-minded, very matterof-fact Tolstoy, especially the realistic Tolstoy of the middle years; if the peasant Platon Karataev has something in common with the
agrarian ethos of the Slavophil (and indeed pan-Slav) ideologistssimple rural wisdom as against the absurdities of the over-clever westyet Pierre Bezukhov in the early drafts of War and Ptau ends his life as a Decembrist and an exile in Siberia, and cannot be conceived
in all his spiritual wanderings as ultimately finding comfort in any
metaphysical system, still less in the bosom of the Orthodox, or any
other, established, Church. The Slavophils saw through the pretensions of western social and psychological science, and that was sympathetic to Tolstoy; but their positive doctrines interested him little. He was against unintelligible mysteries, against mists of antiquity, against
any kind of recourse to mumbo-jumbo: his hostile picture of the freemasons in War and Peace remained symptomatic of his attitude to the end. This can only have been reinfor-ced by his interest in the
writings of, and his visit in 1 861 to, the exiled Proudhon, whose
confused irrationalism, puritanism, hatred of authority and bourgeois
intellectuals, and general Rousseauis.m and violence of tone evidently
pleased him. It is more than possible that he took the title of his novel
from Proudhon's La Gutrrt tt Ia paix published in the same year.
If the classical German Idealists had had no direct effect upon
55
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
Tolstoy, there was at least one German philosopher for whom h e did
express admiration. And indeed it is not difficult to see why he found
Schopenhauer attractive: that solitary thinker drew a gloomy picture
of the impotent human will beating desperately against the rigidly
determined laws of the universe; he spoke of the vanity of all human
passions, the absurdity of rational systems, the universal failure to
understand the non-rational springs of action and feeling, the suffering
to which all flesh is subject, and the consequent desirability of reducing
human vulnerability by reducing man himself to the condition of the
utmost quietism, where, being passionless, he cannot be frustrated or
humiliated or wounded. This celebrated doctrine reflected Tolstoy's
later views-that man suffers much because he seeks too much, is
foolishly ambitious and grotesquely over-estimates his capacities; from
Schopenhauer, too, may come the bitter emphasis laid on the familiar
contrast of the illusion of free will with the reality of the iron laws
which govern the w:orld, in particular the account of the inevitable
suffering which this illusion, since it cannot be made to vanish, must
necessarily cause. This, for both Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, is the
central tragedy of human life; if only men would learn how little the
cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they
can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of
which is the history of the world; above all, what presumptuous nonsense it is to claim to perceive an order merely on the strength of believing desperately that an order must exist, when all one actually
perceives is meaningless chaos-a chaos of which the heightened form,
the microcosm in which the disorder of human life is reflected in an
intense degree, is war.
The best avowed of all Tolstoy's literary debts is, of course, that
to Stendhal. In his celebrated interview in 1 90 1 with Paul Boyer,1
Tolstoy coupled Stendhal and Rousseau as the two writers to whom
he owed most, and added that all he had learnt about war he had learnt
from Stendhal's description of the battle of Waterloo in La Chartrtuu
dt Parme, where Fabrice wanders about the battlefield 'understanding
nothing'. And he added that this conception-war 'without panacht' or
'embellishments' -of which his brother Nikolay had spoken to him,
he later had verified for himself during his own service in the Crimean
War. Nothing ever won so much praise from active soldiers as
Tolstoy's vigntttes of episodes in the war, his descriptions of how
1 See PaMI Boytr (r864-1949) d1tZ Tolitoi' (Pari!, 1950), p. 40.
s6
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
battles appear to those who are actually engaged in them. No doubt
Tolstoy was right in declaring that he owed much of this dry light to
Stendhal. But there is a figure behind Stendhal even drier, even more
destructive, from whom Stendhal may well, at least in part, have
derived his new method of interpreting social life, a celebrated writer
with whose works Tolstoy was certainly acquainted and to whom he
owed a deeper debt than is commonly supposed; for the striking
resemblance between their views can hardly be put down either to
accident, or to the mysterious operations of the Ztitgtist. This figure
was the famous Joseph de Maistre; and the full story of his in8uence
on Tolstoy, although it has been noted by students of Tolstoy, and by
at least one critic of Maistre,1 still largely remains to be written.
v
On I· November a 865, in the middle of writing /.Par and Ptau,
Tolstoy wrote down in his diary 'I am reading Maistre',1 and on 7
September 1 866 he wrote to the editor Bartenev, who acted as a kind
of general assistant to him, asking him to send the 'Maistre archive',
i.e. his letters and notes. There is every reason why Tolstoy should
have read this now relatively little read author. Count Joseph de
Maistre was a Savoyard royalist who had first made a name for
himself by writing anti-revolutionary tracts during the last years of
the eighteenth century. Although normally classified as an orthodox
Catholic reactionary writer, a pillar of the Bourbon Restoration and a
defender of the pre-revolutionary status quo, in particular of papal
authority, he was a great deal more than this. He held grimly unconventional and misanthropic views about the nature of individuals and societies, and wrote with a dry and ironical violence about the incurably savage and wicked nature of man, the inevitability of perpetual slaughter, the divinely instituted character of wars, and the overwhelming part played in hurpan affairs by the passion for self-immolation which, more than natural sociability or artificial agreements, creates
armies and civil societies alike; he emphasised the need for absolute
authority, punishment and continual repression if civilisation and
order were to survive at all. Both the content and the tone of his
1 See Adolfo Omodeo, u, rtazio,ario (Bari, 1939), p. 1 1 %, note %.
1 'Chitayu "Maistre" ', quoted by B. M. Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48,
note 1 above), vol. z, p. 309·
57
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
wnung are closer to Nietzsche, d'Annunzio, and the heralds of
modern fascism than to the respectable royalists of his own time, and
caused a stir in their own day both among the legitimists and in
Napoleonic France. In I 803 Maistre was sent by his master, the King
of Savoy, then living in exile in Rome as a victim of Napoleon and
soon forced to move to Sardinia, as his semi-official representative to
the Court of St Petersburg. Maistre, who possessed considerable social
charm as well as an acute sense of his environment, made a great
impression upon the society of the Russian capital as a polished
courtier, a wit and a shrewd political observer. He remained in St
Petersburg from I 803 to I 8 I 7, and his exquisitely written and often
uncannily penetrating and prophetic diplomatic dispatches and letters,
as well as his private correspondence and the various scattered notes
on Russia and her inhabitants, sent to his government as well as to his
friends and consultants among the Russian nobility, form a uniquely
valuable source of information about the life and opinions of the ruling
circles of the Russian Empire during and immediately after the
Napoleonic period.
He died in I 82 I , the author of several theologico-political essays,
but the definitive edition of his works, in particular of the celebrated
Soirees de Saint-Pitershourg, which in the form of Platonic dialogue
dealt with the nature and sanctions of human government and other
political and philosophical problems, as well as his Corrtspondance
diplomatique and his letters, was published in full only in the 50s and
early 6os by his son Rodolphe and by others. Maistre's open hatred
of Austria, his anti-Bonapartism, as well as the rising importance of
the Piedmontese kingdom before and after the Crimean War, naturally
increased interest in his personality and his thought at this date. Books
on him began to appear and excited a good deal of discussion in Russian
literary and historical circles. Tolstoy possessed the Soirees, as well as
Maistre's diplomatic correspondence and letters, and copies of them
were to be found in the library at Yasnaya Polyana. It is in any case
quite clear that Tolstoy used them extensively in War and Peact.1
Thus the celebrated description of Paulucci's intervention in the
debate of the Russian General Staff at Drissa is reproduced almost
verbatim from a letter by Maistre. Similarly Prince Vasily's conversation at Mme Scherer's reception with the 'homme de beaucoup de merite' about Kutuzov, is obviously based on a letter by Maistre, in
1 See Eikhenbaum, op. cit. (p. 48, note I above).
sa
THE H ED G E H O G AND THE FOX
which all the French phnses with which this conversation is sprinkled
are to be found. There is, moreover, a marginal note in one of
Tolstoy's early drafts, 'At Anna Pavlovna's J. Maistre', which refers
to the rarmte11r who tells the beautiful Helene and an admiring circle
of listeners the idiotic anecdote about the meeting of Napoleon with
the Due d'Enghien at supper with t�e celebrated actress MlleGeorges.
Again, old Prince Bolkonsky's habit of shifting his bed from one room
to another is probably taken from a story which Maistre tells about
the similar habit of Count Stroganov. Finally the name of Maistre
occurs in the novel itself, as being a01ong those who agree that it
would be embarrassing and senseless to capture the more eminent
princes and marshals of Napoleon's army, since this would merely
create diplomatic difficulties. Zhikharev, whose memoirs Tolstoy is
know11 to have used, met Maistre in 1 807, and described him in
glowing colours;1 something of the atmosphere to be found in these
memoirs enters into Tolstoy's description of the eminent �migr� in
Anna Pavlovna Scherer's drawing-room, with which War and Peau
opens, and his other references to fashionable Petersburg society at
this date. These echoes and parallels have been collated carefully by
Tolstoyan scholars, and leave no doubt about the extent of Tolstoy's
borrowing.
Among these parallels there are similarities of a more important
kind. Maistre explains that the victory of the legendary Horatius over
the Curiatii-like all victories in general -was due to the intangible
factor of morale, and Tolstoy similarly speaks of the supreme importance of this unknown quantity in determining the outcome of battlesthe impalpable 'spirit' of troops and their commanders. This emphasis on the imponderable and the incalculable is part and parcel of Maistre's
general irrationalism. More clearly and boldly than anyone before
him Maistre declared that the human intellect was bu� a feeble instrument when pitted against the power of natural forces; that rational explanations of human conduct seldom explained anything. He maintained that only the irrational, precisely because it defied explanation and could therefore not be undermined by the critical activities of reason, was
able to persist and be strong. And he gave as examples such irrational
institutions as hereditary monarchy and marriage, which �urvived
from age to age, while such rational institutions as dective monarchy,
1 S. P. Zhikharev, Z.pisli swrtmtflflila (Moscow, 1934-), vol. 2, pp. 1 1 2-
1 3.
59
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
o r 'free' personal relationships, swiftly and for no obvious 'reason'
collapsed wherever they were introduced. Maistre conceived of life
as a savage battle at all levels, between plants and animals no less than
individuals and nations, a battle from which no gain was expected,
but which originated in some primal, mysterious, sanguinary, selfimmolatory craving implanted by God. This instinct was far more powerful than the feeble efforts of rational men who tried to achieve
peace and happiness (which was, in any case, not the deepest desire of
the human heart-only of its caricature, the liberal intellect) by planning
the life of society without reckoning with the violent forces which
sooner or later would inevitably cause their puny structures to collapse
like so many houses of cards. Maistre regarded the battlefield as
typical of life in all its aspects, and derided the generals who thought
that they were in fact controlling the movements of their troops and
directing the course of the battle. He dedared that no one in the
actual heat of battle can begin to tell what is going on :
On parle beaucoup de batailles dans le monde sans savoir ce que
c'est; on est surtout assez sujet � les considerer comme des points,
tandis qu'elles couvrent deux ou trois lieues de pays: on vous dit
gravement: Comment ne savez-vous pas ce qui s'est passe dans ce
combat puisque vous y etiez? tandis que c'est precisement le contraire
qu'on polurait dire assez souvent. Celui qui est � Ia droite sait-il ce
qui se passe � Ia gauche? sait-il seulement ce qui se passe � deux pas
de lui? Je me represente aisement une de ces scenes epouvantables:
sur un vaste terrain couvert de tous les apprets du carnage, et qui
semble s'ebranler sous les pas des hommes et des chevaux; au milieu
du feu et des tourbillons de fumee; etourdi, transporte par le
retentissement des armes � feu et des instruments militaires, par des
voix qui commandent, qui hurlent ou qui s'eteignent; environne de
morts, de mourants, de cadavres mutiles; possede tour a tour par
Ia crainte, par !'esperance, par Ia rage, par cinq ou six ivresses
differentes, que devient l'homme? que voit-il? que sait-il au bout
de quelques heures? que peut-il sur lui et sur les autres? Parmi cette
foule de guerriers qui ont combattu tout le jour, il n'y en a souvent
pas un seul, et pas meme le general, qui sache ou est le vainqueur.
II ne tiendnit qu'a moi de vous citer des batailles modernes, des
batailles fameuses dont Ia memoire ne perira jamais, des batailles
qui ont change Ia face des affaires en Europe, et qui n'ont ete
perdues que parce que tel ou tel homme a cru qu'elles l'etaient; de
manil:re qu'en supposant toutes les circonstances egales, et pas une
goutte de sang de plus versee de part et d'autre, un autre general
6o
THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX
aurait fait chanter le Tt Dtum chez lui, et fore� l'histoire de dire
tout le contraire de ce qu'elle" dira.1
And later:
N'avons-nous pas fini m�me par voir perdre des batailles gagn�es?
. . . Je crois en general que les batailles ne se gagnent ni ne se
perdent point physiquement.1
A nd again, in a similar strain:
De m8me une armee de .f.O,OOO hommes est inf�rieure physiquement t une autre armee de 6o,ooo: mais si Ia premiere a plus de courage, d'experience et de discipline, elle pourra battre Ia seconde;
car elle a plus d'action avec moins de 1Ila.S$C, et c'est ce que nous
voyons t chaque page de l'histoire.3
And finally:
C'est }'opinion qui perd les batailles, et c'est !'opinion qui les
gagne.'
Victory is a moral or psychological, not a physical issue:
qu'est ce qu'une botailk perdue? . . . Cest une botaille qu'on croit
avDir ptrdut. Rien n'est plus vrai. Un homme qui se bat avec un
autre est vaincu lorsqu'il est tu� ou ter�. et que }'autre est debout;
il n'en est pas ainsi de deux arm�: l'une ne peut @tre tuee, tand.is
que }'autre reste en pied. Les forces se balancent ainsi que les mons,
et depuis surtout que }'invention de Ia poudre a mis plus d'�it�
dans les moyens de destruction, une bataille ne se perd plus mat�riellement; c'est-t-dire parce qu'il y a plus de morts d'un cOt� que de
)'autre: aussi Fr�d�ric II, qui s'y entendait un peu, disait: Yainrrt,
c'tst avanctr. Mais que} est celui qui avance? c'est celui dont Ia
conscience et Ia contenance font reculer l'autrc.6
There is and can be no military science, for 'C'est }'imagination qui
perd les bataill�',8 and 'peu de batailles sont perdues physiquement-
1 J. de Maistre, us Soirlts tk Silitrt-Pittrs6Durg {Paris, 196o), entretien 7,
P· :n8.
I ibid., P· 229.
1 ibid., pp. Z:Z.f.·S· The last sentence ia reproduced by Tolltoy almost
verbatim.
' ibid., p. z:z6.
1 ibid., pp. 226-7.
1 ibid., p. 227.
RU SSIAN TH INKERS
vous tirez, je tire • • . le viritable vainqueur, comme le viritable vainaa,
c'est celui qui croit l'etre'.1
This is the lesson which Tolstoy says he derives from Stendhal,
but the words of Prince Andrey about Austerlitz-'We lost because
we told ourselves we lost' -as well as the attribution of Russian victory
over Napoleon to the strength of the Russian desire to survive, echo
Maistre and not Stendhal.
This close parallelism between Maistre's and Tolstoy's views about
the chaos and uncontrollability of battles and wars, with its larger
implications for human life generally, together with the contempt of
both for the naive explanations provided by academic historians to
account for human violence and lust for war, was noted by the eminent
French historian Albert Sorel, in a little-known lecture to the Ecole
des Sciences Politiques delivered on 7 April 1 888.1 He drew a parallel
between Maistre and Tolstoy, and observed that although Maistre
was a theocrat, while Tolstoy was a 'nihilist', yet both regarded the
first causes of events as mysterious, involving the reduction of human
wills to nullity. 'The distance', wrote Sorel, 'from the theocrat to the
mystic, and from the mystic to the nihilist, is smaller than that from
the butterAy to the larva, from the larva to the chrysalis, from the
chrysalis to the butterAy.' Tolstoy resembles Maistre in being, above
all, curious about first causes, in asking such questions as Maistre's
'Expliquez pourquoi a qu'il y a de plus honorable dons le monde au
jugement de tout le genre lzumoin sons exception, est le droit de vmer
innocemment le song innocent.?',l in rejecting all rationalist or
naturalistic answers, in stressing impalpable psychological and 'spiritual'
-and sometimes 'zoological' -factors as determining events, and in
stressing these at the expense of statistical analyses of military strength,
very much like Maistre in his dispatches to his government at Cagliari.
• Letters, I4 September I8u.
2 Alben Sorel, 'Tolstol historien', Revue bkue 4I (January-June I888),
46o-79· This lecture, reprinted in Sorel's Lectures bisturiqru:s (Paris, I894), has
been unjustly neglected by students of Tolstoy; it does much to correct the views
of those (e.g. P. I. Biryukov and K. V. Pokrovskyin their works cited above [p. 15,
note I; p. 41, note z], not to mention later critics and literary historians who
almost all rely upon their authority) who omit all reference to Maistre. Emile
Haumant is almost unique among earlier scholars in ignoring secondary authorities, and discovering the truth for himself; see his Lil Culture frlmfllist en Rlmie (I700-I9oo) (Paris, I9Io), pp. 490-z.
J op. cit. (p. 6I, note I above), entretien 7, pp. Z l l-I J.
6:z
T H E HEDG E H O G AND T H E FOX
Indeed, Tolstoy's accounts of mass movements-in .battle, and in the
flight of the Russians from Moscow or of the French from Russiamight almost be designed to give concrete illustrations of Maistre's theory of the unplanned and unplannable character of all great events.
But the parallel runs deeper. The Savoyard Count and the Russian
are both reacting, and reacting violently, against liberal optimism
concerning human goodness, human reason, and the value or inevitability of material progress: both furiously denounce the notion that mankind can be made eternally happy and virtuous by rational and
scientific means.
The first great wave of optimistic rationalism which followed the
Wars of Religion broke against the violence of the great French
Revolution and the political despotism and social and economic misery
which ensued : in Russia a similar development was shattered by the
long succession of repressive measures taken by Nicholas I to counteract firstly the effect of the Decembrist revolt, and, nearly a quarter of a century later, the influence of the European revolutions of 1 848-9;
and to this must be added the material and moral effect, a decade later,
of the Crimean debacle. In both cases the emergence of naked force
killed a great deal of tender-minded idealism, and resulted in various
types of realism and toughness - among others, materialistic socialism,
authoritarian neo-feudalism, blood-and-iron nationalism and other
bitterly anti-liberal movements. In the case of both Maistre and
Tolstoy, for all their unbridgeably deep psychological, social, cultural,
and religious differences, the disillusionment took the form of an
acute scepticism about scientific method as such, distrust of all liberalism, positivism, rationalism, and of all the forms of high-minded secularism then influential in western Europe; and led to a deliberate
emphasis on the 'unpleasant' aspects of _human history, from which
sentimental romantics, humanist historians, and optimistic social
theorists seemed so resolutely to be averting their gaze.
Both Maistre and Tolstoy spoke of political reformers (in one
interesting instance, of the same individual representative of them, the
Russian statesman Speransky) in the same tone of bitterly contem�
tuous irony. Maistre was suspected of having had an actual hand in
Speransky's fall and exile; Tolstoy, through the eyes of Prince Andrey,
describes the pale face of Alexander's one-time favourite, his soft hands,
his fussy and self-important manner, the artificiality and emptiness of
his movements-as somehow indicative of the unreality of his person
and of his liberal activities-in a manner which Maistre could only
63
R U SSIAN TH I N K E R S
have applauded. Both speak of intellectuals with scorn and hostility.
Maistre regards them as being not merely grotesque casualties of the
historical process - hideous cautions created by Providence to scare
mankind into return to the ancient Roman faith-but as beings
dangerous to society, a pestilential sect of questioners and corrupters
of youth against whose corrosive activity all prudent rulers must take
measures. Tolstoy treats them with contempt rather than hatred, and
represents them as poor, misguided, feeble-witted creatures with
delusions of grandeur. Maistre sees them as a brood of social and
political locusts, as a canker at the heart of Christian civilisation which
is of all things the most sacred and will be preserved only by the heroic
efforts of the Pope and his Church. Tolstoy looks on them as clever
fools, spinners of empty subtleties, blind and deaf to the realities which
simpler hearts can grasp, and from time to time he lets fly at them
with the brutal violence of a grim, anarchical old peasant, avenging
himself, after years of silence, on the silly, chattering, town-bred
monkeys, so knowing, and full of words to explain everything, and
superior, and impotent and empty. Both dismiss any interpretation of
history which does not place at the heart of it the problem of the nature
of power, and both speak with disdain about rationalistic attempts to
explain it. Maistre amuses himself at the expense of the Encyclopedists- their clever superficialities, their neat but empty categoriesvery much in the manner adopt�d by Tolstoy towards their descendants a century later-the scientific sociologists and historians. Both profess
belief in the deep wisdom of the uncorrupted common people, although
Maistre's mordant obiter dicta about the hopeless barbarism, venality
and ignorance of the Russians cannot have been to Tolstoy's taste, if
indeed he ever read them.
Both Maistre and Tolstoy regard the western world as in some
sense 'rotting', as being in rapid decay. This was the doctrine which
the Roman Catholic counter-revolutionaries at the turn of the century
virtually invented, and it formed part of their view of the French
Revolution as a divine punishment visited upon those who strayed
from the Christian faith and in particular that of the Roman Church.
From France this denunciation of secularism was carried by many
devious routes, mainly by second-rate journalists and their academic
readers, to Germany and to Russia (to Russia both directly and via
German versions), where it found a ready soil among those who,
having themselves avoided the revolutionary upheavals, found it
flattering to their amour proprt to believe that they, at any rate, might
64
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
still be on the path to greater power and glory, while the west, destroyed
by the failure of its ancient faith, was fast disintegrating morally and
politically. No doubt Tolstoy derived this element in his outlook at
least as much from Slavophils and other Russian chauvinists as directly
from Maistre, but it is worth noting that this belief is exceptionally
powerful in both these dry and aristocratic observers, and governs
their oddly similar outlooks. Both were au fond unyieldingly pessimistic thinkers, whose ruthless destruction of current illusions frightened off their contemporaries even when they reluctantly conceded the truth of what was said. bespite the fact that Maistre was fanatically ultramontane and a supporter of established institutions,
while Tolstoy, unpolitical in his earlier work, gave no evidence of
radical sentiment, both were obscurely felt to be nihilistic-the humane
values of the nineteenth century fell to pieces under their fingers. Both
sought for some escape from their own inescapable and unanswerable
scepticism in some vast, impregnable truth which would protect them
from the effects of their own natural inclinations and temperament:
Maistre in the Church, Tolstoy in the uncorrupted human heart and
simple brotherly love-a state he could have known but seldom, an ideal
before the vision of which all his descriptive skill deserts him and usually
yields something inartistic, wooden and naive; painfully touching, painfully unconvincing, and conspicuously remote from his own experience.
Yet the analogy must not be overstressed : it is true that both
Maistre and Tolstoy attach the greatest possible importance to war
and conflict, b�t Maistre, like Proudhon after him,1 glorifies war, and
1 Tolstoy visited Proudhon in Brussels in 1 861, the year in which the
latter published a work which was called La Gu�rrt tlla paix, translated into
Russian three years later. On the basis of this fact Eikhenbaum tries to deduce
the influence of Proudhon upon Tolstoy's novel. Proudhon follows Maistre
in regarding the origins of wars as a dark and sacred mystery; and there is
much confused irrationalism, puritanism, love of paradox, and general
Rousseauism in all his work. But these qualities are widespread in radical
French thought, and it is difficult to find anything specifically Proudhonist
in Tolstoy's War and P�au, besides the title. The extent of Proudhon'a
general influence on all kinds of Russian intellectuals during this period was,
of course, very large; it would thus be just as easy, indeed easier, to construct
a case for regarding Dostoevsky- or Maxim Gorky-as a ProudAonisanl as to
look on Tolitoy as one; yet this would be no more than an idle exercise in
critical ingenuity; for the resemblances are vague and general, while the
differences are deeper, more numerous and more specific.
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
declares i t to b e mysterious and divine, while Tolstoy detests it and
regards it as in principle explicable if only we knew enough of the
many minute causes- the celebrated 'differential' of history. Maistre
believed in authority because it was an irrational force, he believed in
the need to submit, in the inevitability of crime and the supreme
importance of inquisitions and punishment. He regarded the executioner as the cornerstone of society, and it was not for nothing that Stendhal called him I 'ami du hourreau and Lamennais said of him
that there were only two realities for him-crime and punishment
'his works are as though written on the scaffold'. Maistre's vision of
the world is one of savage creatures tearing each other limb from
limb, killing for the sake of killing, with violence and blood, which
he sees as the normal condition of all animate life. Tolstoy is far from
such horror, crime, and sadism : 1 and he is not, pace Albert Sorel and
Vogue, in any sense a mystic: he has no fear of questioning anything,
and believes that some simple answer must exist-if only we did not
insist on tormenting ourselves with searching for it in strange and
remote places, when it lies all the time at our feet. Maistre supported
the principle of hierarchy and believed in a self-sacrificing aristocracy,
heroism, obedience, and the most rigid control of the masses by their
social and theological superiors. Accordingly, he advocated that
education in Russia be placed in the hands of the Jesuits; they would
at least inculcate into the barbarous Scythians the Latin language,
which was the sacred tongue of humanity if only because it embodied
the prejudices and superstitions of previous ages-beliefs which had
stood the test of history and experience-alone able to form a wall
strong enough to keep out the terrible acids of atheism, liberalism,
and freedom of thought. Above all he regarded natural science and
secular literature as dangerous commodities in the hands of those
not completely indoctrinated against them, a heady wine which
would dangerously excite, and in the end destroy, any society not
used to it.
Tolstoy all his life fought against open obscurantism and artificial
repression of the desire for knowledge; his harshest words were
directed against those Russian statesmen and publicists in the last
1 Yet Tolstoy, too, says that millions of men kill each other, knowing
that it is physically and morally evil, because it is 'necessary'; because in
doing so, men 'ful.6.lled . . . an elemental, zoological law'. This is pure
Maistre, and very remote from Stendhal or Rousseau.
66
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E F O X
quarter of the nineteenth century- Pobedonostsev and his friends and
minions-who practised precisely these maxims of the great Catholic
reactionary. The author of War and Ptace plainly hated the Jesuits,
and particularly detested their success in converting Russian ladies of
fashion during Alexander's reign-the final events in the life of Pierre's
worthless wife, Helene, might almost have been founded upon
Maistre's activities as a missionary to the aristocracy of St Petersburg:
indeed, there is every reason to think that the Jesuits were expelled
from Russia, and Maistre himself was virtually recalled, when his
interference was deemed too overt and too successful by the Emperor
himself.
Nothing, therefore, would have shocked and irritated Tolstoy so
much as to be told that he had a great deal in common with this
apostle of darkness, this defender of ignorance and serfdom. N evertheless, of all writers on social questions, Maistre's tone most nearly resembles that of Tolstoy. Both preserve the same sardonic, almost
cynical, disbelief in the improvement of society by rational means, by
the enactment of good laws or the propagation of scientific knowledge.
Both speak with the same angry irony of every fashionable explanation,
every social nostrum, particularly of the ordering and planning of
society in accordance with some man-made formula. In Maistre
openly, and in Tolstoy less obviously, there is a deeply sceptical attitude
towards all experts and all techniques, all high-minded professions of
secular faith and efforts at social improvement by well-meaning but,
alas, idealistic persons; there is the same distaste for anyone who deals
in ideas, who believes in abstract principles: and both are deeply
affected by Voltaire's temper, and bitterly reject his views. Both
ultimately appeal to some elemental source concealed in the souls of
men, Maistre even while denouncing Rousseau as a false prophet,
Tolstoy with his more ambiguous attitude towards him. Both above
all reject the concept of individual political liberty: of civil rights
guaranteed by some impersonal system of justice. Maistre, because he
regarded any desire for personal freedom-whether political or economic or social or cultural or religious-as wilful indiscipline and stupid insubordination, and supported tradition in its most darkly i!"rational
and repressive forms, because it alone provided the energy which gave
life, continuity, and safe anchorage to social institutions; Tolstoy
rejected political reform because he believed that ultimate regeneration
could come only from within, and that the inner life was only lived
truly in the untouched depths of the mass of the people.
67
R U SS IAN T H I N K E R S
V I
But there is a larger and more important parallel between Tolstoy's
interpretation of history and the ideas of Maistre, and it raises issues
of fundamental principle concerning knowledge of the past. One of
the most striking elements common to the thought of these dissimilar,
and indeed antagonistic, pmuurs, is their preoccupation with the
'inexorable' character-the 'march'-of events. Both Tolstoy and
Maistre think of what occurs as a thick, opaque, inextricably complex
web of events, objects, characteristics, connected and divided by
literally innumerable unidentifiable links-and gaps and sudden discontinuities too, visible and invisible. It is a view of reality which makes all clear, logical and scientific constructions- the well defined,
symmetrical patterns of human reason-seem smooth, thin, empty,
'abstract' and totally ineffective as means either of description or of
analysis of anything that lives, or has ever lived. Maistre attributes
this to the incurable impotence of human powers of observation and
of reasoning, at least when they function without the aid of the superhuman sources of knowledge-faith, revelation, tradition, above all the mystical vision of the great saints and doctors of the Church, their
unanalysable, special sense of reality to which natural science, free
criticism and the secular spirit are fatal. The wisest of the Greeks,
many among the great Romans, and after them the dominant ecclesiastics and statesmen of the Middle Ages, Maistre tells us, possessed this insight; from it flowed their power, their dignity and their success.
The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation :
hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts
and technicians-the Gratculus uuritns-the remote but unmistakable
ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian
Age-the terriblf' Eighteenth Century-all the lcrivasurit tt avocasstrit
- the miserable crew of scribblers and attorneys, with the predatory,
sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and selfdestructive, because blind and deaf to the true Word of God. Only the Church t:nderstands the 'inner' rhythms, the 'deeper' currents of
the world, the silent march of things; non in commotiont Dominus; not
in noisy democratic !llanifestos nor in the rattle of constitutional
formulas, nor in revolutionary violence, but in the eternal natural
order, governed by 'natural' law. Only those who understand it know
what can and what cannot be achieved, what should and what should
not be attempted. They and they alone hold the key to secular success
68
THE H ED G E H O G AND T H E FOX
as well as to spiritual salvation. Omniscience belongs only to God. But
only by immersing ourselves in His Word- His theological or metaphysical principles, embodied at their lowest in instincts and ancient superstitions which are but primitive ways, tested by time, of divining
and obeying His laws-whereas reasoning is an effort to substitute
one's own arbitrary rules-dare we hope for wisdom. Practical wisdom
is to a large degree knowledge of the inevitable: of what, given our
world order, could not but happen; and conversely, of how things
cannot be, or could not have been, done; of why some schemes must,
cannot help but, end in failure, although for this no demonstrative or
scientific reason can be given. The rare capacity for seeing this we
righdy call a 'sense of reality'-it is a sense of what fits with what, of
what cannot exist with what; and it goes by many names: insight,
wisdom, practical genius, a sense of the past, an understanding of life
and of human character.
Tolstoy's view is not very different; save that he gives as the reason
for the folly of our exaggerated claims to understand or determine
events not foolish or blasphemous efforts to do without special, i.e.
supernatural knowledge, but our ignorance of too many among the
vast number of interrelations-the minute determining causes of
events; if we began to know the causal network in its infinite variety,
we should cease to praise and blame, boast and regret, or look on
human beings as heroes or villains, but should submit with due
humility to unavoidable necessity. Yet to say no more than this is to
give a travesty of his beliefs. It is indeed Tolstoy's explicit doctrine in
War and Ptoct that all truth is in science-in the knowledge of material
causes-and that we consequently render ourselves ridiculous by
arriving at conclusions on too little evidence, comparing in this
regard unfavourably with peasants or savages who, being not so
very much more ignorant, at least make more modest claims; but
this is not the view of the world that, in fact, underlies either W or and
Ptoct or Anno Kormino or any other work which belongs to this
period of Tolstoy's life. Kutuzov is wise and not merely clever as, for
example, the time-serving Drubetskoy or Bilibin are clever, and he
is not a victim to abstract theories or dogma as the German military
experts are; he is unlike them, and is wiser than they-but this is so
not because he knows more facts than they and has at his finger tips
a greater number of the 'minute causes' of events than his advisers or
his adversaries-than Pfuel or Paulucci or Berthier or the King of
Naples. Karataev brings light to Pierre, whereas the Freemasons did
·'
69
RU SSIAN T H IN K E R S
not, but this i s so not because h e happens to have scientific information
superior to that possessed by the Moscow lodges; Levin goes through
an experience during his work in the fields, and Prince Andrey while
lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz, but in neither case
has there been a discovery of fresh facts or of new laws in any ordinary
sense. On the contrary, the greater one's accumulation of facts, the
more futile one's activity, the more hopeless one's failure-as shown by
the group of reformers who surround ·Alexander. They and men like
them are only saved from Faustian despair by stupidity (like the
Germans and the military experts and experts ge:1erally) or by vanity
(like Napoleon) or by frivolity (like Oblonsky) or by heartlessness (like
Karenin). What is it that Pierre, Prince Andrey, Levin discover? And
what are they searching for, and what is the centre and climax of the
spiritual crisis resolved by the experience that transforms their lives?
Not the chastening realisation of how little of the totality of facts
and laws known to Laplace's omniscient observer they- Pierre, Levin
and the rest-can claim to have discovered; not a simple admission of
Socratic ignorance. Still less does it consist in what is almost at the
opposite pole-in a new, a more precise awareness of the 'iron laws'
that govern our lives, in a vision of nature as a machine or a factory,
in the cosmology of the great materialists, Diderot or Lamettrie or
Cabanis, or of the mid-nineteenth century scientific writers idolised by
the 'nihilist' Bazarov in Turgenev's Fathers and Children; nor yet in
some transcendent sense of the inexpressible oneness of life to which
poets, mystics and metaphysicians have in all ages testified. Nevertheless, something is perceived ; there is a vision, or at least a glimpse, a moment of revelation which in some sense explains and reconciles, a
theodicy, a justification of what exists and happens, as well as its
elucidation. What does it consist in? Tolstoy does not tell us in so
many words: for when (in his later, explicitly dida<:tic works) he sets
out to do so, his doctrine is no longer the same. Yet no reader of
War and Peace can be wholly unaware of what he is being told. And
that not only in the Kutuzov or Karataev scenes, or other quasitheological or quasi-metaphysical passages- but even more, for example, in the narrative, non-philosophical section of the epilogue, in which
Pierre, Natasha, Nikolay Rostov, Princess Marie are shown anchored
in their new solid, sober lives with their established day to day routine.
We are here plainly intended to see that these 'heroes' of the novelthe 'good' people-have now, after the storms and agonies of ten years and more, achieved a kind of peace, based on some degree of under-
THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX
standing: understanding of what? Of the need to submit: to what! Not
simply to the will of God (not at any rate during the writing of the
great novels, in the J 86os or 7os) nor to the 'iron laws' of the sciences;
but to the permanent relationships of things,1 and the universal
texture of human life, wherein alone truth and justice are to be found
by a kind of 'natural'-somewhat Aristotelian-knowledge. To do this
is, above all, to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and
what they cannot. How can this be known? Not by a specific inquiry
and discovery, but by an awareness, n'Jt necessarily explicit or conscious,
of certain general characteristics of human life and experience. And the
most important and most pervasive of these is the crucial line that
divides the 'surface' from the 'depths' -on the one hand the world of
perceptible, describable, analysable data, both physical and psychological, both 'external' and 'inner', both public and private, with which the sciences can deal, although they have in some regions-those
outside physics-made so little progress; and, on the other hand, the
order which, as it were, 'contains' and determines the structure of
experience, the framework in which it-that is, we and all that we
experience-must be conceived as being set, that which enters into
our habits of thought, action, feeling, our emotions, hopes, wishes,
our ways of talking, believing, reacting, being. We-sentient creatures
-are in part living in a world the constituents of which we can discover,
classify and act upon by rational, scientific, deliberately planned
methods; but in part (Tolstoy and Maistre, and many thinkers with
them, say much the larger part) we are immersed and submerged in a
medium that, precisely to the degree to which we inevitably take it for
granted as part of ourselves, we do not and cannot observe as if from
the outside; cannot identify, measure and seek to manipulate; cannot
even be wholly aware of, inasmuch as it enters too intimately into all
our experience, is itself too closely interwoven with all that we are
and do to be lifted out of the flow (it is the flow) and observed with
scientific detachment, as an object. It-the medium in which we aredetermines our most pennanent categories, our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the
central and the peripheral, the subjective and the objective, of the
beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, preso:nt and
future, of one and many; hence neither these, nor any other explicitly
1 Alm01t in the senae in which tlW phrase is used by Montesquieu in the
opening sentence of De /'esprit des lois.
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
conceived categories o r concepts can b e applied to it-for it i s itself
but a vague name for the totality that includes these categories, these
concepts, the ultimate framework, the basic presuppositions wherewith we function. Nevertheless, though we cannot analyse the medium without some (impossible) vantage point outside it (for there is no
'outside'), yet some human beings are better aware-although they
cannot describe it-of the texture and direction of these 'submerged'
portions of their own and everyone else's lives; better aware of this
than others, who either ignore the existence of the all-pervasive
medium (the 'flow of life'), and are rightly called st�perficial; or else
try to apply to it instruments-scientific, metaphysical etc. -adapted
solely to objects above the surface, i.e. the relatively conscious,
manipulable portion of our experience, and so achieve absurdities in
their theories and humiliating failures in practice. Wisdom is ability
to allow for the (at least by us) unalterable medium in which we actas we allow for the pervasiveness, say, of time or space, which characterises all our experience; and to discount, less or more consciously, the
'inevitable trends', the 'imponderables', the 'way things are going'. It
is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours
of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity
for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor
which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated;
an ability to be guided by rules of thumb-the 'immemorial wisdom'
said to reside in peasants and o�her 'simple folk' -where rules of
science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic
orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live.
Sometimes Tolstoy does speak as if science could in principle, if not
in practice, penetrate and conquer everything; and if it did, then we
should know the causes of all there is, and know we were not free,
but wholly determined -which is all that the wisest can ever know.
So, too, Maistre talks as if the school men knew more than we, through
their superior techniques: but what they knew was still, in some sense,
'the -facts' : the subject-matter of the sciences; St Thomas knew
incomparably more than Newton, and with more precision and more
certainty, but what he knew was of the same kind. But despite this
lip-service to the truth-finding capacities of natural science or theology,
these avowals remain purely formal : and a very different belief finds
expression in the positive doctrines of both Maistre and Tolstoy.
Aquinas is praised by Maistre not for being a better mathematician
than d' Alembert or Monge; Kutuzov's virtue does not, according to
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
Tolstoy, consist in his being a better, more scientific theorist of war
than Pfuel or Paulucci. These great men are wiser, not more knowledgeable; it is not their deductive or inductive reasoning that makes them masters; their vision is 'profounder', they see something the
others fail to see; they see the way the world goes, what goes with
what, and what never will be brought together; they see what can be
and what cannot; how men live and to what ends, what they do and
suffer, and how and why they act, and should act, thus and not otherwise. This 'seeing' purveys, in a sense, no fresh information about the universe; it is an awareness of the interplay of the imponderable with
the ponderable, of the 'shape' of things in general or of a specific
situation, or of a particular character, which is precisely what cannot
be deduced from, or even formulated in terms of, the laws of nature
demanded by scientific determinism. Whatever can be subsumed under
such laws scientists can and do deal with; that needs no 'wisdom';
and to deny science its rights because of the existence of this superior
'wisdom' is a wanton invasion of scientific territory, and a confusion
of categories. Tolstoy, at least, does not go to the length of denying
the efficacy of physics in its own sphere; but he thinks this sphere
trivial in comparison with what is permanently out of the reach of
science-the social, moral, political, spiritual worlds, which cannot be
sorted out and described and predicted by any science, because the
proportion in them of 'submerged', uninspectable life is too high. The
insight that reveals the nature and structure of these worlds is not a
mere makeshift substitute, an empirical pis oller to which recourse is
had only so long as the relevant scientific techniques are insufficiently
refined; its business is altogether different: it does what no science
can claim to do; it distinguishes the real from the sham, the worth.!
while from the worthless, that which can be done or borne from
what cannot be; and does so without giving rational grounds for its
pronouncements, if only because 'rational' and 'irrational' are terms
that themselves acquire their meanings and uses in relation to-by
'growing out of' -it, and not vice versa. For what are the data of
such understanding if not the ultimate soil, the framework, the
atmosphere, the context, the medium (to use whatever metaphor is
most expressive) in which all our thoughts and acts are felt, valued,
judged, in the inevitable ways that they are? It is the ever present
sense of this framework-of this movement of events, or changing
pattern of characteristics-as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power (in the sense of 'power'
·'
73
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
i n which the progress of scientific knowledge has given u s power
over nature), that is at the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his
realism, his pessimism, and his (and Maistre's) contempt for the faith
placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense. It is
'there' -the framework, the foundation of everything-and the wise
man alone has a sense of it; Pierre gropes for it; Kutuzov feels it in
his bones; Karataev is at one with it. All Tolstoy's heroes attain to
at least intermittent glimpses of it-and this it is that makes all the
conventional explanations, the scientific, the historical, those of unreRective 'good sense', seem so hollow and, at their most pretentious, so shamefully false. Tolstoy himself, too, knows that the truth is
there, and not 'here' - not in the regions susceptible to observation,
discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time; but he has not, himself, seen it face to face; for
he has not, do what he might, a vision of the whole; he is not, he is
remote from being, a hedgehog; and what he sees is not the one, but,
always with an ever growing minuteness, in all its teeming individuality,
with an obsessive, inescapable, incorruptible, all-penetrating lucidity
which maddens him, the many.
V I I
We are part of a larger scheme o f things than w e ca n understand. We
cannot describe it in the way in which external objects or the characters
of other people can be described, by isolating them somewhat from the
historical 'Row' in which they have their being, and from the 'submerged', unfathomed, portions of themselves to which professional historians have, according to Tolstoy, paid so little heed; for we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it. For until and unless we do so (only
after much bitter suffering, if we are to trust Aeschylus and the Book
of Job), we shall protest and suffer in vain, and make sorry fools of
ourselves (as Napoleon did) into the bargain. This sense of the circumambient stream, defiance of whose nature through stupidity or overweening egotism will make our acts and thoughts self-defeating, is the vision of the unity of experience, the sense of history, the true
knowledge of reality, the belief in the incommunicable wisdom of
the sage (or the saint) which, mutatis mutandis, is common to Tolstoy
and Maistre. Their realism is of a similar sort: the natural enemy of
romanticism, sentimentalism and 'historicism' as much as of aggressive
THE H E D G E H O G AND THE FOX
'scientism'. Their purpose is not to distinguish the little that is known
or done from the limitless ocean of what, in principle, could or one
day would be known or done, whether by advance in the knowledge
of the natural sciences or of metaphysics or of the historical sciences,
or by a return to the past, or by some other method; what they seek
to establish are the eternal frontiers of our knowledge and power, to
demarcate them from what cannot in principle ever be known or
altered by men. According to Maistre our destiny lies in original sinin the fact that we are human- finite, fallible, vicious, vain-and that all our empirical knowledge (as opposed to the teachings of the Church)
is infected by error and monomania. According to Tolstoy all our
knowledge is necessarily empirical- there is no other-but it will never
conduct us to true understanding, but only to an accumulation of
arbitrarily abstracted bits and pieces of information; yet that seems to
him (as much as to any metaphysician of the Idealist school which he
despised) worthless beside, and unintelligible save in so far as it derives
from and points to, this inexpressible but very palpable kind of superior
understanding which alone is worth pursuing. Sometimes Tolstoy
comes near to saying what it is: the more we know, he tells us, about
a given human action, the more inevitable, determined it seems to us
to be; why?-because the more we know about all the relevant conditions and antecedents, the more difficult we find it to think away various circumstances, and conjecture what might have occurred
without them-and as we go on removing in our imagination what
we know to be true, fact by fact, this becomes not merely difficult
but impossible. Tolstoy's meaning is not obscure. We are what we
are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristicsphysical, psychological, social etc.- that it has; what we think, feel, do, is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible
alternatives, whether in the present or future or past. Our imagination
and ability to calculate, our power of conceiving, let us say, what
might have been, if the past had, in this or that particular, been otherwise, soon reaches its natural limits-limits created both by the weakness of our capacity for calculating alternatives- 'might have beens'and (we may add by a logical extension of Tolstoy's argument) even more by the fact that our thoughts, the terms in which they occur,
the symbols themselves, are what they are, are themselves determined
by the actual structure of our world. Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others: a world too different is (empirically) not con-
"
75
R U SSIAN T H I NK E R S
ccivable at all: some minds are more imaginative than others, but all
stop somewhere. The world is a system and a network: to conceive
of men as 'free' is to think of them as capable of having, at some
past juncture, acted in some fashion other than that in which they did
act; it is to think of what consequences would have come of such
unfulfilled possibilities and in what respects the world would have
been different, as a result, from the world as it now is. It is difficult
enough to do this in the case of artificial, purely deductive systems, as
for example in chess, where the permutations are finite in number,
and clear in type- having been arranged so by us, artificially-so that
the combinations are calculable. But if you apply this method to the
vague, rich texture of the real world, and try to work out the implications of this or that unrealised plan or unperformed action-the effect of it on the totality of later events-basing yourself on such knowledge
of causal laws, probabilities etc. as you have, you will find that the
greater the number of 'minute' causes you discriminate, the more
appalling becomes the task of 'deducing' any consequence of the
'unhinging' of each of these, one by one; for each of the consequences
affects the whole of the rest of the uncountable totality of events and
things; which unlike chess is not defined in terms of a finite, arbitrarily
chosen set of concepts and rules. And if, whether in real life or even
in chess, you begin to tamper with basic notions-continuity of space,
divisibility of time and the like-you will soon reach a stage in which
the symbols fail to function, your thoughts become confused and
paralysed. Consequendy the fuller our knowledge of facts and of their
connections the more difficult to conceive alternatives; the clearer
and more exact the terms-or the categories-in which we conceive
and describe the world, the more fixed our world structure, the less
'free' acts seem. To know dtese limits, both of imagination and,
ultimately, of thought itself, is to come &ce to face with the 'inexorable' unifying pattern of the world; to realise our identity with it, to submit to it, is to find truth and peace. This is not mere Oriental
fatalism, nor the mechanistic determinism of the celebrated German
materialists of the day, Buchner and Vogt, or Moleschott, admired
so deeply by the revolutionary 'nihilists' of Tolstoy's generation in
Russia; nor is it a yearning for mystical illumination or integration.
It is scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But
its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a m.>nistic vision of life
on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a
hedgehog.
T H E H E D G E HO G AND T H E FOX
This is remarkably close to Maistre's dogmatic affirmations: we
must achieve an attitude of assent to the demands of history which are
the voice of God speaking through His servants and His divine
institutions, not made by human hands and not destructible by them.
We must attune ourselves to the true word of God, the inner 'go' of
things; but what it is in concrete cases, how we are to conduct our
private lives or public policies-of that we are told little by either critic
of optimistic liberalism. Nor can we expect to be told. For the positive
vision escapes them. Tolstoy's language-and Maistre's r.o less-is
adapted to the opposite activity. It is in analysing, identifying sharply,
marking differences, isolating concrete examples, piercing to the heart
of each individual entity pn- u, that Tolstoy rises to the full height
of his genius; and similarly Maistre achieves his brilliant effects by
pinning down and offering for public pillory-by a montage sur
/'lpinglt-the absurdities committed by his opponents. They are acute
observers of the varieties of experience: every attempt to represent
these falsely, or to offer ddusive explanations of them, they detect
immediately and deride savagely. Yet they both know that the full
truth-the ultimate basis of the correlation of all the ingredients of
the universe with one another�the context in which alone anything
that they, or anyone else, can say can ever be true or false, trivial or
important-that resides in a synoptic vision which, because they do
not possess it, they cannot express. What is it that Pierre has learnt, of
which Princess Marie's marriage is an acceptance, that Prince Andrey
all his life pursued with such agony? Like Augustine, Tolstoy can
only say what it is not; His genius is devastatingly destructive. He can
only,attempt to point towards his goal by exposing the false signposts
to it; to isolate the truth by annihilating that which it is not-namely
all that can be said in the clear, analytical language that corresponds
to the all too clear, but necessarily limited, vision of the foxes. Like
Moses, he must halt at the borders of the Promised Land; without it
his journey is meaningless; but he cannot enter it; yet he knows that
it exists, and can tell us, as no one else has ever told us, all that it is
not-above all, ni.t anything that art, or science or civilisation or
rational criticism, can achieve. And so too Joseph de Maistre. He is
the Voltaire of reaction. Every new doctrine since the ages of faith is
tom to shreds with ferocious skill and malice. The pretenders are
exposed and struck down one by one; the armoury of weapons against
liberal and humanitarian doctrines is the most effective ever assembled.
But the throne remains vacant, the positive doctrine is too uncon-
77
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
vincing. Maistre sighs for the Dark Ages, but no sooner are plans
for the undoing of the French Revolution-a return to the status 'luo
antt'-suggested by his fellow emigres, than he denounces them as
childish nonsense-an attempt to behave as if what has occurred and
changed us all irretrievably had never been. To try to reverse the
Revolution, he wrote, was as if one had been invited to drain the
Lake of Geneva by bottling its waters in a wine cellar.
There is no kinship between him and those who really did believe
in the possibility of some kind of return-nco-medievalists from
Wackenroder and Gorres and Cobbett to G. K. Chesterton and
Slavophils and Distributists and pre-Raphaelites and other nostalgic
romantics; for he believed, as Tolstoy also did, in the exact opposite :
in the 'inexorable' power of the present moment : in our inability to do
away with the sum of conditions which cumulatively determine our
basic categories, an order which we can never fully describe or, otherwise than by some immediate awareness of it, come to know.
The quarrel between these rival types of knowledge-that which
results from methodical inquiry, and the more impalpable kind that
consists in the 'sense of reality', in 'wisdom' -is very old. And the
claims of both have generally been recognised to have some validity:
the bitterest clashes have been concerned with the precise line which
marks the frontier between their territories. Those who made large
claims for non-scientific knowledge have been accused by their
adversaries of irrationalism and obscurantism, of the deliberate rejection, in favour of the emotions or blind prejudice, of reliable public standards of ascertainable truth; and have, in their turn, charged their
opponents, the ambitious champions of science, with making absurd
claims, promising the impossible, issuing false prospectuses undertaking to explain history or the arts or the states of the individual soul (and to change them too) when quite plainly they do not begin to
understand what they are; when the results of their labours, even
when they are not nugatory, tend to take unpredicted, often catastrophic directions-and all' this because they will not, being vain and headstrong, admit that too many factors in too many situations are
always unknown, and not discoverable by the methods of natural
science. Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable,
not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world
whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each
context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically)
best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to dis-
78
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
tinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study
and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the
most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features
of our world, which, if anything, are over-familiar, so that their
'inexorable' pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly
noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an
object of study. This is the distinction that permeates the thought of
Pascal and Blake, Rousseau and Schelling, Goethe and Coleridge,
Chateaubriand and Carlyle; of all those who speak of the, reasons of
the heart, or of men's moral or spiritual nature, of sublimity and
depth, of the 'profounder' insight of poets and prophets, of special
kinds of understanding, of inwardly comprehending, or being at one
with, the world. To these latter thinkers both Tolstoy and Maistre
belong. Tolstoy blames everything on our ignorance of empirical
causes, and. Maistre on the abandonment of Thomist logic or the
theology of the Catholic Church. But these avowed professions are
belied by the tone and content of what in fact the two great critics
say. Both stress, over and over again, the contrast between the 'inner'
and the 'outer', the 'surface' which alone is lighted by the rays of
science and of reason, and the 'depths'-'the real life lived by men'.
For Maistre, as later for Barres, true knowledge- wisdom-lies in an
understanding of, and communion with, Ia terre et les morts (what
has this to do with Thomist logic?)- the great unalterable movement
created by the links between the dead and the living and the yet
unborn and the land on which they live; and it is this, perhaps, or
something akin to it, that, in their respective fashions, Burke and
Taine, and their many imitators, have attempted to convey. As for
Tolstoy, to him such mystical conservatism was peculiarly detestable,
since it seemed to him to evade the central question by merely restating
it, concealed in a cloud of pompous rhetoric, as the answer. Yet he,
too, in the end, presents us with the vision, dimly discerned by K utuzov
and by Pierre, of Russia in her vastness, and what she could and what
she could not do or suffer, and how and when-all of which Napoleon
and his advisers (who knew a great deal but not of what was relevant
to the issue) did not perceive; and so (although their knowledge of
history and science and minute causes was perhaps greater than
Kutuzov's or Pierre's) were led duly to their doom. Maistre's paeans
to the superior science of the great Christian soldiers of the past and
Tolstoy's lamentations about our scientific ignorance should not
mislead anyone as to the nature of what they are in fact defending:
79
R U S S I A N T H I N K E R S
awareness of the 'deep currents', the raisons de ctZur, which they did
not indeed themselves know by direct experience; but beside which,
they were convinced, the devices of science were but a snare and a
delusion.
Despite their deep dissimilarity and indeed violent opposition to
one another, Tolstoy's sceptical realism and Maistre's dogmatic
authoritarianism are blood brothers. For both spring from an agonised
belief in a single, serene vision, in which all problems are resolved, all
doubts stilled, peace and understanding finally achieved. Deprived of
this vision, they devoted all their formidable resollrces from their
very different, and indeed often incompatible, positions, to the elimination of all possible adversaries and critics of it. The faiths for whose mere abstract possibility they fought were not, indeed, identical. It is
the predicament in which they found themselves and that caused them
to dedicate their strength to the lifelong task of destruction, it is their
common enemies and the strong likeness between their temperaments
that make them odd but unmistakable allies in a war which they were
both conscious of fighting until their dying day.
V I I I
Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were-one the apostle of the gospel
that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims
of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering-they were united
by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both
by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto
differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world,
observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle
devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the
superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat,
however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a
condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons
of criticism, with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were overgenerously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from nonnal intellectual proces5es
to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps,
offering a path to peace and salvation. Maistre began as a moderate
liberal and ended by pulverising the new nineteenth-century world
from the solitary citadel of his own variety of ultramontane Catholicism.
8o
T H E H E D G E H O G AND T H E FOX
Tolstoy began with a view of human life and history which contradicted all his knowledge, all his gifts, all his inclinations, and which, in consequence, he could scarcely be said to have embraced in the sense
of practising it, either as a writer or as a man. From this, in his old
age, he passed into a form of life in which he tried to resolve the
glaring contradiction between what he believed about men and events,
and what he thought he believed, or ought to believe, by behaving, in
the end, as if factual questions of this kind were not the fundamental
issues at all, only the trivial preoccupations of an idle, ill-conducted
life, while the real questions were quite different. But it was of no
use: the Muse cannot be cheated. Tolstoy was the least superficial
of men : he could not swim with the tide without being drawn
irresistibly beneath the surface to investigate the darker depths below;
and he could not avoid seeing what he saw and doubting even that;
he could close his eyes but not forget that he was doing so; his
appalling, destructive, sense of what was false frustrated this final
effort at self-deception as it ciid all the earlier ones; and he died in
agony, oppressed by the burden of his intellectual infallibility and
his sense of perpetual moral error, the greatest of those who can
neither reconcile, nor leave unreconciled, the conflict of what there
is with what there ought to be. Tolstoy's sense of reality was until
the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which
he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect
shivered the world, and he dedicated all of his vast strength of mind
and will to the lifelong denial of this fact. At once insanely proud
and filled with self-hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold
and violently passionate, contemptuous and self-abasing, tormented
and detached, surrounded by an adoring family, by devoted followers,
by the admiration of the entire civilised world, and yet almost wholly
isolated, he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old
man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.
Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty
'Human life is a great social duty,' (said Louis Blanc]:
'man must constantly sacrifice himself for society.'
'Why?' I asked suddenly.
'How do you mean "Why?"- but surely the whole
purpose and mission of man is the well-being of society?'
'But it will never be attained if everyone makes sacrifices
and nobody enjoys himself.'
'You are playing with words.'
'The muddle-headedness of a barbarian,' I replied,
laughing. Alexander Herzen, 'My Past and Thoughts'1
Since the age of thirteen . . . I have served one idea,
marched under one banner-war against all imposed
authority-against every kind of deprivation of freedom,
in the name of the absolute independence of the individual.
I should like to go on with my little guerilla war-like a
real Cossack-11:sj tigtflt F1111s1-as the Germans say.
Aleunder Herzen, letter to Mazzini1
OF all the Russian revolutionary writers of the nineteenth century,
Herzen and Bakunin remain the most arresting. They were divided
by many differences both of doctrine and of temperament, but they
were at one in placing the ideal of individual liberty at the centre of
their thought and action. Both dedicated their lives to rebellion against
every form of oppression, social and political, public and private, open
and concealed; but the very multiplicity of their gifts has tended to
obscure the relative value of their ideas on this crucial topic.
Bakunin was a gifted journalist, whereas Herzen was a writer of
1 So6r1111it so(Aiuflii 11 1rid1J111i lomdA (Co/JtmJ Wri1i11gs ;, TAirty
l'olumtr) (Moacow, 1 954-65; inde:r:es 1966), val. XI, p. 48. All subsequent
references to Herzen's works are to this edition, by volume and page, thus:
XI 48.
1 To G. Mazzini, 13 September 1 850.
8:1
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
8+
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
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
bought at the cost of the torture of one innocent child; but the
87
R U SS IAN T H I NK E R S
arguments which Herzen employed i n defence of his pOsition, and
the description of the enemy whom he picked out for pillory and
destruction, were set forth in language which both in tone and substance had little in common with either the theological or the liberal eloquence of his age.
As an acute and prophetic observer of his times he is comparable,
perhaps, to Marx and Tocqueville; as a moralist he is more interesting
and original than either.
I I I
Man, it is commonly asserted, desires liberty. Moreover, human beings
are said to have rights, in virtue of which they claim a certain degree
of freedom of action. These formulas taken by themselves strike
Herzen as hollow. They must be given some concrete meaning, but
even then-if they are taken as hypotheses about what people actually
believe- they are untrue; not borne out by history; for the masses have
seldom desired freedom :
The masses want to stay the hand which impudently snatches from
them the bread which they have earned . . . They are indifferent
to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority.
They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are
offended by those who stand alone. By equality they understand
equality of oppression . . . they want a social government to rule
for their benefit, and not, like the present one, against it. But to
govern themselves doesn't enter their heads.1
On this topic there has been altogether too much 'romanticism for the
heart' and 'idealism for the mind'2- too much craving for verbal
magic, too much desire to substitute words for things. With the result
that bloody struggles have been fought and many innocent human
beings slaughtered and the most horrible crimes condoned in the name
of empty abstractions:
There is no nation in the world . . . which has shed so much blood
for freedom as the French, and there is no people which understands it less, seeks to realise it less . . . on the streets, in the courts, in their homes . . . The French are the most abstract and religious
people in the world; the fanaticism of ideas with them goes hand in
hand with lack of respect for persons, with contempt for their
1 'From the Other Shore': VI 1 24-.
I ibid.: VI 1 2].
88
H E R Z E N AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
neighbours-the French turn everything into an idol, and then woe
to him who does not bow the knee to the idol of the day. Frenchmen fight like heroes for freedom and without a thought drag you to jail if you don't agree with their opinions . . . The despotic sa/us
populi and the bloody and inquisitorial pereat mundus et fiat justitia
are engraved equally in the consciousness of royalists and democrats
. . . read George Sand, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Micheret, you will meet everywhere Christianity and romanticism adapted to our own morality; everywhere dualism, abstraction, abstract
duty, enforced virtues and official and rhetorical morality without
any relation to real life.1
Ultimately, Herzen goes on to say, this is heartless frivolity, the
sacrifice of human beings to mere words which inRame the passions,
and which, upon being pressed for their meaning, turn out to refer
to nothing, a kind of political gaminerie which 'excited and fascinated
Europe', but also plunged it into inhuman and unnecessary slaughter.
'Dualism' is for Herzen a confusion of words with facts, the construction of theories employing abstract terms which are not founded in discovered real needs, of political programmes deduced from abstract
principles unrelated to real situations. These formulas grow into
terrible weapons in the hands of fanatical doctrinaires who seek to
bind them upon human beings, if need be, by violent vivisection, for
the sake of some absolute ideal, for which the sanction lies in some
uncriticised and uncriticisable vision- metaphysical, religious, aesthetic,
at any rate, unconcerned with the actual needs of actual persons -in
the name of which the revolutionary leaders kill and torture with a
quiet conscience, because they know that this and this alone is- must
be-the solution to all social and political and personal ills. And he
develops this thesis along lines made familiar to us by Tocqueville
and other critics of democracy, by pointing out that the masses detest
talent, wish everyone to think as they do, and are bitterly suspicious
of independence of thought and conduct:
The submission of the individual to society-to the people-to
humanity- to the idea-is a continuation of human sacrifice . . . the
crucifixion of the innocent for the guilty . . . The individual who
is the true, real monad of society, has always been sacrificed to some
general concept, some collective noun, some banner or other. What
the purpose of . . . the sacrifice was . . . was never so much as asked. 2
1 'Letters from France and Italy', tenth letter: V l7 s-6.
I 'From the Other Shore': VI u s-6.
89
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
Since these abstractions-history, progress, the safety of the people,
social equality-have all been cruel altars upon which innocents have
been offered up without a qualm, they are deserving of notice. Herzen
examines them in turn.
If history has an inexorable direction, a rational structure, and a
purpose (perhaps a beneficial one), we must adjust ourselves to it or
perish. But what is this rational purpose? Herzen cannot discern it;
he sees no sense in history, only the story of 'hereditary, chronic
madness':
It seems unnecessary to cite examples, there are millions of them.
Open any history you like and what is striking . . . is that instead
of real interests everything is governed by imaginary interests,
fantasies. Look at the kind of causes in which blood is shed, in
which people bear extreme sufferings; look at what is praised and
what is blamed, and you will be convinced of a truth which at first
seems sad-of a truth which on second thoughts is full of comfort,
that all this is the result of a deranged intellect. Wherever you look
in the ancient world, you will find madness almost as widespread
as it is in our own. Here is Curti us throwing himself into a pit to
save the city. There a father is sacrificing his daughter to obtain a
fair wind, and he has found an old idiot to slaughter the poor girl
for him, and this lunatic has not been locked up, has not been taken
to a madhouse, but has been recognised as the high priest. Here
the King of Persia orders the sea to be flogged, and understands the
absurdity of his act as little as his enemies the Athenians, who
wanted to cure the intellect and the understanding of human
beings with hemlock. What frightful fever was it that made the
emperors persecute Christianity? . . .
And after the Christians were torn and tortured by wild beasts,
they themselves, in their turn, began to persecute and torture
one another more furiously than they themselves had been persecuted. How many innocent Germans and Frenchmen perished just so, for no reason at all, while their demented judges thought
they were merely doing their duty, and slept peacefully not many.
steps from the place where the heretics were being roasted to death.1
'History is the autobiography of a madman.'1 This might have been
written with equal bitterness by Voltaire and by Tolstoy. The purpose
of history? We do not make history and are not responsible for it. If
1 'Doctor Krupov': IV z63-4.
--1-i'61d.:
-
IV z64.
90
H E RZEN AND BAKUN I N ON LIBERTY
history is a tale told by an idiot. it is certainly criminal to justify the
oppression and cruelty. the imposition of one's arbitrary will upon
many thousands of human beings, in the name of hollow abstractionsthe 'demands' of' history' or of'historical destiny'. of'national security'.
of 'the logic of the facts'. 'Salus populi suprema lex. pereat mundus et
fiat justitia have about them a strong smell of burnt bodies, blood,
inquisition. torture, and generally of"the triumph of order". '1 Abstractions. apart from their evil consequences, are a mere attempt to evade facts which do not fit into our preconceived schema.
A man looks at something freely only when he does not bend it to
his theory, and does not himself bend before it; reverence before it,
not free but enforced, limits a man, narrows his freedom; something in talking of which one is not allowed to smile without blasphemy . . . is a fetish, a man is crushed by it, he is frightened of
confounding it with ordinary life.1
It becomes an icon, an object of blind, uncomprehending woBhip, and
so a mystery justifying excessive crimes. And in the same vein:
The world will not know liberty until all that is religious.
political, is transformed into something simple "'nd human, is made
susceptible to criticism and denial. Logic when it comes of age
detests canonised truths . . . it thinks nothing sacrosanct, and if
the republic arrogates to itself the same rights as the monarchy, it
will despise it as much, nay, more . . . It is not enough to despise
the crown-one must not be filled with awe before the Phrygian
Cap; it is not enough not to consider lhe·majestl a crime: one must
look on sa/us populi as being one. a
And he adds that patriotism-to sacrifice oneself for one's country-is
doubtless noble; but it is better still if one survives together with one's
country. So much for 'history'. Human beings 'will be cured of [such]
idealism as they have been of other historical diseases-chivalry,
Catholicism, Protestantism'."
1 'From the Other Shore': VI 140.
t 'Letters from France and Italy', lifth letter: V 89. See also the remarkable
analysis of the universal desire to evade intellectual respJnsibility by the
creation of idols and the transgression of the Second Commandment in 'New
Variations on Old Themes' (II 86-102), which originally appeared in
SOPrement�il.
a 'From the Other Shore': VI 46.
" ibid.: VI 3 5·
RU SSIAN TH INKERS
Then there are those who speak of 'progress', and are prepared to
sacrifice the present to the future, to make men suffer today in order
that their remote descendants might be happy; and condone brutal
crimes and the degradation of human beings, because these are the
indispensable means toward some guaranteed future felicity. For this
attitude-shared equally by reactionary Hegelians and revolutionary
communists, speculative utilitarians and ultramontane zealots, and
indeed all who justify repellent means in the name of noble, but distant,
ends- Herzen reserves his most violent contempt and ridicule. To it
he devotes the best pages of From the Other Shore-his political
profession de foi, written as a lament for the broken illusions of
1 8 ... 8.
If progress is the goal, for whom are we working? Who is this
Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding
them, draws back; and as a consolation to the exhausted and
doomed multitudes, shouting 'morituri te salutant', can only give
the . . . mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful
on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive
today to the sad role of caryatids supporting a floor for others some
day to dance on . . . or of wretched galley slaves who, up to their
knees in mud, drag a barge . . . with the humble words 'progress
in the future' upon its flag? . . . a goal which is infinitely remote is
no goal, only . . . a deception; a goal must be closer-at the very
least the labourer's wage, or pleasure in work performed. Each
epoch, each generation, each life has had, has, its own fullness; and
m route new demands grow, new experiences, new methods . . .
The end of each generation is itself. Not only does Nature never
make one generation the means for the attainment of some future
goal, but she doesn't concern herself with the future at all; like
Cleopatra, she is ready to dissolve the pearl in wine for a moment's
pleasure • . . 1
. . . If humanity marched straight towards some result, there
would be no history, only logic . . . reason develops slowly, painfully,
it does not exist in nature, nor outside natu:-e . . . one has to arrange
life with it as best one can, because there is no libretto. If history
followed a set libretto it would lose all interest, become unnecessary,
boring, ludicrous . . . great men would be so many heroes strutting
on a stage • • • History is all improvisation, all will, all extemporethere are no frontiers, no itineraries. Predicaments occur; sacred discontent; the fire of life; and the endless challenge to the fighters
1 ibid.: VI H-S·
HERZEN AND B A K U N I N ON L I B E RTY
to try their strength, to go where they will, where there is a road;
and where there is none, genius will blast a path.1
Herz.en goes on to say that processes in history or nature may repeat
themselves for millions of years; or·stop suddenly; the tail of a comet
may touch our planet and extinguish all life upon it; and this would
be the finale of history. But nothing follows from this, it carries no
moral with it. There is no guarantee that things will happen in one
way rather than another. The death of a single human being is no
less absurd and unintelligible than the death of the entire human race;
it is a mystery that we accept, and with which there is no need to
frighten children.
Nature is not a smooth, teleological development, certainly not a
development designed for human happiness or the fulfilment of social
justice. Nature is for Herz.en a mass of potentialities which develop in
accordance with no intelligible plan. Some develop, some perish; in
favourable conditions they may be realised, but they may deviate,
collapse, die. This leads some men to cynicism and despair. Is human
life an endless cycle of growth and recession, achievement and collapse?
Is there no purpose in it all? Is human effort bound to end in ruin, to
be followed by a new beginning as foredoomed to failure as its predecessors? This is a misunderstanding of reality. Why should nature be conceived as a utilitarian instrument designed for man's progress
or happiness? Why should utility-the fulfilment of purposes-be
demanded of the infinitely rich, infinitely generous cosmic process?
Is there not a profound vulgarity in asking of what use its marvellous
colour, its exquisite scent is to the plant, or what its purpose can be
when it is doomed to perish so soon? Nature is infinitely and recklessly
fertile-'she goes . to extreme limits . . . until she reaches the outer
frontier of all possible development-death -which cools her ardour
and checks the excess of her poetic fancy, her unbridled creative
passion.'2 Why should nature be expected to follow our dreary categories? What right have we to insist that history is meaningless unless it obeys the patterns we impose upon it, pursues our goals, our transient,
pedestrian ideals? History is an improvisation, it ' "simultaneously
knocks upon a thousand doors, . . . doors which may open . . . who
knows?" "Baltic ones, perhaps-and then Russia will pour over
Europe?" "Possibly." '3 Everything in nature, in history, is what it is,
and its own end. The present is its own fulfilment, it does not exist
1 ibid.: VI 36.
I ibid.: VI 31·
1 ibid.: V I 3z.
93
R U SS IAN TH INKERS
for the sake of some unknown future. If everything existed for the
sake of something else, every fact, event, creature would be a means
to something beyond itself in some cosmic plan. Or are we only
puppets, pulled by invisible strings, victims of mysterious forces in a
cosmic libretto? Is this what we mean by moral freedom? Is the
culmination of a process eo ipso its purpose? Is old age the purpose of
youth, merely because this is the order of human growth? Is the
purpose of life death?
Why does a singer sing? Merely in order that, when he has stopped
singing, his song might be �emembered, so that �he pleasure that his
song has given may awaken a longing for that which cannot be
recovered? No. This is a false and purblind and shallow view of life.
The purpose of the singer is the song. And the purpose of life is to
live it.
Everything passes, but what passes may reward the pilgrim for his
sufferings. Gt'ethe has told us that there is no insurance, no security,
man must be content with the present; but he is not; he rejects beauty
and fulfilment because he must own the future too. This is Herz.en's
answer to all those who like Mazzini or Kossuth, or the socialists
or the communists, called for supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the
sake of civilisation, or equality, or justice, or humanity, if not in the
present, then in the future. But this is 'idealism', metaphysical
'dualism', secular eschatology. The purpose oflife is itself, the purpose
of the struggle for liberty is the liberty here, today, ofliving individuals,
each with his own individual ends, for the sake of which they move
and fight and suffer, ends which are sacred to them; to crush their
freedom, stop their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some
ineffable felicity of the future, is blind, because that future is always
too uncertain, and vicious, because it outrages the only moral values
we know, tramples on real human lives and needs, and in the name
of what? Of freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,
mystical sounds, abstractions. Why is personal liberty worth pursuing?
Only for what it is in itself, because it is what it is, not because the
majority desires freedom. Men in general do not seek freedom, despite
Rousseau's celebrated exclamation that they are born free; that,
remarks Herz.en (echoing Joseph de Maistre),is as if you were to say
' Fish were born to fty, yet everywhere they swim.'1 lchthyophils may
seek to prove that fish are 'by nature' made to fty; but they are not.
1 ibid.: VI 94·
H E RZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LI BERTY
And most people do not like liberators; they would rather continue
in the ancient ruts, and bear the ancient yokes, than take the immense
risks of building a new life. They prefer (Herzen repeats again and
again) even the hideous cost of the present, muttering that modern
life is at any rate better than feudalism and barbarism. 'The people'
do not desire liberty, only civilised individuals do; for the desire for
freedom is bound up with civilisation. The value of freedom, like
that of civilisation or education-none of which is 'natural' or obtainable without great effort-consists in the fact that without it the individual personality cannot realise all its potentialities-cannot live,
act, enjoy, create in the illimitable fashions which every moment of
history affords, and which differ in unfathomable ways from every
other moment of history, and are wholly incommensurable with them.
Man 'wants to be neither a passive grave-digger of the past, nor the
unconscious midwife of the future'.1 He wants to live in his own day.
His morality cannot be derived from the laws of history (which do
not exist) nor from the objective goals of human progress (there are
none such -they change with changing circumstances and persons).
Moral ends are what people want for their own sake. 'The truly free
man creates his own morality.'2
This denunciation of general moral rules- without a trace of
Byronic or Nietzschean hyperbole-is a doctrine not heard often in
the nineteenth century; indeed, in its full extent, not until well into
our own. It hits both right and left: against the romantic historians,
against Hegel, and to some degree against Kant; against utilitarians
and against supermen; against Tolstoy, and against the religion of
art, against 'scientific' ethics, and all the churches; it is empirical
and naturalistic, recognises absolute values as well as change, and is
overawed neither by evolution nor socialism. And it is original to an
arresting degree.
If existing political parties are to be condemned, it is not, Herzen
declares, because they do not satisfy the wishes of the majority, for
the majority, in any case, prefer slavery to freedom, and the liberation
of those who inwardly still remain slaves always leads to barbarism
and anarchy: 'to dismantle the Bastille stone by stone will not of
itself make free men out of the prisoners'.3 'The fatal error [of the
1 'Letter on the Freedom of the Will' (to his son Alexander): XX 4-37-B.
z 'From the Other Shore': VI I 3 I .
3 ibid.: VI :z9.
95
RU SSIAN T H I N K E R S
French radicals i n 1 848] is . • . to have tried to free others before they
were themselves liberated . . . They want, without altering the walls
[of the prison], to give them a new function, as if a plan for a jail
could be used for a free existence.'1 Economic justice is certainly not
enough : and this is ignored, to their own doom, by the socialist 'sects'.
As for democracy, it can well be a 'razor' with which an immature
people-like France with its universal suffrage in 1 848-nearly cut its
own throat;2 to try to remedy this by a dictatorship ('Petrograndism')
leads to even more violent suppression. Gracchus Babeuf, who was
disappointed by the results of the French Revolution, proclaimed the
religion of equality-'the equality of penal servitude'.3 As for the
communists of our own day, what is it they offer us? The 'forced
labour of communism' of Cabet? The 'organisation of labour in
ancient Egypt a Ia Louis Blanc'?' The neatly laid out little phalansteries of Fourier, in which a free man cannot breathe-in which one side of life is permanently repressed for the benefit of others?& Communism is merely a levelling movement, the despotism of frenzied mobs, of Committees of Public Safety invoking the security of the
people-always a monstrous slogan, as vile as the enemy they seek to
overthrow. Barbarism is abominable whichever side it comes from:
'Who will finish us off, put an end to it all? The senile barbarism of
the sceptre or the wild barbarism of communism? A blood-stained
sabre or the red Rag?'8 It is true that liberals are feeble, unrealistic,
and cowardly, and have no undetstanding of the needs of the poor
and the weak, of the new proletarian class which is rising; it is true
that the conservatives have shown themselves brutal, stupid, mean,
and despotic-although let it be remembered that priests and landowners are usually closer to the masses and understand their needs better than liberal intellectuals, even if their own intentions are less
benevolent or honest. It is true that Slavophils are mere escapists,
defenders of an empty throne, condoning a bad present in the name
of an imaginary past. These men follow brutal and selfish instincts,
or empty formulas. But the unbridled democracy of the present is no
1 ibid.: VI s • .
2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 584.
3 ibid.: XX 578.
4 'From the Other Shore': VI 472.
& 'To an Old Comrade': XX 578.
1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 1 .
H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
better, and can suppress men and their liberties even more brutally
than the odious and sordid government of Napoleon III.
What do the masses care for 'us'? The masses can hurl in the teeth
of the European ruling class, 'We were hungry and you gave us chatter,
we were naked and you sent us beyond our frontiers to kill other
hungry and naked men.' Parliamentary government in England is
certainly no answer, for it, in common with other so-called democratic
institutions ('traps called oases of liberty'), merely defends the rights
of property, exiles men in the interests of public safety, and keeps
under arms men who are ready, without asking why, to fire instantly
as soon as ordered. Little do naive democrats know what it is that
they believe in, and what the consequences will be. 'Why is belief
in God . . . and the Kingdom of Heaven silly, whereas belief in earthly
Utopias is not silly?'1 As for the consequences, one day there really
will be democracy on earth, the rule of the masses. Then indeed
something will occur.
The whole of Europe will leave its normal courses and will be
drowned in a general cataclysm . . . Cities taken by storm and looted
will fall into poverty, education will decline, factories will come to
a stop, villages will be emptied, the countryside will remain without
hands to work it, as after the Thirty Years' War. Exhausted and
starving peoples will submit to everything, and military discipline
will take the place of law and of every kind of orderly administration. Then the victors will begin to fight for their loot. Civilisation, industry, terrified, will Ree to England and America, taking with them from the general ruin, some their money, others their
scientific knowledge or their unfinished work. Europe will become
a Bohemia after the Hussites.
And then, on the brink of suffering and disaster, a new war will
break out, home grown, internal, the revenge of the have-nots
against the haves . . . Communism will sweep across the world in
a violent tempest-dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift; in thunder and
lightning, amid the fire of the burning palaces, upon the ruin of
factories and public buildings the New Commandments will be
enunciated . . . the New Symbols of the Faith.
They will be connected in a thousand fashions with the historic
ways of life . . . but the basic tone will be set by socialism. The
institutions and structure of our own time and civilisation will
perish -will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be liquidated.
You regret the death of civilisation?
1 'From the Other Shore': VI 104.
97
R U S S I AN T H I N K E R S
I , too, I am sorry.
But the masses will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave
nothing but tears, want, igrwrance and humiliation.1
It is prophecies of this type by the founding fathers of the New
Order that cause embarrassment to contemporary Soviet critics and
hagiographers. They are usually dealt with by omission.
Heine and Burckhardt too had seen nightmarish visions, and spoke
of the demons called into being by the injustices and the 'contradictions'
of the new world, which promised not Utopia but ruin. Like them,
Herzen harbours no illusions:
Do you not perceive these . . . new barbarians, marching to
destroy? . . . Like lava they are stirring heavily beneath the surface
of the earth . . . when the hour strikes, Herculaneum and Pompeii
will be wiped out, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust will
perish equally. This will be not a judgement, not a vengeance, but
a cataclysm, a total revolution . . . This lava, these barbarians, this
new world, these Nazarenes who are coming to put an end to the
impotent and decrepit . . . they are closer than you think. For it is
they, none other, who are dying of cold and of hunger, it is they
whose muttering you hear . . . from the garrets and the cellars,
while you and I in our rooms on the first lloor are chatting about
socialism 'over pastry and champagne'.l
Herzen is more consistently 'dialectical' than the 'scientific' socialists
who swept away the 'Utopias' of their rivals, only to succumb to
millennia! fantasies of their own. To set by the side of the classless
idyll of Engels in the Communist Manifesto let us choose these lines
by Herzen:
Socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own
extremes and absurdities. Then there will again burst forth from
the titanic breast of the revolting minority a cry of denial. Once
more a mortal battle will be joined in which socialism will occupy
the place of today's conservatism, and will be defeated by the
coming revolution as yet invisible to us . . . 8
The historical process has no 'culmination'. Human beings have
invented this notion only because they cannot face the possibility of
an endless conftict.
1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourteenth letter: V 2 1 5-17.
2 'From the Other Shore': VI 58-9.
a ibid.: VI uo.
H ERZEN AND B A K U N I N ON LIBERTY
Such passages as these have their analogues in savage prophecies by
Hegel and by Marx, who also predicted the doom of the bourgeoisie,
and death and lava and a new civilisation. But, whereas there is in
both Hegel and Marx an unmistakable note of sardonic, gloating joy
in the very thought of vast, destructive powers unchained, and the
coming holocaust of all the innocents . and the fools and the contemptible philistines, so little aware of their terrible fate, Herzen is free from this prostration before the mere spectacle of triumphant
power and violence, from contempt for weakness as such, and from
the romantic pessimism which is at the heart of the nihilism and
fascism that was to come; for he thinks the cataclysm neither inevitable nor glorious. He despises these liberals who begin revolutions and then try to extinguish their consequences, who at the same time
undermine the old order and cling to it, light the fuse and try to
stop the explosion, who are frightened by the emergence of that
mythical creature, their 'unfortunate brother, cheated of his inheritance',1 the worker, the proletarian who demands his rights, who does not realise that while he has nothing to lose, the intellectual may lose
everything. It is the liberals who betrayed the revolution in 1 848 in
Paris, in Rome, in Vienna, not only by taking flight and helping the
defeated reactionaries to regain power and stamp out liberty, but by
first running away, then pleading that the 'historical forces' were too
strong to resist. If one has no answer to a problem, it is more honest
to admit this, and to formulate the problem clearly, than first to
obscure it, commit acts of weakness and betrayal, and then plead as
an excuse that history was too much for one. True, the ideals o( 1 848
were themselves empty enough; at least they looked so to Herzen in
1 869 : 'not one constructive, organic idea . . . economic blunders
(which] lead not indirectly, like political ones, but directly and deeply,
to ruin, stagnation, a hungry death'.2 Economic blunders plus 'the
arithmetical pantheism of universal suffrage', 'superstitious faith in
republics'8 or in parliamentary reform, is in effect his summary of
some of the ideals of 1 848. Nevertheless, the liberals did not fight
even for their own foolish programme. And in any case liberty was
not to be gained by such means. The claims of our time are clear
enough, they are social more than economic; for mere economic
1 ibid.: VI S3·
2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 576.
3 'My Past and Thoughu': XI 70.
99
R U SSIAN T H I N K E R S
change, as advoated by socialists, unaccompanied b y a deeper transformation, will not suffice to abolish civilised cannibalism, monarchy and religion, courts and governments, moral beliefs and habits. The
institutions of private life must be changed too.
Is it not odd that man, liberated by modern science from penury
and lawless rapacity, has nevertheless not been made free, but has
somehow been swallowed up by society? To understand the entire
breadth and reality, all the sanctity of the rights of man, and not
to destroy society, not to reduce it to atoms, is the hardest of social
problems; it will probably one day be resolved by history itself; in
the past it has never been resolved.1
Science will not solve it, pact Saint-Simon, nor will preaching against
the horrors of unbridled competition, nor advocacy of the abolition
of poverty, if all they do is to dissolve individuals into a single, monolithic, oppressive community-Gracchus Babeuf's 'equality of penal servitude'.
History is not determined. Life, fortunately, has no libretto,
improvisation is always possible, nothing makes it necessary for the
future to fulfil the programme prepared by the metaphysicians.•
Socialism is neither impossible nor inevitable, and it is the business of
the believers in liberty to prevent it from degenerating either into
bourgeois philistinism or communist slavery. Life is neither good nor
bad, men are what they make themselves. Without social sense they
become orang-utans, without egotism, tame monkeys.3 But there are
not inexorable forces to compel them to be either. Our ends are not
made for us, but by us;' hence to justify trampling on liberty today
by the promise of freedom tomorrow, because it is 'objectively'
guaranteed, is to make use of a cruel and wicked delusion as a pretext
for iniquitous action. 'If only people wanted, instead of saving the
world, to save themselves-instead of liberating humanity, to liberate
themselves, they would do much for the salvation of the world and
the liberation of man.'6
Herzen goes on to say tha:t man is of course dependent on his
environment and his time-physiologically, educationally, biologically,
as well as at more conscious levels; and he concedes that men reflect
1 'Letters from France and Italy', fourth letter: V 6:z.
I 'From the Other Shore': VI 36, 9 I .
8 ibid.: VI I 30.
' ibid.: VI I 3 r.
6 ibid.: VI 1 19.
1 00
H ERZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
their own time and are affected by the circumstances of their lives.
But the possibility of opposition to the social medium, and protest
against it, is nevertheless just as real; whether it is effective or not;
whether it takes a social or an individual form.1 Belief in determinism
is merely an alibi for weakness. There will always be those fatalists
who will say 'the choice of the paths of history is not in the individual's
power. Events do not depend on persons, but persons on events: we
only seem to control our direction, but actually sail wherever the wave
takes us. '2 But this is not true.
Our paths are not unalterable at all. On the contrary, they
change with circumstances, with understanding, with personal
energy. The individual is made by . . . events, but events are also
made by individuals and bear their stamp upon them- there is
perpetual interaction . . . . To be passive tools of forces independent
of us- . . . this is not for us; to be the blind instrument of fate-the
scourge, the executioner of God, one needs naive faith, the simplicity of ignorance, wild fanaticism, a pure, uncontaminated, childlike quality of thought.•
To pretend that we are like this today would be a lie. Leaders arise,
like Bismarck (or Marx), who claim to guide their nation or their
class to the inevitable triumph reserved for them by destiny, whose
chosen instruments they feel themselves to be; in the name of their
sacred historic mission they ruin, torture, enslave. But they remain
brutal impostors.
What thinking persons have forgiven Attila, the Committee of
Public Safety, even Peter the First, they will not forgive us; we
have heard no voice calling to us from on high to fulfil a destiny;
no voice from the nether regions to point a path to us. For us, there
is only one voice, one power, the power of reason and understanding.
In rejecting them we become the unfrocked priests of science,
renegades from civilisation.'
I V
I f this is a condemnation of Bismarck or Marx, it is directed more
obviously and expressly at Bakunin and the Russian Jacobins, at
Karakozov's pistol and Chernyshevsky's 'axe', sanctified by the new
young revolutionaries; at the terrorist propaganda of Zaichnevsky or
1 ibid.: VI 1 zo.
2 'To an Old Comrade': XX 588.
a ibid.
' ibid.: XX 588-9.
101
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
of Semo-Solovievich, and the culminating horror o f Nechaev's
activity and the final perversions of revolutionary doctrine, which
went far beyond its western origins, and treated honour, compassion,
and the scruples of civilisation as so many personal affronts. From this
it is not far to Plekhanov's celebrated formula of 1 903, 'the safety
of the revolution is the supreme law', which sanctioned the suspension
of civil liberties; and so to the April Theses, and the treatment of
'inviolability of the person' as a luxury to be dispensed with in difficult
moments.
Th� chasm between Herzen and Bakunin is not bridgeable. And
the half-hearted attempts by Soviet historians, if not to slur over the
differences, at any rate to represent them as necessary and successive
stages in the evolution of a single process-necessary both logically
and historically (because history and the development of ideas obey
'logical' laws)-are melancholy failures. The views of those who, like
Herzen (or Mill), place personal liberty in the centre of their social
and political doctrine, to whom it is the holy of holies the surrender
of which makes all other activities, whether of defence or attack,
valueless;1 and, as opposed to them, of those for whom such liberty is
only a desirable by-product of the social transformation which is the
sole end of their activity, or else a transient stage of development
made inevitable by history-these two attitudes are opposed, and no
reconciliation or compromise between them is conceivable; for the
Phrygian Cap comes between them. For Herzen the issue of personal
liberty overshadows even such crucial questions as centralism against
free federation; revolution from above versus revolution from below;
political versus economic activity; peasants versus city workers;
collaboration with other parties versus refusal to transact and the cry
for 'political purity' and independence; belief in the unavoidability of
capitalist development versus the possibility of circumnavigating it;
and all the other great issues which divided the liberal and revolutionary
parties in Russia until the revolution. For those who stand 'in awe
of the Phrygian Cap', sa/us populi is a final criterion before which all
other considerations must yield. For Herzen it remains a 'criminal'
principle, the greatest tyranny of all; to accept it is to sacrifice the
1 'However low . . . governments sank,' Herzen once remarked about the
west in contrast to Russia, 'Spinoza was not sentenced to transportation, nor
Lessing to be flogged or conscripted' ('From the Other Shore': VI I s). The
twentieth century has destroyed the force of this comparison.
102
H E RZEN AND BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
freedom of individuals to some huge abstraction-some monstrosity
invented by metaphysics or religion, to escape from the real, earthly
issues, to be guilty of 'dualism', that is, to divorce the principles of
action from empirical facts, and deduce them from some other set of
'facts' provided by some special mode of vision;1 to take a path which
in the end always leads to 'cannibalism'-the slaughter of men and
women today for the sake of 'future happiness'. The Lttttrs to an Old
Comradt are aimed, above all, at this fatal fallacy. Herzen rightly held
Bakunin guilty of it, and behind the ardent phrases, the lion-hearted
courage, the broad Russian nature, the gaiety, the charm and the
imagination of his friend-to whom he remained personally devoted
to the end-he discerned a cynical indifference to the fate of individual
human beings, a childish enthusiasm for playing with human lives
for the sake of social experiment, a lust for revolution for revolution's
sake, which went ill with his professed horror before the spectacle of
arbitrary violence or the humiliation of innocent persons. He detected
a certain genuine inhumanity in Bakunin (of which Belinsky and
Turgenev were not unaware), a hatred of slavery, oppression, hypocrisy, poverty, in the abstract, without actual revulsion against their manifestations in concrete instances-a genuine Hegelianism of outlook-the feeling that it is useless to blame the instruments of history, when one can rise to a loftier height and survey the structure of
history itself. Bakunin hated tsardom, but displayed too little specific
loathing of Nicholas; he would never have given sixpences to little
boys in Twickenham to cry, on the day of the Emperor's death,
'Zamicoll is dead ! ' or feel the emancipation of the peasants as a
personal happiness. The fate of individuals did not greatly concern
him; his units were too vague and too large; 'First destroy, and then
we shall see.' Temperament, vision, generosity, courage, revolutionary
fire, elemental force of nature, these Bakunin had to overftowing.
The rights and liberties of individuals play no great part in his apo-
calyptic vision.
•
Herzen's position on this issue is clear, and did not alter throughout
his life. No distant ends, no appeals to overriding principles or abstract
nouns can justify the suppression of liberty, or fraud, violence and
tyranny. Once the conduct of life in accordance with the moral
principles that we actually live by, in the situation as we know it to
be, and not as it might, or could, or should be, is abandoned, the path
1 'From the Other Shore': VI I z6.
I OJ
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
is open to the abolition of individual freedom and of all the values of
humane culture. With genuine horror and disgust Herzen saw and
denounced the militant, boorish anti-humanism of the younger
generation of Russian revolutionaries-fearless but brutal, full of
savage indignation, but hostile to civilisation and liberty, a generation
of Calibans-'the syphilis of [the] revolutionary passions'1 of Herzen's
own generation. They paid him back by a campaign of systematic
denigration as a 'soft' aristocratic dilettante, a feeble liberal trimmer,
a traitor to the revolution, a superfluous survival of an obsolete past.
He responded with a bitter and accurate vignette of the 'new men' :
the new generation will say to the old: ' "you are hypocrites, we will
be cynics; you spoke like moralists, we shall speak like scoundrels;
you were civil to your superiors, rude to your inferiors; we shall be
rude to all; you bow without feeling respect, we shall push and jostle
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
all the dissonances will fiow into one harmonious whole -the democratic and universal church of human freedom. '1 Once launched upon the waves of this type of mid-nineteenth-century radical patter, one
knows only too well what to expect. To paraphrase another passage,
I am not free if you, too, are not free; my liberty must be 'reflected'
in the freedom of others-the individualist is wrong who thinks that
the frontier of my liberty is your liberty-liberties are complementaryare indispensable to each other-not competitive.2 The 'political and juridical' concept of liberty is part and parcel of that criminal use of
words which equates society and the detested state. It deprives men
of liberty for it sets the individu;ll against society; upon this the
thoroughly vicious theory of the social contract-by which men have
to give up some portion of their original, 'natural' liberty in order to
associate in harmony-is founded. But this is a fallacy, for it is only in
society that men become both human and free-'only collective and
social labour liberates [man J from the yoke of . . . nature', and without
such liberation 'no moral or intellectual liberty' is possible.3 Liberty
cannot occur in solitude, but is a form of reciprocity. I am free and
human only so far as others are such. My freedom is limitless because
that of others is also such ; our liberties mirror one another-so long
as there is one slave, I am not free, not human, have no dignity and
no rights. Liberty is not a physical or a social condition but a mental
one: it consists of universal reciprocal recognition of the individual's
liberties: slavery is a state of mind and the slaveowner is as much a
slave as his chattels." The glib Hegelian claptrap of this kind with
which the works of Bakunin abound has not even the alleged
merits of Hegelianism, for it contrives to reproduce many of the worst
confusions of eighteenth-century thought, including that whereby the
comparatively clear, if negative, concept of personal liberty as a
condition in which a man is not coerced by others into doing what he
does not wish to do, is confounded with the Utopian and perhaps
1 Quoted by A. Ruge in his memoirs of Bakunin, in Ntut Frtit Prtsu,
April/May r 876.
2 'Three Lectures to the Workers of Val de Saint-lmier', in J. Guillaume
(ed.), op. cit. (p. r o6, note 1 above), vol. 5, pp. 23 1-2.
8 M. Bakunin, 'The Knouto-German Empire and the Social Revolu tion',
Iz6rannyt Jochintniya, vol. 2 (PetrogradfMoscow, 192 2), pp. 2 3 5-6.
4 ibid., pp. 236-8.
107
R U S S IAN T H I N K E R S
unintelligible notion of being free from laws in a different sense of
'law' - from the necessities of nature or even of social coexistence. And
from this it is inferred that since to ask for freedom from Nature is
absurd, since I am what I am as part of her, therefore, because my
relationships with other human beings are part of 'Nature', it is
equally senseless to ask for freedom from them-what one should
seek is a 'freedom' which consists in a 'harmonious solidarity' with
them.
Bakunin rebelled against Hegel and professed to hate Christianity;
but his language is a conventional amalgam of both. The assumption
that all virtues are compatible, nay, mutually entailed by one another,
that the liberty of one man can never clash with that of another if
both are rational (for then they cannot desire conflicting ends), that
unlimited liberty is not only compatible with unlimited equality but
inconceivable without it-; reluctance to attempt a serious analysis of
either the notions of liberty or of equality; the belief that it is only
avoidable human folly and wickedness which are responsible for
preventing the natural goodness and wisdom of man from making a
paradise upon earth almost instantaneously, or at least as soon as the
tyrannical state, with its vicious and idiotic legal system, is destroyed
root and branch-all these naive fallacies, intelligible enough in the
eighteenth century, but endlessly criticised in Bakunin's own sophisticated century, form the substance of his st"rmons urbi et orbi; and in particular of his fiery allocutions to the fascinated watchmakers of La
Chaux-de-Fonds and the Valley of Saint-lmier.
Bakunin's thought is almost always simple, shallow, and clear; the
language is passionate, direct and imprecise, riding from climax to
climax of rhetorical evidence, sometimes expository, more often
hortatory or polemical, usually ironical, sometimes sparkling, always
gay, always entertaining, always readable, seldom related to facts of
experience, never original or serious or specific. Liberty-the wordoccurs ceaselessly. Sometimes Bakunin speaks of it in exalted semireligious terms, and declares that the instinct to mutiny-defiance-is one of the three basic 'moments' in the development of humanity,
denounces God and rays homage to Satan, the first rebel, the true
friend of freedom. In such 'Acherontic' moods, in words which
resemble the opening of a revolutionary marching song, he declares
that the only true revolutionary element in Russia (or anywhere else)
is the doughty (likhoi) world of brigands and desperadoes, who, having
nothing to lose, will destroy the old world -after which the new will
1 08
H E RZ E N AN:p BAK U N I N ON L I B E RTY
arise spontaneously like the phoenix from the ashes.1 He puts his
hopes in the sons of the ruined gentry, in all those who drown their
sorrows and indignation in violent outbreaks against their cramping
milieu. Like Weitling, he calls upon the dregs of the underworld, and,
in particular, the disgruntled peasants, the Pugachevs and Razins, to
rise like modern Samsons and bring down the temple of iniquity. At
other times, more innocently, he calls merely for a revolt against all
fathers and all schoolmasters: children must be free to choose their
own careers; we want 'neither demigods nor slaves', but an equal
society, above all not differentiated by university education, which
creates intellectual superiority and leads to more painful inequalities
than even aristocracy or plutocracy. Sometimes he speaks of the
necessity for an 'iron dictatorship' during the transitional period
between the vicious society of today with its 'knouto-German' army
and police, and the stateless society of tomorrow confined by no
restraints. Other times he says that all dictatorships tend inevitably to
perpetuate themselves, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is
yet one more detestable despotism of one class over another. He cries
that all 'imposed' laws, being man-made, must be thrown off at once;
but allows that 'social' laws which are 'natural' and not 'artificial'
will have to be obeyed-as if these latter are fixed and immutable and
beyond human control. Few of the optimistic confusions of the
eighteenth-century rationalists fail to make an appearance somewhere
in his works. After proclaiming the right- the duty-to mutiny, and
the urgent necessity for the violent overthrow of the state, he happily
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
sake of his own personal ends (however much, and however rightly,
he might believe them to be connected or identical with those of
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги