Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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,

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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,

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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

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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,