Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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