Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

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 ·

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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