Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers

epitomises the pariLdox of Russian consistency: their desire for an ideal

which would resist all attempts at demolition led the intelligentsia to

apply themselves to the work of demolition with an enthusiasm and

lucidity which exposed the hollowness of those assumptions about

society and human nature on which the belief in absolute and universal

solutions is based. In an essay on the populist tradition which dominated

Russian radical thought in the nineteenth century, Berlin shows that

the populists were far ahead of their time in their awareness of the

dehumanising implications of contemporary liberal and radical theories

of progress, which placed such faith in quantification, centralisation,

and rationalisation of productive processes .

. Most of the intelligentsia regarded their destructive criticism as a

mere preliminary, the clearing of the ground for some great ideological

construction; Berlin sees it as thoroughly relevant to our own time,

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INTR O D U CTION

when only a consistent pluralism an protect human freedom from the

depredations of the systematisers. Such a pluralism, he shows, was

fully articulated in the ideas of a thinker whose originality has hitherto

been largely overlooked-Alexander Herzen.

The founder of Russian populism, Herzen was known in the west as

a Russian radical with a Utopian faith in an archaic form of socialism.

Isaiah Berlin, in two essays on Herzen, and in introductions1 to his

greatest works, From the Other Shore and My Past and Thoughts, has

transformed our understanding of him, firmly establishing him as 'one

of Russia's three moral preachers of genius', the author of some of the

most profound of modern writings on the subject of liberty.

Like other members of the intelligentsia, Herzen had begun his

intellectual career with a search for an ideal, which he found in

socialism; he believed that the instincts of the Russian peasant would

lead to a form of socialism superior to any in the west. But he refused

to prescribe his ideal as a final solution to social problems, on the

grounds that a search for such a solution was incompatible with respect

for human liberty. At the beginning of the 184os he was attracted, like

Bakunin, to the Young Hegelians, with their belief that the way to

freedom lay through negation of the outworn dogmas, traditions and

institutions to which men habitually enslaved themselves and others.

H� espoused this rejection of absolutes with a thoroughgoing consistency equalled only by Stirner, deriving from it a deeply radical humanism. He attributed the failure of liberating movements in the

past to a fatally inconsistent tendency to idolatry on the part even of the

most radical iconoclasts, who liberate men from one yoke only to

enslave them to another. Rejection of specific forll!S of oppression never

went far enough: it failed to attack their common source-the tyranny

of abstractions over individuals. As Berlin shows, Herzen's attacks on

all deterministic philosophies of progress demonstrate how well he

understood that 'the greatest of sins that any human being can perpe-trate is to seek to transfer moral responsibility from his own shoulders to an unpredictable future order', to sanctify monstrous crimes by faith

in some remote Utopia.

Berlin emphasises that Herzen's own predicament was a very

modern one, in that he was torn between the conflicting values of

equality and excellence: he recognised the injustice of elites but valued

1 Not included in this volume. The introduction to My Past a,uJ Thoughts is

one of the essays in Against the Curren/, a forthcoming volume of the selection.

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RUSSIAN THIN K E R S

the- intellectual and moral freedom, and the aesthetic distinction, of

true aristocracy. But while refusing, unlike the ideologists of the left,

ro sacrifice excellence to equality, h� understood, with J. S. Mill,

something which has only become dear in our own day: that the

common mean between these values, represented by 'mass societies', is

not the best of both worlds, but more frequently, in Mill's words, an

aesthetically and Nhically repellent 'conglomerated mediocrity', the

submergence of the individual in the mass. With great conviction and

in a language as vivid and committed as Herzen's own, Berlin has

perceived and conveyed to the English reader the originality of

Herzen's belief that there are no general solutions to individual and

specific problems, only temporary expedients which must be based on

an acute sense of the uniqueness of each historical situation, and on a

high degree of responsiveness to the particular needs and demands of

diverse individuals and peoples.

Berlin's exploration of the self-searching of Russian thinkers includes studies of two writers-Tolstoy and Turgenev. These studies refute a widespread misconception about the relations between Russian

writers and thinkers: namely, that in Russia literature and radical

thought form two distinct traditions related only by mutual hostility.

Tolstoy's and Dostoevsky's well-known aversion to the intelligentsia

is frequently quoted to emphasise the gulf between Russia's great

writers, who were concerned with exploring men's spiritual depths, and

the intelligentsia, materialists concerned only with the external forms

of social existence. In his essays on Tolstoy and Turgenev Berlin

shows that their art can be understood only as a product of the same

moral conflict as that experienced by the radical intelligentsia. The

essays have a dual significance: as works of criticism they offer insights

which should make a fundamental difference to our understanding of

two of Russia's greatest writers; as studies of conflicts between two

opposing visions of reality they are a significant contribution to the

·

history of ideas.

In his famous study of Tolstoy's view of history, 'The Hedgehog

and the Fox', and in the less well-known essay, 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', Berlin shows that the relation between Tolstoy's artistic vision and his moral pread:.ing may be understood as a titanic struggle

between the monist and pluralist visions of reality. Tolstoy's 'lethal

nihilism' led him to denounce the pretensions of all theories, dogmas

and systems to explain, order or predict the complex and contradictory

phenomena of history and social existence, but the driving force of this

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INTR O D U C T I ON

nihilism was a passionate longing to discover one unitary truth,

encompassing all existence and impregnable to attack. He was thus

constantly in contradiction with himself, perceiving reality in its

multiplicity but believing only in 'one vast, unitary whole'. In his art

he expressed an unsurpassed feeling for the irreducible variety of

phenomena, but in his moral preaching he advocated simplification,

reduction to one single level, that of the Russian peasant or the simple

Christian ethic. In some of the most psychologically delicate and

revealing passages ever written on Tolstoy, Berlin shows that his

tragedy was that his sense of reality was too strong to be compatible

with any of the narrow ideals he set up; the conclusions articulated in

Herz.en's writings were demonstrated in the tragedy of Tolstoy's life:

his inability, despite the most desperate attempts, to harmonise opposing

but equally valid goals and attitudes. Yet his failure, his inability to

resolve his inner contradictions, gives Tolstoy a moral stature apparent