Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

themselves might well be unaware-awareness of which is, indeed,

the very process of enlightenment.

The doctrine that every human being, country, race, institution

has its own unique, individual, inner purpose which is itself an

'organic' element in the wider purpose of all that exists, and that in

becoming conscious of that purpose it is, by this very fact, participating

in the march towards light and freedom- this secular version of an

ancient religious belief powerfully impressed the minds of the young

Russians. They imbibed it all the more readily as a result of two causes,

one material, one spiritual.

The material cause was the unwillingness of the government to

let its subjects travel to France, which was thought of, particularly

after 1 830, as a chronically revolutionary country, liable to perpetual

upheavals, blood-letting, violence and chaos. By contrast, Gennany

lay peaceful under the heel of a very respectable despotism. Consequently young Russians were encouraged to go to German universities, where they would obtain a sound training in civic principles that

would, so it was supposed, make them still more faithful servants of

the Russian autocracy.

The result was the exact opposite. Crypto-francophile sentiment

in Gennany itself was at this time so violent, and enlightened Cennans

themselves believed in ideas-in this case those of the French enlightenment-so much more intensely and fanatically than the French themselves, that the young Russian Anacharsises who dutifully went to Gennany were infected by dangerous ideas far more violently there

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than they could ever have been had they gone to Paris in the easygoing early years of Louis Philippe. The government of Nicholas I could hardly have foreseen the chasm into which it was destined to fall.

If this was the first cause of romantic ferment, the second was its

direct consequence. The young Russians who had travelled to

Germany, or read German books, became possessed with the simple

idea that if, as ultramontane Catholics in France and nationalists in

Germany were sedulously maintaining, the French Revolution and

the decadence that followed were scourges sent upon the people for

abandoning their ancient faith and ways, the Russians were surely

free from these vices, since, whatever else might be true of them, no

revolution had been visited upon them. The German romantic

historians were particularly zealous in preaching the view that, if the

west was declining because of its scepticism, its rationalism, its

materialism, and its abandonment of its own spiritual tradition, then

the Germans, who had not suffered this melancholy fate, should be

viewed as a fresh and youthful nation, with habits uncontaminated

by the corruption of Rome in decay, barbarous indeed, but full of

violent energy, about to come into the inheritance falling from the

feebie hands of the French.

The Russians merely took this process of reasoning one step

further. They rightly judged that if youth, barbarism, and lack of

education were criteria of a glorious future, they had an even more

powerful hope of it than the Germans. Consequently the vast outpouring of German romantic rhetoric about the unexhausted forces of the Germans and the unexpended German language with its

pristine purity and the young, unwearied German nation, directed

as it was against the 'impure', Latinised, decadent western nations,

was received in Russia with understandable enthusiasm. Moreover, it

stimulated a wave of social idealism which began to possess all classes,

from the early 20s of the century until well into the early 40s. The

proper task of a man was to dedicate himself to the ideal for which

his 'essence' was intended. This could not consist in scientific rationalism (as the French eighteenth-century materialists had taught), for it was a delusion to think that life was governed by mechanical laws. It

was an even worse delusion to suppose that it was possible to apply a

scientific discipline, derived from the study of inanimate matter, to

the rational government of human beings and the organisation of

their lives on a world-wide scale. The duty of man was something

very different-to understand· the texture, the 'go', the principle of

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life of all there is, to penetrate to the soul of the world (a theological

and mystical notion wrapped by the followers of Schelling and Hegel

in rationalist terminology), to grasp the hidden, 'inner' plan of the

universe, to understand his own place in it, and to act accordingly.

The task of the philosopher was to discern the march of history, or

of what was, somewhat mysteriously, called 'the Idea', and discover

whither it was carrying mankind. History was an enormous river,

the direction of which could, however, only be observed by people

with a capacity for a special kind of deep, inner contemplation. No

amount of observation of the outer world would ever teach you where

this inward Drong, this subterranean current, led. To uncover it

was to be at one with it; the development both of your individual

self as a rational being, and of society, depended upon a correct assessment of the spiritual direction of the larger 'organism' to which you belonged. To the question of how this organism was to be identified what it was-the various metaphysicians who founded the principal romantic schools of philosophy replied differently. Herder declared

this unit to be a spiritual culture or way of life; the Roman Catholic

penseurs identified it with the life of the Christian Church; Fichte

somewhat obscurely, and after him Hegel unequivocally, declared it

to be the national state.

The whole notion of organic method militated in favour of supposing that the favourite instrument of the eighteenth centurychemical analysis into constituent bits, into ultimate, irreducible atoms, whether of inanimate matter or of social institutions-was an inadequate

way of apprehending anything. 'Growth' was the great new term new, that is, in its application far beyond the bounds of scientific biology; and in order to apprehend what growth was, you had to have

a special inner sense capable of apprehending the invisible kingdom,

an intuitive grasp of the impalpable principle in virtue of which a

thing grows as it does; grows not simply by successive increments of

'dead' parts, but by some kind of occult vital process that needs a

quasi-mystical power of vision, a special sense of the Row of life, of

the forces of history, of the principles at work in nature, in art, in

personal relationships, of the creative spirit unknown to empirical

science, to seize upon its essence.

I V

This is the heart of political romanticism, from Burke to our own

day, and the source of many passionate arguments directed against

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liberal reform and every attempt to remedy social evils by rational

means, on the grounds that these were based on a 'mechanical' outlook

-a misunderstanding of what society was and of how it developed.

The programmes of the French Encyclopedists or of the adherents of

Lessing in Germany were condemned as so many ludicrous and

Procrustean attempts to treat society as if it were an amalgam of

bits of inanimate stuff, a mere machine, whereas it was a palpitating,

living whole.

The Russians were highly susceptible to this propaganda, which