Isaiah Berlin - Russian Thinkers

life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes

reward the pilgrim for all his sufFering�. Goethe has told us that there

can be no guarantee, no security. Man could be content with the

present. But he is not. He rejects beauty, he rejects fulfilment today,

because he must own the future also. That is Herzen's answer to all

those who, like Mazzini, or the socialists of his time, called for

supreme sacrifices and sufferings for the sake of nationality, or human

civilisation, or socialism, or justice, or humanity-if not in the present,

then in the future.

Herzen rejects this violently. The purpose of the struggle for liberty

is not liberty tomorrow, it is liberty today, the liberty of living individuals with their own individual ends, the ends for which they move and fight and perhaps die, ends which are sacred to them. To crush

their freedom, their pursuits, to ruin their ends for the sake of some

vague felicity in the future which cannot be guaranteed, about which

we know nothing, which is simply the product of some enormous

metaphysical construction that itself rests upon sand, for which there

is no logical, or empirical, or any other rational guarantee-to do that

is in the first place blind, because the future is uncertain; and in the

second place vicious, because it offends against the only moral values

we know; because it tramples on human demands in the name of

abstractions-freedom, happiness, justice-fanatical generalisations,

mystical sounds, idolised sets of :ovords.

Why is liberty valuable? Because it is an end in itself, because it is

what it is. To bring it as a sacrifice to something else is simply to

perform an act of human sacrifice.

This is Herzen's ultimate sermon, and from this he develops the

corollary that one of the deepest of modern disasters is to be caught up

in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely

against the western socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let

alone the enemy-priests or conservatives) but even more against his

own close friend Bakunin, who persisted in trying to stir up violent

rebellion, involving torture and martyrdom, for the sake of dim,

confused and distant goals. For Herzen, one of the greatest of sins

that any human being can perpetrate is to seek to transfer moral

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responsibility from his own shoulders to those of an unpredictable

future order, and, in the name of something which may never happen,

perpetrate crimes today which no one would deny to be monstrous

if they were performed for some egoistic purpose, and do not seem

so only because they are sanctified by faith in some remote and

intangible Utopia.

For all his hatred of despotism, and in particular of the Russian

regime, Herzen was all his life convinced that equally fatal dangers

threatened from his own socialist and revolutionary allies. He believed

this because there was a time when, with his friend, the critic Belinsky,

he too had believed that a simple solution was feasible; that some great

system-a world adumbrated by Saint-Simon or by Proudhon-did

provide it: that if one regulated social life rationally and put it. in

order, and created a clear. and tidy organisation, human problems

could be finally resolved. Dostoevsky once said of Belinsky that his

socialism was nothing but a simple belief in a marvellous life of

'unheard-of splendour, on new and . . . adamantine foundations'. Because

Herzen had himself once believed in these foundations (although

never with simple and absolute faith) and because this belief came

toppling down and was utterly destroyed in the fearful cataclysms of

1 848 and 1 849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have

feet of clay, he denounces his own past with peculiarly intense indignation: we call upon the masses, he writes, to rise and crush the tyrants.

But the masses are indifferent to individual freedom and independence,

and suspicious of talent: 'they want a . . . government to rule for their

benefit, and not . . . against it. But to govern themselves doesn't enter

their heads.' 'It is not enough to despise the Crown; one must not be

filled with awe before the Phrygian Cap . . .' He speaks with bitter

scorn about monolithic, oppressive communist idylls, about the barbarous 'equality of penal servitude', about the 'forced labour' of socialists like Cabet, about barbarians marching to destroy.

Who will finish us off? The senile barbarism of the sceptre or

the wild barbarism of communism; the bloody sabre, or the red

Aag? . . .

. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempestdreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .

[Our] institutions . ; . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be

liquidattd . . . I am sorry [for the death of civilisation]. But the masses

will not regret it; the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears,

want, ignorance and humiliation.

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He is terrified of the oppressors, but he is terrified of the liberators too.

He is terrified of them because for him they are the secular heirs of

the religious bigots of the ages of faith; because anybody who has a

cut and dried scheme, a straitjacket which he wishes to impose on

humanity as the sole possible remedy for all human ills, is ultimately

bound to create a situation intolerable for free human beings, for men

like himself who want to express themselves, who want to have some

area in which to develop their own resources, and are prepared to

respect the originality, the spontaneity, the natural impulse towards

self-expression on the part of other- human beings too. He calls this

Petrograndism-the methods of Peter the Great. He admires Peter

the Great. He admires him because he did at least overthrow the

feudal rigidity, the dark night, as he thinks of it, of medieval Russia.

He admires the Jacobins because the Jacobins dared to do something

instead of nothing. Yet he is dearly aware, and became more and

more so the longer he lived (he says all this with arresting clarity in

his open letters To an Old Comrade- Bakunin-written in the late

1 86os), that Petrograndism, the behaviour of Attila, the behaviour

of the Committee of Public Safety in 1 792 -the use of methods which

presuppose the possibility of simple and radical solutions-always in

the end lead to oppression, bloodshed and collapse. He declares that

whatever the justification in earlier and more innocent ages of acts

inspired by fanatical faith, nobody has any right to act in this fashion

who has lived through the nineteenth century and has seen what

human beings are really made of-the complex, crooked texture of

men and institutions. Progress must adjust itself to the actual pace

of historical change, to the actual economic and social needs of society,

because to suppress the bourgeoisie by violent revolution-and there

was nothing he despised more than the bourgeoisie, and the mean,

grasping, philistine financial bourgeoisie of Paris most of all-before

its historical role has been played out, would merely mean that the

bourgeois spirit and bourgeois forms would persist into the new social

order. 'They want, without altering the walls [of the prison], to give