Herzen

There is a lovely review in the NYT by Michael Ignatieff  of the book The Discovery of Chance The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly. Tolstoy thought Herzen (1812-70) was one of the finest prose writers of his time, and so did Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. He was also an editor, a political activist and a scathing and ironical polemicist, castigating equally the Russian despots in Petersburg and his fellow socialists in exile in London, Geneva and Paris. After Herzen’s death, he had the misfortune to be praised by Vladimir Ilych Lenin for his “selfless devotion” in exile to the cause of revolution. Praise from that tyrannous quarter has damaged Herzen’s reputation ever since. It was also untrue. Herzen loathed revolutionary violence, and he rejected the argument, first articulated by Karl Marx, that Communism was “the solution of the riddle of history.” Isaiah Berlin had regard for Herzen and  his friend and mentor, Aileen M. Kelly, has devoted her life to the resurrection of Herzen’s reputation.

Ignatieff writes: As someone who lived through the intoxication of the 1848 revolution, only to see his hopes crushed, and who supported the cause of Polish freedom in the uprising of 1863, only to be execrated by Russian friends who turned into anti-Polish xenophobes, he wrote with poignant insight about a perennial theme in politics: how to sustain political hope when your dreams are repeatedly shattered.

While Turgenev sank into misanthropic pessimism when his liberal dreams came to nothing and Dostoyevsky transited from revolutionary agitation to deep-dyed conservatism, Herzen remained true to the revolutionary dreams of his youth, without ever losing what Isaiah Berlin was to call his unsparing sense of reality.

 

Herzen matters today because he thought about the cruel dialectic between hope and history in politics and because he struggled to find Russia its own way into the 20th century. Should Russia rejoin the river of European liberty or to follow a separate, Asiatic destiny? Kelly argues he was the 19th-century thinker who thought most deeply about the implications of Darwinism for the theories of history that the European intelligentsia inherited from the Enlightenment.  Thanks to his exposure to Darwin’s predecessors, Kelly argues, Herzen was the only Russian socialist who immediately grasped the implications of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” when it appeared in 1859. He realized that evolution overturned the idea of history as a purposive story of progress guided by human intention.

 

Herzen also saw, as none of his socialist contemporaries did, that Darwin had overturned socialist politics, particularly its assumption that revolutionaries — or a leading class like the proletariat — could guide history toward revolutionary triumph. Kelly’s book is called “The Discovery of Chance” because she believes that Herzen, more than any other 19th-century political philosopher, understood how devastating it was to political hope to discover that evolution worked through chance, through the random emergence of evolutionary variations that turned out to have adaptive survival value. Remarkably, this insight did not lead Herzen to pessimism, despite the blighting of so many of his political hopes. In one of his characteristically vivid metaphors, he wrote: “We must be proud of not being needles and threads in the hands of fate as it sews the motley cloth of history. . . . We know that this cloth is not sewn without us. . . . And that is not all; we can change the pattern of the carpet.” Even as man develops “according to the laws of the most fatal necessity,” he wrote, “he constantly posits himself as free. This is a necessary condition for his activity, this is a psychological fact, a social fact.” The logic of history may escape us, he wrote, but “man can do his duty.”

(from Michael Ignatieff)