And:
We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life is death.
6
This is Herzen's central political and social thesis, and it enters henceforth into the stream of Russian radical thought as an antidote to the exaggerated utilitarianism of which its adversaries have so often accused it. The purpose of the singer is the song, and the purpose of life is to be lived. Everything passes, but what passes may sometimes reward the pilgrim for all his sufferings.
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,
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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 felictty 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, juctice - fanatical generalisations, mystical sounds, idolised sets of words. '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 modem disasters is to be caught up in abstractions instead of realities. And this he maintains not merely against the W estern socialists and liberals among whom he lived (let alone the enemy - priests or conservatives) but even more again 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 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-C.Y.E.-2
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Simon o r 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 1848
and 1849 in which almost every one of his idols proved to have feet of day, 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 flag? . . .
. . . Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempest dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift . . .
[Our] institutions . . . will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be
!i'quidated . . . 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.
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
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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 clearly 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 1792 - 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 bour·