Alexander Herzen
On the subject of The Case for the Negative Freedom in Isaiah Berlin v. the Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. I been reading some Berlin lately. And since I am interested in the history of ideas I noticed that the central confrontation described by Adam Curtis in the documentary has a historical precedent. One of the remarkable strengths of Isaiah Berlin was his incredible grasp on the history of the post Bastille thought and ideas. But unlike most western political historians he had also the deep understanding of the pre-revolutionary ideas in Russia. So before Isaiah Berlin and Jean-Paul Sartre there was Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin was the original anarcho-rebel (ridiculed by his “centrist” contemporaries Karl Marx, Herzen and after them Lenin). Herzen was the sober commentator, deeply skeptical about the positive outcomes for the violent revolutions. Hence the original argument is not between Isaiah Berlin and Jean-Paul Sartre but between Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin (Berlin (and Lenin) considered Herzen their spiritual precursor). But despite the fact that Vladimir Lenin always spoke about his admiration for Herzen, there were the passages that they never published in the CCCP. For example this prophesy from the Letters from France and Italy, 14th Letter astonishingly written by Herzen circa 1850 (quoted by Isaiah Berlin in his essay Herzen and Bakunin on Individual Liberty):
“The whole of Europe will leave its normal courses and will be drowned in a general cataclysm… Cities taken by storm and looted will fall into poverty, education will decline, factories will come to a stop, villages will be emptied, the countryside will remain without hands to work it, as after the ‘Thirty Years’ War. Exhausted and starving peoples will submit to everything, and military discipline will take the place of law and of every kind of orderly administration. Then the victors will begin to fight for their loot. Civilisation, industry, terrified, will flee to England and America, taking with them from the general ruin, some their money, others their scientific knowledge or their unfinished work. Europe will become a Bohemia after the Hussites.
And then, on the brink of suffering and disaster, a new war will break out, home grown, internal, the revenge of the have-nots against the haves… Communism will sweep across the world in a violent tempest-dreadful, bloody, unjust, swift; in thunder and lightning, amid the fire of the burning palaces, upon the ruin of factories and public buildings the New Commandments will be enunciated… the New Symbols of the Faith.
They will be connected in a thousand fashions with the historic ways of life… but the basic tone will be set by socialism. The institutions and structure of our own time and civilisation will perish-will, as Proudhon politely puts it, be liquidated. You regret the death of civilisation? I, too, I am sorry. But the masses will not regret it, the masses to whom it gave nothing but tears, want, ignorance and humiliation.”
Isaiah Berlin writes that Alexander Herzen harboured no illusions (From the Other Shore):
“Do you not perceive these… new barbarians, marching to destroy? …Like lava they are stirring heavily beneath the surface of the earth… when the hour strikes, Herculaneum and Pompeii will be wiped out, the good and the bad, the just and the unjust will perish equally. This will be not a judgement, not a vengeance, but a cataclysm, a total revolution… This lava, these barbarians, this new world, these Nazarenes who are coming to put an end to the impotent and decrepit… they are closer than you think. For it is they, none other, who are dying of cold and of hunger, it is they whose muttering you hear… from the garrets and the cellars, while you and I in our rooms on the first floor are chatting about socialism “over pastry and champagne”.
The prophecy continues to the conclusion (From the Other Shore):
“Socialism will develop in all its phases until it reaches its own extremes and absurdities. Then there will again burst forth from the titanic breast of the revolting minority a cry of denial. Once more a mortal battle will be joined in which socialism will occupy the place of today’s conservatism, and will be defeated by the coming revolution as yet invisible to us…”
Even Dostoyevsky in his most lucid moments never had this clarity.