Q: The Slavophiles and Westernizers were both radical, each in their own way. Discuss.

This essay attempts to examine a particular historical moment in nineteenth-century Russian thought: the period between the late 1830s and 1850s, when the existing divisions within the ‘intelligentsia’ came to be reconfigured along arguments that were polemically known as ‘Slavophile’ and ‘Westernizing’. Each of these two camps was constituted as much by the polemical refusals of its positions by its rival as by its own agency. The intellectual circles centring around people like Kireevsky, Khomiakov, Belinsky and Herzen experienced a rather ambiguous relationship with one another. They shared a common discursive space where the necessity to radically transform the existing state of things in Russia was accepted, but they were nevertheless conscious of – and indeed deliberately produced – a deep split in the understanding of the times they lived in, their past, and their possible future.

Members of the intelligentsia, despite their mutual divergences in ideological location, did inhabit a common discursive terrain. They were – and this defined them – engaged intellectuals in the understood sense of the term, concerned with the analysis and solution of the problems that faced Russian society. They were also completely divorced from the exercise of power. This was what made the intelligentsia a recognizable, discrete intellectual body, clearly distinct from the official ideologues and thinkers of Tsarist Russia. It was also this that made it structurally possible for so many of them to live out lives marked by a profound hostility to the practices of power in their time. In a sense, then, the intelligentsia was drawn into the tides of radicalism through the logic of its own location in Russian society. Intellectually, this divorce from power meant that their ideas were, by their very nature, alternatives to the existing structures of things. The range of positions available to the intelligentsia was wide, as it was in Europe: there were conservatives, reactionaries, liberals, monarchists, republicans and socialists. However, the context in which these positions came to be articulated is of central importance. In themselves, most of these ideas weren’t new; they were drawn from the established intellectual traditions in Western Europe, and appealed to the same sources of legitimacy. Even the most brilliant figures in the intelligentsia could not boast of any very profound innovation in the formal and moral structures of argument. But at the same time, these were novel positions. The separation of the intelligentsia from political power refigured the European traditions their ideas were drawn from, and ideas that were drawn from European conservatism could be used in the service of extremely radical causes. Translated into another context, the thought-patterns of the Enlightenment, of revolution, of liberal constitutionalism, of conservative reaction, of romanticism, and of egalitarian utopia were all sketched into the contours of ideologies and practices that may have been anathema to them in Europe.

The terrain of intellectual engagement was marked out, in its essentials, fairly early, and was more or less set in place by the end of Catherine’s reign. Whether liberal or conservative in their orientation, the members of the putative intelligentsia ( the term itself only emerged in 1860 ) were energized by certain common themes of interest. They were all deeply concerned, in varying ways, with the Europe of the French and Industrial Revolutions, with the radical changes sweeping across the Continent and England. The apparent asymmetry of the trajectories of European ( which meant, essentially, Western European ) and Russian development led to intense speculation about Russia’s present and future. This had two dimensions. First, Russia was counterposed to ‘Europe’, and the intelligenstsia found itself divided in its evaluations and assessments of the two entities, which were virtually reified into contrasting ‘principles’ of historical and spiritual Being. The major transformations in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe were obsessively studied and judged, and different paths were sketched out for Russia’s future, based on the embracing or the rejection of ‘Europe’. Second, the need to understand Russia – and Europe – was swiftly drawn on to the terrain of history: Different representations and interpretations of the past emerged, as either model for or antithesis of the possible future. The corollary of this was a radical dissatisfaction with Russia’s present – which all the major thinkers of the time held to be redeemable only by drastic change. The basically conservative impulse towards the restoration of a lost ( and mythicized ) ‘traditional’ Russia converged with radical desires to break with the past at this point – both refused the status quo. Finally, this marked concern with Russia’s historical destiny was intermeshed with the intelligentsia’s understanding of itself. The intelligentsia imagined itself possessed of a ‘consciousness’ withheld from the masses of Russia, and its separation from political authority was in a sense ideologically inverted: the experience of powerlessness seemed to confer a moral authority which allowed it to cast itself as the repository and energizing principle of Russia’s regeneration. This authority, however, carried with it a corresponding responsibility to the future, which might explain the passion of the polemical arguments of the 1840s and later. It is arguable that this sense of responsibility derived from a sense of guilt experienced by the intelligentsia: as beneficiaries of the very practices (of autocracy, serfdom and so on) that many of them effectively benefited from, and yet distanced from power, they saw themselves as invested with both a moral responsibility to expiate themselves, as it were, and a moral authority that allowed them to do so. Of course, one cannot generalize this overmuch, since all sections of the intelligentsia were by no means opposed to either autocracy or serfdom. But it is at least possible that this ambiguous location furnished the possibility of a more radical critique of society, and such a critique was penned recurrently by intellectuals, from Radishchev onwards.

All this is not to suggest that ideas were valued purely instrumentally and not for their own sake: the abstract fascinations of the thought of Hegel, Schelling and Feuerbach were great, and much of Russian intellectual practice was steeped in abstraction. Of the Hegelian wave of the 1840s Herzen wrote:

People who loved each other avoided each other for weeks at a time because they disagreed on the definition of “all-

embracing spirit”, or had taken as personal insult an opinion on “the absolute personality and its existence in itself.”

This is a telling comment on the passion of intellectual engagement in that time. However, philosophy was always ultimately as much an agenda – for the making of the future – as it was an ‘intellectual exercise’: rather, the two were never separated. The necessity of praxis haunted the generation of the 1840s, and its apparent impossibility during the years immediately after 1848 bred great agony. Herzen called it Russia’s ‘long dark night’; the period following, though, was to see an intensification of political argument, moving towards the crystallization of rich and varied ideologies ( especially among the socialists ), and also the development of thinking about concrete political strategy. The contours of the debates, however, had been drawn in the earlier period, and the continuities in thought were as significant as the breaks.

Before turning to the arguments of the Slavophiles and the Westernizers in the 1840s, it might be helpful to briefly examine some of the major arguments that preceded, and in a sense created, the intellectual ferment of these times. By the late eighteenth-century, several positions associated with the ‘intelligentsia’ had begun to emerge. Traditionalist and conservative ideologues, best represented by Nikolai Karamzin and Count Mikhail Shcherbatov and (the early intelligentsia was of almost exclusively aristocratic pedigree) argued the case for the renewal of Russian tradition. Shcherbatov attacked the growth of individuation and the levelling logic which he associated with Russia after the Petrine reforms, setting against them a valorization of community and a respect for natural hierarchy. He looked for a positive model of society to hang his critiques of modernity on, and found it in the seventeenth century, which he constructed ( and, needless to say, mythicized ) in the form of an utterly utopian simplicity. The romantic conservatism of an outlook that sought to fashion this sort of organic continuity with a mythologized history of traditional virtue and simplicity, however, went hand in hand with a vision of the future that, precisely because of these values, invested in a radical refusal of the legacy of post-Petrine Russia. So there is an interesting paradox here: in the name of tradition, Shcherbatov and his like-minded contemporaries sought to uproot the only tradition, in the fullest sense of the word, that Russian society and its administration embodied – that of the Petrine reforms. Karamzin, writing in 1811 – and therefore at the heart of the epoch of European revolution, sharpened the critique of European modernity that Shcherbatov had worked out. Like his predecessor, he laid great emphasis on the preservation of historical continuity, and the need for change to grow gradually and ‘organically’ out of the historical foundations on which society was based. However, unlike Shcherbatov, he also developed the theme that the Slavophiles were later to invest so heavily in, the counterposition of Russia to Europe. Russian traditionalism and organicity were upheld as a model to a Europe deeply fractured by the experience of the historical break that the French Revolution marked. As Andrzej Walicki points out, though, Karamzin’s ideas were complicated; he seems to have had a great deal of sympathy for what he called ‘republican virtues’ and at the end of his life confessed himself a ‘republican at heart’. His twelve-volume History Of The Russian State contained an analysis of the republican traditions of Russian history that greatly pleased the Decembrists. Intellectually, though, his most interesting innovation was, it can be argued, his analysis of the nature of ‘traditional’ Russian Tsarist power and its limits (in its pre-Petrine forms). The Tsar’s authority, inviolable in matters of State, was by this token completely split off from the realm of private life, where the individual experienced a freedom and inner moral authority – a very Kantian notion – that was equally inviolable. Individual freedom, needless to say, was specific to the members of the gentry, and did not extend to man-in-the-abstract, an illegitimate creation of the Enlightenment. It is interesting, though, that Karamzin’s ideas on the nature of true individual freedom prefigured those of the Slavophiles of the 1840s, and especially of Aksakov, the most radical voice among them.

In an ideological division that was to prefigure the Slavophile-Westernizer confrontation, the conservative intelligentsia was pitting its arguments against those of a strong liberal stream, based on a much more positive appreciation of the European Enlightenment and the age of revolution, and carried by the logic of its own positions to the terrain of radical political activism. This took the form of a revolutionary liberalism that culminated with the Decembrist uprising of 1825, which sent intense shock waves through the autocracy. The intellectual basis for this, however, was contained in the potentially very transgressive doctrines of the Enlightenment (which Catherine flirted with for a while, but briefly) and the open and intransigent radicalism of the French Revolution. The doctrine of natural rights was especially transgressive, since it violated and replaced older traditions of rights. Natural rights, inherent to human beings, were split off from and opposed to limited privileges, where earlier the notions of right and privilege had been coextensive, even synonymous. Ontologically, this was founded on a notion of the abstract individual, embodying a spatial and temporal universality, something that was anathema to the central tenets of conservatism – the irreducibility of the particular and the determining nature of historical and cultural difference. These were the intellectual battle-lines in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe, where they were however complicated by the growth of an often very radical Romanticism, with an equal emphasis on the organic and the particular, on the intuitive rather than the rational ordering and rendering of experience. All these positions were absorbed and refigured in Russian discourse. What is of importance here, however, is the challenge that the egalitarian and universalist logic of much European thought – and in particular the doctrine of natural rights – posed to the sovereignty of the Tsar and the power of the Russian autocracy.

Aleksandr Radishchev (1749-1802) represented the apotheosis of these trends in the eighteenth century. Born into the family of a relatively humane landowner, he was probably deeply moved by the suffering of the peasants who formed a constitutive part of his early experience. Radishchev’s classic work, A Journey From St Petersburg To Moscow, was written in 1790, and contains a scathing attack upon serfdom and the various degrees of exploitation peasants had to suffer. Most of all, he lamented the injustice and irrationality of a system where the most productive labour in society – that of the agriculturist – had to ‘wear the fetters’. In a fascinating passage, Radishchev also launches an attack upon the hard-headed and hard-hearted logic of economics, which turned peasants into tools (similar, he observed in a brilliant insight, to soldiers in battle, who obey their orders unquestioningly and without reason): ‘do we think our citizens hungry because their granaries are full and their stomachs empty?’ Radishchev’s exposition of the evils of serfdom had recourse to an anecdotal mode of representation, where his travels through the countryside (much like William Cobbett’s Rural Rides several decades later) laid bare the variegated experience of rural life and exploitation in its fullness. However, it was not simply the representation of misery that gave Radishchev’s work its charge. In its ability to conceive of humanity in the abstract, it made the suffering individual representative of the suffering of all humankind. Radishchev’s alternative ideal of freedom was republican in nature, inspired by the American Revolution and the British parliamentary system. Not surprisingly, Catherine was deeply alarmed at the nest of vipers her flirtation with the Enlightenment had stirred up, and Radishchev’s work (proscribed by the State) naturally strengthened her resolve to close off the spaces for debate she had allowed – indeed, helped – to open. Three decades later, however, the Decembrist uprising, and the extremely radical-republican testimonies of the accused (Kakhovsky declared: ‘The people have conceived a sacred truth – that they do not exist for governments, but governments must be organized for them’) confirmed the worst fears of the State. It is true that Decembrism had its limits; for instance, its call for the abolition of serfdom was not accompanied by a corresponding demand for the redistribution of the land. However, their pronouncements indicated an absorption of the doctrine of natural rights, the most radical ideological energy imaginable, and one from which all manner of transgressive, revolutionary imaginaries could flow. By this time, the revolutionary doctrine of constitutionalism had also taken firm shape in a strand of Russian radicalism, and the Decembrist demand for a constitution struck a blow at the foundations of Tsarism.

The direct precursor of the debates of the 1840s was Petr Chaadaev, a deeply contradictory figure in the history of Russian thought, whose essential conservatism produced its own radical antinomies when rearticulated by those he influenced. Chaadaev was associated in his youth with the Decembrists, and was actually invited to join them. However, he refused the offer, withdrew from the intellectual circles of Moscow, and for several years devoted himself to extremely private philosophical meditation. Between 1828 and 1831, he published eight Philosophical Letters, ostensibly addressed to ‘a lady’, only one of which – the first, which kicked up the biggest intellectual controversy of the 1830s – was published in his lifetime, in 1836. In the 1830s, after completing the Letters, Chaadaev returned to the salons of Moscow, and became one of the figures around which the intense arguments of the decade constituted themselves.

Chaadaev was familiar with the intellectual currents of the time, and had read Kant and even Hegel, the latter being, as Walicki observes, a rather unfamiliar figure in 1820s Russia. French Catholic philosophy had a major impact on him, although here too his sources were characteristically ambiguous: he drew on both de Maistre (the exemplar of conservative reaction) and Lamennais, who represented the current of Christian socialism. In essence, though, Chaadaev’s thought was quite clearly deeply conservative. Some of his ideas can be seen in terms of an oppositional dialogue with Kant. Reason for Chaadaev was located in God, and thus human beings merely participated in an universal rationality that was in no sense founded on themselves. Only revelation, then, could provide true knowledge; neither reason nor experience could (contra both Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism). The radical autonomy of the individual will, the foundation of Kant’s moral law, was therefore (for Chaadaev) a myth. The natural order of humanity was based on dependence, and thus on the subordination of the individual to a superior principle, the universal mind. Kantian ‘pure reason’, based on the isolated individual, could only yield limited and inferior truths. By extension, then, the moral law, as Kant had seen it (in terms of the inner self-legislation of the individual will, founded on the categorical imperative, ‘Act only on that maxim that you can simultaneously will to become an universal law’, which through a chain of logical reasoning is developed into the doctrine, ‘Always act in order to achieve the Kingdom of Ends’) was also null and void. Morality lay outside the jurisdiction of the individual, and (here is Chaadaev’s central point) had to submit to the discipline of tradition, in particular the tradition of the Church, the repository of universal and historical truths. This privileging of the Church was founded on a hierarchical conceptualization of the natural social principle, articulated in clear opposition to the radical and (logically) equalizing thrust within the Enlightenment. Chaadaev’s valorization of ‘absolute sociality’ rested on the notion that the truths generated within the universal mind can be grasped only by a select few, by individuals and nations, ‘supraindividual moral personalities’ that are moving towards a realization of universality, and are conscious instruments of this superior force that the ‘masses’ obey blindly and instinctually.

This was the core of Chaadaev’s arguments; its implications in the context of the imagining of Russian history and destiny are perhaps more interesting, and constitute what was arguably the most significant intervention in the story of early nineteenth-century Russian thought. To put it baldly, Chaadaev worked out a certain provocative (and superbly expressed) conception of Russia’s past and its relationship with Europe, and made the same basic interpretive frame serve two utterly opposed visions of the future in the space of eight years. The first of his Letters, the source of major controversy, articulated the first of these visions, a deeply pessimistic one. The ‘traditions’ that Chaadaev’s philosophical musings had led him to celebrate were those of Western Europe: its civic institutions, its Catholicism, its intellectual accomplishments, and its laws. None of these existed in Russia, which was trapped ‘in the narrowest present, without a past or a future, in the midst of a flat calm’. Russia had no history: this was the perception that informed Chaadaev’s interpretations, in 1829 certainly, but equally in 1837. Chaadaev took the great theme of European conservatism – the organic embeddedness of the present in its historical foundations – and denied it to Russian history. Russia had not created its own past, it had borrowed and imperfectly digested scraps of European tradition (and given nothing back to the world in return). Its Christianity had been frozen at the moment of the Great Schism, and had been denied the fruits of Roman Catholicism. Its social structures – as represented most of all by the obshchina or peasant commune – were backward and stultified. Above all, Russian civilization had none of the essential unity  that marked the great civilizations of history: classical Antiquity, the Chinese, the Indian, Islam, and above all European Christianity. This was how Chaadaev chose to put it:

Isolated in the world, we have given nothing to the world, we have taken nothing from the world; we have not

added a single idea to the mass of human ideas; we have contributed nothing to the progress of the human spirit.

And we have disfigured everything we have touched of that progress.

The only salvation for Russia, argued Chaadaev, was to reproduce the centuries of Western history she had been denied when expelled from the mainstream of European civilization by the Schism. The hope, if any, lay in uncompromising Westernization. Since Russia had no history and no traditions it could claim with pride, she needed to create these. And this process necessarily had to chart the historical path of Western Christianity, navigate waters that had already been navigated, reproduce a very complex and frequently painful experience of growth.

Between 1829 and 1837, though, something happened to turn Chaadaev’s ideas inside out, pose them radically against themselves. There was certainly a great deal of pressure behind this: the publication of the first Letter in 1836, with its profound pessimism, despair and national self-disgust, was a politically troubling event. Chaadaev had marked out a space from which all the institutions of present-day Russia – her autocracy, her bureaucracy, her Church and her culture – could be fiercely attacked. Dangerous intellectual debates were facilitated by the Letter. Not surprisingly, pressure mounted from various quarters, and in 1837 Chaadaev published his Apology Of A Madman, which was an apparent retraction of his position, though actually an inversion. However, there is evidence of a genuine change in Chaadaev’s ideas. In letters to A.I Turgenev written in 1833 and 1835, he declared: ‘It is Europe we shall teach an infinity of things which she could not conceive without us’, and ‘Let us discover our future by ourselves, and let us not ask the others what we should do’. This ideological volte-face was determined most of all, probably, by the 1830 July Revolution in France. The end of the Restoration, in Chaadaev’s apocalyptic imagination, meant also, effectively, the end of Europe (or rather, the European principle) as a signpost to a desirable future.

In Apology Of A Madman, Chaadaev managed to reverse his position on Russia on the basis of the very arguments he had put forward in the Letter. Russia had been deprived of the legacy of both the East (‘…it spread waves of light all over the earth from the heart of its solitary meditations…’) and the West (‘….in the Occident the minds proudly and freely advanced, bowing only to the authority of reason and of God….their eyes always fixed on the unlimited future.’) Once again, Chaadaev evokes the contrast of a Europe steeped in its history and traditions, and a Russia without either. But precisely by this token, Russia now appears as the realm of radical and complete freedom, a tabula rasa, unencumbered by the burdens of the past, and consequently waiting to be made. Peter the Great emerges as the unlikely hero of this celebration of a putative Russianness, since he understood the possibilities a country like Russia offered to a strong ruler, and exploited these to the hilt in his aggressively Westernizing project. At a key point in the Apology, Chaadaev enters into an ambiguous discussion of a ‘new school’ that ‘proclaims that we are the cherished children of the Orient’. His association of this with a doctrine of Russian exceptionalism makes it clear that he’s referring to the Slavophiles. He refuses the association with the Orient, but ends with a ringing and rather moving endorsement of the idea of a unique Russian destiny. The Oriental principle has long been dead, Europe has exhausted itself, and now:

I believe that we are in a fortunate position……I am firmly convinced that we are called upon to resolve most

of the social problems, to perfect most of the ideas that have come up in the old societies, and to decide most of

the weighty questions concerning the human race….in a way we are appointed, by the very nature of things, to

serve as a real jury for the many suits which are being argued before the great tribunals of the human spirit and

human society.

So the argument that condemned Russia to a slavish imitation of the West is now spun around, and made to serve the cause of Russia’s destiny, its historic mission in the world, to provide a model for the future of humanity through its radical self-transformation. In these two documents, then, Chaadaev spelt out the two extreme positions possible in speculations about Russia’s relationship to the West and her future, and both of these flowed from the same interpretation of history. Subsequent intellectual debates – including that between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers – can be traced back here. The question of exactly what Russia was to do, confronted with a rapidly changing Europe, tormented all successive generations of intellectuals. It is to the first of these generations to which this essay turns, after this extended prologue.

The Slavophiles and the Westernizers developed radically different positions on the issues that their predecessors had chalked out. Their debates were carried out in the intellectual ferment of the 1830s and 1840s, dominated by the influence of German Idealism on the philosophical circles of the time. Schellingianism and, later and much more powerfully, Hegelianism, refigured the philosophical preoccupations of the intelligentsia, such that even their most convinced opponents had no choice but to engage intensely with them. A range of very complicated arguments emerged, and it should not be supposed that the Slavophiles and the Westernizers present a neat polarity of thought. It is true, though, that the doctrinal coherence of these rival positions did emerge precisely from a mutual opposition: it was this sense of opposition that clarified the ideas of the main figures on both sides of the divided intelligentsia. It is as an engagement, a dialogue, that this opposition is best studied. However, it is necessary to first set out, in the form of an admittedly unsatisfactory catalogue, the central ideas of the main figures of each school.

Slavophilism in its classic form has an identity utterly separate from Russian nationalism, Pan-Slavism or the other ideologies it has sometimes been conflated with. The particularist/universalist distinction sometimes made between the Slavophiles and Westernizers is also untenable: the Westernizers were as deeply concerned with the fate of Russia as the Slavophiles, and the Slavophiles were as universalist, in their own way, as their detractors. Classical Slavophilism is best represented by four figures: Ivan Kireevski (1806-56), Alexei Khomiakov (1804-60), Konstantin Aksakov (1817-60), and Yury Samarin (1819-76). While each of these was a highly distinctive thinker in his own right, their ideas were in a certain sense homologous. They founded their philosophies on the dichotomy between the two great universal alternatives, Europe and Russia. Russia, cast in an extremely positive light, became a putative metaphor for the future of the rest of the world, and her regeneration became the metaphor for universal regeneration. The basic philosophical doctrines of the Slavophiles were drawn from European conservatism, which was the source for their attack upon European ‘bourgeois liberalism’, with its hollow freedoms and empty political practice. The individuation engendered by the development of bourgeois society tore apart the bonds of community and Christian brotherhood, which could be restored only by a prioritizing of faith over rationality. Bourgeois law and political organization, in this account, were seen as fundamentally self-contradictory, since they moved incoherently between the drive to limit State authority and the drive to coercion, arising from the very function of the State, which was to harmonize conflictual individual interests. The rule of law and the abstract rights of the abstract individual, in the Slavophile analysis, were irreconciliable logically. Absolute private property in the European sense, too, was an infringement of community and a source of alienation and conflict. In the Slavophile imagination, the mir emerged as the body that enshrined and protected the principle of communal property. The emphasis on commonality was central to the Slavophiles, who abjured the notion that the individual could fashion his own morality and his own ways of living; these must be subjected to the jurisdiction of common moral norms. Tönnies’ Gesellschaft/Gemeinschaft distinction appealed to the Slavophiles, who celebrated a community in which individuals were ‘organically’ linked to one another. Further, the Slavophiles made use of the classic conservative anti-Enlightenment position that the growth of society should involve no sudden ruptures with the past, but should be based on its historical foundations. The cross-cutting of diverse ideologies is evident here: the critique of bourgeois society, the cornerstone of Slavophile polemic, the valorization of community life (and the Russian peasant commune), and the search for alternatives to this modernity were ideas voiced on both left and right in this period. A romantic conservatism, borrowed from the European intellectual tradition, was often in danger of being translated by the Slavophiles into the language and the traditions of radical left-wing critique. In general, their position remained within the limits of a ‘conservative utopianism’ as Walicki terms it, but there were slippages.

It was the Slavophiles who developed into its fullest form the old conception of an opposition between ‘Europe’ and ‘Russia’, based on a particular reading of history. Kireevski and Khomiakov were both historians, and they worked out a historical frame within which to situate these separate historical trajectories. Kireevski argued that the radical separation of Russia from Europe rested on her exclusion from the Roman heritage. Western society was based on Roman law, which was founded on abstract reason. Roman rationalism and jurisprudence formalized all social bonds, divesting them of their ‘organic’ moorings. Human beings were subordinated to the ties of legality and property that chained them. The state, separated from private life, imposed itself above it as an external, coercive force; again, organicity was dispensed with. Further, the European state could only develop through a vicious cycle of conquest and revolutionary violence. Russia, on the other hand, drew her strength from the Byzantine  tradition, which repudiated this particular logic. She had ‘invited’ her rulers to rule (this was an old myth, though based on a certain kernel of truth; it is true that Russian princes in the pre-Mongol period did not engage in conquest along the same lines as the European feudal states). Kireevski also valorized the principle of the obshchina, which embodied the principle of the distribution of power throughout society. Communities called upon princes to discharge their duties in the ideal Russian state (again, this was a myth based on an actual historical experience, that of medieval Novgorod, which as a powerful merchant centre did have the capacity to choose and dismiss princes at times). Peace and harmony, then, were the outstanding characteristics of Russia, where communities and institutions were embedded in history and tradition.

Khomiakov summed up the logic of European history in an insight of brilliant clarity: philosophically, Western civilization embodied a clash between ‘unity without freedom’ (Catholicism, with its corporate organization, its Pope, its dogma, and its categorical exclusion of the transgressive) and ‘freedom without unity’ (the experience of Protestantism, with its Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone, which led to atomization and individuation, and had no space for anything but contractual, soulless bonds between autonomous individuals). Kireevski developed from this basic opposition an understanding of the core of modern Western civilization, obliquely articulating a moral critique of capitalist society that had much in common with forms of European radical utopianism. Mechanical industrial production, which ‘rules the world without faith or poetry’, was the only object of worship in Western society. In a stunningly acute indictment of the logic of capitalism, Kireevski declared:

It (industry) unites and divides people. It determines one’s fatherland, it delineates classes, it lies at the base of

state structures, it moves nations, it declares war, makes peace, changes mores, gives direction to science, and

determines the character of culture…..It is the real deity in which people believe and to which they submit….

Unselfish activity has become unconceivable; it has acquired the same significance in the contemporary world

as chivalry had in the time of Cervantes.

He was, to his credit, the only Slavophile to engage seriously with the monumental changes in European life brought about by these processes. For him, however, this was ultimately the logical, indeed teleological, culmination of the logic of the trajectory of Western life and thought, which he anatomized in his essays on philosophy. The object of critique here was, unsurprisingly, rationality. Cartesianism, argued Kireevski, the foundation of contemporary European thought, subordinated experience to logical thought. The self-validating play of logical propositions admitted of no justification by reality, and intellectual processes, in their enclosed, ‘pure’ form, yielded a priori conclusions that sought no confirmation by experience. To this he counterposed his concept of ‘integrality’ and ‘integral reason’, which, unlike Western rationality, did not split the knowing subject off from the comprehended object. Instinct, intuition and insight into experience were the foundations of Kireevski’s alternative epistemology, much in line, ironically, with Romanticism, a powerful current within the very European intellectual tradition that he rejected in such categorical terms. The complete knowledge that Kireevski sought was, for him, founded on ‘inner concentration’, the focusing of all the capacities and resources of the human mind. (Western philosophy was one-sided in this respect; its fetishization of abstract rationality stifled the spiritual resources through which knowledge could be accessed). Pure reason could only comprehend the abstract, ‘integrality’ could comprehend reality in all its richness. For Kireevski as for Khomiakov, such integral knowledge, above all, could only be produced by pure religious faith, embodied by Russian Orthodoxy, with its spiritual capacities that outmatched the rational intelligence of Europe. However, – and here Kireevski’s thought reaffirmed its conservative moorings – not all individuals possessed the capacity for integral reason to the same extent, and the weakness of Protestantism and Cartesian rationality also lay in their rejection of any logical basis for a hierarchized capacity for knowledge. Pure reason was not dangerous simply because of its abstraction; it also laid the logical basis for a kind of levelling of epistemological capacity (and thus of human ability) that contradicted the axiom that human beings are unequally endowed and have differential access to the truth. Eventually, Kireevski endorsed a pluralism that was also deeply hierarchical.

Given his historical vision, Kireevski was compelled to confront head-on (and did confront head-on) the problem that haunted conservatism and Slavophilism alike. Given Russia’s indubitable spiritual superiority to Europe, why was it, in fact, less ‘developed’? Or to put it differently, what caused the sense of Russian inferiority? Kireevski could have written this off as an illusion, but he was too serious a scholar to do so. He argued that a thousand years ago, Russia and Europe had started from similar positions, but something had happened along the way, and their trajectories had diverged. Not just that, but they had eventually followed paths which affirmed Europe, rather than Russia, as intellectual leader of the world. This was something that disturbed him deeply: what was it that denied Russia the moral and intellectual force, the power to sway and convince the world, the thinkers who could do so, all of which had been granted Europe? Kireevski posed this problem, but his solution to it was intellectually unsatisfactory, and indicates the real limits of the Slavophile engagement with history and the meaning of historical processes. It was Westernization, and above all the Petrine reforms, that diverted Russia from her historical destiny, her path to progress, and pushed her into the by-lane of a slavish emulation of the West. Her historical right to greatness – and to the intellectual leadership of the world – would be restored once she returned to her original path. This had become possible now, at this historical moment, because European thought and culture had reached its apogee – interestingly – with Hegel. There was no further creative greatness to be expected of a civilization that was marked by the destructiveness and anomie of industrial modernity.

It is the philosophical alternative to Western rationality, in its existential and moral dimensions, that Khomiakov developed in his writings. His idealized Russian Orthodoxy, needless to say, was a doctrine and practice that had never existed in the pure form that he described. It is necessary to keep in mind, though, that as a philosopher he and Kireevski were both concerned, above all, with the logical form, the ideal-type (to apply later terminology) which the real expressions of Orthodoxy and Western rationality embodied. Khomiakov was the most universalist of the Slavophiles; for him the contrast between Russia and Europe was one part of a universal history, driven by the search for the boundary between freedom and necessity. ‘Europe’ (and on this level Europe included Russia) was the only civilization in which freedom was the energizing principle. The freedom of the Judaeo-Christian world, reaching its culmination in modern Europe, found its highest expression in Orthodoxy.

Orthodox Christianity, for Khomiakov, refused the polar oppositions and tensions of Western Christianity, since it was founded on a communitarian ethic that had no recourse to enforced unity. This was the principle of sobornost (translated as ‘conciliarism’), a true fellowship of believers that jettisoned both selfish individualism and coercive restraint. Ruler and ruled were united by an organic bond of mutual trust, and the moral bonds that held the community together were enshrined in the obshchina, the rural commune characterized by the common use of land and the rule of custom. The togetherness of sobornost expressed a universal Christian truth that was ultimately immanent within religion. However, the practice of this true Christianity – in other words, the practice of community – alone could achieve this truth. The free unity this was founded on, argued Khomiakov, was prereflective and not open to rationalization, and it rested ‘within the womb of mother Church.’ But – and here Khomiakov approached a dangerously radical position – it was free in a literal sense; no authority or hierarchy could dictate  this universal truth. There was no place here for the moral or doctrinal authority of the Church organization, for truths were not transcendent (thus, they did not admit of privileged access for a religious elite) but immanent. The only repository of authority was the freely united community of believers, born into the truth, as it were, and realizing it through the practice of sobornost. There is a powerfully democratic and levelling thrust within the structure of Khomiakov’s argument, and he was naturally looked upon with suspicion and distrust by ‘actually existing’ Orthodoxy.

The most interesting and radical of the Slavophiles, in a sense, was Konstantin Aksakov, whose thought is also testimony to the internal diversity of the Slavophile tradition. Aksakov’s ideas, seen superficially, confirm the pronouncements of Kireevski and Khomiakov, and of the main line of Russian conservatism. He accepted the contrast between Russia’s past and present, and he accepted the fundamental distinctions between Europe and Russia. However, his moral passions, and in particular his reading of the communitarian ethic, took him in a far more radical direction. To the historical and cultural oppositions made by the other Slavophiles, he added another: the distinction between the State and the zemlya, a term which literally connotes ‘land’, but was used by Aksakov to denote a people who were rooted, but also radically ‘not of the state’. This was, naturally, embodied in the peasant commune, with its (according to Slavophile mythology) entirely autonomous practices of periodic repartitioning of land, common use-rights and popular assemblies. This was a total separation of spheres: while the ‘people’ were the source of all morality, the State was the seat of power. The people, then, create the moral norms on which the State acts, and have no hand in the actual exercise of power. But conversely, the State has no moral authority of its own, and acts according to the moral dictates of the people, even though it monopolizes power. In a sense, this disjunction between authority and power transformed the realm of powerlessness into what might have seemed antithetical, the realm of freedom. For Aksakov, the people, possessed of an ‘internal’ truth, were free precisely in their separation for power: the ‘external’ truth vested in the state in the form of legality and executive power exercised no corresponding moral claim. All politico-legal attempts to mediate this fundamental and necessary division of spheres between state and community were harmful. Aksakov can be seen, then, to occupy an ambiguous position in relation to ‘bourgeois liberalism’ in one sense. On the one hand, he rejected the liberal demand for political freedom and the extension of political participation. On the other hand, this very rejection flowed from a radical split between the political and social spheres that lay at the very heart of Western liberalism. The consequences of Aksakov’s thought could be very radical: the people may have been ‘free from politics’, but any State which compromised the sovereignty of the morality vested in the people was illegitimate.

For Aksakov, the uniqueness of Russia lay in the fact that here the state was not elevated to the absolute and highest principle of social organization: rather, in a radical sense it was separate from social organization. There was a harmonious link between state and people: the 16th and 17th century representative institution, the zemskii sobor, perfectly represented the interests of the people, of the community and its morality. However, this was a relationship of freedom: the state sought the support of the zemskii sobor when necessary and the monarch retained the right to make final political decisions; by the same token, the life of the community was not ordered or violated. It was a relationship based entirely on moral conviction, there was none of the instrumental reason of legal guarantees that bound them together. Within social life, the mir was inviolable and sovereign; each individual had to submit to his mir. But the apparent authoritarianism of this position was illusory; since, much like the relationship of state and zemlya, no formal power or imposed authority could enter the bond between the individual and the mir. The bond of obedience had to rest on the moral conviction of the individual in the rightness of his submission: there was to be no individual autonomy of action, but the drive for this would proceed from the individual’s own relinquishment of agency. Communal traditions would not be violated; but neither would they be enforced. It is a profoundly utopian vision, for it orders, within its scheme, not only a future pattern of social relations but also a future psychology: more than that, a psychology that is to emerge immanently within community and the individual, without coercion or external constraint. The radical implications of this were not evaded by Aksakov: he made it clear that the State as it existed in contemporary Russia was not based on these principles, it was alien and oppressive; it violated the moral sanctions of the people; the bureaucracy was an appalling excrescence that had no legitimacy. His vision of the future was, however, projected back into an imagined past: the ‘golden seventeenth century’, the pre-Petrine era of peace and harmony. It was the Petrine reforms that destroyed this balance, and so had to be held responsible for Russia’s present decay. There were anarchist possibilities in this ideology. And these possibilities were consistently followed through in much of Aksakov’s thought. He went so far as to propose the abolition of serfdom without compensation for the nobility, since the institution was a violent, external imposition upon the ‘inner truth’ of peasant life. He was also, interestingly, just as critical of the servitude of the established Church to the State. Aksakov’s particular variant of Slavophilism, then, was a strange and fascinating ideological admixture. From a traditionalist critique of the present and a largely fictionalized account of the past, and from a horror of the institutions of Western modernity that informed all Slavophile thought, he deduced a radically utopian, semi-anarchist vision of the future.

The ideas of the Slavophiles emerged in opposition to and were clarified by their opposition to the growth of what came to be known as ‘Westernism’ in the late 1830s and 1840s. The ‘Westernizers’ congregated in philosophical circles, mostly in Moscow University, and like the Slavophiles were mostly of gentry origins. To put it in very simple terms, the Westernizers started from the acceptance of Russian backwardness and European superiority. This did not make them either less patriotic or more universalist than the Slavophiles, for the problems they addressed and analysed were basically the same, and the regeneration of Russia was as central to then as their opponents. However, in general their ideas were informed by a far more positive appreciation of the meaning of Western ‘progress’, an appreciation triggered in part by their great fascination with the grand currents in Western philosophy, and in particular the thought of Hegel. The abstract universalism condemned by the Slavophiles, the formality of universal written law, the principles of rights and constitutional government, and the sovereignty of individual reason were the bedrock of their philosophy. Given these starting points, the Westernizers moved off in very different directions, and by the end of the 1840s there were clearly discernible differences between the liberal and the more left-wing and socialist variants of Westernism.

This was also a period which Isaiah Berlin has identified with the birth of the Russian intelligentsia. Whether one accepts this or chooses to trace intellectual history in deeper soil, it is true that the intelligentsia became a self-conscious force in these years, conscious of its unity and of a wider historical mission, perhaps because of the intensity of their interchanges. As Berlin argues in a sensitive essay about the 1840s in Russia, the enormous influence of German Romanticism could lead both in the conservative direction of a rejection of all rational and empirical analysis, and in the more radical direction of a celebration of the momentous and frequently unknowable changes that this period seemed to be experiencing. Given the absence of a tradition of secular education in Russia, there was an enormous hunger for new ideas, and every trace of Western thought that found its way into Russia was seized upon eagerly, digested, worked over and teased and prised open. Herzen’s memoirs provide a sense of the excitement of the times. Perhaps it is in this sense that Westernism is best understood, as a fascination – and a pleasurable one – with ideas coming from the West (and in particular from Germany, though French socialism also had a marked impact); an engagement that could have positive consequences for the making of the Russian future.

It might be helpful, given this context of a Western-inspired intellectual ferment, to briefly take note of some of the prime European intellectual currents that animated the Russian intelligentsia. To begin with, it is significant that the grand explanatory systems and laws of the Enlightenment (or the caricature of the Enlightenment, which has served as a more convenient straw man for its detractors than has the real item, right up to present-day polemics) found no very great philosophical resonance among this generation of intellectuals, although many of the values – in particular, political values – associated with Enlightenment and revolutionary France were internalized by them. Romantic and Hegelian critiques – and the alternative systems founded on them – proved more exciting for the intelligentsia.

As Martin Malia observes, Schelling’s idealism, although already absorbed by some intellectual circles of the early nineteenth century, really caught on around 1825, significantly parallel to the Decembrist movement. German idealism conceived of reality as an organic structure, where art and religion were bound to the social and political structures of an age. Historicism, too, was part of this outlook: all ages were woven into a historical chain of becoming, and reality kept evolving from lower to higher forms. In its more ambitious, post-Kantian forms, idealism sought to reduce all of reality to idea, to thought: the mind, capable of comprehending both the external and internal world (both noumena and phenomena, contra Kant), can also, through its laws, govern this reality, such that it finds its ultimate expression in the full, knowing consciousness. Since reality was fully permeable by mind, it had to be reducible to mind and encompassed within the self. Thus, in its knowledge of the universe, the mind also came to consciousness of itself. Knowledge of the self, then, was also consciousness of – and identity with – Geist, the Absolute, Spirit. However, mind and the external world had to be in a sense both identical and separate, since otherwise reality would cease to exist and the mind would only know its own ideas. Within idealism, identity and separation were reconciled by the dialectic, the dynamic process whereby subject and object developed into each other, absorbed within a struggle that both united and opposed them. Also of significance was the premium placed upon personal intuition as a means of knowledge by German idealism: since all knowledge is self-knowledge, intuition can be just as valid epistemologically as objective empiricism. Schellingianism was the form in which the intellectual universe of idealism entered Russia. Berlin lays great stress upon the attractions of Schelling’s privileging of intuition, experience and sympathy – as opposed to rational classification, experiment, induction and deduction – in both epistemology and art. This romanticism, argues Berlin, initially attracted Russian intellectuals like Stankevich because it offered a faith in beauty, harmony, peace and creativity that could be discerned beneath the cruelties of everyday life. Schelling – and, initially, Hegel too – provided a sort of escape route for engaged intellectuals after the suppression of the Decembrist uprising. Given the conditions of literary censorship and the impossibilities of open political action, the elevation of art as the fit subject of discourse was appealing.

Hegel’s influence, though, was far vaster, profounder and more complex than that of Schelling. As Malia points out, Hegel represented the highest point of German idealism, but the structure of his thought led by its own logic to an engagement with reality on new terms. Russian thought returned to realism via the long detour of idealism. It was the form of this return that was so difficult for the Westernizers to negotiate, since Hegel – much like Chaadaev – presented two diametrically opposite journeys to reality. The pronouncement that haunted Russian thinkers in its depth and ambiguities was the famous aphorism: ‘The real is the rational and the rational is the real’. Hegel fused the two in a unique manner. Reality, he argued, was so diversely constituted that it was impossible for the mind to know it in its discrete determinations. Rather, what could be known was the universal totality, the total space the multiple manifestations of reality occupied. And this universal totality could be known only through reason, and could only be known now, at this epochal moment in human evolution when man’s capacities to access the truth have expanded to hitherto inconceivable dimensions. However, this reality itself is constituted, made by man, at the highest point of his creative abilities. Man can thus realize the rational; he can make it real. Knowledge could now transform the world, and the act of knowing could now simultaneously be an intervention. Hegel also worked out the implications of the identity of mind and being. Man exists only insofar as he is self-aware. This awareness itself is a constitutive process of being, and there is thus no moment at which he is not creating himself. Subject and object are merged in this endless process of realization and creation. This process, however, is also one of creative destruction: there is no moment at which man is not constantly destroying the self – and the world – he has created, in order to build the new. All experience has to be negated, and this negation itself must be negated. It was this dialectical principle that was Hegel’s contribution to subsequent radical philosophy – and in particular that of Marx, who subsumed the tragedy and the grandeur of the ‘Bacchanalian world of creative destruction’ (a Hegelian phrase) in the Manifesto (`All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned..’) and thereby saw Hegel’s philosophy for what, above all it was – a tremendous insight into the constellation of creative and destructive energies that defined the epoch he (and Marx) lived in.

The Russian intelligentsia grappled with Hegel in a more complex manner. This was because in Hegel’s own philosophy, the revolutionary thrust of the dialectic was sublimated in a very conservative resolution. For Hegel, the modern state (he was evidently speaking of the Prussian state) had achieved the final negation of all negations, it was absolute and final. The real was the rational, and this was an achieved result, not a radical project waiting to be made and renewed. The rational was not simply potentially real, but actually real. The Russian Hegelians – among them Stankevich, Belinskii, Bakunin and, interestingly, Konstantin Aksakov in his pre-Slavophile days, were tormented by the ‘reconciliation with reality’ that this seemed to present, not least because they were, in the apparent political hopelessness of these years, deeply enchanted by it. In a letter to Stankevich, Belinsky – of all people – wrote of his relief at discovering that ‘force is law and law is force’ when he came across Hegel’s principle of the real being the rational; he experienced the revelation as a release, a liberation from the moral responsibility to protest. Stankevich, too, rejected the necessity of protest – as, most astonishingly, did Bakunin. In all these cases, however (even with Stankevich towards the very end of his life), the principle of active intervention began to reassert itself, very often through an embracing of the more radical possibilities within Hegelianism. Feuerbach, with his Left Hegelianism and his call for the material liberation of man, provided a tortuous route from Hegel to socialism, notably with the Petrashevtsy. This was only one of many resolutions, however, and in the 1840s those who were already being called the Westernizers followed many diverse paths to their engagement with Russia, her past and her destiny. Herzen’s Memoirs contain a vivid description of his shock when, returning to Moscow from a three-year exile in 1840, he found Belinskii and Bakunin preaching the gospel of reconciliation with reality. He also describes Belinskii’s recovery of a radical attitude to reality. Significantly, Herzen was the only major Westernizing intellectual of his time not to succumb to the conservative interpretation of Hegel.

The circle that Stankevich (1813-40) founded in Moscow University was a direct precursor of the rival groups – eventually resolved into a Slavophile/Westernizer opposition – that sprang up in the 1830s and 1840s. In the 1840s the intellectuals who rejected the Slavophile celebration of the Russian ‘principle’ became increasingly aware of the power of the ideas they opposed, and the need to engage with them, critically but seriously. It was Herzen, characteristically, who had the most nuanced and balanced appreciation of Slavophilism, recognizing the potency of their critique of Europe, which was similar to the moral passion and the acuity of the socialist interpretation of capitalism. (It is true that the Westernizers, in this regard, despite largely being on the philosophical Left in the understood sense, had nothing comparable to offer). It was Vissarion Belinskii (1811-48), though, who was the central intellectual figure of the 1840s, despite his petty-bourgeois origins (as opposed to the aristocratic pedigree of most of the intelligentsia) and his comparative narrowness of learning. He seems to have exercised a degree of moral influence, and commanded a personal and intellectual respect, even adulation, that was unparalleled in the history of nineteenth-century Russian thought.

Belinskii took over and refigured the Slavophile notion of the contrast between ancient and modern Russia and that between Russia and Europe, reinterpreting the dichotomies in the light of Hegelian dialectics. Three great dialectical moments or stages defined Russian history for Belinskii. The stage of ‘natural immediacy’, of a people enclosed within themselves, unaware of the outside world and living as one with nature, pre-reflectively, almost primitively, in a highly integrated and highly unselfconscious state, was the first of these. The focus on the near-primitiveness of the narod was deliberate, counterposed to the volkish idealizations the Slavophiles invested so heavily in. This stage was negated by that of ‘reflection’, as, in the process of reflection about this condition, people differentiated into ruler and ruled, into social strata, and a political life emerged. ‘Consciousness’ came to demarcate people from one another, and the ‘conscious’ understood their world through the mediation of the universal concepts of Western culture. The historical caesura this accomplishment of consciousness was founded on was, naturally, the Petrine reforms, as Russia engaged with European culture. This negation was in its turn negated, in classic Hegelian form, as the dialectic moved into the stage of synthesis and the previous stages were ‘sublated’. European universalism in this age – the present – comes to acquire a Russian dimension, just as everything that was authentically ‘Russian’ comes to be Europeanized. What emerges from this is the identity of Europe and Russia , the erasure of civilizational distance and difference; only a national distinction can now be maintained. European culture now has an integrative function: it produces national consciousness in Russia, and in a sense (re)creates Russia herself. The historical agent for this change, according to Belinskii, is not the state but the intelligentsia. It is here that he affirms the radical moral responsibility to the future that drove Slavophiles and Westernizers alike (but especially the latter), a responsibility that had momentarily been jettisoned during the Hegelian ‘reconciliation with reality’.

Shortly before he died, Belinskii wrote a scathing attack upon Gogol for his Selected Passages From A Correspondence With Friends, which had defended serfdom and autocracy. This document, which took the form of an open letter addressed to Gogol, is filled with the moral passion and acuity of polemic that made Belinskii the most devastating literary critic (Berlin sees him as the founder of ‘social criticism’) and the most revered moral intelligence of his times. His engagement with ideas of a more radical stripe seems evident here, as he condemns the Russian clergy, characterized by ‘fat bellies, scholastic pedantry and savage ignorance’. His understanding of the Russian people, as contained here, is utterly different from the exaltations of the Slavophiles: here the people are celebrated for their lucidity and common sense, and ‘therein, perhaps, lies the vastness of its historical destinies in the future’. Through a slow and halting process of ideological transformation, the narod are beginning to be pictured not merely as the repositories of either ignorance or virtue, but as human beings with a destiny to achieve, or, rather, a destiny to be achieved for them by the intelligentsia. Belinskii’s letter, besides being a devastating polemic against a writer who he sees as having unforgivably betrayed his literary genius, also contains a proud assertion: ‘I believe I know the Russian public a little’. Belinskii’s roots in Russia (he knew no foreign languages, unlike his peers) are constantly reaffirmed and celebrated. This confirms the inadequacy of an equation of the Westernizer/Slavophile divide with a nationalist/internationalist divide. Belinskii’s polemic against Maikov (who called for the overcoming of national particularism through the liquidation of nationality as such) is a further indication of this. He described nationalities as ‘the individualities of mankind’ and condemned Maikov’s ‘humanist cosmopolitanism’.

By the end of his life, Belinskii was beginning to come to terms with the problem of capitalism, and to profess socialist convictions. These were still confused convictions, without the anchoring that Herzen’s later articulations were to achieve. While a vague ideal of ‘socialism’ was seen as desirable as an end in itself, Belinskii tended to believe that this needed to be achieved through the historical path of capitalism and bourgeois democracy. The problem, however, was not resolved, and complicated by the need to counter the Slavophile  critique of capitalism, with all its evident truths, for the latter was a weapon in the service of an ideology that rejected Westernization tout court. Not being prepared to embrace Fourier and utopian socialism as unambiguously as the Petrashevtsy did, Belinskii could see no path other than the bourgeois one towards the accomplishment of the immediate goal: Western modernity. At the same time, his experiences abroad demonstrated the palpable suffering and pauperization that were a direct consequence of this very accomplishment. Walicki argues, though, that Belinskii always remained essentially within the bourgeois democratic tradition, with which a certain anger with, and even contempt of, the bourgeoisie was not entirely incompatible.

Belinskii was the most public and vigorous critic of the Slavophiles, and the epithet ‘Westernizer’ came to be primarily associated with those who were influenced by him and formed part of the intellectual circles he was part of. However, these were also distinctive personalities in their own right, and very diverse in their orientations. Granovsky was a liberal Westerner who sharply condemned Slavophile revivalism, which he saw as the ‘summoning of a decrepit phantom’, based on the disingenuous fabrication of traditions. One of the most prominent historian among the Westernizers, he found much to admire in the whole course of Western history: the wisdom of European philosophers, including the medieval schoolmen, the democratic and constitutional forms, partly pioneered by the urban communes of the Middle Ages, the vast heritage of classical civilization (the very things the Slavophiles condemned – Roman law and civilian administration – came in for praise), the civilizing influence of the Western Church (in particular its humaneness towards serfs), the institutions of knighthood and chivalry, and the historical achievements of great individuals like Charlemagne. Clearly, Granovsky had a particular fascination for the medieval. He was, however, wary of the radicalism of the philosophical and political Left, as represented above all by Belinskii and Herzen, and was unsympathetic to socialism. Konstantin Kavelin was another major Westernizer, who outraged the Slavophiles in his moral endorsement of the Petrine reforms. His analysis of Russia’s historical trajectory was this: community relations grounded in custom and kinship were gradually replaced by a system of formal political and juridical legislation, which emancipated the individual from traditional fetters and protected his freedom. The logic of Kavelin’s argument, however, eventually extended in a direction radically different from that of the main line of Westernism. The modernizing Russian state initiated by the Petrine reforms was, in his view, the historical agent of progress. This, needless to say, contradicted the idea of the moral authority (and privileged responsibility) of the intelligentsia. From the 1850s, as Slavophilism began to splinter and disintegrate, Westernism as a coherent ideological position also began to lose its force, and the gentry liberalism of the 1840s was gradually transformed into a new, Westernizing conservatism from the 1850s and 1860s on, best represented by Chicherin and Gradovskii. For Chicherin, the Hegelian celebration of the powerful state became a basis for the celebration of Russian autocracy. He developed a powerful and more than partially accurate attack on the Slavophile celebration of the village commune, arguing that it was not ‘organically’ embedded in the bloodstream of Russian history, but was actually a sixteenth-century creation of a centralizing state that sought to streamline its fiscal policies. The call for Russian modernization, in the context of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, became a celebration of actual processes of Westernization, and liberalism blended with a conservative defence of the state. What was lost from the generation of the 1840s was the tradition of the Westernizing left of that time, whose call for the achievement of Western modernity was inextricable with a radical opposition to autocracy.

The person who continued to profess a political and social radicalism long after Westernism was no longer a tenable transformative ideology was, of course, Alexander Herzen (1812-70), often seen as the greatest figure in the history of nineteenth-century Russian thought. Isaiah Berlin, not known for his fondness for radicals, has this to say: ‘Russia is not so rich in first-rate thinkers that she can afford to ignore one of the three moral preachers of genius born upon her soil’. For Berlin, Herzen is significant above all for his commitment to individual liberty, which he sees as a source of tension for his socialism. Malia’s rich biography establishes Herzen as a complex and many-sided thinker, steeped in the intellectual traditions of the West, committed to a radical egalitarianism, and the central figure in the shift from liberalism to socialism as the radical alternative for the Russian intelligentsia. Herzen, unlike Belinskii, avoided the attractions of the ‘reconciliation with reality’ propounded by Belinskii and Bakunin. Herzen engaged fruitfully with Schelling, Saint-Simonian socialism, Hegel and Feuerbach, but it was a more critical engagement than some of the other Westernizers could manage. As Berlin points out, Herzen’s appreciation of Hegel was tempered by his concern for the particular and the contingent, and his suspicion of grand world-historical schemes. Berlin’s interpretation, though, is possibly a little too static and overstated, since – with a range of qualifications – Herzen was for a long time a committed Hegelian, though, as Walicki points out, he distinguished between the purely cognitive logic (purged of contingency and circumstance) of Hegelianism and the actual process of historical movement. Like most of his radical contemporaries, Herzen made a point of thinking in dialectical terms.

Before 1848, Herzen had accepted the basic tenets of Westernism with respect to the contrast between Russia and Europe. However, the suppression of the revolutions on the Continent in that year (which marked as significant a historical break for Russian as for Western European thought) made him turn his back on Europe, and turn to an unexpected, radical idealization of the Russian obshchina as the possible repository of an emancipated future. There were apparently incongruous Chaadaevian and Slavophile echoes in Herzen’s claim that a ‘young’ Russia could rejuvenate Europe. In his vision of a socialism founded on the commune, which he popularized rather than invented, there are shades of Aksakov. The trajectory of Herzen and early Russian agrarian socialism, however, is far too complicated to trace here.

 

The Slavophiles and the Westernizers, then, represented the two most powerful intellectual trends in the Russia of the 1840s. Superficially, it is easy to assimilate the differences between them to a narrative of a conservative/liberal or radical dichotomy. To a degree such a split is historically true, but it conceals more than it reveals. The Slavophiles and Westernizers were equally steeped in the traditions of Western thought and equally preoccupied with the interpretation of Russian history. The conservative/radical opposition did not only run along one path. None of the Westernizers ever worked out the profound critiques of capitalist civilization that the Slavophiles approached (though they conflated modern capitalist society with the immanent ‘logic’ of Western civilization as a whole), and these were critiques that had something in common with some of the positions crystallizing on the Left in Europe. Nor were the Westernizers consistently radical in their philosophy: the quietistic strands within Hegelianism appealed to the most radical among them. Further, basically conservative starting points could produce a completely antithetical eventual conclusion. Aksakov is a case in point. Universalism and nationalism, too, do not divide neatly along the Slavophile/Westernizer line of opposition. The Westernizers were probably more concerned, as Walicki argues, with the idea of a nation: the Slavophile celebration of community is not analogous, and ‘Russia’ in the latter imaginary represented more a civilizational than a national principle, counterposed to ‘Europe’. Both intellectual Weltanschauungen could be deeply hierarchical and authoritarian: in Kireevski’s argument the capacity to grasp the truth was differentially distributed, and in the ideology of the 1840s philosophical Left there was a constant assumption of the moral right of the intelligentsia to act on behalf of the masses, and a concomitant denial of agency to the latter. But there were resources of egalitarianism and a space from which to question power in both these ideological clusterings too, in Aksakov as well as in Belinskii.

All this complicates but does not negate the real differences and oppositions between Slavophilism and Westernism. It is impossible to deny that the Westernizers responded to the currents of European thought that entered Russia – German idealism and Hegel in particular – with an enthusiasm that was very far removed from the suspicion (though not unmixed with appreciation) with which the Slavophiles treated these doctrines. The radical Westernizers clung desperately to the philosophical models of the West not out of any lack of originality or need for mentors, but because their hatred of Tsarist autocracy and the purposes of power in their time ran very deep. The political activism that the Westernizers yearned for – and which some of them experienced – would have been anathema to most of the Westernizers, who could not have produced intellectuals quite as engaged with the imperative to find urgent solutions to urgent problems in the way that Herzen and Bakunin, to take only the outstanding examples, were. However, as members of the intelligentsia who were emphatically not the ideologues of autocracy, the Slavophiles did have certain implicit radical credentials that cannot be dismissed out of hand. There was a common intellectual space shared by the Slavophiles and the Westernizers, a space in which they articulated their ideas as individuals, as intellectual collectivities, and debated issues of common concern. They retained an intellectual autonomy and integrity through these debates, and refused to simply become the mouthpieces of the Tsarist state, even when at their most conservative. Some of this shared space, then, was at least implicitly oppositional.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. Andrzej Walicki: A History Of Russian Thought From The Enlightenment To Marxism

(Stanford, 1979)

  1. Andrzej Walicki: The Slavophile Controversy: History Of A Conservative Utopia In

Nineteenth Century Russian Thought (Oxford, 1975)

  1. Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers (1978)
  2. Martin Malia: Alexander Herzen And the Birth of Russian Socialism

(Harvard, 1962)

  1. Alexander Herzen: My Past And Thoughts (extracts)
  2. Derek Offord: Portraits Of Early Russian Liberals
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Kireevsky, Khomiakov, Belinsky, Bakunin, Herzen)

  1. Thomas Riha (ed): Readings In Russian Civilization, vol. II
  2. Alexander Radishchev: A Journey From St. Petersburg To Moscow (extract)
  3. The Decembrists: Extracts from Testimonies of Pestel, Kakhovsky, Bestuzhev and Trubetskoi
  4. Petr Chaadaev: Philosophical Letters (extracts); Apology Of A Madman (extracts); Letters To

A.I Turgenev (extracts)

  1. d) Vissarion Belinskii: ‘Letter To Gogol’