Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/368

342 Germany, was radically opposed to absolutism. The positivist materialism of Herzen and his radical associates found its fiercest opponent in official Orthodoxy, in the theocratic program of Nicholas and Uvarov. Since in Russia (and indeed in Europe as well) the state is so intimately associated with the church, metaphysical opposition to the church and church doctrine simultaneously became political opposition to the state. As time passed, this opposition developed, and displayed varying degrees of intensity. If the earlier liberals, such men as N. Turgenev, had been compelled to emigrate owing to their political demand for a constitution, it was all the more natural that Herzen and his fellow radicals should be forced to take refuge in Europe.

Westernism is sharply distinguished from slavophilism by the political trend of the former. The slavophils were unpolitical; they desired merely "inner," moral and religious reform, whereas the westernisers' aim was for "outer," political reform. Thus westernism became radical, oppositional, and directly revolutionary.

HE westernisers were distinguished from the slavophils by their estimate of the value of the state and of politics. To the westernisers the state was a political rather than a moral entity, and they attached to it a greater value than did the slavophils. But this is true only of the liberal westernisers, those of the right or comparatively conservative wing, for the radical westernisers, Herzen for instance, agreed rather with the slavophils in their valuation of the state and of politics. A difference further exists between the theories of the westernisers and those of the slavophils as regards the origin of the state in general and of the Russian state in particular.

Whilst the slavophils considered that the Russian state originated in the family community and the village community, the westernisers taught that the Old Russian state, like all European states, had developed out of the patriarchal tribal organisation. To the Westernisers (and indeed to the slavophils as well), patriarchalism was the explanation and perhaps the justification of absolutism. Konstantin Aksakov, however, was strongly opposed to the patriarchal theory, and expressed the view that Russia least of all had been a patriarchal state.