Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/444

418 of Hegel and Feuerbach which revolutionised his outlook and made him a socialist. He wrote a brief sketch of socialism in Russia, representing the Petraševcy and Černyševskii as precursors of socialism. After 1848 he discarded French and European socialism as futile, but he continued to term himself a socialist and to look forward to the true social revolution. In "Kolokol," especially in the later issues, the socialist note is extremely prominent, being stressed in polemic against the younger revolutionists who were dissatisfied with Herzen.

Herzen speaks of his socialism as "Russian." It is agrarian socialism, the socialism of the mužik and of the artel. But he advocated in addition municipal socialism, political socialism, and district socialism. Thus was Herzenism distinguished from Marxism, which looks chiefly to workers and proletarians for its fulfilment. Herzen's "Russian" socialism often spoken of as "Russian" communism, is further distinguished from Marxism by this, that Herzen, though a materialist, did not teach economic materialism. His own account of Marx in London shows, moreover, that Marx and the Marxists were to him personally uncongenial. He sided with Bakunin against Marx, and when the first edition of Marx's magnum opus was published in 1867, Herzen paid scant attention to it.

His primary demand, as has been recorded above, was for brain equality. He knew that civilisation is impossible to the hungry, and he knew that the civilisation of the minority depends on the physical toil of the majority. From Louis Blanc and others he learned of the class struggle in Europe, and he himself levelled accusations against the "Manicheism of society," but he was defiinitely opposed to the class struggle. He insisted that the function of socialism was not merely to put an end "to anthropophagy" and especially to capitalism, but above all to annihilate everything monarchical and religious. Herzen looked to socialism for a new philosophy, and it seemed to him that Saint-Simon and Fourier had uttered no more than the first lispings of the future philosophy.

His socialism was based upon a positivist and materialist outlook. Shortly before his death, in The Physician, the Dying, and the Dead, he censured the socialism of his contemporaries as being still a religion, that is to say illusion, and from socialism of this texture he expected nothing but a new blood-letting, and not the true act of liberation.

In his demand for brain equality Herzen is no communist