Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/156

130 opposed to centralism, for he regarded the centralised state as essentially bourgeois.

I cannot expound in detail how in these questions, too, Lavrov was eclectic, how here likewise he displayed tactical vacillations between "politism and apolitism," between socialism and anarchism, between Marx and Bakunin. This is obvious in his relationship to anarchism and in the cautious way in which he formulated his hostility to the state. His opposition to Bakunin and Načaev was based chiefly upon ethical grounds.

Lavrov's attitude towards Herzen was dictated by the former’s consistent socialism and by his ethical rigorism. Lavrov was a stoic, and Herzen seemed to him unduly dilettantist (using the word in Renan's sense). He stood nearer to Bělinskii and Černyševskii, and had, indeed, marked resemblances with the Jatter. In the early sixties, Lavrov preached anthropologism, following Černyševskii. From this standpoint, the "historical realist," like the Feuerbachian anthropologist, was thoroughly rationalistic and definitely anti-religious. When we studied the program of "Vpered" we saw that historical realism was sharply contrasted with theology and philosophy. Černyševskii, too, was an ethical rigorist, and it was from the characters in What is fo be Done that Lavrov derived the content of his socialistic imperative. Finally, Černyševskii likewise displayed a certain harshness of style, and we may ask ourselves whether in his case, as in that of Lavrov, this may have been connected with the vigorously rationalist outlook,

Passing finally to consider Lavrov’s relationship to the narodniki, it is an illuminating fact that Lavrov cannot be accounted one of the philosophers of the narodnicestvo. To Lavrov, as to the other progressive and revolutionary thinkers and politicians of his day, it seemed that the Russian peasantry constituted the Russian folk, and his "workers' socialism" was conceived rather on agrarian than on industrial lines. Moreover, he approved the mir and the artel as socialistic institutions, and he favoured propaganda among the peasants. But just as for himself he was content with propaganda among the intelligentsia, so were his whole method and mentality too much the fruit of his strong and peculiar individualism for it to be possible that he should accept as decisive and assume for his own guidance the principles of the narodničestvo.