Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/183

Rh his formula for the solution of the social question (the abolition of the division of labour by simple cooperation) has a purely socialist foundation. His socialism, however, is not Marxist.

We have already seen that Mihailovskii does not accept economic materialism. He rejects, further, the positivist objectivism and the amoralism of the Marxists; nor does he, like Marx and the Marxists, provide for socialism a necessary and exclusively historical foundation. Mihailovskii is a subjectivist, and his socialism has an ethical foundation; in his treatment of history he elucidates the social mischief which has been effected under the regime of liberalism. Despite his socialism, and qua socialist, Mihailovskii fights for the rights of individuality. The loss of individuality, the impossibility for the average man to develop his individuality completely, de-individualisation—this is for him the crowning evil of the capitalist division of labour, and of the capitalist economic oppression of the masses.

Mihailovskii prizes Marx's sociology more than he prizes that writer's economics. He considers that Marx was still far too much influenced by the unsound conception of the abstract man by which the thought of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and the other classical economists, was dominated. Speaking generally, Mihailovskii censures the economists for undue tendency to abstraction, objecting above all to the concept of national wealth as an abstract figment in whose name individuality is stifled. It is for this reason, says Mihailovskii, that the liberal political economists never carried the principle of individualism to its logical conclusion. Like Comte, he refuses to regard political economy as the leading and determinative constituent of social science, for he looks upon it as a discipline subordinate to sociology, one whose function it is to discuss a variety of social reciprocity, namely economic reciprocity.

Mihailovskii wrote freely in support of his campaign against "the disciples" (i.e. the followers of Marx), but it cannot be said that he settled his account with Marxism adequately.

His polemic against the Marxists brought Mihailovskii into closer personal relationships with the narodniki, and eventually he became one of the collaborators on their literary organ. But we cannot term him a narodnik, even though some have wished to describe him as a representative of the "critical narodničestvo." He blames the narodniki for their