Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/449

Rh the orthodox Marxists regard liberalism as twin brother of the anarchism they so strongly condemn. This adverse judgment is all the more powerful in its effect seeing that the liberal opponents of Marxism (Diehl, for instance) take the same view.

All that I need say in conclusion is that when the possibility of a renascence of liberalism is mooted, I am not thinking so much of the relationship of liberalism to Marxism as of the socialisation and democratisation of liberalism.

IBERALISM is the latest of the religions, but its church is of this world, not of the world to come; its theodicy is a political doctrine; its roots are in the earth; it knows nothing of mystical peace formulas, for its need is to make peace a practical reality. Liberalism, at first victorious and subsequently defeated, disclosed the sundering breach in all its nudity. The distressing consciousness of this breach is manifested in the irony of the contemporary world, in the scepticism with which modern man scatters the fragments of his broken idols." Such was the characterisation of liberalism penned by Herzen in the year 1852, when his mood was one of despair owing to the collapse of the revolution. The same mood had in the previous year led him to express the conviction that liberalism would not make itself at home in Russia, that liberalism was quite alien to the Russian nature.

Herzen erred, for liberalism had hid a home in Russia since the days of Peter. After Peter, Catherine II was likewise representative of liberal ideas, for she had direct philosophic associations with Voltaire and Diderot, though her regime was less liberal than that of Peter. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot secured in St. Petersburg numerous and enthusiastic readers and adherents, so that the French enlightenment reinforced the enlightenment already inaugurated by Peter and his successors. We find in St. Petersburg and Moscow the freethinking philosophy of the eighteenth century, the rationalism and the humanitarian philosophy of the enlightenment; this philosophy directed its shafts against serfdom,