Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/62

36 as soon as the masses should become sufficiently enlightened, was not to be found; he saw that absolute monarchy was no more than the completion of aristocratic hierarchy, and that freedom can be established in no other way than from below upwards, democratically, by the democracy. Henceforward Černyševskii advocated the sound view that the opposition between democracy and aristocracy is fundamental to the political organisation of society, that monarchy is but a form of aristocracy. He refuted Čičerin when the latter pointed to instances in which monarchs had made common cause with the people against the aristocracy. With equal justice he considered that serfdom was the groundwork of aristocratic absolutism.

His individualism, the high value he placed upon culture, and his recognition that manufacturing industry is the leading motive force of the present time, frequently led him into a disapproval of and even a contempt for the state, and this gave his teaching a somewhat anarchistic flavour. Sometimes he displayed hostility to the word "government," and would at least hear nothing of "regulation." It is evident that he was greatly influenced by Proudhon.

His antipathy to absolutism led him, in the existing state of foreign affairs, to put his trust above all in France, "the European volcano." It was in France, in especial, that he studied the political evolution of the new age.

His opposition to Russian absolutism led him to approve the radical movement in Poland, heralded already by the events of the year 1863; and he desired complete independence, not for the Poles alone, but likewise for the Little Russians. He sympathised with the Magyars against Austria. Like Marx, he found it hard to forgive the Austrian Slavs for their reactionary and antirevolutionary conduct in 1848; and when the beginnings of constitutionalist freedom were manifest in the early sixties, it was his fear that the Austrian Slavs would become tools of the reaction.

Černyševskii openly declared himself in favour of "democracy," and occasionally spoke of his trend as "radical"; the political significance of these designations becomes clear in the light of the theory just expounded concerning the opposition between democracy and aristocracy (as a democrat Černyševskii was of course a republican); and it is further illuminated by his attacks upon the liberals or progressists.