U.S.A. 825.

00

Isaiah Berlin's The Sense of Reality at last

makes available an important body of previ­

ously unknown work by one of our leading

historians of ideas and one of the finest essay­

ists writing in English. Eight of the nine pieces

included here are published for the first time,

and their range is characteristically wide. The

subjects explored include realism in history,

judgment in politics, the history of socialism,

the nature and impact of Marxism, the radical

cultural revolution instigated by the Romantics,

Russian notions of artistic commitment, and

the origins and practice of nationalism. The

title essay, starting from the impossibility of

historians being able to re-create a bygone

epoch, is a superb centerpiece.

These studies all display Berlin's central con­

cerns, and all of them address issues germane to

contemporary debates. With exemplary lucidity

and rare penetration, he sheds fresh light on

themes of enduring importance.

THE SENSE
OF REALITY
 Also by the same author

Karl Marx

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Four Essays on Liberty

Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly

Russian Thinkers

Edited by Henry Hardy

Against the Current

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

The JJfagus of the North

 THE SENSE
OF REALITY

Studies in Ideas and their History

ISAIAH BERLIN

Edited by Henry Hardy

With an introduction by Patrick Gardiner

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

New York
 Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 L'nion Square \\'est, :-.Jew York 10003

Copyright © Isaiah Berlin. 1996

Selection and editorial matter© Henry Hardy, 1996
Introduction © Patrick Gardiner, 1996

Isaiah Berlin has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
to be identified as the author of this work, Henry Hardy as its editor

All rights reserved

Printed in the L'nited States of America

First published in 1996 by Chatto & \\'indus Limited, England
First Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition, 1997

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berlin, Isaiah. Sir.

The sense of reality : studies in ideas and their history I Isaiah
Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy ; with an introduction by Patrick
Gardiner. - 1st Farrar, Straus ed.

p. em.

Originally published: London, England: Chatto & \\'indus, 1996.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-374-26092-3 (hardco\'er : alk. paper)

I. History-Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Modern. 3. History,
!\lodern. I. Hardy, Henry. II. Title.

DI6.8.B3292 1997
901-dc21 96-39829
For Alfred and Irene Brendel
 CONTENTS

Editor's preface lX

Introduction by Patrick Gardiner XUI

The Sense of Reality I

Political Judgement 40
Philosophy and Government Repression 54
Socialism and Socialist Theories 77
Marxism and the International in the
Nineteenth Century I I6
The Romantic Revolution: A Crisis in the
History of Modern Thought I 68
Artistic Commitment: A Russian Legacy I 94

Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism 23 2

Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness
of Nationality 249
Index 267
 EDITOR'S PREFACE

DuRIN G the last six years I have had the privilege of assembling
and editing Isaiah Berlin's extensive unpublished work: essays,
addresses, lectures, broadcasts and discussions (categories that are
of course not mutually exclusive) spanning the last sixty years and
more. My sometimes elusive sources have included manuscripts
and typescripts, recordings (often unscripted)! and transcripts -
very various in accuracy - of recordings that no longer exist. The
edited typescripts I have accumulated in readiness for selective
publication are approximately equal in extent (at some one million
words) to Berlin's hitheno published work.
Two long studies drawn from this corpus of material, on Joseph
de Maistre and J. G. Hamann/ have already been published, and
the nine pieces selected for inclusion in the present volume are
from the same source. They and their harbingers have three
properties in common. First, they existed as more or less finished
scripts, most if not all of which had been thought of by Berlin at
the time of composition as potentially publishable, though for one
reason or another they had escaped being printed. Secondly, they
seem to me, and to others who have read them, fully to deserve
addition to Berlin's published oeuvre- to put it no less modestly.
Finally, they are linked thematically, in that they all exemplify his
central concern with ideas and their history, as my subtitle
indicates. My hope is that more of the unpublished material will in
due course see the light, and that more of Berlin's published but

1 I have deposited copies of the recordings at the National Sound Archive in

London.
2 'Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism', included with seven published

but uncollected essays in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the

History of Ideas (London, 1990; New York, 1991); and The Magus of the North:
]. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modem Irrationalism (London, 1993; New York,
1994).
X T H E S EN S E O F REALITY

hitherto uncollected writings will be brought together; but with a

few exceptions - chiefly his pieces on Soviet Russia and on
Zionism - the present volume, added to its eight predecessors,•
completes the collective publication of Berlin's more finished
longer essays.
I turn now to the origins of the pieces. 'The Sense of Reality' was
the basis for the first Elizabeth Cutter Morrow Lecture, delivered
on 9 October 1 9 5 3 at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts,
under the title 'Realism in History'; some of the matters it deals
with have been touched on by Berlin in other essays, for example
'The Hedgehog and the Fox' and 'The Concept of Scientific
History', but this is his most sustained treatment, and clearly
merits a place in this collection. 'Political Judgement', which also
has points of contact with 'The Sense of Reality', but from a
distinctively political angle, was a talk (the sixth in a series of seven
entitled 'Thinking about Politics') first broadcast on I 9 June I 9 5 7
o n the Third Programme o f the BBC: the text is jointly based o n a
prepared script and on a recording of the broadcast. 'Philosophy
and Government Repression' was a lecture prepared for a series
entitled 'Man's Right to Freedom of Thought and Expression',
which was part of the bicentennial celebrations at Columbia
University, New York; the lecture was scheduled for 24 March
I 9 5 4 , but in the event Berlin was unable to attend. 'Socialism and
Socialist Theories' differs from the other pieces by having appeared
in print at the time it was written: it was first published in
Chambers's Encyclopaedia (London, 1950: Newnes; New York,
19 5 0: Oxford University Press), and in a revised form in a
subsequent edition of the same work (Oxford, New York etc.,
1 9 66: Pergamon); the present version incorporates further revisions
intended for a new edition of the encyclopaedia which never
appeared, and is included partly for that reason, partly because it
has not previously been collected, and partly because of its
appropriate subject-matter. 'Marxism and the International in the
Nineteenth Century' was the basis of a lecture given at Stanford
University in 964 at a conference held to mark the centenary of
r

1 In addition to the two volumes mentioned in the previous note, there are six

earlier collections of pieces that had previously been published only one by one in
a scattered fashion. These are Four Essays on Liberty (London and New York,
1969), Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London and New
York, 1 976), Russian Thinkers (London and New York, 1978), Concepts and
Categories: Philosophital Essays (London, 1978; New York, 1979), Against the
Current: Essays in the<History of Ideas (London, 1979; New York, 1980) and
Personal Impressions (London, 1980; New York, 198 1).
 '
ED ITO R S P REFACE Xl

the First International Working Men's Association. 'The Romantic

Revolution' was written for a conference in Rome in March 1960,
where it was delivered in an Italian translation: during the long
gestation of this book the Italian text has appeared in Isaiah Berlin,
Tra Ia filosofia e Ia storia delle idee: intervista autobiografica, ed.
Steven Lukes (Florence, 1994: Ponte aile Grazie), and Dutch and
German translations of the original English text in, respectively,
Nexus and Lettre international. 'Artistic Commitment' is a revised
version of a talk first given in the United States in the early 1 96os.
'Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism' was the First
Humayun Kabir Memorial Lecture, delivered in New Delhi in
1 97 2. 'Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality'
was also delivered in New Delhi, on 1 3 November 1 961, at a
conference held to mark the centenary of Tagore's birth.
As in the case of previous volumes, I have received generous and
indispensable help from a number of scholars, to whom I offer my
very grateful thanks. Patrick Gardiner (to whom I am also
indebted for his excellent introduction) and Roger Hausheer read
all the essays that I chose, as well as a number that I didn't, and
helped me both to make the selection and to solve a number of
specific textual problems. Professor G. A. Cohen read and com­
mented on the pieces on socialism and Marxism, helping me to
convince Berlin, who is irremediably sceptical about his work, that
they should be included; and Professor Terrell Carver, among
other acts of intellectual largesse, has enabled me to add references
to the latter essay. Dr Gunnar Beck helped invaluably with Fichte,
Andrew Robinson with Tagore, Professor Frank Seeley with
Turgenev, Dr Ralph Walker with Kant, Helen McCurdy with
several Russian problems. Dr Derek Offord put his expert knowl­
edge of Belinsky and other Russian authors at my disposal with a
truly heroic generosity, patience and effectiveness that leave me
especially deeply in his debt. I also profited, not for the first time,
from the prodigious learning of Dr Leofranc Holford-Strevens.
Isaiah Berlin himself with considerable forbearance read and
approved my edited text of all the pieces, making a number of
revisions in the process. Without his secretary, Pat Utechin, nothing
would be possible; and the same has been true since I 990 of the
most generous benefactors who have financed my Fellowship at
Wolfson College, and of Lord Bullock, at whose instigation the
post was created for me. Finally, I should like to thank my editors
at Chatto and Windus, Will Sulkin and Jenny Uglow, for their
xu T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

help and support; and Elisabeth Sifton of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
for a careful reading of the typescript that yielded numerous
refinements.

April 1996 H EN RY H A RD Y
Wolfson College, Oxford
 INTRODUCTION

Patrick Gardiner

Is A I A H B E R L I N 's
writings have impinged upon so many distinct
spheres of thought and enquiry, and have ramified in such different
and at times unexpected directions, that a question may be raised as
to what leading conceptions have ultimately guided or held
together his varied excursions into these apparently disparate
intellectual domains. This is not as straightforward a question as it
might look; indeed, in the eyes of some of his admirers it may seem
to be quite inapposite, missing the essential point. For they might
claim that much of the distinctive value of his achievement lies
precisely in the notable absence it displays of any unitary ambi­
tions or systematic pretensions; the range and sheer diversity of
what he has written, involving amongst other things a constant
readiness to consider on their own terms both sharply conflicting
beliefs and the points of view of those holding them, have played a
key role in enlarging the horizons of his readers and in loosening
the grip of obstructive prejudices or dogmas. Berlin himself has
characterised as 'doctrinaire' a person who is 'liable to suppress
what he may, if he comes across it, suspect to be true', and it is
certainly the case that his own outlook stands in complete contrast
to this. Even so, and notwithstanding the openness and objectivity
of approach he has consistently shown, it seems possible to discern
in his work the outlines of particular preoccupations and themes
that give it an inner coherence not the less impressive for being
relatively unobtrusive and unemphatic. What at first sight may
appear to be stray or unrelated strands in his thinking frequently
turn out on closer examination to be threads in a wider pattern,
forming parts of a more inclusive whole. They can be seen, in other
words, as contributing to an intricate complex of subtly intercon­
nected ideas rather than as belonging to the framework of some
rigid theoretical system. Furthermore, the complex in question can
itself be said to reflect the presence of certain overarching concerns
XlV THE S E N S E OF REALITY

whose pervasive influence has manifested itself in vanous ways

throughout Berlin's intellectual career.
One of these recurrent concerns is with the nature and signifi­
cance of history, a subject which is central to the tide essay of the
present collection. Berlin has often denied that he is or ever has
been a historian, and it may be that there is some accepted if
restrictive sense of the term in which this is so. The fact remains,
however, that he has made a unique and celebrated contribution to
the history of ideas and hence possesses an intimate working
knowledge of issues and problems of the kind to which this branch
of enquiry into the human past gives rise. Moreover, in pursuing
his studies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought he has
inevitably been confronted by widely varying theories concerning
both the character of the historical process and our cognisance of
it. Thus when writing his first book, on Karl Marx, he was obliged
not only to come to grips with Marx's own highly influential
accounts of the forces governing historical change and develop­
ment, but also to read the works of such important predecessors as
Helvetius, Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Comte. In one way or
another these writers shared the conviction, widely current among
thinkers of the French Enlightenment, that scientific methods and
categories of the type that had proved so successful in advancing
our knowledge of the natural world should be extended to the
study of humanity and its history. Berlin has described elsewhere
how, in the course of investigating the sources of these and allied
claims, he sought to understand from within the problems that
obsessed those who had propounded them; the ideas of the past (he
felt) could only be brought to life by 'entering into' the minds and
viewpoints of the persons who held them and the social or cultural
contexts to which they belonged. In following this procedure,
however, he was aware of engaging in a kind of thinking that
seemed far removed from what was proposed by the writers he was
immediately concerned with, imaginative and empathetic under­
standing of the sort in question having no apparent parallels or
analogues within the natural sciences. Where, on the other hand, he
did discern a responsive echo was in the works of two eighteenth­
century thinkers of quite a different cast of mind. Vico and Herder
were in various respects conspicuously at odds with the prevailing
temper of their time, and not least in their attitude to what they
held to be the distinctive character of the historian's subject-matter.
 INT R O D U CTION XV

This, in their view, made attempts to assimilate historical method­

ology to that of the sciences misconceived in principle. For
whereas in the case of the latter we could never obtain more than a
purely 'external' knowledge of the phenomena with which they
dealt, the cognitive relation in which we stood to the phenomena
specific to history was of a wholly dissimilar order. Here it was
possible to achieve a direct or inward grasp of the mental processes
that found expression in the doings and creations of historical
agents; the underlying humanity historians shared with those they
sought to comprehend enabled them to ascertain from the inside
what it was that moved and activated the subjects of their
enquiries, even when - as was frequently the case - this was a
matter of recapturing through imaginative effort the interior life of
other periods or cultures whose pervasive outlooks and preconcep­
tions differed profoundly from their own. Both Vico and Herder,
albeit in varying ways, implied that such an approach was funda­
mental to any meaningful pursuit of the human studies, and it is a
conception of historical practice whose cardinal importance Berlin
- in common here with their twentieth-century admirer and
follower Collingwood - has likewise insisted upon.
The influence of such contentions, involving an emphasis on the
essential autonomy of historical thought and understanding, may
be said to lie behind some of the theses advanced in 'The Sense of
Reality', where the contrast drawn between history and other
disciplines recalls the attention Berlin has accorded to various
aspects of this complex topic in a number of notable essays.
Nevertheless, in the present instance he approaches it from a
direction that diverges in significant respects from ones taken in
some of his other discussions, his perspective here having more
general implications and encompassing practical as well as academic
issues. The title given to the piece is indeed indicative of this, and
partly reflects his characteristic suspicion of attempts to simplify,
or reduce to artificially abstract terms, the 'dark mass of factors'
that constitutes human existence, whether these are undertaken for
purely theoretical purposes or whether with a view to implement­
ing comprehensive plans of a political or social nature. He has
always shown himself to be acutely aware of the perennial
fascination exercised by the prospect of discovering some infallible
formula or universal prescription capable of resolving the multifar­
ious problems presented by the human condition in a way that
would leave no loose ends or dangling uncertainties. And in this
XVl T H E S E N SE O F REALITY

connection he has also stressed the extent to which in the modern

period - that is, roughly since the end of the seventeenth century -
such an aspiration has often found expression in efforts to
demonstrate that the historical process conforms to ineluctable
laws or uniformities which can be understood to hold for the
future as well as the past, thus possessing predictive as well as
explanatory potential. But he considers none the less that the
fascination alluded to represents a temptation which should be
resisted, and that the difficulties underlying some of the projects it
has given rise to are rooted in misunderstandings that extend
beyond the bounds of historical interpretation and methodology,
ultimately reaching into the depths and texture of all human life
and experience.
As Berlin points out, historical theorising of the type he has in
mind by no means conforms to a single pattern, representative
accounts ranging from ones founded on mechanically-conceived
regularities to others that invoke 'organic' or evolutionary laws of
development. In the present context, however, his concern is not
with distinguishing and commenting on different examples of the
genre; rather it is that of questioning the whole notion of
constructing a law-governed or systematic theory that would be
capable of fitting into a unified scheme the multiplicity and variety
of heterogeneous elements of which the historical process is
composed. On the latter point he refers with approval to Tolstoy,
and it is noteworthy that much that he says on this theme echoes
the tone of the Russian writer's views on history as presented at the
close of War and Peace. Not only did Tolstoy exhibit considerable
scepticism with regard to the crude simplifications and bland
generalities he attributed to the various philosophies of history and
society that had so far been produced; he further implied that all
projects involving the use of abstractions and schemata of the kind
favoured by speculative theorists were bound in the end to
founder, their being imrinsic:.1lly unfitted to comprehend the
continuum of 'infinitesimals' - the series of countless, minute and
interrelated actions and events - that made up the life and story of
humanity. In Berlin's own treatment of the subject one finds a
similarly critical attitude taken up towards previous 'pseudo-scien­
tific histories and theories of human behaviour', together with a
comparable, though by no means identical, emphasis on the
manner in which the dense material of history may be expected to
 INTRO D U C T I O N XVll

resist the imposition of procedures originally adapted to radically

different areas of concern and enquiry.
Such affinities are hardly surprising, Tolstoy's particular gifts as
a creative writer making him in Berlin's eyes especially well
equipped to appreciate the richness and diversity of human reality
as it is lived and known: the endless variety and individuality of
things and people, the subtle cross-currents of feeling involved in
both social intercourse and personal relationships, the depths of
self-regard and the confusions of aim lying beneath the surface of
public life - these were amongst the myriad phenomena which his
exceptional powers of observation and imagination captured and
which led him to look through the smooth and regular outlines
drawn by history's self-proclaimed interpreters to the uneven and
often chaotic details of actual experience they concealed. As is well
known, such aspects of Tolstoy's achit!vement are eloquently
portrayed in Berlin's penetrating study, 'The Hedgehog and the
Fox'. There, however, he was largely concerned to contrast
Tolstoy's artistic insight and flair with another, quite opposite, side
to his outlook and personality, one that hankered after some
monistic or unitary truth which would altogether transcend the
problems and distractions that plague our mundane existence. In
the present context, on the other hand, he wishes to indicate the
relevance of the novelist's specifically literary abilities to the essay's
general theme, relating them not merely to the activities of
historians engaged in reconstructing the past but also to those of
politicians and so-called 'men of action' in their dealings with the
world of practical affairs. Thus in 'Political Judgement', which
follows 'The Sense of Reality' as a companion piece and elaborates
on some of its points, Berlin suggests that qualities of mind
analogous in certain respects to ones possessed by imaginative
writers can be said to play a role both in the study of history and in
the conduct of what he terms 'statecraft'. Like the trained historian,
the effective politician needs a developed capacity for a 'non­
generalising assessment of specific situations'; a finely attuned
sensitivity to the shifting contours or levels of social existence, and,
combined with this, an intuitive 'feel' for what is empirically
feasible and for what hangs together with what in the intricate and
frequently recalcitrant sphere of particular facts or circumstances,
have perennially been amongst the distinctive characteristics of
outstanding political leaders. Berlin notes that such 'practical
XVlll T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

wisdom' or genius has tended to be treated by the great systemat­

isers of history as representing a haphazard 'pre-scientific'
approach which is no longer acceptable on theoretical grounds and
which stands in need of radical reform or replacement. But he also
points out that some of their proposed improvements can scarcely
be felt to have constituted an encouraging response to this alleged
requirement, the Utopian-style experiments they have inspired
resulting in unanticipated consequences of a kind with which -
ironically enough - history itself has made us only too familiar.
Taken together, these two articles have an ample sweep and
scope that exemplify their author's singular range and illuminating
breadth of vision. They were originally written in the 1 9 5 0s, and
the various allusions they contain to speculative social theories and
blueprints may therefore partly be viewed as reflecting the preoc­
cupations of a period acutely conscious of the totalitarian ideolo­
gies that continued to hold sway over much of the political
landscape. Even so, it would be a mistake to regard such references
as possessing no more than a limited or transient significance when
judged within the overall perspective of Berlin's thought. He was
almost from the first alert to the dangers inherent in a misplaced
'scientism' and the blurring of boundaries it is apt to engender, an
early resistance to reductionist trends in epistemology and the
philosophy of language prefiguring in some ways the objections he
was later to raise against influential doctrines in political and social
theory. He has never denied that it was proper and indeed
estimable to salute and seek to emulate methods that had promoted
the success of the natural sciences within their own domains; but it
was another thing entirely to advocate an uncritical extension of
these to alien fields of investigation or to quite separate levels of
experience. As we have seen, he has attributed misconceptions on
the latter score to certain eighteenth-century philosophes and their
followers in the approach they adopted to human affairs. That,
however, has not been the sole source of his dissatisfaction with the
views of such thinkers, the wider reservations he has from time to
time expressed in his writings raising questions about his attitude
to the Enlightenment as a whole. The nature of some of the
uncertainties that have been felt may be gleaned from other essays
included in the present volume.
In actual fact, an,d despite what is on occasions supposed, Berlin
has been far from ,reticent in characterising his own, admittedly
complex, position on the subject. Thus he has gone out of his way
 INTR O D UCTI O N XIX

to praise representatives of the Enlightenment for their courageous

opposition to many of the evils of their time, including ignorance,
oppression, cruelty and superstition, and for their support for
ideals like reason, liberty and human happiness; as he succinctly
remarked to an interlocutor,1 this put him on their side. At the
same time, though, and notwithstanding the attachment he feels to
much that they stood for, he also considers that they were prone to
give dogmatic credence to assumptions - often traditional in origin
- which were by no means self-evident and whose validity their
professed respect for empirical principles might have led them to
query. These included specific conceptions of a uniform and basi­
cally unchanging human nature, together with closely related
beliefs in the existence of universal values which were harmo­
niously realisable by human beings in the course of their lives.
Some of the issues arising from such preconceptions are examined
in 'The Romantic Revolution': here it is argued that the emergence
of romanticism in the late eighteenth century constituted a dra­
matic change in the intellectual climate of the time, the objective
status of accepted standards and norms being challenged by
subjectivist doctrines in a fashion that had momentous repercus­
sions within the spheres of ethics, aesthetics and politics. In
concluding this arresting discussion Berlin suggests that one long­
term effect of the resultant clash of outlooks has been that we find
ourselves today to be the heirs of two traditions, with a tendency
to 'shift uneasily from one foot to the other'. Equally, however, he
maintains that the novel and subversive ideas introduced by the
movement indisputably deepened and enriched the understanding
of people and societies, both exposing limitations or lacunae
discernible in the Enlightenment inheritance and simultaneously
opening up fresh possibilities of thought and feeling which had
hitherto lain beyond the bounds of the European imagination.
Berlin's treatment of the above tension between these different
standpoints is consonant with the combination of acuity and
empathetic insight that pervades his approach to the history of
ideas as a whole. On the one hand, he has shown an exceptional
ability to grasp from within, and appreciate the force of, intellec­
tual and cultural outlooks that are often opposed to ones to which
as a person he feels most sympathetic. On the other, he has been

1 Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London and New

York, 1992), p. 70.

XX T H E S E N S E OF REALITY

quick to recognise and pinpoint the sinister implications latent in a

number of the positions he has so vividly portrayed: not least the
shapes of irrationalism and of aggressive forms of nationalism that
lurk within some of the doctrines belonging to what he has called
the Counter-Enlightenment. On the latter score, what he writes
towards the end of his essay on Rabindranath Tagore is indicative
of the line he wishes to draw between the beneficent and the
destructively chauvinist guises in which nationalism can appear.
Here as elsewhere, he comments, Tagore tried to tell the truth
without over-simplification, and to that extent was perhaps lis­
tened to the less, for - as the American philosopher C. I. Lewis
remarked - 'There is no a priori reason for thinking that, when we
discover the truth, it will prove interesting.' Berlin quotes this
observation with approval. In his own writings, however, it can
truly be said that the truth invariably proves to be so.
 THE SENSE OF REALITY

WH E N M EN, as occasionally happens, develop a distaste for the age

in which they live, and love and admire some past period with such
uncritical devotion that it is clear that, if they had their choice, they
would wish to be alive then and not now - and when, as the next
step, they seek to introduce into their lives certain of the habits and
practices of the idealised past, and criticise the present for falling
short of, or for degeneration from, this past - we tend to accuse
them of nostalgic 'escapism', romantic antiquarianism, lack of
realism; we dismiss their efforts as attempts to 'turn the clock
back', to 'ignore the forces of history', or 'fly in the face of the
facts', at best touching and childish and pathetic, at worst 'retro­
grade', or 'obstructive', or insanely 'fanatical', and, although
doomed to failure in the end, capable of creating gratuitous
obstacles to progress in the immediate present and future.
This kind of charge is made, and apparently understood, easily.
It goes with such notions as the 'logic of the facts', or the 'march of
history', which, like the laws of nature (with which they are partly
identified), are thought of as, in some sense, 'inexorable', likely to
take their course whatever human beings may wish or pray for, an
inevitable process to which individuals must adjust themselves, for
if they defy it they will perish; which, like the Fates in the line by
Seneca, 'ducunt volentem . . . nolentem trahunt'_l And yet this
way of thinking seems to presuppose a machinery in the universe
which those who think in these terms do not necessarily accept,
which indeed they may, if they are students of history rather than
metaphysics, seek to refute by means of negative instances drawn
from their own and others' experience. Nevertheless, even those
who try to rebut this way of thinking find that they cannot

1 'draw those who are willing, drag those who are not'. Letters, I 07. I I,
adapting Cleanthes.
2 T H E S E N S E O F REAL ITY

altogether abandon the concepts in question because they seem to

correspond to something in their view of how things happen,
although they do not, perhaps, believe in the machinery of
determinism which is normally held to be the source of them.
Let me try to make this somewhat clearer. Everyone, no doubt,
believes that there are factors that are largely or wholly beyond
conscious human control. And when we describe this or that
scheme as impractical or Utopian we often mean that it cannot be
realised in the face of such uncontrollable facts or processes. These
are of many kinds: regions of nature with which we cannot
interfere, for example the solar system or the general realm dealt
with by astronomy; there we can alter neither the state of the
entities in question nor the laws which they obey. As for the rest of
the physical world, dealt with by the various natural sciences, we
conceive of the laws which govern them as unalterable by us, but
claim to be able to intervene to some degree in altering the states of
things and persons which obey these laws. Some believe such
interventions are themselves subject to laws: that we ourselves are
wholly determined by our past; that our behaviour is in principle
wholly calculable; and that our 'freedom' in interfering with
natural processes is therefore illusory. Others deny this in whole�
in part, but that does not concern us here, since both sides are
willing to grant that large portions of our universe, particularly its
inanimate portion, is as it is and suffers what it does whether we
will it or no.
When we examine the world of sentient beings, some portions of
it are certainly thought to be governed by 'necessity'. There are, to
begin with, the effects of the interplay of human beings with
nature - their own bodies and what is external to them. The
assumption is made that there are certain basic human needs, for
food, for shelter, the minimum means by which life can be carried
on, perhaps for certain forms of pleasure or self-expression,
communication; that these are affected by such relatively fixed
phenomena as climate, geographical formation and the products of
a natural environment, which take the form of economic, social,
religious institutions, and so on, each of which is the combined
effect of physical, biological, psychological, geographical factors,
and so forth, and in which certain uniformities can be discovered,
in terms of which' patterns are observable in the lives of both
individuals and societies - cyclical patterns of the kind dis<;:ussed by
Plato or Polybius, or non-recurrent ones, as in the sacred works of
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY 3
the Jews, the Christians, and perhaps Pythagoreans and Orphics,
the patterns and chains of being which are to be found in various
Eastern religions and philosophies, and in modern days in the
cosmologies of such writers as Vico, Hegel, Comte, Buckle, Marx,
Pareto, and a good many contemporary social psychologists and
anthropologists and philosophers of history. These tend to treat
human institutions as not proceeding solely from conscious human
purposes or desires; but having made due allowance for such
conscious purposes, whether on the part of those who found or
those who use and participate in institutions, they stress uncon­
scious or semi-conscious causes on the part of both individuals and
groups, and, even more, the by-products of the encounters of the
uncoordinated purposes of various human beings, each acting as he
does partly for coherent and articulate motives, partly for causes or
reasons little known to himself or to others, and thereby causing
states of affairs which nobody may have intended as such, but
which in their turn condition the lives and characters and actions of
men.
On this view, if we consider how much is independent of
conscious human policies - the entire realm of insentient nature,
the sciences of which take no heed of human issues; and such
human sciences as psychology and sociology, which assume some
kind of basic human reactions and uniformities of behaviour, both
social and individual, as unlikely to be altered radically by the fiats
of individuals - if all this is taken into account, a picture emerges of
a universe the behaviour of which is in principle largely calculable.
Naturally we tend to come under the influence of this picture, to
think of history as growing in inevitable stages, in an irreversible
direction, ideally, at least, describable as instances of the totality of
the laws which between them describe and summarise the natural
uniformities in terms of which we conceive of the behaviour of
both things and persons. The life of the fourteenth century was as
it was because it was a 'stage' reached by the interplay of human
and non-human factors - its institutions were those which human
needs, half consciously and half quite unawares, caused to come
about or to survive, and because the individual and institutional life
of the fourteenth century was as it was, the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries could not but be as they were, and could not resemble,
say, the third or the ninth or the thirteenth century, because the
fourteenth century had made that quite 'impossible'. We may not
know what the laws are which social evolution obeys, nor the
4 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

precise causal factors which function between the life of the

individual and that of the 'social anthill' to which it belongs, but
we may be sure that there are such laws and factors. We realise that
this is so if we ask ourselves whether we think that history explains
anything, that is, that any light is thrown upon the fifteenth
century by what occurred in the fourteenth, in the sense that if we
grasp the historical links we shall understand what made the
fifteenth century what it was. To grasp this is to see what it is that
makes it absurd to suggest that everything in the fifteenth century
might have been an exact reproduction of what occurred in the
thirteenth century - as if the fourteenth century had never been.
And from this there appears to follow that cluster of concepts with
which we began. There is a pattern and it has direction; it is not
necessarily 'progressive', that is, we need not believe that we are
gradually approaching some 'desirable' goal, however we define
desirable; but we are pursuing a definite and irreversible direction;
nostalgia for some past stage of it is eo ipso Utopian; for it is like
asking for the reversal of the nexus of causes and effects. We may
admire the past, but to try to reproduce it is to ignore this nexus.
The oak cannot return to the condition of the acorn; an old man
cannot, as it were, unlive what he has lived through and literally be
young once more, with the body as well as the heart and mind of
youth. Romantic hankerings after past ages are virtually a desire to
undo the 'inexorable' logic of events. If it were possible to
reproduce past conditions, historical causality would be broken,
which, since we cannot help thinking in terms of it, is psychologi­
cally impossible as well as irrational and absurd.
We may be told that such expressions as 'anachronism' are
surely themselves sufficient to convey this truth: to describe
somebody or something as an anachronism is to say that he or it is
not characteristic of the general pattern of the age. We do not need
much argument to convince us that there is something gravely
deficient in a historian who thinks that Richelieu could have done
what he did just as well in the 1 9 50s, or that Shakespeare could
have written the plays which he wrote in Ancient Rome, or Outer
Mongolia. And this sense of what belongs where, of what cannot
have happened as against that which could, is said to imply the
notion of an irreversible process, where everything belongs to the
stage to which it does and is 'out of place' or 'out of time' if
mistakenly inserted in the wrong context.
So far so good. We are committed to no more than that there are
 T H E S E N S E O F R E A L ITY 5
some criteria of reality - that we have some methods for distin­
guishing the real from the illusory, real mountain peaks from cloud
formations, real palms and springs from mirages in the desert, real
characteristics of an age or a culture from fanciful reconstructions,
real alternatives which can be realised at a given time from
alternatives realisable, it may be, in other places and at other times,
but not in the society or period in question. It is in terms of some
such principle that various historical theorists stake out their
claims. Asked why Shakespeare could not have written HamletT;;
Ancient Rome, Hegelians would speak of the Graeco-Roman
spirit, with which such thoughts, feelings and words as Shake­
speare's were not compatible. Marxists might refer to 'relation­
ships' and 'forces' of production, which in Rome were such as to
have 'inevitably' generated a cultural superstructure in which Virgil
could function, and Shakespeare could not have functioned, as he
did. Montesquieu would have spoken of geography, climates, the
'dominant spirit' of different social systems; Chateaubriand of the
difference made by Christianity, Gobineau of race; Herder, the
folk spirit; Taine - race, milieu, the moment; Spengler, the self­
contained 'morphology' of mutually exclusive cultures and civilisa­
tions; and so forth. To be Utopian, to perpetrate anachronisms, to
be unrealistic, 'escapist', not to understand history or life or the
world, is to fail to grasp a particular set of laws and formulae which
each school offers as the key to its explanation of why what
happens must happen as it does and not in some other order. What
is common to all the schools is a belief that there is an order and a
key to its understanding, a plan - either a geometry or a geography
of events. Those who understand it are wise, those who do not,
wander in darkness.
And yet there is something peculiar about this, both in theory
and in practice. In theory, because no attempt to provide such a
'key' in history has worked thus far. No doubt much valuable light
has been thrown upon past conditions by emphasis on hitherto
neglected factors: before Montesquieu and Vico, the importance of
customs and institutions, of language, grammar, mythology, legal
systems; of the influence of environmental and other undramatic,
continuous causal factors in explaining why men behaved as they
did, and indeed as an instrument for revealing how the world
looked to men relatively remote in time or space, what they felt
and said, and why and how, and for how long and with what
effect - all this was largely unrecognised. Marx taught us to pay
6 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

more attention to the influence of the economic and social

condition of individuals; Herder and Hegel to the interrelations of
apparently diverse cultural phenomena and to the life of institu­
tions; Durkheim to unintended social patterns; Freud to the
importance of irrational and unconscious factors in individual
experience; Sorel and Jung to the importance of irrational myths
and collective emotional attitudes in the behaviour of societies. We
hav� lea rned a gr� a� deal; our perspective has altered; we see men
and societies from new angles, in different lights. The discoveries
which have led to this are genuine discoveries and historical writing
has been transformed by them.
But the 'key' escapes us. We can neither, as in astronomy or even
geology, given initial conditions, confidently reconstruct - calcu­
late either the past or the future of a culture, of a society or class, of
an individual or a group - save in instances so rare and abnormal,
with such gaps, with the assistance of so many ad hoc hypotheses
and epicycles, that direct observation is more economical and more
informative than such attempts at scientific inference. If we ask
ourselves how much we really can tell about a given period in a
culture or a given pattern of human action - a war, a revolution, a
renaissance of art or science - from knowledge of even its
immediate antecedents or consequences, we must surely answer:
scarcely anything at all. No historian, however steeped in sociol­
ogy or psychology or some metaphysical theory, will attempt to
write history in so a priori a fashion. When Hegel attempted this,
with the courage of his anti-empirical prejudices, the result was
seen as somewhat erroneous even by his followers; so too Spengler,
when he insists that the streets of Greek cities were straight and
crossed each other at right angles because of the geometrical spirit
of the Greeks, is easily shown to be writing rubbish. The theorists
of history certainly supposed that they were providing historians
with wings enabling them to span great territories rapidly, as
compared with the slow pedestrian rate of the empirical fact­
gatherer; but although the wings have been with us now for more
than a century, nobody has, as yet, flown; those who, as Henri
Poincare remarked in an analogous connection, tried to do so came
to a sorry end. The attempts to substitute machines, methods of
mass production, for the slow manual labour of antiquaries and
historical researchers have all broken down; we still rely on those
who spend their liv€s in painfully piecing together their knowledge
from fragments of actual evidence, obeying this evidence wherever
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY 7
it leads them, however tortuous and unfamiliar the pattern, or with
no consciousness of any pattern at all. Meanwhile the wings and
the machinery are gathering dust on the shelves of museums,
examples of overweening ambition and idle fantasy, not of intellec­
tual achievement.
The great system-builders have in their works both expressed
and influenced human attitudes towards the world - the light in
which events are seen. Metaphysical, religious, scientific systems
and attitudes have altered the distribution of emphasis, the sense of
what is important or significant or admirable, or again of what is
remote or barbarous or trivial - have profoundly affected human
concepts and categories, the eyes with which men see or feel and
understand the world, the spectacles through which they look -
but they have not done the work of a science as they claimed, have
not revealed new facts, increased the sum of our information,
disclosed unsuspected events. Our belief that events and persons
and things belong where they belong inevitably, inexorably, and
per contra our sense of Utopia and anachronism, remain as strong
as ever; but our belief in specific laws of history, of which we can
formulate the science, is not too confident - if their behaviour
whether as historians or as men of action is any evidence - even
among the minority of those who pursue such topics. It is unlikely,
therefore, that the first springs from the second; that our disbelief
in the possibility of 'a return to the past' rests on a fear of
contradicting some given law or laws of history. For while our
attitude towards the existence of such laws is more than doubtful,
our belief in the absurdity of romantic efforts at recapturing past
glories is exceedingly strong. The latter cannot, therefore, depend
upon the former. What, then, is the content of our notion of the
inevitable 'march of history', of the folly of trying to resist what we
call irresistible?
Impressed (and to some degree oppressed) by true considera­
tions about the limits of free human action - the barriers imposed
by unalterable and little alterable regularities in nature, in the
functioning of human bodies and minds - the majority of eight­
eenth-century thinkers and, following them, enlightened opinion
in the last century, and to some degree in our own, conceived the
possibility of a true empirical science of history which, even if it
never became sufficiently precise to enable us to make predictions
or retrodictions in specific situations, nevertheless, by dealing with
great numbers, and relying on comparisons of rich statistical data,
8 T H E S E N SE OF REALITY

would indicate the general direction of, say, social and technologi­
cal development, and enable us to rule out some plans, revolution­
ary and reformist, as demonstrably anachronistic and therefore
Utopian - as not conforming to the 'objective' direction of social
development. If anyone in the nineteenth century contemplated
seriously a return to pre-Raphaelite forms of life it was unnecessary
to discuss whether this was or was not desirable; it was surely
enough to say that the Renaissance and the Reformation and the
Industrial Revolution had in fact occurred, that factories could not
be dismantled and great mass industries turned back into small­
scale crafts, as if the discoveries and inventions and changes in
forms of life which these had brought about had never been, that
there had been advance in knowledge and civilisation, in the means
of production and distribution, and that whatever might occur
next, it was beyond the wit and strength of man to deflect a process
which was as uncontrollable as the great uniformities of nature.
Opinions might differ as to what the true laws of this process were,
but all were agreed that there were such laws, and that to try to
alter them or behave as if they were not decisive was an absurd
day-dream, a childish desire to substitute for the laws of science
those of some whimsical fairy-tale in which everything is possible.
It was true that the great men who had first achieved the triumph
of this new scientific attitude - the anti-clerical philosophers and
scientists of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century
- had over-simplified things. They evidently supposed that men
were to be analysed as material objects in space and that their lives
and thoughts were in principle deducible from the mechanical laws
which governed the behaviour of their bodies. This the nineteenth
century felt to be too crude a view, and it was condemned as
'mechanistic' by the German metaphysicians, as 'vulgar materia­
lism' by the Marxists, as non-evolutionary and insufficiently
'organic' by Darwinians and positivists. Such mechanical laws
might account for that which is largely unaltered throughout
recorded human history - the permanent chemical, physical,
biological and physiological consequences of cause and effect, or
functional (or statistical) interrelations, or whatever was the central
category of these sciences. But history did not consist of mere
short-term repetitions: development occurred; a principle was
wanted to account ·for continuous change and not merely for
'static' difference. The thinkers of the eighteenth century had been
too deeply infatuated by Newton's mechanical model, which
 T H E S E N S E O F R E A L ITY 9
explained the realm of nature but not that of history. Something
was needed to discover historical laws, but as the laws of biology
had differed from the laws of chemistry, not merely in applying to
a different subject-matter but in being in principle other kinds of
laws, so history - for Hegel the evolution of the spirit, for Saint­
Simon or Marx the development of social relations, for Spengler or
Toynbee {the last voices of the nineteenth century) the develop­
ment of cultures, less or more isolable ways of life - obeyed laws of
its own; laws which took account of the specific behaviour of
nations or classes or social groups and of individuals which
belonged to them, without reducing these (or believing that they
should or could be reduced) to the behaviour of particles of matter
in space, which was represented, justly or not, as the eighteenth­
century - mechanistic - ideal of all explanation.
To understand how to live and act, whether in private or in
public life, was to grasp these laws and use them for one's
purposes. The Hegelians believed that this was achieved by a
species of rational intuition; Marxists, Comtists and Darwinians,
by scientific investigation; Schelling and his romantic followers, by
inspired 'vitalistic' and 'mythopoeic' insight, by the illumination of
artistic genius; and so on. All these schools believed that human
society grew in a discoverable direction, governed by laws; that the
borderline which divided science from Utopia, effectiveness from
ineffectiveness in every sphere of life, was discoverable by reason
and observation and could be plotted less or more precisely; that,
in short, there was � clock, its movement followed discoverable
rules, and it could not be put back.
These beliefs were rudely shaken by the evidence of the
twentieth century. The notions, the ideas and forms of life which
were considered to be inalienable from, 'organically' necessary to,
the particular stage of historical evolution reached by mankind
were broken or twisted out of recognition by new and violent
leaders: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler. It is true that these acted as they did
in the name of their own historical or pseudo-historical theories,
the Communists in the name of dialectical materialism, Hitler in
the name of racial hegemonism. But there was no doubt that they
achieved what had hitherto been regarded as virtually impossible,
contrary to the laws of advancing civilisation - a breach of the
inexorable laws of human history. It became clear that men of
sufficient energy and ruthlessness could collect a sufficient degree
of material power to transform their worlds much more radically
10 T H E S E N S E O F REA LITY

than had been thought possible before - that if one genuinely

rejected those moral, political, legal concepts which were regarded
as firm, as much elements of their own historical phase as its
material arrangements, and if, moreover, one did not shrink from
killing millions of human beings, against accepted beliefs as to what
was feasible, against what was thought right by the majority in
one's own time, then greater changes could be introduced than the
'laws' allowed for. Human beings and their institutions turned out
to be much more malleable, far less resistant, the laws turned out to
be far more elastic, than the earlier doctrinaires had taught us to
believe. There was talk of a relapse into - a deliberate return to -
barbarism, which according to the earlier revolutionary theories
was not merely regrettable but wellnigh impossible. ' "' � ., 1 "·

It was a truth to the reception of which there was every kind of

resistance. Thus when in Russia a regime openly and boldly
exterminated many of the achievements of Western civilisation -
both in the arts and, to some degree, in the sciences, certainly in
politics and morals - on the ground that these belonged to the
ideology of a minority condemned by history to destruction, this
holocaust had to be represented, not as the reversal which it was,
but as the continuation of a revolutionary leap forward of this very
civilisation in the direction in which it had been proceeding
previously, although in fact (unlike the great French Revolution)
what occurred represented an almost total change of direction. This
could not be stated, because the doctrines in the name of which the
revolution was carried out - and which, ironically enough, the
revolution did so much to expose and discredit - were too strongly
ingrained as official radical shibboleths to which lip-service was
still paid. Hitler, with a better understanding of what he was doing,
proclaimed that he was indeed returning to an ancient past, and
seeking to undo the effects of the Enlightenment and of r 7 89; and,
although his plan was regarded as a mad dream, a sadistic nee­
medieval fantasy which could not be realised in the twentieth
century, and largely discounted accordingly by liberals, conserva­
tives and Marxists alike, who shall now say that he totally failed?
He ruled for only a dozen years, and in the course of them
transformed the outlook and structure of life of his subjects
beyond the expectations of the wildest historical and political
thinkers of Western (and Eastern) Europe; if he lost in the end, he
lost by so narrow a margin that it does not need an eccentric
imagination to conceive that he might have won, and that the
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY II

consequences of his victory would have finally reduced to non­

sense the doctrines according to which his rise and his victories
were demonstrably impossible.
In I 944 a plan was submitted at the Quebec Conference by
Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury, whereby Ger­
man industries were to be dismantled and the entire country turned
back to pasture. It was a plan which could scarcely be taken
seriously, although Roosevelt is said - I do not know how
reliably - to have briefly inclined towards it. Nevertheless, those
who were horrified by it and resisted it conceded that it was
practicable. Yet the very notion that some such plan could be put
into operation would have struck most historians, philosophers,
statesmen, most intelligent men in the late nineteenth century - say
at any time before I 9 I 4 - as wildly Utopian. To this degree Lenin,
Hitler and Stalin and their minor followers elsewhere, by their acts
rather than their precepts, demonstrated the truth, horrifying to
some, comforting to others, that human beings are a good deal
more plastic than was hitherto thought, that given enough will­
power, fanaticism, determination - and no doubt a favourable
conjunction of circumstances - almost anything, at any rate far
more than was hitherto thought possible, can be altered.
The banisters upon which the system-builders of the nineteenth
century have taught us to lean have proved unequal to the pressure
that was put upon them. The techniques of modern civilisation, so
far from guaranteeing us against lapses into the past or violent
lunges in unpredictable directions, have proved the most effective
weapons in the hands -of those who wish to change human beings
by playing on irrational impulses and defying the framework of
civilised life according to some arbitrary pattern of their owfl.It
became a question of where revolutionaries were prepared to
stop - a moral more than a psychological question - since the
resistance of habit, tradition, 'inexorable' technological progress
collapses easily before sufficient and determined assaults. Efforts
were made to prove that these assaults themselves followed a
pattern, that whether they came from the right or the left, they too
- the advances of totalitarianism - were inevitable, as progress
towards individual liberty had once been proclaimed to be. But
such analyses lacked the old superb conviction of those nineteenth­
century prophets and seers who thought that they really had, at
last, solved the riddle of history, and once and for all; it became all
too clear that these were mere half-hearted, dispirited efforts to
12 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

peer into a crystal ball, so suddenly once again covered with the
mist of uncertainty after the lucid mirage of two centuries in which
the rays of science were alleged to have pierced through the night
of historical ignorance. Now, once more, it was only a movement
of shadows, indeterminate and unsubstantial, describable only in
terms of approximations, inspired guesswork, short-term conclu­
sions from local phenomena, liable to be upset by too many
unknown and apparently unknowable factors.
The obverse side of this was, of course, an increased belief in the
efficacy of individual initiative - the notion that every situation was
more fluid than had been supposed in more tranquil times - which
pleased those who found the scientific and determinist picture or
the Hegelian teleology too cut and dried, too stifling, too unprom­
ising of novelty; too narrow for the assertion of revolutionary
energies, for the testing of violent new sensations; and terrified
those who seek order, tranquillity, dependable values, moral and
physical security, a world in which the margin of error is
calculable, the limits of change are discoverable, and cataclysms are
due to natural causes only - and these in principle predictable with
the advance of scientific knowledge. The social world certainly
seems more disturbing, fuller of undiscovered perils, than hitherto;
but then it would follow that there is a career more open to talents,
provided they are audacious, powerful and ruthless enough.
Under these circumstances, it may be asked, why cannot we
reproduce, let us say, the conditions of the fourteenth century, if
we should wish to do so? True, it is not easy to upset the
arrangements of the twentieth century and replace them by
something so widely different; not easy, but surely not literally
impossible? If Hitler, if Stalin, could transform their societies, and
affect the world to so vast a degree in so short a time; if Germany
could have been 'pastoralised'; if all the warning voices about how
easy it would be to end human civilisation by this or that
destructive weapon, how precarious the whole establishment is, are
telling the truth; then surely there is a field for creative no less than
for destructive capacities ? If things are less fixed than they seemed,
do not such terms as 'anachronism', the 'logic of the facts' and the
rest begin to lose their force? If we can, given the opportunity,
operate more freely than we once believed that we could, what does
divide Utopian from realistic planning? If we really believe that the
life of the fourteenth century is preferable to that of the twentieth,
then, if we are resolute enough and have enough material resources,
 THE S E N S E O F REAL ITY 13

and there are enough of us, and we do not hesitate to commit all
that resists us to the flames, why cannot we 'return to the past' ?
The laws of nature do not prevent us, for they have not altered in
the last six centuries. What then is it that stops us - stops, say, neo­
medieval fanatics from working their will? For there is no doubt
that something does do so, that even the most extreme among them
scarcely believe that they could literally reproduce some past
golden age, Merrie England, the Old South, or the world of le
vert galant, in the sense in which Communist or Fascist fanatics
believe that they can cause the world to go through a transforma­
tion no less violent - to divert it, as it were, from its previous path
by at least as sharp an angle.
Let us try to imagine what such a return to the past would entail.
Supposing a man did get into his head to re-establish the condi­
tions of his favourite time and place - to recreate them as closely as
he could - what steps would he take? To begin with he would have
to acquaint himself as minutely as he could with the former life
which he wished to re-establish. He must suppose himself to know
something about the form of life in question to have fallen so
�
deeply in love with it. Whether his knowledge is real or delusive is
for the moment not relevant. Let us assume that he is more than a
sentimental enthusiast, that he is a profound student of history and
the social sciences; he will then know that, in order to attain to a
certain form of life, more must be done than to wear certain types
of clothes, eat certain types of food, reorganise our social lives in
accordance with certain sorts of patterns, or possess certain
religious beliefs. We wjll not succeed in doing this, but merely go
through our parts like actors on a stage, unless the bases of such
life, economic, social, linguistic, perhaps geographical and ecologi­
cal as well, are appropriate, that is, of such a kind as to make his
ideal society possible and, indeed, natural and normal. Undaunted
he sets about - let us assume him to be, if not omnipotent, at any
rate in control of very powerful material resources, and to have to
deal with singularly impressionable and docile human beings - he
sets about to transform all the required natural and artificial
conditions accordingly. If he is fanatical enough and isolates his
society sufficiently from contact with the outer world (or, alterna­
tively, if his experiment is world-wide in extent), he may at any
rate in theory succeed to some degree. Human lives are radically
alterable, human beings can be re-educated and conditioned and
turned topsy-turvy - that is the principal lesson of the violent
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

times in which we live. In addition to vast material resources and

extraordinary skill in using these, he must also have an astonishing
knowledge about the age which he is seeking to reproduce and the
causes and factors which made it what it was. But let us assume that
he has these too, and understands London in the fourteenth
century, let us say, or Florence in the fifteenth, as no one has ever
known it before. He will know it better certainly than its own
inhabitants could have known it; for they took too much for
granted, too much seemed so normal and habitual to them, so that
they could not, however self-conscious the most analytical and
critical of them may have been, notice the climate, the network of
habits and thoughts and feelings in which they lived, in the way in
which an outside observer, able to compare it with phenomena
sufficiently unlike it to emphasise its peculiarities, can do. Never­
theless, it is clear that however skilful, minute, fanatically thorough
such a reconstruction were, it would fail in its principal objective -
the literal recreation of some past culture. And that not at all for
the most obvious causes - because one's knowledge is liable to
error, because one is looking at the golden age from some later
vantage-point, different from that from which the Londoners in
the fourteenth or Florentines in the fifteenth could possibly view
themselves and others - for even if the creator of this world may
himself be debarred from observing things from two points of view
at once, yet he can skilfully and consciously, using the methods
pilloried by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, at any rate
manufacture human beings whose viewpoint is transformed in the
requisite fashion - nor, again, because of the many obvious
practical difficulties in the realisation of so eccentric a scheme: all
these could, at least in theory, be disposed of. Nevertheless,
however triumphantly these are overcome, the result will always
seem curiously artificial - a skilful forgery, a piece of synthetic
antiquarianism grafted on inescapably contemporary foundations.
It seems clear that in trying to acquire knowledge about the
world, external or internal, physical or mental, we inevitably notice
and describe only certain characteristics of it - those which are, as
it were, public, which attract attention to themselves because of
some specific interest which we have in investigating them, because
of our practical needs or theoretical interests: aspects of the world
in terms of which communication between men takes place;
characteristics whi�h may be misunderstood or misdescribed,
knowledge of which is in some degree important, that is, makes a
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

difference to our activity, whether designed for use or pleasure;

interested or disinterested objects of action or thought or feeling or
contemplation. And we feel that we progress in knowledge as we
discover unfamiliar facts and relationships, particularly when these
turn out to be relevant to our principal purposes, to survival and all
the means thereto, to our happiness or the satisfaction of the many
diverse and conflicting needs for the sake of which human beings
do what they do and are as they are.
What is left out of such investigations is what is too obvious to
need mentioning. If we are anthropologists, and describe human
habits or beliefs, we regard as worthy of notice and report those
respects in which other tribes differ from us, or those in which they
resemble us unexpectedly because their many differences might
make us think otherwise. We do not record the obvious: for
example the fact that the natives of Polynesia prefer being warm to
being cold, or dislike hunger or physical pain; it is too tedious to
record this. We take it for granted, quite naturally and justifiably,
that if these natives are human beings, this will be true of them as it
is of us, and of all the other human beings we have heard of - it is
one of the components of normality. Neither do we report that the
heads of these Polynesians are three-dimensional and that they
have space behind and in front of them - this too almost follows
from the definitions of these terms and must be taken for granted.
When one considers how many such facts - habits, beliefs - we
take for granted in thinking or saying anything at all, how many
notions, ethical, political, social, personal, go to the making of the
outlook of a single perspn, however simple and unreflective, in any
given environment, we begin to realise how very small a part of the
total our sciences - not merely natural sciences, which work by
generalising at a high level of abstraction, but the humane,
'impressionistic' studies, history, biography, sociology, introspec­
tive psychology, the methods of the novelists, of the writers of
memoirs, of students of human affairs from every angle - are able
to take in. And this is not a matter for surprise or regret: if we were
aware of all that we could in principle be aware of we should
swiftly be out of our minds. The most primitive act of observation
or thought requires some fixed habits, a whole framework of
things, persons, ideas, beliefs, attitudes to be taken for granted,
uncriticised assumptions, unanalysed beliefs. Our language, or
whatever symbolism we think with, is itself impregnated by these
basic attitudes. We cannot, even in principle, enumerate all that we
 16 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

know and believe, for the words or symbols with which we do so

themselves embody and express certain attitudes which are ex
hypothesi 'encapsulated' in them, and not easily describable by
them. We can make use of one set of symbols in order to uncover
the assumptions which underlie another, and even as much as this
is a most painful, difficult and crucially important task which only
a very few, very subtle, very profound, very serious, penetrating
and bold and dear-headed thinkers of genius have succeeded in
performing to any degree at all; but we cannot examine the whole
of our symbolism and yet employ for this purpose no symbols at
all. There is no Archimedean point outside ourselves where we can
stand in order to take up our critical viewpoint, in order to observe
and analyse all that we think or believe by simply inspecting it, all
that we can be said to take for granted because we behave as
though we accepted it - the supposition is a self-evident absurdity.
The quality of depth in thinkers who are professional philoso­
phers or novelists, or men of genius of other kinds, precisely
consists in penetrating to one of these great assumptions, embed­
ded in some widespread attitude, and isolating that and questioning
it - wondering how it might be if it were otherwise. It is when one
of these nerves is touched, nerves which lie so deep within us that it
is in terms of them that we feel as we feel and think as we think,
that we are conscious of those electric shocks which indicate that
some genuinely profound insight has occurred. It is only when this
unique, immediately recognisable, disturbing experience comes
that we are aware that we are in the presence of this peculiar and
very rare form of genius, possessed by those who make us
conscious of the most pervasive, least observed categories, those
which lie closest to us and which for that very reason escape
description, however much our emotions, our curiosity, our
industry, are mobilised to record the whole of what we know.
Everyone will know the quality I refer to. Newton dealt with
problems which had long occupied the attention of philosophers
and scientists, and proposed solutions to problems of a notorious
difficulty, solutions characterised by a simplicity and a comprehen­
siveness which are marks of his particular kind of genius. But his
results, if they were disturbirtg, were so only to specialists, other
physicists or cosmologists. He altered many men's outlooks, no
doubt, but nothing that he said directly touched their innermost
private and quintessential thoughts and feelings. But Pascal ques­
tioned those categories, touched those half conscious, or altogether
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

unconscious, habits of thought, beliefs, attitudes in terms of which

the inner life, the basic components of their own private worlds,
presented themselves to the men of his time. He made great
discoveries in mathematics, but it is not for this that his thought is
credited with unique qualities of depth: in his Pensees there are no
formal discoveries, no solutions, not even clear statements of
problems with indications of how they are to be investigated. And
yet Locke, who did all these things, and was a thinker of
unparalleled influence, has never been regarded as an exceptionally
profound thinker; this despite his originality, his universality, his
massive contribution to philosophy and politics as compared with
the isolated fragments left by Pascal. It is so too with Kant. He laid
bare categories of a very pervasive, very basic kind - space, time,
number, thinghood, freedom, moral personality - and therefore,
for all that he was a systematic and often pedantic philosopher, a
difficult writer, an obscure logician, a routine professorial meta­
physician and moralist, he was in his lifetime recognised to be what
he was, not merely a man of genius in many fields but one of the
few authentically profound and therefore revolutionary thinkers in
human history: one who discussed not merely what others were
discussing, saw not merely what others were describing, and
answered not merely what was generally being asked, but pierced
through a layer of suppositions and assumptions which language
itself embodies to habits of thought, basic frameworks in terms of
which we think and act, and touched these. Nothing can compare
with the experience of being made aware of the characteristics of
the most intimate instruments with which one thinks and feels -
not of the problems to which one seeks solutions, nor of the
solutions, but of the innermost terms, the most deeply ingrained
categories with which, and not about which, one thinks; of kinds
of ways in which one's experiences occur; not of the nature of the
experiences themselves, however remarkable, however instructive
an analysis of these last may be.
It seems clear that what is easiest for us to observe and describe
is the furniture of the external world - trees, rocks, houses, tables,
other human beings. Some people with a meditative cast of mind
are able to describe their own feelings and thoughts with sensitive­
ness and precision; some with keener and more analytical minds
can do much to distinguish and describe the main categories in
which we think - the differences between mathematical and
historical thought, or between the concept of a thing and of a
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

person, or between subject or object, or between acts and feelings,

and so on. The concepts and categories involved in formal
disciplines which have relatively clear rules - physics or mathe­
matics or grammar or the language of international diplomacy - are
comparatively easy to investigate. For those involved in less
articulate activities - in the activities of the musician, in writing
novels or poetry, in painting, composing, in the everyday inter­
course of human beings and the 'common-sense' picture of the
world - it is, for obvious reasons, far more difficult. We can
construct sciences on the assumption of certain relative invariances;
the behaviour of stones, or grass, or plants or butterflies, we
assume to have been not so different in dim ages as to stultify the
assumptions made today by chemistry or geology or physics or
botany or zoology. And unless we believed human beings were
sufficiently similar in certain basic and abstractable aspects
throughout sufficiently long stretches of time, we should have no
grounds for trusting those generalisations which, consciously or
not, enter into not merely such proclaimed sciences as sociology,
psychology and anthropology, but into history and biography and
the art of the novelist, and political theory and every form of social
observation.
Some of these generalisations lie too close to us and are too self­
evident to be brought up into the light by any save those bold and
original and independent men of genius. Pascal and Dostoevsky,
Proust, St Augustine have succeeded, in such acts of deep-sea
diving, in observing and reporting such basic structural attitudes
and categories. Some of these apply to mankind over sufficiently
long stretches of time to be regarded as virtually universal; some
vary from age to age and culture to culture, and vary, doubtless, to
some degree, between persons and groups of persons and at
different times and in different circumstances. Provided the small
differences are ignored, and what is treated is always some very
large number, we can formulate laws which apply literally only to
idealised entities, whose relationship to actual objects or persons is
always a matter of doubt or intuitive skill on the part of the
specialist dealing with the problem, like the application of the
general laws of anatomy to an individual disease, only more so.
The concept, for example, of a basic 'human' nature, which cannot
be radically altered, and is that which makes most human beings
human, is a vague effort to convey a notion of a complex of
unvarying and unanalysed characteristics which we know by
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY 19
acquaintance, as it were, from the inside, but which is insusceptible
to precise scientific formulation or manipulation. Such general
terms - human nature, peace, war, stability, freedom, power, rise,
decline - are convenient symbols which sum up, are a concentrate
of, my observations; but however much the sciences bring under
their sway, however detailed, scrupulous, verified, coherent are the
accounts of our best historians, an immense amount is necessarily
left out at both ends of the scale - both the deepest, the most
pervasive categories which enter too much into all our experience
to be easily detachable from it for observation, and at the other end
those endlessly shifting, altering views, feelings, reactions, instincts,
beliefs which constitute the uniqueness of each individual and of
each of his acts and thoughts, and the uniqueness too, the
individual flavour, the peculiar pattern of life, of a character, of an
institution, a mood, and also of an artistic style, an entire culture,
an age, a nation, a civilisation.
It is a truism to say that it is the differences and not the
similarities that constitute the completeness of an act of recogni­
tion, of a historical description, of a personality - whether of an
object or an individual or a culture. Vico and Herder, despite all
their extravagances and obscurities, taught us once and for all that
to be a Homeric Greek or an eighteenth-century German is to
belong to a unique society, and that what it is to 'belong' cannot be
analysed in terms of something which these persons have in
common with other societies or entities in the universe, but only in
terms of what each of them has in common with other Homeric
Greeks or Germans -· that there is a Greek or German way of
talking, eating, concluding treaties, engaging in commerce, dancing,
gesturing, tying shoelaces, building ships, explaining the past,
worshipping God, permeated by some common quality which
cannot be analysed in terms of instances of general laws or effects
of discoverable causes, recurrent uniformities, repetitions which
allow common elements to be abstracted and sometimes experi­
mented upon. The unique pattern in terms of which all acts which
are German are interlaced, or which enables us to attribute a
painting or even a line of poetry or a witticism to one age rather
than another and to one author rather than another - of that no
science exists. We recognise these manifestations as we recognise
the expressions on the faces of our friends. The interconnection of
different activities which are seen to spring from, or constitute, a
unique single character or style or historical situation is much more
20 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

like the unity of an aesthetic whole, a symphony or a portrait; what

we condemn as false or inappropriate is much more like what is
rejected as false or inappropriate in a painting or a poem than in a
deductive system or a scientific theory, or in the interlinked
hypotheses of a natural science. How we perform such acts of
identification and attribution it is almost impossible to say. Too
many factors enter into the process; they are too evanescent, their
links are often too subtle and invisible; the notion that they could
be made the subject of a technique and taught to others systemati­
cally is plainly absurd, and yet they are among the most familiar
experiences we have. They enter into the vast majority of our
common-sense judgements and opinions and predictions of the
behaviour of others, they are what we live by, our most ingrained
methods, our habits of thought and feeling, they change and we
hardly notice it, they change in others and we may not consciously
notice that, but may react to it in a half conscious fashion. The
investigation of such presuppositions - of what makes the unique
outlook of an age or of a person - plainly needs far more
sympathy, interest and imagination, as well as experience of life,
than the more abstract and disciplined activities of natural scien­
tists.
Every person and every age may thus be said to have at least two
levels: an upper, public, illuminated, easily noticed, clearly describ­
able surface from which similarities are capable of being profitably
abstracted and condensed into laws; and below this a path into less
and less obvious yet more and more intimate and pervasive
characteristics, too closely mixed with feelings and activities to be
easily distinguishable from them. With great patience, industry,
assiduity we can delve beneath the surface - novelists do this better
than trained 'social scientists' - but the consistency is that of some
viscous substance: we encounter no stone wall, no insuperable
obstacle, but each step is more difficult, each effort to advance robs
us of the desire or ability to continue. Tolstoy, Shakespeare,
Dostoevsky, Kafka, Nietzsche have penetrated more deeply than
John Buchan or H. G. Wells, or Bertrand Russell; but what we
know on this level of half-articulate habits, unexamined assump­
tions and ways of thought, semi-instinctive reactions, models of
life so deeply embedded as not to be felt consciously at all - what
we know of this is' so little, and likely, because we do not have the
time, the subtlety ahd the penetration, to remain so negligible, that
to claim to be able to construct generalisations where at best we can
 THE SENSE OF REALITY 21
only indulge the art of exquisite portrait-painting, to claim the
possibility of some infallible scientific key where each unique
entity demands a lifetime of minute, devoted observation, sympa­
thy, insight, is one of the most grotesque claims ever made by
human beings.

II

The ideal of all natural sciences is a system of propositions so

general, so clear, so comprehensive, connected with each other by
logical links so unambiguous and direct that the result resembles as
closely as possible a deductive system, where one can travel along
wholly reliable, logical routes from any point on the system to any
other - wholly reliable because constructed a priori according to
rules guaranteed as in a game, because they have been adopted,
because it has been decided to keep and not break them. The
usefulness of such a system - as opposed to its power or beauty -
depends, of course, not on its logical scope and coherence, but on
its applicability to matters of fact. This in its turn depends not
merely on the skill with which we construct the system, but on the
actual behaviour of things and persons in the world, to which the
system is applied, or from which the system is generalised or
idealised. For this reason it has always been the case that the more
general and logically satisfactory a system was, the less useful it was
in describing the specific course of the behaviour of a particular
entity in the universe - the larger the number of entities, the more
accurate the descriptive and predictive power of the system; the
smaller the number of instances, the greater the margin of error, of
deviation from the norm.
Historians, whose business it is to tell us what actually happened
in the world, consequently fight shy of rigid theoretical patterns
into which the facts may sometimes have to be fitted with a good
deal of awkwardness and artificiality. And this instinct is a sound
one. The proper aim of the sciences is to note the number of
similarities in the behaviour of objects and to construct proposi­
tions of the greatest degree of generality from which the largest
number of such uniformities can be logically deduced. In history
our purpose is the opposite. When we wish to describe a particular
revolution - what actually took place - the last thing we wish to do
is to concentrate solely upon those characteristics of it which it has
in common with as many other revolutions as we can discover,
22 THE SENSE O F REALITY
ignoring the differences as irrelevant to our study; and so what a
historian wishes to bring out is what is specific, unique, in a given
character or series of events or historical situation, so that the
reader, presented with this account, should be able to grasp the
situation in what is called its 'concreteness', that is, as it occurred at
the particular time, in the particular place, as the result of the
particular antecedents, in the framework of the particular events in
which it and it alone occurred - the respects in which it differs
from everything w�ich has occurred before or is likely to occur
after it. The historian is concerned to paint a portrait which
conveys the unique pattern of experience, and not an X-ray
photograph which is capable of acting as a general symbol for all
structures of a similar type.
This truth was understood - and exaggerated - by those thinkers
of the romantic movement who complained that previous histori­
ans had been too abstract or too pedestrian and mechanical with
their lists of reigns and battles and irrelevant, disconnected chroni­
clers' tales, had failed to clothe these dry bones in the flesh of living
reality, to paint either human character or society in such a way as
to give the reader a sense of actuality, a sense of the kind of society
or kind of character which he could imagine that he could have met
or been himself in living relations with; and that historical novelists
or painters or other men whose imagination was adequate to their
knowledge did this more successfully.
This historical gift consists not merely in establishing facts by
means of those recognised techniques, those ways of handling
evidence, which specialists - palaeographers, epigraphists, archaeol­
ogists, anthropologists and so forth - have developed, which may
well entail logical processes not altogether unlike those of the
natural sciences, with their tendency to generality and abstraction,
and the use of idealised models, but something at the opposite end
of the scale, namely an eye for what is unique and unrepeated, for
the particular concatenation of circumstances, unique combina­
tions of attributes, which give a person, a situation, a culture, an
age its peculiar character, in virtue of which it is possible to
attribute this or that political decision, this or that painting or
moral view or form of handwriting, to a given civilisation or phase
of a civilisation, or even to individuals in it, with a high degree of
plausibility.
How is it done? It is not at all easy to say. It requires scrupulous
observation, accurate knowledge of facts, but is more than this: it is
 THE SENSE O F REALITY 23
a form of understanding and not of knowledge of facts in the
ordinary sense. When we say that we know someone's character
well, that a given action could not have been performed by the man
in question; or, alternatively, that we regard something as alto­
gether characteristic of him, precisely the kind of thing which he
and only he might do - a perception which at once depends on our
knowledge of his style of life, his cast of mind or heart, and
increases our understanding of them - what kind of knowledge is it
that we are claiming? If we were pressed to set forth the general
psychological laws from which we deduce or could have deduced
this, and, moreover, the things upon which such generalisations are
built, we should break down at once. Whether, theoretically, we
could have arrived at our intimate understanding of our friend's (or
our enemy's) unique personality by such scientific means I do not
know - it seems evident that no one ever has, so far, arrived at this
kind of knowledge by any such method. The sense in which the
most learned and accurate psychologist, working purely on the
basis of accumulated scientific data, and of hypotheses bolstered up
by these, can describe and predict the behaviour of the human
being in a concrete situation, from hour to hour and day to day, is
very different from that in which someone who knows a man well,
as friends and associates and relations do, can do so; it is far more
general, far less accurate if applied to a particular situation. A
medical chart or diagram is not the equivalent of a portrait such as
a gifted novelist or human being endowed with adequate insight -
understanding - could form; not equivalent not at all because it
needs less skill or is less valuable for its own purposes, but because
if it confines itself to publicly recordable facts and generalisations
attested by them, it must necessarily leave out of account that vast
number of small, constantly altering, evanescent colours, scents,
sounds, and the psychical equivalents of these, the half noticed, half
inferred, half gazed-at, half unconsciously absorbed minutiae of
behaviour and thought and feeling which are at once too numer­
ous, too complex, too fine and too indiscriminable from each other
to be identified, named, ordered, recorded, set forth in neutral
scientific language. And more than this, there are among them
pattern qualities - what else are we to call them? - habits of
thought and emotion, ways of looking at, reacting to, talking about
experiences which lie too close to us to be discriminated and
classified - of which we are not strictly aware as such, but which,
nevertheless, we absorb into our picture of what goes on, and the
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
more sensitively and sharply aware of them we are the more
understanding and insight we are rightly said to possess.
This is what understanding human beings largely consists in. To
try to analyse and clearly describe what goes on when we
understand in this sense is impossible, not because the process in
some way 'transcends' or is 'beyond' normal experience, is some
special act of magical divination not describable in the language of
ordinary experience; but for the opposite reason, that it enters too
intimately into our most normal experience, and is a kind of
automatic integration of a very large number of data too fugitive
and various to be mounted on the pin of some scientific process,
one by one, in a sense too obvious, too much taken for granted, to
be enumerable. Our language is not meant to catch them; it is
intended to communicate relatively stable characteristics, princi­
pally of the external world, in terms of which we deal with one
another, which form the frontier of our common world, in the
manipulation of which our lives largely consist. It is not intended
to describe, either, those characteristics which are too permanent,
too much with us, to be noticed, since they are always there - and
therefore raise no specific problems, since they accompany all our
perceptions (these are the categories which, with a singular effort of
self-consciousness, philosophers reveal) - or, at the other end of
the scale, those characteristics which are not constant enough,
which are too ephemeral, which give its unique flavour to that
which passes, which constitute the unique essence of a particular
situation, a particular moment of history, which give it its irre­
placeable character, the ebb and flow of differences which make
each moment, each person, each significant act - and the pattern of
each culture or human enterprise - be what it is in itself, uniquely
different from everything else whatever. These fleeting properties
in their turn presuppose those same constant characteristics,
neither too omnipresent to be noticed nor too evanescent to be
catalogued, with which the official disciplines deal - the sciences
and the parasciences of mankind. And yet what makes men foolish
or wise, understanding or blind, as opposed to knowledgeable or
learned or well informed, is the perception of these unique flavours
of each situation as it is, in its specific differences - of that in it
wherein it differs from all other situations, that is, those aspects of
it which make it insusceptible to scientific treatment, because it is
that element in it which no generalisation, because it is a generalisa­
tiOn, can cover.
 T H E S E N S E OF REALITY

As I have said above, it is possible to say something about these

unique differences - indeed historians and biographers attempt to
do so. It is the ability to do this which makes some people
profounder students of human beings than others, better advisers
to them about their problems than others who are more learned, in
possession of more facts and hypotheses. But in the end not
everything can be set down, spoken or written: there is too much;
it passes too swiftly; it infects the modes of expression themselves
and we have no outside vantage-point from which dispassionately
to observe and identify it all. What I am attempting to describe is,
in short, that sensitive self-adjustment to what cannot be measured
or weighed or fully described at all - that capacity called imagina­
tive insight, at its highest point genius - which historians and
novelists and dramatists and ordinary persons endowed with
understanding of life (at its normal level called common sense)
alike display. This is an essential factor in making us admire and
trust some historians more than others. It is when a historian so
describes the past that we are conscious of having brought before
us not merely attested facts, but a revelation of a form of life, of a
society presented in sufficiently rich and coherent detail, suffi­
ciently similar to what we ourselves understand by human life or
society or men's intercourse, that we can continue - extrapolate ­
for ourselves, go on by ourselves, understand why this man did
this and that nation that, without having to have it explained in
detail, because those of our faculties have been brought into play
which operate similarly in our understanding of our own society,
as opposed to some inductive or deductive conclusions - it is then
that we recognise what we have been given as being history, and
not the dry rattle of mechanical formulae or of a loose heap of
historical bones.
This is what is called bringing a past age to life. The path is beset
by treacherous traps: each age, each group of men, each individual
has its own perspective, and these do not remain static, but alter,
and this must be understood from such evidence as we have, and
no final proof that we have understood, in the sense in which the
sciences provide it, is here available. The tests of truth and
falsehood, of honest methods and deception, of mere imaginative
reconstruction and painfully gained, reliable insight, are what they
are in ordinary life, where we do distinguish between wisdom and
folly, men of genius and charlatans, without the employment of
scientific criteria. Moreover, every past perspective itself differs in
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
the perspective of all successive observers. There is the perspec­
tive - the unique pattern of attitudes - which is the Renaissance
view of things or way of life (that which is common to its own
inner variety of outlooks and characters, and so on); and there is,
let us say, the eighteenth-century view, the spectacle of the
Renaissance as it was viewed by, say, the French Enlightenment in
the eighteenth century; and this will differ from its appearance to
Victorian thinkers, or twentieth-century Communists or neo­
Thomists. These perspectives and perspectives of perspectives are
there, and it is just as idle to ask which are true and which false as it
is to ask which view of the Alps is the true view and which false.
But there is a sense in which 'facts', what can be demonstrated by
the evidence, as opposed to interpretations, theories, hypotheses,
perspectives, must remain the same for all these changing outlooks,
otherwise we should have no historical truth at all. And blurred
though the frontier may be between fact on the one hand and
attitudes and interpretations on the other, yet it exists. Gibbon
would not have rejected facts discovered by Ranke or Creighton or
Pirenne because they were not what he considered to be facts (nor
would Thucydides); he would have rejected them, if he had, only
because he might have thought that they were false or trivial or not
what he was looking for. Within Western culture there is sufficient
agreement about what counts as fact and what is theory or
interpretation (despite continual efforts to deny this by relativists
and subjectivists of all kinds) to make doubts about the frontiers
between them a pseudo-problem. Nevertheless a mere recital of
facts is not history, not even if scientifically testable hypotheses are
added to them; only the setting of them in the concrete, at times
opaque, but continuous, rich, full texture of 'real life' - the
intersubjective, directly recognisable continuum of experience -
will do.
Yet so difficult are such insights to obtain, so subjective, too,
does a succession of perspectives seem, that there is a natural
temptation for historians who take their duty seriously to avoid
them, or at least reduce them to a minimum. Hence the plea of
those austere researchers who declare that to establish that the
good King Dagobert or Emperor Leo the !saurian died on this or
that day of this or that year, however trivial and dreary this may
seem, is to estaolish a firm fact, something which no future
researchers will need to discover again, a solid brick in the temple
of knowledge; whereas an attempt to analyse the 'medieval mind',
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
to give so vivid an account of some portion of Frankish or
Byzantine society as to make it possible for the reader to 'enter
into it' imaginatively, is, in the end, only conjecture and journal­
ism, a coherent fantasy, conceived, it may be, in impossible modern
terms, likely to give way at some not too distant date to some other
'interpretation', no less arbitrary, reflecting all the interests and
temperaments of the new interpreters; not history, not science, a
piece of capricious self-expression, agreeable, even fascinating, but
nicht Wissenschaft, blof3 Kunst.
Our intellectual history is a succession of periods of inflation
and deflation; when the imagination grows too luxuriant at the
expense of careful observation and detail there is a salutary reaction
towards austerity and the unadorned facts; when the accounts of
these grow so colourless, bleak and pedantic that the public begins
to wonder why so dreary an activity, so little connected with any
possible human interest, is worth pursuing at all, a Macaulay, a
Mommsen, a Michelet, a Pirenne restates the facts in some
magnificent synthesis which restores the faith of the weary reader
in history as an account of actual human beings, and not merely of
some corner of their lives so isolated, so artificially abstracted from
the rest as no longer to provide the answer to any possible question
which anyone may reasonably be expected to wish to ask about the
past. There is an oscillation between attempts to say as little as
possible (to play safe - to take the least possible risks with the
truth) and attempts to say as much as possible (not to say less than
we can - to leave as little as possible out), a perpetual oscillation
between horror of saying more than we know for certain, which
leads one to say as little as possible, as nearly nothing at all (at any
rate of interest) as we humanly can, and per contra the attempt to
describe the past in real terms, to give it the look of life, something
recognisably human, even at the inevitable risk of saying more than
we can know by accredited 'scientific' methods, bringing into play
those ways of assessing and analysing facts which are intrinsic to
our normal daily experience as human beings in relation to each
other - the whole intellectual, imaginative, moral, aesthetic, reli­
gious life of men - but which may not pass the scrutiny of a purely
fact-establishing enquiry. And historians at a given time incline in
favour of one or another of these poles as they react against some
excessive earlier tendency towards too much exuberance or fantasy,
or too puritanical a hatred of the imagination.
28 THE SENSE OF REALITY
III
History is the account of the relations of humans to each other and
to their environment; consequently what is true of history is likely
to be true of political thought and action as well. The natural
admiration for the triumphs of the sciences since Galileo and
Newton has stimulated those forms of political theory which, on
the assumption that human beings obeyed discoverable natural
laws, and that their ills were due to ignorance or vice and could be
cured, like those of their bodies, by the application of the right
kind of social hygiene, formulated schemes whereby men could be
made happy through, and virtuous by, some particular reorganisa­
tion of their lives. And indeed, if what men knew about themselves
could be set forth in the same systematic form in which they
formulate their knowledge of natural objects, they could perhaps
count upon a similar degree of success in altering their lives. The
triumphs of technology were rightly attributed to adequate know­
ledge of the laws of nature, which enabled men to predict the results
of their own actions and experiments. They knew that they could
not do everything, but they also could foretell, within a reasonable
margin of error, how much, within the limits of what can be done,
they would achieve. And yet, whenever this same method was
applied to human affairs, notably in 1 789 and 1 792 and 1 793 , in
1 848 and in 1 9 1 7, the results seldom corresponded to the hopes of
those human engineers who conducted the crucial social experi­
ments. The great French Revolution failed to establish what its
creators - impregnated with the human sciences of their time - had
hoped and expected to create; liberty, equality, fraternity were not
realised separately, much less together. What had gone wrong?
Had there not been sufficient knowledge of facts? Had the
Encyclopaedists offered mistaken hypotheses? Had there been a
miscalculation in the mathematics involved ?
Those who believed that the lives of human beings could be
controlled and planned by scientists thought that they had found
the error in insufficient attention to economic facts. This is what
Babeuf had thought; this is what had inspired the abortive risings
of June I 8 4 8 in Paris; but this last was a greater failure than its
predecessor. What was responsible for failure on this occasion?
Marxists were ready with an answer: the dominant principle of
human development was the clash of economically determined
classes; this had been forgotten or ignored by shallow-minded,
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
unworldly politicians. Armed with this final insight the experi­
menters could not fail; and it was with supreme confidence that all
the relevant knowledge was at their command - they knew what
they were doing, they could calculate the result - that the
Bolshevik Revolution of I 9 I 7 was launched and, in due course,
failed to bring about what had been expected by its makers, failed
on a more spectacular scale than any revolution hitherto.
Not that these revolutions were ineffective: 1 7 89 and I 9 I 7 had
each destroyed an old world, 'liquidated' entire classes, trans­
formed the world very violently and permanently; but the positive
element of the programme - the transformed human beings, the
new moral world - conspicuously failed to materialise. Each
revolution had been cursed and blessed, but the results seemed
equally remote from the darkest forebodings of its victims and the
brightest hopes of its leaders. Something had been miscalculated,
something had proved recalcitrant to the social arithmetic
employed. The makers of the revolution found themselves, in each
case, swept on by the forces which they had released in a direction
which they had scarcely anticipated. Some were destroyed by these
forces, some attempted to control them but were plainly controlled
by them, for all their efforts to dominate the elements. Observers
of these great events were ready with ad hoc hypotheses to account
for or explain away each failure, each frustration. Others fell into a
kind of fatalism and gave up all effort to understand the unintelli­
gible. Others again took refuge in generalisations so vast, patterns
stretching over so many centuries and millennia, that minor
bubbles upon the surface, wars and revolutions, were 'compensated
for' in terms of the cosmic curve taken as a whole. The effort of
imagination which went into this was grandiose, but its value in
explaining specific events - the great revolutions of our time - was
correspondingly small.
Plans for human improvement, from the most revolutionary and
radical to the mildest reforms, assume some degree of understand­
ing of the way in which social life occurs, together with some
hypothesis as to what actions will be followed by what consequen­
ces. To the degree to which such views of society and hypotheses
about the most efficient methods for transforming it take the form
of explicitly held theories, they take into account, solely or
principally, those facts of social life which are most noticeable, that
is to say, neither - for the reasons we have given above - the most
obvious nor the least obvious, but only those which obtrude
30 THE SENSE OF REALITY
themselves on our attention (for instance, those which have
changed the most in the recent past, or which are the most
prominent obstacles or aids to something which I or my class or
my Church or my profession wish to promote). Moreover, the
facts in question are those which lend themselves most easily to
generalisations - and therefore fit most neatly into theories of
society, history, political development and change. All theories
involve a high degree of abstraction, and those, therefore, who base
their actions upon such theories tend to take notice mostly of
aspects of the situation that conform to such treatment. This is
what we have called the upper level - outer, publicly inspectable
social facts. Below them, at various levels of greater and greater
complexity, is a complicated network of relationships involving
every form of human intercourse, more and more insusceptible to
tidy classification, more and more opaque to the theorist's vision as
he attempts to unravel their texture, which becomes more and
more complex, composed of smaller, more numerous and more
elusive particles, as he attempts to analyse any given social unit,
more or less arbitrarily defined, in its full individuality - as it
actually occurs, uniquely different from every other unit. Never­
theless, it is evident that the distinction between the 'upper' and the
'lower' levels is artificial: each theorist abstracts as he does for his
limited purposes, but the number of ways in which this can be
done is literally infinite, the strands which connect the elements of
social experience, the facets, interrelationships, interactions, are
very numerous - certainly incapable of being exhaustively dredged
up in any number, however great, of theoretical nets.
The political theory in terms of which, say, a revolution is made
concentrates upon certain aspects of the upper, public level; with
luck, energy, skill, resolution on the part of the revolutionaries, this
level is radically altered; certain institutions are duly destroyed,
others put in their place; human lives are altered, new ideas and
policies imposed and acted upon. But this upheaval inevitably stirs
up, if we may continue to use the metaphor, the lower levels of life.
The texture of a society viewed vertically is continuous. Changes
above cause tremors of violent force to run through the entire
system. If the revolution at the top is very violent it penetrates to
the lowest depths, the obscurest corners of the life of the society.
The theorists of the revolution may suppose themselves able to
predict the effects of their new model upon the portions of the
social structure which they observe more or less clearly - that have
 THE SENSE OF REALITY 31
a place in their theories - but they cannot discount the results of
their acts upon the darker levels, and the way in which these will,
in turn, affect the level with which they are familiar. Inevitably
their acts affect more than they can possibly know. The less
observable processes, which are insufficiently clear to be taken
account of, naturally result in by-products which are largely
incalculable; with the result that it is the regular history of all great
revolutions - violent reversals initiated to create a new heaven and
a new earth in obedience to a formula - that although they do
indeed at times upset existing forms, and for good, they lead, more
often than not, to totally new and unforetold situations equally
remote from the expectations of the revolutionaries and of their
opponents. The more abstract the formula, the less adapted to the
tortuous, tangled lines of actual human relationships, the further
the total effect from the cut and dried convictions of the theorists.
The prejudices of most men who regard themselves as practical
against the solutions of social programmes urged by the theorists -
the popular distrust of intellectuals and doctrinaires - rest upon a
feeling that the schemata over-simplify the complex texture of
human life, that instead of following their contours they try to alter
them, to compel them to conform to the symmetry and simplicity
of the schemata themselves, and that this does not pay sufficient
heed to the shapeless living reality of human lives; and the less the
application of such formulae yields the expected results, the more
exasperated the theorists become, the more they try to force the
facts into some preconceived mould - the more resistance they
encounter, the more violent are the efforts to overcome it, the
greater the reaction, confusion, suffering untold, the more the
original ends are lost sight of, until the consequences of the
experiments are beyond what anybody had wished or planned or
expected, too often a bitter and purposeless struggle of planners
and their victims in a situation which is too much for them, grown
beyond the control of both.
Why should such terms as 'doctrinaire', 'fanatical ideologue',
'abstract theorist' be obvious terms of opprobrium if the doctrine,
the ideas, the abstractions can be correct and true - if there is a
science of society and we can foretell the results of radical acts with
a fair degree of accuracy? Why should it not be proper to apply
them to society? We do not blame physicists for believing in the
doctrines of their science; we do not condemn astronomers for
32 THE SENSE O F REALITY
unswerving devotion to mathematical methods; it is when econo­
mists or sociologists or political theorists obtain sufficient power to
alter our lives that men become suspicious or indignant or violently
upset. This may partly be due to natural conservatism, hatred of
change, unconscious adherence to 'common-sense' theories of their
own, no wit less stupid, unthinking faith in and loyalty to the old
establishment, however cruel, unjust, grotesque. But the whole of
this resistance to doctrine is not attributable to stupidity and
mediocrity and vested interests and prejudices and narrow egoism
and ignorance and superstition; in part it is due to beliefs about
what kind of behaviour does and what kind of behaviour does not
tend to produce successful results - to the memories of failed
revolutions, to the oceans of blood which have not led to the
Kingdom of Love but to further blood, more misery. And at the
back of this is a just feeling that statecraft - the art of governing
and altering societies - is unlike either the erudition of scholars or
scientific knowledge; that statesmen of genius, unlike the masters
of these disciplines, cannot communicate their knowledge directly,
cannot teach a specific set of rules, cannot set forth any proposi­
tions they have established in a form in which they can be learned
easily by others (so that no one need establish them again), or teach
a method which, after them, any competent specialist can practise
without needing the genius of the original inventor or discoverer.
What is called wisdom in statesmen, political skill, is understanding
rather than knowledge - some kind of acquaintance with relevant
facts of such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell what fits
with what: what can be done in given circumstances and what
cannot, what means will work in what situations and how far,
without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or
even what they know. What makes us distinguish Augustus Caesar
or Henry IV of France or Richelieu or Washington or Cavour
from such men as John of Leiden or the Emperor Joseph II of
Austria or Robespierre or Hitler or Stalin, in some sense certainly
no less remarkable? What is the 'secret' of the successes of the
former? How did they know what to do, when to do it? Why does
their work abide, while the work of men no less resolute,
knowledgeable, fearless has crumbled, and, as often as not, left
only untold human misery as its memorial?
Once we ask what the secret is, it becomes plain that there is and
can be none, that we are wondering what key these men had to the
mysteries of their own situations when, in fact, there is no , key.
 THE SENSE OF REALITY 33
Botany is a science but gardening is not; action and the results of
action in situations where only the surface is visible will be
successful, partly, no doubt, as the result of luck, but partly owing
to 'insight' on the part of the actors, that is, the kind of
understanding of the relations of the 'upper' to the 'lower' levels,
the kind of semi-instinctive integration of the unaccountable
infinitesimals of which individual and social life is composed (of
which Tolstoy spoke so well in the Epilogue to War and Peace), in
which all kinds of skills are involved - powers of observation,
knowledge of facts, above all experience - in connection with
which we speak of a sense of timing, sensitiveness to the needs and
capacities of human beings, political and historical genius, in short
the kind of human wisdom, ability to conduct one's life or fit
means to ends, with which, as Faust found, mere knowledge of
facts - learning, science - was not at all identical. Trial and error
occur here, as in the sciences, as in the growth of scholarship. What
Karl Popper calls the hypothetico-deductive method plays a central
part here, and so do deduction and induction in their orthodox
senses. But there is an element of improvisation, of playing by ear,
of being able to size up the situation, of knowing when to leap and
when to remain still, for which no formulae, no nostrums, no
general recipes, no skill in identifying specific situations as instan­
ces of general laws can be a substitute.1

1 This kind of knowledge, or practical genius, which statesmen and historians

equally need if they are to succeed in understanding the societies of their own or
other times, of the past and perhaps of the future, is not the same as that referred
to in the celebrated distinction drawn by Gilbert Ryle between knowing that and
knowing how. To know how to do something - to possess or acquire a skill or a
knack - does not imply an ability to describe why one is acting as one is; a man
who knows how to ride a bicycle need not be able to explain what he is doing or
why his behaviour leads to the results he desires. But a statesman faced with a
critical situation and forced to choose between alternative courses, or a historian
who rejects some explanation of past events as fanciful or superficial because
events cannot have happened in the manner indicated, or because the explanation
does not disclose the relationships of the truly crucial factors, does in some sense
judge the situation, assess it so that he can answer objectors, can give reasons for
rejecting alternative solutions, and yet cannot demonstrate the truth of what he is
saying by reference to theories or systems of knowledge, except to some
inconsiderable degree - certainly not in a sense in which scientists or scholars
must be ready to do it. And yet in scholarship, for instance, there are strong
analogies to the kind of understanding of which I speak. The scholar's process of,
say, amending a corrupt text seems to me not altogether unlike the analysis or
diagnosis of a social situation. Here, too, no doubt, one cannot do without
34 THE SENSE O F REALITY
The rationalists of the eighteenth century have often been
accused, and with reason, of ignoring this truth, and of supposing
that the phenomena of social and individual life could be deduced
from initial conditions plus scientific laws, like heavenly bodies in
the Newtonian system. The truth they ignored was the existence of
too great a gap between the generalisation and the concrete
situation - the simplicity of the former, the excessive complexity of
the latter. But some among their critics are in no better case. No
doubt Helvetius and Robespierre and Comte and Lenin erred in
supposing that applied science would solve all human ills. But
Burke and Maistre and Tolstoy and T. S. Eliot, who perceive the
fallacies of this position, tend themselves to suggest that although
the key of science is no key, yet a true method of unlocking the
mystery exists - in reliance upon tradition, or revelation and faith,

method, scientific system: marks in manuscripts are compared to other marks,

structures of sentences to other structures; induction can take the place of
memory, hypothetico-deductive tests the place of guesswork. Yet when Porson
amended the text of Aristophanes with such spectacular success, his sense of
Aristophanes' style - an awareness of what Aristophanes could and what he could
not have said - could not have been performed by an 'artificial brain', no matter
how many general propositions about ancient Greek comedy had been fed into it,
how many manuscripts and papyri and critical editions had been added thereto.
Had he not possessed his prodigious learning Porson might not have conceived
his solutions; but his capacity for finding them depended on an ability to co­
ordinate an untold number of dimly articulated data - and then to take the crucial
step, or undergo the crucial experience - to discriminate and articulate to himself a
, pattern�:y�hich provided all or many of the desiderata. That is what is meant by
calling his guesswork inspired. In principle a great many of the characteristics of
Aristophanes' style which entered into his imaginative activity in a semi-con­
scious fashion could be laid bare, enumerated and labelled, and their connections
systematically worked out. In practice this is obviously impossible, because the
facts are too minute, there are too many of them, too few persons are adept at
such pearl-diving operations, and so forth. Much the same is the case with regard
to solutions of problems of history and human action. There is, in one sense, no
empirical reason why such processes should not be fully describable and reducible
to sciences; why the work of genius, inspiration, imagination - both that of
generalisation on the one hand, and that of scrupulous minute fitting of fragments
·- /: "'·
� ' J I' J ' • J '

into a,'Jiattern 'on the other - should not be done by machines. But our experience
would have to be altogether different - its multi-faceted, 'many-level' structure
would have to be radically altered for this to be possible. And when possibilities
as radical as this are contemplated - which the imagination can scarcely compass ­
it is perhaps improper, to call them empirical. They belong to the ultimate, most
general characteristics �f normal human experience, which we cannot assume, on
the basis of human experience to date, to be alterable; these characteristics are
sometimes known as categories rather than empirical facts.
 THE SENSE OF REALITY 35
or an 'organic' view of life, or utter simplicity and simple Christian
faith, or divining the hidden stream of Christian civilisation. But if
we are right all such solutions are false in principle. There is no
substitute for a sense of reality.1 Many activities may be propae­
deutic to it, as archaeology and palaeography are to history.
Historians and men of action draw their information whence they
can. Scientific, statistical methods and microscopic biographical
detail - none of these is irrelevant, all may increase this sense of
what belongs where. Indeed, without a minimum of plain informa­
tion of this type there is nothing but ignorance. Nevertheless, the
sense of reality or of history which enables us to detect the
relationships of actual things and persons is acquaintance with
particulars, while all theory deals with attributes and idealised
entities - with the general.
This is perceived by many thinkers, but only Hegel attempted to
wed the two by speaking of the universal as 'concrete', by
dismissing actual science for dealing with abstractions and pro­
pounding the possibility of another altogether superior one which,
without ceasing to be general, would enable the scientist (that is,
metaphysician) to reason his way by infallible steps to the heart of
the concrete particular - the actual situation, which he would
understand in all its complexity and fullness and richness, as clearly
and exhaustively, and with the same kind of demonstrative cer­
tainty, as he grasped rigorously deductive systems. By this mon­
strous paradox a state of mind was conceived in which contradic­
tory attributes - the formal and the material; theory and practice;
deduction and direct acquaintance; that which is here and now, the
actual situation, as well as that which is there and then, divided
from it by time and space; thought and observation; actual
experience and generalisations from it; subject and object; things
and words - all were proclaimed to be one and indivisible, the
object of a transcendental wisdom, the Geist coming to conscious­
ness of itself, which would supersede all the lame and broken
efforts to treat the fragments of reality one by one, or, worse still,
as if each contained a whole. Nevertheless, in this very effort to cut
through the knot by what, at the best, is a sensational conjuring­
trick, Hegel did something towards exposing the exaggerated
claims of the positivism of his time, which identified all knowledge

1 T. S. Eliot said that men cannot face too much reality; but great historians,
·

novelists and other artists do face it more than others.

 THE SENSE OF REALITY
with the methods of the natural sciences, culminating in a system
of general propositions covering the universe and accounting for all
there was.
From this kind of positivism most Utopias of our time have
flowed. What is it that we mean when we call a thinker Utopian, or
when we accuse a historian of giving an unrealistic, over-doctri­
naire account of events? After all, no modern Utopian can be
accused of wishing co defy the laws of physics. It is not laws like
,,
gravitation or electromagnetism that modern Utopians have
ignored. What then have addicts to such systems sinned against?
Not certainly the laws of sociology, for very few such have as yet
been established, even by the least rigorous, most impressionistic of
'scientific' procedures. Indeed, the excessive belief in their existence
is often one of the marks of lack of realism - as is shown on every
occasion when men of action successfully defy them and knock
over yet p other false sociological model. It seems truer to say that
to be Utopian is to suggest that courses can be followed which, in
fact, cannot, and to argue this from theoretical premisses and in the
face of the 'concrete' evidence of the 'facts'. That is certainly what
Napoleon or Bismarck meant when they railed against speculative
theorists. ' - '

What are these facts which resist our wishes, which make
otherwise desirable schemes seem impracticable to men of sense,
which make those who nevertheless urge their realisation liable to
be called foolish theorists, blind Utopians? There is no doubt that,
in arguing about what can and what cannot be done, we tend to say
of this or that plan that 'it will inevitably fail' - that is, that it rests
on the assumption that human wills, human organisations, will be
strong enough to effect this or that, when in fact they will not,
since forces too powerful for them will crush and defeat them.
What are these forces? Forces which, say, Bismarck or Lord
Salisbury or Abraham Lincoln understood, we believe, but which
mere fanatics obsessed by theories do not.
There is at least one answer to this question which is certainly
false, and that is that Bismarck perceived laws which the fanatics do
not, that his relation to them is that of Newton or Darwin to pre­
scientific astrologers or alchemists. This is not so. If we knew laws,
the laws which govern social or individual life, we could operate
within them by using them as we use others in conquering nature,
by inventing methods which take full account of such forces - of
 THE SENSE O F REALITY 37
their relationships and costly effects. This dependable social tech­
nology is precisely what we lack. No one really supposes that
Bismarck knew more laws of social dynamics, or knew them
better, than, say, Comte. On the contrary, it is because Comte
believed in them and William James did not that the former is
condemned as Utopian. When we speak of some process as
inevitable, when we warn people not to pit their wills against the
greater power of the historical situation, which they cannot alter,
or cannot alter in the manner they desire, what we mean is not that
we know facts and laws which we obey, but that we do riot; that
we are aware, beyond the facts to which the potential reformers
point, of a dark mass of factors whose general drift we perceive but
whose precise interrelations we cannot formulate, and that any
attempt to behave as if only the clear 'top level' factors were
significant or crucial, ignoring the hinterland, will lead to frustra­
tion of the intended reforms, perhaps to unexpected disaster. When
we think of Utopians as pathetically attempting to overturn
institutions or alter the nature of individuals or States, the pathos
derives not from the fact that there are known laws which such
men are blindly defying, but from the fact that they take their
knowledge of a small portion of the scene to cover the entire scene;
because instead of realising and admitting how small our know­
ledge is, how even such knowledge as we could hope to possess of
the relations of what is clearly visible and what is not cannot be
formulated in the form of laws or generalisations, they pretend that
all that need be known is known, that they are working with open
eyes in a transparent medium, with facts and laws accurately laid
out before them, instead of groping, as in fact they are doing, in a
half-light where some may see a little further than others but where
none sees beyond a certain point, and, like pilots in a mist, must
rely upon a general sense of where they are and how to navigate in
such weather and in such waters, with such help as they may derive
from maps drawn at other dates by men employing different
conventions, and by the aid of such instruments as give nothing
cl � J" ,
but the most general information about their situation . ·"

It is one of the greatest and most fatal fallacies of the great

system-builders of the nineteenth century, Hegelians and Comtists
and, above all, the many Marxist sects, to suppose that if we call
something inevitable we mean to indicate the existence of a law. In
the natural sciences the concept of inevitability is seldom used, and
to identify there what is inevitable with that which conforms to a
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
law may perhaps be valid, and is certainly harmless; but in the
sphere of human relations the precise opposite seems to be the case.
When we speak of forces too great to be resisted we do not mean
that we have come up against an 'iron law'. We mean that there is
too much that we do not know, but dimly surmise, about the
situation, and that our wills and the means at our disposal may not
be efficacious enough to overcome these unknown factors, menac­
ing often precisely because they are too difficult to analyse. We
rightly admire those statesmen who, without pretending to detect
laws, are able to do more than others to accomplish their plans,
because of a superior sense of the contours of these unknown and
half-known factors, and of their effect upon this or that actual
situation. They are the persons who estimate what effect this or
that deliberate human act is likely to have on the particular texture
which the situation presents to them; and they assess the texture,
and how much they or others will be able to modify it by acts of
will - a texture compounded of human and non-human factors in
their interplay - without the benefit of laws or theories; for the
factors in question are below the level o(cleat scientific vision, are
precisely those which are too complex, too numerous, too minute
to be distilled into an elegant deductive structure of natural laws
susceptible to mathematical treatment, and are 'formidable', 'inex­
orable', 'inevitable' precisely because the texture is opaque. We
cannot tell exactly how plastic it will prove, because every effort to
act upon it is a risk and not precisely calculable - the exact opposite
of what it would be if there were social laws and we knew them
and what we meant by 'inevitable', or that which accorded with
them.
The equation which identifies the difficult medium in which we
live with something which obeys objective laws, themselves pre­
cise, contradicts our normal usage. For Marxists and, indeed, all
those who believe that social or individual life is wholly deter­
mined by laws at least in principle discoverable, men are weaker
than they supposed in their pre-scientific pride; they are calculable,
and in principle capable of omniscience. But as we ordinarily think
of ourselves, especially as historians or men of action - that is,
when we are dealing with particular individuals and things and
facts - we see a very different spectacle: of men governed by few
natural laws; falling into error, defeated, victims of one another,
through ignorance not of laws, but largely of the results of human
acts, those being most successful who possess (apart from luck,
 T H E S E N S E OF REALITY 39
which is perhaps indispensable) a combination of will-power and a
capacity for non-scientific, non-generalising assessment of specific
situations ad hoc; which leads to a picture of men as free,
sometimes strong, and largely ignorant that is the precise contrary
of the scientific view of them as weak, determined and potentially
OmniSCICnt.
The glaring failure of the latter view to conform with what we
see life to be like is what causes such suspicion to fall on scientists
when they attempt to generalise about history or politics. Their
theories are condemned as foolish and doctrinaire and Utopian.
What is meant is that all reforms suggested by such considerations,
whether of the left or the right, fail to take into account the only
method by which anything is ever achieved in practice, whether
good or bad, the only method of discovery, the answer to the
questions which are proper to historians, namely: What do men do
and suffer, and why and how? It is the view that answers to these
questions can be provided by formulating general laws, from
which the past and future of individuals and societies can be
successfully predicted, that has led to misconceptions alike in
theory and practice: to fanciful, pseudo-scientific histories and
theories of human behaviour, abstract and formal at the expense of
the facts, and to revolutions and wars and ideological campaigns
conducted on the basis of dogmatic certainty about their out­
come - vast misconceptions which have cost the lives, liberty and
happiness of a great many innocent human beings.
 POLITICAL JUD GEMENT

WHAT I S it to have good judgement in politics? What is it to be

politically wise, or gifted, to be a political genius, or even to be no
more than politically competent, to know how to get things done?
Perhaps one way of looking for the answer is by considering what
we are saying when we denounce statesmen, or pity them, for not
possessing these qualities. We sometimes complain that they are
blinded by prejudice or passion, but blinded to what? We say that
they don't understand the times they live in, or that they are
resisting something called 'the logic of the facts', or 'trying to put
the clock back', or that 'history is against them', or that they are
ignorant or incapable of learning, or else unpractical idealists,
visionaries, Utopians, hypnotised by the dream of some fabulous
past or some unrealisable future. All such expressions and meta­
phors seem to presuppose that there is something to know (of
which the critic has some notion) which these unfortunate persons
have somehow not managed to grasp, whether it is the inexorable
movement of some cosmic clock which no man can alter, or some
pattern of things in time or space, or in some more mysterious
medium - 'the realm of the Spirit' or 'ultimate reality' - which one
must first understand if one is to avoid frustration.
But what is this knowledge? Is it knowledge of a science? Are
there really laws to be discovered, rules to be learnt? Can statesmen
be taught something called political science - the science of the
relationships of human beings to each other and to their environ­
ment - which consists, like other sciences, of systems of verified
hypotheses, organised under laws, that enable one, by the use of
further experiment and observation, to discover other facts, and to
verify new hypotheses?
Certainly that was the notion, either concealed or open, of both
Hobbes and Spinoza, each in his own fashion, and of their
followers - a notion that grew more and more powerful in the
 POLITI CAL JUD GEMENT
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the natural sciences
acquired enormous prestige, and attempts were made to maintain
that anything not capable of being reduced to a natural science
could not properly be called knowledge at all. The more ambitious
and extreme scientific determinists - Holbach, Helvetius, La
Mettrie - used to think that, given enough knowledge of universal
human nature and of the laws of social behaviour, and enough
knowledge of the state of given human beings at a given time, one
could scientifically calculate how these human beings, or at any
rate large groups of them - entire societies or classes - would
behave under some other given set of circumstances. It was argued,
and this seemed reasonable enough at the time, that just as
knowledge of mechanics was indispensable to engineers or archi­
tects or inventors, so knowledge of social mechanics was necessary
for anyone - statesmen, for example - who wished to get large
bodies of men to do this or that. For without it what had they to
rely on but casual impressions, half-remembered, unverified recol­
lections, guesswork, mere rules of thumb, unscientific hypotheses?
One must, no doubt, make do with these if one has no proper
scientific method at one's disposal; but one should realise that this
is no better than unorganised conjectures about nature made by
primitive peoples, or by the inhabitants of Europe during the Dark
Ages - grotesquely inadequate tools superseded by the earliest
advances of true science. And there are those (in institutions of
higher learning) who have thought this, and think this still, in our
own times.
Less ambitious thinkers, influenced by the fathers of the life
sciences at the turn of the eighteenth century, conceived of the
science of society as being rather more like a kind of social
anatomy. To be a good doctor it is necessary, but not sufficient, to
know anatomical theory. For one must also know how to apply it
to specific cases - to particular patients, suffering from particular
forms of a particular disease. This cannot be wholly learnt from
books or professors, it requires considerable personal experience
and natural aptitude. Nevertheless, neither experience nor natural
gifts can ever be a complete substitute for knowledge of a
developed science - pathology, say, or anatomy. To know only the
theory might not be enough to enable one to heal the sick, but to
be ignorant of it is fatal. By analogy with medicine, such faults as
bad political judgement, lack of realism, Utopianism, attempts to
arrest progress, and so on were duly conceived as deriving from
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
ignorance or defiance of the laws of social development - laws of
social biology (which conceives of society as an organism rather
than a mechanism), or of the corresponding science of politics .. . '"

The scientifically inclined philosophers of the eighteenth century

believed passionately in just such laws; and tried to account for
human behaviour wholly in terms of the identifiable effects of
education, of natural environment, and of the calculable results of
the play of appetites and passions. However, this approach turned
out to explain so small a part of the actual behaviour of human
beings at times when it seemed most in need of explanation -
during and after the Jacobin Terror - and failed so conspicuously
to predict or analyse such major phenomena as the growth and
violence of nationalism, the uniqueness of, and the conflicts
between, various cultures, and the events leading to wars and
revolutions, and displayed so little understanding of what may
broadly be called spiritual or emotional life (whether of individuals
or of whole peoples), and the unpredictable play of irrational
factors, that new hypotheses inevitably entered the field, each
claiming to overthrow all the others, and to be the last and
definitive word on the subject.
Messianic preachers - prophets - such as Saint-Simon, Fourier,
Comte, dogmatic thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Spengler, histori­
cally-minded theological thinkers from Bossuet to Toynbee, the
popularisers of Darwin, the adaptors of this or that dominant
school of sociology or psychology - all have attempted to step into
the breach caused by the failure of the eighteenth-century philoso­
phers to construct a proper, successful science of society. Each of
these new nineteenth-century apostles laid some claim to exclusive
possession of the truth. What they all have in common is the belief
that there is one great universal pattern, and one unique method of
apprehending it, knowledge of which would have saved statesmen
many an error, and humanity many a hideous tragedy. i< ' ' ' ' ;<

It was not exactly denied that such statesmen as Colbert, or

Richelieu, or Washington, or Pitt, or Bismarck, seem to have done
well enough without this knowledge, just as bridges had obviously
been built before the principles of mechanics were discovered, and
diseases had been cured by men who appeared to know no
anatomy. It was admitted that much could be - and had been -
achieved by the ihspired guesses of individual men of genius, and
by their instinctive skills; but, so it was argued, particularly
towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was no need to
 POLITI CAL JUDGEMENT 43
look to so precarious a source of light. The principles upon which
these great men acted, even though they may not have known it, so
some optimistic sociologists have maintained, can be extracted and
reduced to an accurate science, very much as the principles of
biology or mechanics must once have been established.
According to this view, political judgement need never again be a
matter of instinct and flair and sudden illuminations and strokes of
unanalysable genius; rather it should henceforth be built upon the
foundations of indubitable knowledge. Opinions might differ
about whether this new knowledge was empirical or a priori,
whether it derived its authority from the methods of natural
science or from metaphysics; but in either form it amounted to
what Herbert Spencer called the sciences of social statics and social
dynamics. Those who applied it were social engineers; the mysteri­
ous art of government was to be mysterious no longer: it could be
taught, learnt, applied; it was a matter of professional competence
and specialisation.
This thesis would be more plausible it the newly discovered laws
did not, as a rule, turn out either to be ancient truisms - such as
that most revolutions are followed by reaction (which amounts to
not much more than the virtual tautology that most movements
come to an end at some time, and are then followed by something
else, often in some opposite direction) - or else to be constantly
upset, and violently upset, by events, leaving the theoretical
systems in ruins. Perhaps nobody did so much to undermine
confidence in a dependable science of human relations as the great
tyrants of our day - Lenin, Stalin, Hitler. If belief in the laws of
history and 'scientific socialism' really did help Lenin or Stalin, it
helped them not so much as a form of knowledge, but in the way
that a fanatical faith in almost any dogma can be of help to
determined men, by justifying ruthless acts and suppressing doubts
and scruples.
Between them, Stalin and Hitler left scarcely stone upon stone of
the once splendid edifice of the inexorable laws of history. Hitler,
after all, almost succeeded in his professed aim of undoing the
results of the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution violently
twisted the whole of Western society out of what, until that time,
seemed to most observers a fairly orderly course - twisted it into
an irregular movement, followed by a dramatic collapse, foretold as
little by Marxist as by any other 'scientific' prophets. It is easy
enough to arrange the past in a symmetrical way - Voltaire's
44 THE SENSE O F REALITY
famous cynical epigram to the effect that history is so many tricks
played upon the dead is not as superficial as it seems.1 A true
science, though, must be able not merely to rearrange the past but
to predict the future. To classify facts, to order them in neat
patterns, is not quite yet a science.
We are told that the great earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in
the mid-eighteenth century shook Voltaire's faith in inevitable
human progress. Similarly the great destructive political upheavals
of our own time have instilled terrible doubts about the feasibility
of a reliable science of human behaviour for the guidance of men of
action - be they industrialists or social-welfare officers or states­
men. The subject evidently had to be re-examined afresh: the
assumption that an exact science of social behaviour was merely a
matter of time and ingenuity no longer seemed quite so self­
evident. What method should this science pursue? Clearly not
deductive: there existed no accepted axioms from which the whole
of human behaviour could be deduced by means of agreed logical
rules. Not even the most dogmatic theologian would claim as much
as that. Inductive, then? Laws based on the survey of a large
collection of empirical data? Or on hypothetical-deductive meth­
ods not very easily applicable to the complexities of human affairs?
In theory, no doubt, such laws should have been discoverable,
but in practice this looked less promising. If I am a statesman faced
with an agonising choice of possible courses of action in a critical
situation, will I really find it useful - even if I can afford to wait
that long for the answer - to employ a team of specialists in
political science to assemble for me from past history all kinds of
cases analogous to my situation, from which I or they must then
abstract what these cases have in common, deriving from this
exercise relevant laws of human behaviour? The instances for such
induction - or for the construction of hypotheses intended to
systematise historical knowledge - would, because human experi­
ence is so various, not be numerous; and the dismissal even from
these instances of all that is unique to each, and the retention only
of that which is common, would produce a very thin, generalised
residue, and one far too unspecific to be of much help in a practical
dilemma.
Obviously what. matters is to understand a particular situation in

1 'Un historien est i.m babillard qui fait des tracasseries aux morts.' The

Complete Works of Voltaire, vol. 82 (Geneva and Toronto, 1 968), p. 4 5 2 ·

 POLITICAL JUD GEMENT 45
its full uniqueness, the particular men and events and dangers, the
particular hopes and fears which are actively at work in a particular
place at a particular time: in Paris in 1 79 1 , in Petrograd in 1 9 1 7, in
Budapest in 1 9 5 6, in Prague in I 968 or in Moscow in 1 99 I . We
need not attend systematically to whatever it is that these have in
common with other events and other situations, which may
resemble them in some respects, but may happen to lack exactly
that which makes all the difference at a particular moment, in a
particular place. If I am driving a car in desperate haste, and come
to a rickety-looking bridge, and must make up my mind whether it
will bear my weight, some knowledge of the principles of engineer­
ing would no doubt be useful. But even so I can scarcely afford to
stop to survey and calculate. To be useful to me in a crisis such
knowledge must have given rise to a semi-instinctive skill - like the
ability to read without simultaneous awareness of the rules of the
language.
Still, in engineering some laws can, after all, be formulated, even
though I do not need to keep them constantly in mind. In the
realm of political action, laws are far and few indeed: skills are
everything. What makes statesmen, like drivers of cars, successful is
that they do not think in general terms - that is, they do not
primarily ask themselves in what respect a given situation is like or
unlike other situations in the long course of human history (which
is what historical sociologists, or theologians in historical clothing,
such as Vico or Toynbee, are fond of doing). Their merit is that
they grasp the unique combination of characteristics that constitute
this particular situation - this and no other. What they are said to
be able to do is to understand the character of a particular
movement, of a particular individual, of a unique state of affairs, of
a unique atmosphere, of some particular combination of economic,
political, personal factors; and we do not readily suppose that this
capacity can literally be taught.
We speak of, say, an exceptional sensitiveness to certain kinds of
fact, we resort to metaphors. We speak of some people as
possessing antennae, as it were, that communicate to them the
specific contours and texture of a particular political or social
situation. We speak of the possession of a good political eye, or
nose, or ear, of a political sense which love or ambition or hate may
bring into play, of a sense that crisis and danger sharpen (or
alternatively blunt), to which experience is crucial, a particular gift,
possibly not altogether unlike that of artists or creative writers. We
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
mean nothing occult or metaphysical; we do not mean a magic eye
able to penetrate into something that ordinary minds cannot
apprehend; we mean something perfectly ordinary, empirical, and
quasi-aesthetic in the way that it works.
The gift we mean entails, above all, a capacity for integrating a
vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicoloured, evanescent,
perpetually overlapping data, too many, too swift, too inter­
mingled to be caught and pinned down and labelled like so many
individual butterflies. To integrate in this sense is to see the data
(those identified by scientific knowledge as well as by direct
perception) as elements in a single pattern, with their implications,
to see them as symptoms of past and future possibilities, to see
them pragmatically - that is, in terms of what you or others can or
will do to them, and what they can or will do to others or to you.
To seize a situation in this sense one needs to see, to be given a kind
of direct, almost sensuous contact with the relevant data, and not
merely to recognise their general characteristics, to classify them or
reason about them, or analyse them, or reach conclusions and
formulate theories about them.
To be able to do this well seems to me to be a gift akin to that of
some novelists, that which makes such writers as, for example,
Tolstoy or Proust convey a sense of direct acquaintance with the
texture of life; not just the sense of a chaotic flow of experience, but
a highly developed discrimination of what matters from the rest,
whether from the point of view of the writer or that of the
characters he describes. Above all this is an acute sense of what fits
with what, what springs from what, what leads to what; how
things seem to vary to different observers, what the effect of such
experience upon them may be; what the result is likely to be in a
concrete situation of the interplay of human beings and impersonal
forces - geographical or biological or psychological or whatever
they may be. It is a sense for what is qualitative rather than
quantitative, for what is specific rather than general; it is a species
of direct acquaintance, as distinct from a capacity for description or
calculation or inference; it is what is variously called natural
wisdom, imaginative understanding, insight, perceptiveness, and,
more misleadingly, intuition (which dangerously suggests some
almost magical faculty), as opposed to the markedly different
virtues - very gre,at as these are - of theoretical knowledge or
learning, erudition, powers of reasoning and generalisation, intel­
lectual genius.
 PO LITI CAL JUDGEMENT 47
The quality I am attempting to describe is that special under­
standing of public life (or for that matter private life) which
successful statesmen have, whether they are wicked or virtuous -
that which Bismarck had (surely a conspicuous example, in the last
century, of a politician endowed with considerable political judge­
ment), or Talleyrand or Franklin Roosevelt, or, for that matter,
men such as Cavour or Disraeli, Gladstone or Atatiirk, in common
with the great psychological novelists, something which is conspic­
uously lacking in men of more purely theoretical genius such as
Newton or Einstein or Russell, or even Freud. This is true even of
Lenin, despite the huge weight of theory with which he burdened
himself.
What are we to call this kind of capacity? Practical wisdom,
practical reason, perhaps, a sense of what will 'work', and what will
not. It is a capacity, in the first place, for synthesis rather than
analysis, for knowledge in the sense in which trainers know their
animals, or parents their children, or conductors their orchestras, as
opposed to that in which chemists know the contents of their test
tubes, or mathematicians know the rules that their symbols obey.
Those who lack this, whatever other qualities they may possess, no
matter how clever, learned, imaginative, kind, noble, attractive,
gifted in other ways they may be, are correctly regarded as
politically inept - in the sense in which Joseph II of Austria was
inept (and he was certainly a morally better man than, say, his
contemporaries Frederick the Great and the Empress Catherine II
of Russia, who were far more successful in attaining their ends, and
far more benevolently disposed towards mankind) or in which the
Puritans, or James II, or Robespierre (or, for that matter, Hitler or
even Lenin in the end) proved to be inept at realising at least their
· · ·

positive ends.
What is it that the Emperor Augustus or Bismarck knew and the
Emperor Claudius or Joseph II did not? Very probably the
Emperor Joseph was intellectually more distinguished and far
better read than Bismarck, and Claudius may have known many
more facts than Augustus. But Bismarck (or Augustus) had the
power of integrating or synthesising the fleeting, broken, infinitely
various wisps and fragments that make up life at any level, just as
every human being, to some extent, must integrate them (if he is to
survive at all), without stopping to analyse how he does what he
does, and whether there is a theoretical justification for his activity.
Everyone must do it, but Bismarck did it over a much larger field, .
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
against a wider horizon of possible courses of action, with far
greater power - to a degree, in fact, which is quite correctly
described as that of genius. Moreover, the bits and pieces which
require to be integrated - that is, seen as fitting with other bits and
pieces, and not compatible with yet others, in the way in which, in
fact, they do fit and fail to fit in reality - these basic ingredients of
life are in a sense too familiar, we are too much with them, they are
too close to us, they form the texture of the semi-conscious and
unconscious levels of our life, and for that reason they tend to
resist tidy classification.
Of course, whatever can be isolated, looked at, inspected, should
be. We need not be obscurantist. I do not wish to say or hint, as
some romantic thinkers have, that something is lost in the very act
of investigating, analysing and bringing to light, that there is some
virtue in darkness as such, that the most important things are too
deep for words, and should be left untouched, that it is somehow
blasphemous to enunciate them.1 This I believe to be a false and
on the whole deleterious doctrine. Whatever can be illuminated,
made articulate, incorporated in a proper science, should of course
be so. 'We murder to dissect,' wrote Wordsworth2 - at times we
do; at other times dissection reveals truths. There are vast regions
of reality which only scientific methods, hypotheses, established
truths, can reveal, account for, explain, and indeed control. What
science can achieve must be welcomed. In historical studies, in
classical scholarship, in archaeology, linguistics, demography, the
study of collective behaviour, in many other fields of human life
and endeavour, scientific methods can give indispensable informa­
tion.
I do not hold with those who maintain that natural science, and
the technology based upon it, somehow distorts our vision, and
prevents us from direct contact with reality - 'being' - which pre­
Socratic Greeks or medieval Europeans saw face to face. This seems
to me an absurd nostalgic delusion. My argument is only that not
everything, in practice, can be - indeed that a great deal cannot be ­
grasped by the sciences. For, as Tolstoy taught us long ago, the
particles are too minute, too heterogeneous, succeed each other too
rapidly, occur in combinations of too great a complexity, are too

1 In this spirit Keats wrote: 'Do not all charms fly I At the mere touch of cold

philosophy? . . . Philosbphy will clip an Angel's wings, I Conquer all mysteries by

rule and line . . '. Lamia ( 1 82o), part 2, line 229.
.

2 In 'The Tables Turned' ( 1 798).

 POLITICAL JUDGEMENT 49
much part and parcel of what we are and do, to be capable of
submitting to the required degree of abstraction, that minimum of
generalisation and formalisation - idealisation - which any science
must exact. After all, Frederick of Prussia and Catherine the Great
founded scientific academies (which are still famous and important)
with the help of French and Swiss scientists - but did not seek to
learn from them how to govern. And although the father of
sociology, the eminent Auguste Comte himself, certainly knew a
great many more facts and laws than any politician, his theories are
today nothing but a sad, huge, oddly-shaped fossil in the stream of
knowledge, a kind of curiosity in a museum, whereas Bismarck's
political gifts - if I may return to this far from admirable man,
because he is perhaps the most effective of all nineteenth-century
statesmen - are, alas, only too familiar amongst us still. There is no
natural science of politics any more than a natural science of ethics.
Natural science cannot answer all questions.
All I am concerned to deny, or at least to doubt, is the truth of
Freud's dictum that while science cannot explain everything,
nothing else can do so. Bismarck understood something which, let
us say, Darwin or James Clerk Maxwell did not need to under­
stand, something about the public medium in which he acted, and
he understood it as sculptors understand stone or clay; understood,
that is, in this particular case, the potential reactions of relevant
bodies of Germans or Frenchmen or Italians or Russians, and
understood this without, so far as we know, any conscious
inference or careful regard to the laws of history, or laws of any
kind, and without recourse to any other specific key or nostrum -
not those recommended by Maistre, or Hegel or Nietzsche or
Bergson or some of their modern irrationalist successors, any more
than those of their enemies, the friends of science. He was
successful because he had the particular gift of using his experience
and observation to guess successfully how things would turn out.
Scientists, at least qua scientists, do not need this talent. Indeed
their training often makes them peculiarly unfit in this respect.
Those who are scientifically trained often seem to hold Utopian
political views precisely because of a belief that methods or models
which work well in their particular fields will apply to the entire
sphere of human action, or if not this particular method or this
particular model, then some other method, some other model of a
more or less similar kind. If natural scientists are at times naive in
politics, this may be due to the influence of an insensibly made, but
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
nevertheless misleading, identification of what \.'odts in the formal
and deductive disciplines, or in laboratories, with what works in
the organisation of human life.
I repeat: to deny that laboratories or scientific models offer
something - sometimes a great deal - of value for social organisa­
tion or political action is sheer obscurantism; but to maintain that
they have more to teach us than any other form of experience is an
equally blind form of doctrinaire fanaticism which has sometimes
led to the torture of innocent men by pseudo-scientific monoma­
niacs in pursuit of the millennium. When we say of the men of
1 7 89 in France, or of 1 9 1 7 in Russia, that they were too doctrinaire,
that they relied too much on theories - whether eighteenth-century
theories such as Rousseau's, or nineteenth-century theories such as
Marx's - we do not mean that although these particular theories
were indeed defective, better ones could in principle be discovered,
and that these better theories really would at last do the job of
making men happy and free and wise, so that they would not need,
any longer, to depend so desperately on the improvisations of
gifted leaders, leaders who are so few and far between, and so liable
to megalomania and terrible mistakes.
What we mean is the opposite: that theories, in this sense, are not
appropriate as such in these situations. It is as if we were to look
for a theory of tea-tasting, a science of architecture. The factors to
be evaluated are in these cases too many, and it is on skill in
integrating them, in the sense I have described, that everything
depends, whatever may be our creed or our purpose - whether we
are utilitarians or liberals, communists or mystical theocrats, or
those who have lost their way in some dark Heideggerian forest.
Sciences, theories no doubt do sometimes help, but they cannot be
even a partial substitute for a perceptual gift, for a capacity for
taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in
which things hang together - a talent to which, the finer, the more
uncannily acute it is, the power of abstraction and analysis seems
alien, if not positively hostile.
A scientifically trained observer can of course always analyse a
particular social abuse, or suggest a particular remedy, but he can
do little, as a scientist, to predict what general effects the applica­
tion of a given remedy or the elimination of a given source of
misery or injustice is going to have on other - especially on
remote - parts of our total social system. We begin by trying to
alter what we can see, but the tremors which our action starts
 POLITICAL JUDGEMENT 5I
sometimes run through the entire depth of our society; levels to
which we pay no conscious attention are stirred, and all kinds of
unintended results ensue. It is semi-instinctive knowledge of these
lower depths, knowledge of the intricate connections between the
upper surface and other, remoter layers of social or individual life
(which Burke was perhaps the first to emphasise, if only to turn his
perception to his own traditionalist purposes), that is an indispen­
sable ingredient of good political judgement.
We rightly fear those bold reformers who are too obsessed by
their vision to pay attention to the medium in which they work,
and who ignore imponderables - John of Leiden, the Puritans,
Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin. For there is a literal sense in
which they know not what they do (and do not care either). And
we are rightly apt to put more trust in the equally bold empiricists,
Henry IV of France, Peter the Great, Frederick of Prussia,
Napoleon, Cavour, Lincoln, Lloyd George, Masaryk, Franklin
Roosevelt (if we are on their side at all), because we see that they
understand their material. Is this not what is meant by political
genius? Or genius in other provinces of human activity? This is not
a contrast between conservatism and radicalism, or between cau­
tion and audacity, but between types of gift. As there are
differences of gifts, so there are different types of folly. Two of
these types are in direct contradiction, and in a curious and
paradoxical fashion.
The paradox is this: in the realm presided over by the natural
sciences, certain laws and principles are recognised as having been
established by proper methods - that is, methods recognised as
reliable by scientific specialists. Those who deny or defy these laws
or methods - people, say, who believe in a flat earth, or do not
believe in gravitation - are quite 7 rightly ;regarded as cranks or
lunatics. But in ordinary life, and perhaps in some of the human­
ities - studies such as history, or philosophy, or law (which differ
from the sciences if only because they do not seem to establish - or
even want to establish - wider and wider generalisations about the
world) - those are Utopian who place excessive faith in laws and
methods derived from alien fields, mostly from the natural scien­
ces, and apply them with great confidence and somewhat mechani­
cally. The arts of life - not least of politics - as well as some among
the humane studies turn out to possess their own special methods
and techniques, their own criteria of success and failure. Utopian­
ism, lack of realism, bad judgement here consist not in failing to
 THE SENSE OF REALITY
apply the methods of natural science, but, on the contrary, in over­
applying them. Here failure comes from resisting that which works
best in each field, from ignoring or opposing it either in favour of
some systematic method or principle claiming universal validity -
say the methods of natural science (as Comte did), or of historical
theology or social development (as Marx did) - or else from a wish
to defy all principles, all methods as such, from simply advocating
trust in a lucky star or personal inspiration: that is, mere irrational­
Ism.
To be rational in any sphere, to display good judgement in it, is
to apply those methods which have turned out to work best in it.
What is rational in a scientist is therefore often Utopian in a
historian or a politician (that is, it systematically fails to obtain the
desired result), and vice versa. This pragmatic platitude entails
consequences that not everyone is ready to accept. Should states­
men be scientific? Should scientists be put in authority, as Plato or
Saint-Simon or H. G. Wells wanted? Equally, we might ask,
should gardeners be scientific, should cooks? Botany helps garden­
ers, laws of dietetics may help cooks, but excessive reliance on
these sciences will lead them - and their clients - to their doom.
The excellence of cooks and gardeners still depends today most
largely upon their artistic endowment and, like that of politicians,
on their capacity to improvise. Most of the suspicion of intellec­
tuals in politics springs from the belief, not entirely false, that,
owing to a strong desire to see life in some simple, symmetrical
fashion, they put too much faith in the beneficent results of
applying directly to life conclusions obtained by operations in
some theoretical sphere. And the corollary of this over-reliance on
theory, a corollary alas too often corroborated by experience, is
that if the facts - that is, the behaviour of living human beings - are
recalcitrant to such experiment, the experimenter becomes
annoyed, and tries to alter the facts to fit the theory, which, in
practice, means a kind of vivisection of societies until they become
what the theory originally declared that the experiment should
have caused them to be. The theory is 'saved', indeed, but at too
high a cost in useless human suffering; yet since it is applied in the
first place, ostensibly at least, to save men from the hardships
which, it is alleged, more haphazard methods would bring about,
the result is self-defeating. So long as there is no science of politics
in sight, attempts �to substitute counterfeit science for individual
judgement not only lead to failure, and, at times, major disasters,
 POLITI CAL JUDGEMENT 53
but also discredit the real sciences, and undermine faith in human
reason.
The passionate advocacy of unattainable ideals may, even if it is
Utopian, break open the barriers of blind tradition and transform
the values of human beings, but the advocacy of pseudo-scientific
or other kinds of falsely certified means - methods of the sort
advertised by metaphysical or other kinds of bogus prospectuses -
can only do harm. There is a story - I don't know how true - that
when the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was one day asked on
what principle he decided whethe: to go to war, he replied that, in
order to decide whether or not to take an umbrella, he looked at
the sky. Perhaps this goes too far. If a reliable science of political
weather-forecasting existed, this would, no doubt, be condemned
as too subjective a procedure. But, for reasons which I have tried to
give, such a science, even if it is not impossible in principle, is still
very far to seek. And to act as if it already existed, or was merely
round the corner, is an appalling and gratuitous handicap to all
political movements, whatever their principles and whatever their
purposes - from the most reactionary to the most violently
revolutionary - and leads to avoidable suffering.
To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in
a field incapable of it is to be blind and to mislead others.
Moreover, t4ere is always the part played by pure luck - which,
mysteriously ·enough, men of good judgement seem to enjoy rather
more often than others. This, too, is perhaps worth pondering.
 PHILOSOPHY
AND GOVERNMENT REPRESSION

A P A RT F R O M the question of what rights are in themselves, or

how human beings come to have them or to own them or to lose
them, it may be asked: Why should philosophers have a special
claim to the right to express themselves? Why they rather than
artists or historians or scientists or ordinary men? Freedom of
speech - or of expression by means other than words - may be an
absolute end, needing no justification in terms of any other
purpose, and worth fighting for, some would add dying for, for its
own sake, independently of its value in making people happy or
wise or strong. That is what I should wish to say myself. But this is
a point of view which has seldom held the field in human affairs;
more frequently there has been a tendency to believe in some single
ideal - social or political or religious - to which everything was to
be sacrificed, and among the first the freedom for individual self­
expression, because it was, quite rightly, seen to constitute a grave
danger to the kind of social conformity which uncritical service to
a single ideal in the end requires. But be that as it may - whether or
not individual freedom is a goal worth defending against the
jealous and exclusive claims of even the noblest form of the single
final human goal - the question remains: Why should philosophers
need special protection from social repression ? Is there a special
correlation between, say, political liberty and philosophical genius?
Would Socrates have risen to even greater heights in a society less
terrified of the dangers to the Athenian way of life? Would
Aristotle have done better in a republic, or Descartes in conditions
of religious freedom, or Spinoza in a society where no one was
liable to be excommunicated for his beliefs? After all, some of the
boldest, most original and most subversive statements ever made
were articulated in Paris in the eighteenth century where both State
and Church exercised unlimited censorship. Immanuel Kant intro­
duced the greatest philosophical revolution of our times as a citizen
 55
P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O VE RN M EN T R E P R E SS I O N

of a State where complete freedom of expression was by no means

encouraged, as he himself came to know only too well; and
conversely conditions of genuine freedom of expression - as they
obtained in many countries of Europe in the nineteenth century -
did not, in England or the French Republic or Switzerland or the
kingdom of Italy, lead to that magnificent flowering of philosophi­
cal talent which those optimistic rationalists who directly connect
the growth of freedom with the progress of philosophy must have
expected.
I am sure that no genuine correlation can be established except
of that elementary kind, for which statistical evidence does not
seem indispensable, whereby it is clear that too much repression
prevents too many persons from saying what they want, and
gradually atrophies their power of comprehension and expression;
from which nothing follows save the trivial fact that if you prevent
people from thinking, and dull their imagination, they will remain
frightened or stupid or infantile and produce little of value in any
province. But the converse does not seem to follow: all that we
seem able to gather from history is that the arts, the sciences and
human thought in general flourish both in periods of freedom and
in periods of intermittent or inefficient oppression; and particularly
when a despotic regime has lost confidence in itself and is visibly
moving towards its fall - in England in the seventeenth century, in
France in the eighteenth, in Russia in the nineteenth. But even this
is not universally true: it was not so in the declining years of the
Roman Empire; nor, so far as I know, in the last years of the
empires of China or Turkey, or the last years of the Spanish
monarchy. I see no profit in trying to extract historical generalisa­
tions from such empirical data, calculated to show that freedom
and philosophy are somehow indissolubly connected. The variety
of human life and of the types of society is too great - each case
must be examined on its merits - and those who seek to establish
great sociological uniformities of this type have, thus far, contrib­
uted more to the sum of human error than to either truth or
entertainment.
And yet there is a connection, and a very profound one, between
the activity of philosophers and social liberty and State control. It
seems to me to follow from what philosophy is, rather than from
an artificial schema of what society is and what the pattern of
history is and how philosophy does or should fit into them.
Consequently I intend to leave for the moment the subject of what
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

freedom is, and whether philosophy needs it and contributes

towards it, and whether it is a good thing or dangerous to the
stability of society; and say a few words about the nature of
philosophy itself, from which I propose later to try to draw some
conclusions, which seem to me to be of importance, about the
connection between philosophical activity and State control in any
form.
Many attempts have been made to define and describe philo­
sophical activity, and perhaps one further attempt will not do great
harm or put too great a strain on the patience of my readers. It
seems to me that philosophy is peculiar in that it has no fixed
technique - no discipline, no set of operational rules in the sense in
which the sciences, both empirical and formal, possess them; in the
sense in which they can be taught to pupils who can, if they are
intelligent and retentive enough, then begin to apply them on their
own. And the reason for this is not far to seek: it is that, as soon as
a subject does acquire rules of this kind, it is sloughed off by
philosophy and falls into one of two receptacles on either side of it,
either into the realm of the empirical sciences or into that of the
formal a priori ones.
It seems clear that whatever philosophy deals with, it does not
concern itself with questions of the kind to which answers can be
established by empirical observation; it does not seek to establish
matters of fact, once it is clear that an answer to a given question
can be found only by some kind of observation - whether of the
normal, common-sense, kind, by which I find out whether it is
raining or whether I can remember Lycidas by heart or have
forgotten it; or by slightly more elaborate techniques, by which I
find out whether a given country is rich or poor, or whether a
given molecule consists of these or those minuter particles, or by
which I discover the age of the earth or of the universe, or the
relation of one musical style to another, or the causes of a great
historical event, or the effect of some unnoticed psychological trait
in the mind of a given individual. In all these cases it is quite clear
how I must proceed in order to establish the facts - namely by
some species of empirical investigation - and once this is so it is
clear that the questions are not philosophical questions (whatever
philosophical implications they may turn out to have), but ques­
tions of fact to be established by the use of appropriate techniques;
so that understanding what the question means is itself in part a
 57
P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O V E RN M ENT R E P R E SS I O N

knowledge of the kind of technique that is relevant to the

establishing of an answer.
Equally there is a class of disciplines of a formal type - deductive
and not inductive or analogical or feeding upon direct inspection ­
which again are not part of the subject-matter of philosophy.
Wherever the technique of establishing the answer is formal, as in
arithmetic, or logic or heraldry, or any other deductive field (say,
chess, or any other game obeying rules) - that is, where the answer
is to be found by applying specific transformation rules in a field
where the axioms and the methods of reasoning are laid down, as it
were, beforehand - there too philosophy has no place.
The history of the sciences, both deductive and inductive, has
consisted largely, if not entirely, in the way in which groups of
related questions to which the answers have previously not been
altogether clear are suddenly seen to depend for their answer upon
methods which are clearly either empirical or formal; once this is
perceived these subjects leave the general field of undifferentiated
human enquiry, presided over by philosophy, and set up as
independent sciences on their own, with specific techniques,
specific rules and teachable methods of procedure. What is left
remains the rich but confusing province of philosophy proper,
which deals with the whole gamut of questions where the method
of solution is not clear, not given as part of the formulation of the
question itself.
If I am asked about the physical composition of a planet, or the
prospects for life on earth, or whether there are living creatures on
Mars, I may not know the answer, but I know - or someone
knows - how to discover it, or what specific obstacles there are to
the answering of such questions, what data are lacking to such
answers, how one would proceed if such data were available; the
only difficulty resides in the actual availability of the means to the
obtaining of the answer, lack of data or absence of the tools
required, not in the obscurity of the question itself, nor in
uncertainty as to what method to adopt or where the answer
should be looked for. Similarly, if someone asks the solution to
some logical or mathematical problem, I know precisely in what
region the answer is to be looked for and what the proper
techniques to be employed are, and any difficulty there may be will
reside in the feebleness of my intellectual resources - I know how
such problems are solved and what kind of mental powers are
necessary to their solution. But if I am asked whether absolute
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

goodness exists; or whether the material world is real; or what

infinity is; or why I cannot go back into the past, or be in two
places at once; or whether you can ever know fully what I think or
what I feel as I know these things; or whether freedom is better
than happiness, or justice, and what justice is - when questions of
this type are asked the difficulty is not about the absence of
material means for their solution, whether lack of physical capacity
(for example, to fly to other planets, to make relevant observations
and come back again) or lack of powers of memory, or intellectual
analysis, or money (with which to build adequate instruments and
the like): the principal difficulty is to know where to look for the
answer at all; to know how even to begin to set about looking for a
satisfactory solution. It is doubt about what would constitute a
satisfactory answer, let alone what the true answer would be. It is
when we are in this kind of mental perplexity, when it is clear that
the problem is not empirical, at however sophisticated a level, nor
one to be solved by mere application of deductive techniques
which could in theory be performed by an electronic device - it is
then that we are in the presence of a genuine philosophical
problem.
It may be that careful thought and elucidation of the problem
will succeed in relegating it to one of the two great roads on either
side of the central causeway - will show that it is an empirical
problem properly to be dealt with by one of the sciences, or by
some new science not yet established; or alternatively that it is a
logical or mathematical or some other kind of deductive question.
This is how philosophy has gradually sloughed off a great many of
the questions with which, at various periods, it was beset. Psychol­
ogy and sociology are the latest of these: and presently logic itself
will doubtless become detached and take flight, as mathematics has,
as an independent discipline, leaving only the problems of its
'foundations' - themselves not analysable in purely logical ways -
to the great source of all problems in general, the philosophically
troubled intellect.
In so far as the first mark of a genuinely philosophical question
is that it does not, as it were, carry the technical means to its own
solution within itself - so that the first difficulty is to establish
what it is that we are asking, what it is that is troubling us, what
kind of answers we would take as even the appropriate kind of
solutions to this problem rather than something totally irrelevant
to them (irrespective of whether they were true or false) - the
 59
P H I L O S O P HY A N D G O VE R N M E N T R E P R E S S I O N

solutions to such questions cannot be provided by creating an

army of experts, who, gifted with reasonable intelligence, assiduity,
devotion, can set about performing the semi-mechanical work
required, as routine scientists or routine historians can perform
their work without inspiration or genius or originality of the
highest order, and can indeed teach others to perform useful
labours without the need of these exceptional attributes.
The major successes of philosophy are constituted not by the
discovery of new techniques for the purpose of providing solutions
for the questions asked earlier but not sufficiently answered - as
Newton provided answers to questions asked before his time, but
answered less skilfully, or not answered at all, by his predecessors.
The major triumphs of philosophy are achieved by thinkers who
do one of two things: either (a) reformulate the questions them­
selves, by themselves having, and binding upon others, a new
vision of the world or some portion of it which itself liberates the
intellect from the state of intellectual quasi-cramp which is the
original problem, and allows of what is called a new synthesis, a
new vision of the relationships of the entities concerned which
automatically of itself solves or resolves the original problem; or
(b) alternatively do the opposite, namely, finding a situation in
which certain dogmatic solutions to questions have been accepted
as true, they by some violent shock upset the previously existing
'synthesis' and force upon the attention of other human beings a
new and disturbing vision which creates tormenting problems
where there was contentment before, and causes people to be
troubled and restless where previously they were blind or uninter­
ested.
Both these procedures are totally different from those either of
empirical scientists, increasing our knowledge of the external
universe, or of the logicians and mathematicians who increase our
knowledge or our techniques for the arrangement of what we do
know; although, of course, no human activity is wholly distinct
from any other, and the kind of synthetic or analytic, combinatory
or disruptive genius which philosophers have possessed plays its
part in every other province of human thought and, indeed, feeling.
Yet there is a radical difference between philosophy and other
pursuits. I do not mean to imply that in the sciences, or in history,
it is enough to proceed by careful observation, patient accumula­
tion of the facts, skilful and ingenious application of techniques
which have proved successful in the past, together with such
6o T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

improvements as experience or imagination suggests; in short that

skill, devotion, honesty, energy, fixity of purpose are sufficient
without inspired conjectures and a sudden insight by genius. But it
is, nevertheless, possible in these provinces to advance without
inspiration, without the unpredictable leap of imaginative genius.
When once a science has been placed on rational and consistent
foundations, and a technique of observation, research, hypothesis,
experiment successfully elaborated, the great pioneers can teach
others less gifted, less enterprising, the proper procedures. A
combination of moral and intellectual gifts somewhat below the
highest order can often yield useful results and advance knowledge
and disseminate light in important ways. An unimaginative histor­
ian who composes a painstaking account of, say, the development
of an industry in a particular locality, or the development of the art
of war in a particular ponion of, let us say, the Mediterranean in
the later Middle Ages, may not be doing something original or
arresting, but he is making a contribution to knowledge, something
which others can weave into a more ambitious pattern, for what he
is doing is not merely not wasted, but is in its own humble way of
positive value. But this is not true in philosophy. In philosophy
proper there are no approved techniques, no possibility of unin­
spired progress, no value in the mechanical or quasi-mechanical
application of proven methods to new subject-matter in co-opera­
tion with others working as a team (as in some of the natural
sciences) or simply for the purpose of providing material for some
more powerful or imaginative mind, as on the historical side.
Philosophy is not concerned with the discovering and the
ordering of facts, and the inferring of other facts from them, as the
sciences are, nor with the weaving of symbolic patterns, as the
formal disciplines are. It is concerned with the formulation of
problems which are genuine simply because they are felt as such,
and the solution of these by ad hoc methods dictated by the nature
of the problem itself, by the kind of demands which it makes, by
the kind of perplexity which it causes; and the greatest of
philosophers have done this, whether consciously or not, by
altering the point of view from which the problem seemed a
problem; by shifting emphasis, by transposing, by shifting the
vision of those who are perplexed, in such a way that they
perceived distinctions which had hitherto not been visible, or came
to see that the distinction upon which they had laid much stress did
not in fact exist, or rested upon muddles or lack of insight.
 61
P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O V E R N M E N T R E P R E SS I O N

The sense in which, for instance, the greatest revolutionary in

modern philosophy - Descartes - altered the history of the subject
was not by patient accumulation of facts, or by experiment, or by
observation, or by endless trial and error, but by a great act of
rebellion. His new method, however he arrived at it, was such that
those who accepted it as a source of light found that the vexing
problems of scholastic philosophy were not so much solved as
rendered irrelevant or meaningless, or shown to be confusions
resting upon distinctions which themselves derived from the
mechanical use of words or concepts without examining what it
was they applied to or in what context they were useful or made
sense. Whereas Newton revolutionised modern physics by inte­
grating hitherto disconnected generalisations into a set of a few
powerful central formulae, whence so much followed deductively
as to render it the most powerful single instrument for the increase
of human knowledge in our epoch, Descartes did not integrate, did
not simply replace a certain number of isolated truths by a central
integrating single theorem or theorems from which the rest
deductively followed; he altered the point of view from which
philosophical, metaphysical, theological problems had been con­
ceived, and thereby created a host of new problems, some of which
in their turn were destined to be superseded and exploded by just
such methods as he himself had used.
Philosophical problems arise because concepts and words and
thoughts and ways of formulating and arguing about the world and
about oneself come into special sorts of collision. This they may do
because there was some original contradiction in some early half­
conscious formulation or use of such thoughts or such symbols; or
because key words have become obsolete - continue to be used
when the circumstances with which they were intimately interwo­
ven no longer exist; or because they have become the subject­
matter of such occupations as metaphysics or theology, which have
tended to develop such concepts or words without paying atten­
tion to the situation in which they were born and to which they
applied, and in which they played a part, and have therefore tended
to create an independent mythology of which such concepts are
the inhabitants and which, sooner or later, because they are no
longer related to the world in which alone they had real signifi­
cance, become a source of perplexity - often an unexplained
nightmare, something the reason for whose existence no one can
any longer remember or account for. This was the condition of
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

scholastic philosophy at many points in the Middle Ages, but

particularly towards the end of the sixteenth century, when some
of its own practitioners had, in a sense, lost interest in what they
were doing, largely because they no longer understood the reasons
for the elaborate manipulation of hollow symbols which much of it
had by this time become.
To take so vast a step as to liberate oneself from the incubus of
an entire system of symbols - and it is scarcely possible to
distinguish symbols from thoughts - to shake oneself free of so
obsessive a framework, requires genius and intellectual strength
and independence of the highest order. The new construction, if it
is created by a man of creative as well as destructive talent, has an
immense and liberating effect upon his contemporaries, since it
removes from them the weight of a no longer intelligible past, and
a use of language which cramps the intellect and causes the kind of
frustrating perplexity which is very different from those real
problems which carry the seeds of their own solution in their own
formulation. The new system, born of an act of rebellion, then
becomes a kind of new orthodoxy, and disciples spring up on all
sides, eager to apply the new technique to provinces to which the
original man of genius had perhaps not conceived of applying
them. This is sometimes successful, and sometimes leads to a new
and equally arid and obfuscating scholasticism. Once the new
orthodoxy has won the day, this in its turn, by making concepts
rigid, by creating an ossified system of symbols no longer flexible
in response to the situations which had originally led to the revolt,
creates new frustrations, new insoluble problems, new philosophi­
cal perplexities.
The error is perpetually perpetrated whereby philosophy is
conceived as a discipline analogous to the most successful pursuits
of the day - typically some given science - conceived, say, as being
analogous to physics or to biology or to history. The old
overthrown philosophy is indeed regarded as a mass of superstition
and error; but the new is hopefully accepted as 'scientific' -
modelled upon the most successful disciplines of its time - and it is
then thought that, just as in the sciences there are techniques
communicable to the disciples of the great pathfinders, so in
philosophy it is equally possible to train armies of specialists
equipped with the latest techniques, using their skills in ways
agreed amongst them for the purpose of a collective discovery and
dissemination of the final truth.
 P H I L O S O PHY A N D G O VE R N M E N T R E P RESS I O N 63
But this very belief, like the process which embodies it, which
has so often led to spectacular success in the sciences, or in history,
or in deductive disciplines like mathematics or logic, is, owing to
the basic sanity upon which it rests, nothing short of a disaster in
philosophy. For the nature of philosophical problems (if I am
right) is that they are precisely those problems which are not
soluble by the application of ready-made techniques, precisely
those questions which puzzle and oppress because they cannot be
dealt with by the techniques so successful in the sciences or
elsewhere, or by any techniques; and in this way are more akin to
the 'problems' of art than to those of science. The supposition that
there is a single, final method of dealing with problems which
themselves arise from the changing texture of life and of thought
and of feeling and of words, of concepts and opinions, of usage and
attitude - this supposition is precisely what itself leads to a
hardening of the arteries, to excessive dogmatism about the proper
use of philosophical terminology, and is itself a cause of that
mental agony which philosophical problems at their most acute
essentially are. Then there is a new rebellion, the old philosophical
luggage is thrown overboard, the victorious and triumphant and
liberating methods of an earlier day are quite correctly labelled as
dead scholastic logomachy, and men of genius break through the
old despotic orthodoxy, set mental bones straight, and create a new
language in terms of which the old problems dissolve, and new
problems in due course come into being. In the course of this
operation some questions are seen to be either empirical or formal,
and are, as it were, cast overboard to the right or to the left, and
cease thereupon to be part of the subject-matter of philosophy. But
despite this systematic parricide much remains, although it is
reformulated and reappears in a new guise, in which it can be
thought about in terms more adapted to the contemporary experi­
ence of the thinkers who grapple with it.
But the pattern of the history of philosophy remains much the
same. In a situation where too many problems have become
traditional, insoluble, in which nothing but trivial and minor
labours are indulged in, and there is a feeling of asphyxiation due
to the fact that the major problems seem hopelessly insoluble, and
lead to intellectual gloom rather than the stimulation of intellectual
power, some great revolutionary arises and breaks through the
existing forms. Leibniz was, for instance, such a one, and nothing is
more common than the next stage of this particular process, when
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

his devoted disciple, Christian Wolff, proceeded to promise a new

rationalist millennium by applying the principles of Leibniz as far
and as wide as he could. He drew up programmes for rational
theology and rational aesthetics, rational ethics, rational history,
rational physics and so forth. Any upheaval in old subjects causes
some intellectual ferment, some light, some freedom; and no doubt
the beginning of the eighteenth century on the continent of Europe
did see a great upsurge of intellectual vitality as thinker after
thinker responded to the promise of a new harmonious synthesis.
Presently the Wolffian movement developed into an arid ortho­
doxy as dry, as mechanical, as scholastic and incapable of yielding
truth or intellectual excitement as the scholasticism which it had
itself so contemptuously and so justifiably destroyed. Then Kant
performed upon it the same bold and violent operation as Leibniz
and the rationalists of the seventeenth century had performed in
their own day.
These liberating operations are the great moments of advance in
the subject; but there is here no cumulative technique, no progress,
no advance towards some single rational goal, as had been fondly
hoped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because Des­
cartes or Spinoza or Leibniz showed their genius in destroying the
work of their predecessors it does not follow that for their own
day and time St Thomas or Albertus Magnus or Duns Scorns or
William of Occam had not performed similar liberating tasks.
Locke and Berkeley had certainly inflicted defeats upon the
orthodox rationalism of the seventeenth century; but then Kant,
and perhaps even some among the German romantic philosophers,
blew up a large portion of the construction of the English
empiricists. In his turn Russell destroyed the greater part of the
impressive-looking edifice of traditional metaphysics, and modern
linguistic analysts have done much to destroy the foundations - at
least the philosophical foundations - upon which Russell had so
confidently built.1
This is the kind of thing which tends to get philosophy into
disrepute. It is felt that the great philosophers are men of consider­
able intellectual genius, and yet it is noticed that there is no single
line of progress, that philosophical disagreements are as sharp and

1 I am told that ' Heidegger undermined traditional epistemology in this

fashion: but since I do not understand his language or views, I am in no position
to comment on this.
 65
P H I L O S O P H Y AND G O VE RN M EN T R E P R E S S I O N

as profound as they have ever been; that there is no agreed corpus

of growing knowledge, as in the sciences; that the discussion often
seems merely verbal; and that there are perpetual 'throwbacks' in
philosophy whereby philosophers in the twentieth century go back
to those in the eighteenth to draw weapons against those of the
nineteenth, whereby the resurrection occurs of thinkers of the past
with whom alliances are made across the centuries against new and
old heresies of other times and other places. From this it is
concluded that there is here some aberration of the human spirit,
that nothing solid is being built, and that all that occurs is empty
verbal discussion, mere talk, without a rigorous technique to
ensure that the results arrived at are guaranteed, solidly embedded
in the great edifice of human knowledge. From this in turn one of
two conclusions is drawn. One is that philosophy is amusing,
sometimes inspired talk which has no 'scientific' value, a species of
personal confession, a kind of individual poetry on the part of
persons (for example, nineteenth-century romantic writers) who
prefer to express themselves in metaphysical prose rather than in
verse. On the other side there are those who do demand some
rigour and discipline and solid achievement, and therefore seek at
last to put philosophy on the sound foundation of the sciences and
make it something, if not quite as respectable, at any rate tending
towards the solidity and the trustworthiness of, say, chemistry, or
at least biology.
Both these attitudes rest upon a misunderstanding of what
philosophy is and what it can do. Philosophy is an attempt, and has
always been an attempt, to find ways of thinking and talking
which, by revealing similarities hitherto unnoticed, and differences
hitherto unremarked (sometimes by drawing new analogies with
hitherto unthought-of models, or pointing with new emphasis at
ignored or underestimated differences between the models hitherto
followed and the objects alleged to be like them), cause a transfor­
mation of outlook sufficient to alter radically attitudes and ways of
thought and speech, and in this way solve or dissolve problems,
redistribute subjects, reformulate and reclassify relationships
between objects, and transform our vision of the world. This, as in
the analogous case of the arts, is something which can be per­
formed only within and for each generation separately, for the
vision of one generation must always, if formulated in words,
frozen into techniques, established as an orthodoxy, become a
66 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

prison-house for the next or next but one; and therefore no

'progress' in the precise sense can be expected; each generation
requires its own osteopathic operation, its own new insights, its
own self-liberation, its own powerful men of genius to transfigure
its vision, establish new relationships and new differences. That is
why third-rate historians, fourth-rate chemists, even fifth-rate
artists, painters, composers, architects, may be of some value; for
all these subjects have their own techniques and operate at their
own proper level, which may be low, but remains a level. But there
is no such thing as third-rate or fourth-rate rebellion, there is no
such thing as a trivial effort to cause a major upheaval. That is why
the third- and fourth-rate philosophers, who are really engaged in
applying the techniques of their predecessors who are dead and
gone, as if they were practising a science, as if they were being
chemists or engineers, are not so much unsuccessful or unimpor­
tant, or unnecessary or superfluous, as positively obstructive, the
very persons whose activity often breeds those perplexities and
darknesses and problems, those superstitious and dogmatic and
often specious and mechanical answers to them, whose sole value is
that they act as a spur and a stimulus to the new rebellion, to the
men of genius who break through the asphyxia of dogmatism in a
subject whose very essence it is to be a liberator and not a
constrictor.
This has its own implications, of a perhaps unnoticed kind, with
regard to State control. The business of control is to preserve the
status quo - to guarantee some established situation, to protect
what is regarded as the best, most harmonious correlation of
interests, combination of factors, that can in the circumstances be
achieved. The purpose of it is stability, peace, contentment. The
principal function of philosophy at its best is to break through,
liberate, upset. And the mere fact that the method with which it
does its upsetting seems abstract and intellectual and often unre­
lated to the burning practical problems of the day is not a sufficient
guarantee against its ultimate influence. For it is difficult to
promise that those who are revolutionary and irreverent in one
sphere will remain docile and conformist in others. Kant did his
best to say nothing too startling in the realm of politics. But his
uncompromising ·ethical conclusions, and to some degree his
metaphysical position as well, led to the most upsetting and
revolutionary consequences shortly after his own death. Hegel
 P H I L O S O PH Y AND G O VERNMENT R E P R E SS I O N 67
certainly tried, as someone once said,1 to trim his sails, to steer his
course unobtrusively in the peaceful inland lake of aesthetics and
metaphysics, and to attract as little notice as possible with his
revolutionary doctrines in the realm of politics. But the Marxist
and Fascist consequences of applying certain principles of Hegel
(however distorted) are not in doubt. In this sense philosophers are
necessarily subversive. Others may remain conformist and do
work of great value. Certainly painters and architects, even physi­
cists and geographers, chemists and astronomers, biographers and
composers, may remain peacefully within the set bounds of some
accepted tradition, and within its rigorous framework create
immortal masterpieces; or, if not masterpieces, pleasing works, of
at any rate temporary value, of a third- or fourth-rate order, works
that nevertheless have their place in the universe, which cannot live
on major works of genius alone.
This peaceful conformity with his environment, this gentle
function within an accepted traditional framework, is not, alas,
open to the philosopher. If that is the kind of activity in which he
wishes to indulge - and it can be worthy enough and inspired
enough - he must cease from philosophy and apply himself to
some other work. For as a philosopher he is bound to subvert,
break through, destroy, liberate, let in air from outside. And even
though in his lifetime he may appear mild, academic and uncon­
cerned with the affairs of the world, his effect upon it is likely to be
more destructive, more revolutionary, more far-reaching than that
of a great many people who appear to make far more noise. This is
not simply an instance of the general influence of ideas as such. Of
course ideas are powerful, in particular when they embody - are
part and parcel of - strong trends, whether material or spiritual,
which are transforming societies and individuals, and work with
them and as part of them and not against them or outside them.
What I wish to emphasise is the peculiar disruptive power of
philosophical ideas.
Perhaps the most dramatic expression was given to this by
Heinrich Heine, when in his account of the philosophical schools
of Germany he paints an apocalyptic vision of the vast destruction
to come, when the great god Thor lifts his hammer to smash
Western civilisation, and the armed followers of Fichte, Schelling

1 Alexander Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridsati tomakh, vol. 9 (Moscow,

1956), p. 2 1 .
68 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

and Hegel burst out against the civilised Latin West and lay waste
its ancient culture. He compares Kant to Robespierre and warns
the French not to despise the humble philosopher in his study,
who in peace and silence meditates in terms of apparently harmless
abstractions, but then, like Rousseau and Kant, lights the fuse
which leads to the beheading of a king and world-wide explosions.
Tolstoy once coarsely remarked that to the cobbler nothing is like
leather, and university professors tend to magnify the influence of
ideas upon history simply because these are the wares in which
they professionally deal. Although this was no doubt a just protest
against the placing of exaggerated value upon theories and doc­
trines, and the neglect of other factors - social, spiritual, economic,
psychological - and networks of factors too minute and numerous
and unanalysable to have had names and classifications applied to
them at all, it does ignore the function and effects of philosophical
activity. For, let me repeat, the problems which philosophers deal
with are not technological in character: that is to say they are not of
such a kind as can plainly be solved by the proper application to
them of methods of discovery which can, as it were, be patented
and taught and gradually improved with time, as the methods of
the sciences or of mathematics or even of history or philology have
been improved and perfected. For all such questions are either
empirical - questions of what happens and how and when and
under what circumstances and in company with what - or formal,
that is, questions of consistency, validity, demonstrability, the most
convenient method of expression, and so forth. But philosophical
questions do not arise in this way at all. They arise because some
kind of crossing of intellectual lines has occurred - some kind of
collision, at times on a grand, paralysing scale, of the traffic of
ideas. Philosophical questions have a certain desperateness about
them, are accompanied by a degree of emotional pressure, a craving
for an answer whose very nature is not clear, a sense at once of
urgency and insolubility which indicates not a quest for facts, for
information about the world or about oneself, nor for the comple­
tion of some formal pattern, the ordering of symbols, the bringing
of them into the required relations with each other, but rather that
there is a conflict - some inner conflict of ideas, of concepts or
ways of thought - either, within a discipline, minor collisions
between subsidiary concepts, the current local symbolism; or, in
the case of major crises, a head-on crash, a confusion and
interreaction of entire conceptual systems, of whole methods of
 P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O VE RN M ENT REPRESS I O N 69
looking at the world and of describing it, which leads to the so­
called 'perennial' problems such as free will versus determinism,
theism and atheism, materialism and immaterialism, liberty and
order, authority and equality, happiness and justice, self-sacrifice
and the pursuit of happiness.
The problems depend to a much greater extent than scientific or
mathematical ones upon the particular ways of thinking, on the
particular sets of concepts and categories, prevailing in a given
culture or language in a given country at a particular time. All
problems depend to some degree upon the ways in which people
think and act; but the external universe and men's relations to it,
although they have no doubt changed throughout historic time,
have altered less than ways of thought and of language, whose
inner history is in part the history of those problems which are
properly called philosophical. And because the problems are not
requests for information or greater technical proficiency, deductive
or inductive, the 'solutions' sometimes take the form of artistic or
religious or metaphysical experience, which liberates those who are
oppressed from the particular mental stress which a philosophical
problem necessarily, to some degree, always is. For there are many
ways of ridding oneself of obsessive anxieties of this kind, and one
of them is not by finding a solution but by some method of
obliterating the problem itself - the method so frequently used by
governments of an authoritarian kind, naturally nervous of ferment
and discontent among their subjects, who instead of allowing
unpredictable solutions to be propounded, seek to protect the
security and stability of their regimes by educating their popula­
tions into ignoring or forgetting their troublesome problems, by
ironing them out instead of solving them. This, no doubt, is one
way in which the State can render men incurious, conformist,
obedient, harmonious, but also deprive them of the powers of
choice, of creation, of the pursuit of individual ends, of all that we
call personal freedom - in favour of all that which, since the
Renaissance, liberals in every land have rightly regarded as dark
and oppressive, whether they found it in the European Middle
Ages, in Asiatic tyrannies, in Fascist and Communist regimes of
our own day, or in petty tyrannies and persecutions of originality
and the serious quest for the truth, which are so great a menace,
even in the democracies, particularly in the greatest among them, of
today.
The other path is that which has been taken by the great thinkers
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

of mankind. It is that of breaking through the obstacles to thought

and clearing the confusions and refitting the stage by some
revolutionary transformation of thought, engendered by those
with minds sufficiently imaginative and fresh to be able to rethink
their position, to look at the situation in some radically new
fashion, from some radically new angle from which everything is
seen in what is called 'a different light', so that what seemed
insoluble problems are seen to be merely dark shadows apparently
cast by no longer real entities which, from the new vantage point,
are no longer visible at all.
Because philosophy at its most effective consists in radical
transpositions of chis type - and the more fundamental, that is to
say the less liable to normal self-examination, the categories or
concepts transposed in this way are, the profounder we think a
philosophy to be - its effect is necessarily in the direction of wider
freedom, of upsetting of existing values and habits, of destroying
boundaries, transforming familiar contours, which is at once
exhilarating and disturbing. No doubt chis occurs also outside the
realms of philosophy proper, in the arts, the sciences and other
provinces of human activity. What I should like to maintain is chat,
alchough it may happen there, it need not happen necessarily; an
arc can be strong and creative and give birch to men of great genius
without needing to be revolutionary. Beethoven was no doubt a
highly revolutionary and upsetting composer who transformed the
nature not merely of symphonic music but of the thought -
aesthetic, moral and political - of his time, by creating new ideals
and leading the way to new attitudes, a new romanticism, new
forms of hero-worship, new notions of what constitutes artistic
and personal freedom, integrity, the self-immolation of the artist.
But such phenomena are not essential to music. Bach, it might be
said, was a composer of magnificent genius, but in a sense a
consolidator - a conservative, a creator of order, a source of
strength to the tradition, not of revolutionary upheaval. And
Ranke, chat Bach among historians, similarly preserved more chan
he destroyed. Men of genius may be creative or destructive, may be
liberating or enslaving, or both in one; it is only among philoso­
phers that men of authentic genius are necessarily to a large degree
destructive of past. tradition. Great philosophers always transform,
upset and destroy., It is only the small philosophers who defend
vested interests, apply rules, squeeze into procrustean beds, try
 P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O V E R N M E N T R E P R E SS I O N 71

desperately to fit a great many incompatible, conflicting, contradic­

tory notions into some formal and schematic orthodoxy which is a
misapplication of some original revolutionary vision. And when I
say misapplication I mean that all attempts to construct orthodox­
ies out of such visions are necessarily ipso facto misapplications.
That is the most important point, it seems to me, about all
philosophical activity - that there can in it be no orthodoxy, that
there can be no methods capable of indefinite improvement, so that
we can say that each generation begins peacefully where the
previous generations have left the great work unfinished, so that it
can be said that there is continuous progress, and the philosophers
of the seventeenth century have improved upon the work of those
of the sixteenth, and those of the twentieth have brought to
fruition the tasks left unfinished in the nineteenth. This cannot, if I
am right, in principle be true. It makes no more sense than saying
that Tennyson continued - and improved - the poetry of Aeschy­
lus or Virgil, or that impressionist and post-impressionist painters
are an 'advance on' or a 'retrogression from' the painters of the
Renaissance, or the sculptors of the Middle Ages, or Benin.
This is what constitutes the uniqueness of philosophy: that its
whole work is, and has always been, addressed to each generation
with its peculiar problems, created by the particular intellectual or
political or social or psychological circumstances of its own time;
that originality in philosophy always consisted in the liberation of
those beset by problems from some cramping orthodoxy - itself
the ossified relic of some previous period - which failed to answer
or tended to distort questions which have arisen since, perhaps
themselves stimulated by the insufficiency of the prevailing philos­
ophy, by its dogmatism or its obscurity, or its incapacity to
respond to some of the problems of its own time. That is why
many virtues are of little use in philosophy: patience, industry,
capacity for taking pains, a retentive memory, skill in ordering
material; all these excellent qualities which are needed by histori­
ans, logicians, natural scientists sometimes tend to become enemies
of the truth in philosophy. For in that subject there is no 'research',
properly speaking. This applies only to the history of ideas and of
their origins and propagation, not to original philosophical
thought. That is why in philosophy only the first-rate are of use,
only the bold, uncommon intellects which possess what Russell
once called the capacity for the dissociation of ideas - for the
dissolution of concepts which have traditionally travelled tied in
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

bundles - for the questioning of truths so familiar, so thoroughly

taken for granted, that the mere suggestion that they could be
questioned, that they could be analysed, that their ingredients
could be taken apart, sends electric shocks through the frame of
ordinary common sense or traditional philosophical thought.
In philosophy alone the plodding, competent, solid workers
who cling to accepted methods, and half-consciously seek to
preserve familiar landmarks, and work within a system of inherited
concepts and categories, are a positive obstruction and a menace ­
the most formidable of all obstacles to progress. The world, one
likes to think, has been created for some given purpose and
everything in it plays some necessary part. If you ask what
necessary part the second- and third- and fourth-rate philosophers,
and those, even, below that line, can have been created to play,
perhaps the answer is that, if they did not exist, the possibility of
those great creative rebellions which mark the stages of human
thought would never have occurred. For the task of the great
philosophers who break through the orthodoxy is to sweep away
the painstaking edifices of their honourable but limited predeces­
sors, who, whether consciously or unconsciously, tend to imprison
thought within their own tidy but fatally misconceived construc­
tions.
If this is so, if it is only in philosophy that true creativeness is
always identical with an act of rebellion, a transformation and
transposition which in relation to tradition is always subversive - if
this is so, then indeed there is a peculiar connection between
philosophy and liberty, philosophy and non-conformity, philoso­
phy and the need for freedom from repression, whether by the
State or any other suppressing agency, which is relatively absent
from other disciplines and is indeed unique. For it seems clear that
great creative art can not merely flourish under tyranny but adapt
itself to it, that even so sensitive a subject as history, needing
correlation of truths unpalatable to a given regime, can neverthe­
less, if not flourish, at any rate continue and generate useful if not
arresting works under a despotism. Certainly the natural sciences
can be pursued under tyrannies - it is only the most extreme forms
of suppression of thought, those despotisms which make all
original activity, all forms of self-expression, dangerous or imposs­
ible, that succeed ,in destroying these human activities as well.
Therefore to denounce slavery because it is fatal to the arts or the
sciences seems to me a kind of hypocrisy. I do not think that a
 73
P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O V E R N M EN T R E P R E SS I O N

sufficiently strict correlation can be established historically to

prove slavery is fatal to these activities. If we denounce slavery we
do so because it is slavery, because we believe in the value of giving
human beings the right to choose what they think and how they
live within certain limits as a sacred end in itself, and for no
utilitarian reason at all. Slavery, cruelty, oppression; the humilia­
tion and degradation of human beings and the vivisection of them
by the State, by the 'engineers of human souls' (as Stalin once so
expressively called them), in order that there might be no dishar­
monies and collisions, and variety be replaced by uniformity, and
individual differences by a single world-embracing discipline -
these are detestable because they are what they are, because we
believe in the opposite, because they offend against our scale of
values, against those ends for the sake of which we live and some of
us are prepared to die, those ends the suppression of which would
make our life literally not worth living; for this reason, and not
because it is discouraging to the arts or hampering to the sciences -
these seem to me feeble and artificial arguments inherited from
those far-off eighteenth-century days when it was thought that all
virtues were not merely compatible with each other but entailed
each other, and that freedom was desirable because without it one
could not have justice or virtue or happiness or knowledge; that
knowledge was desirable because without it these other virtues
could not be. Since then we have learnt that not all good things are
compatible with one another; and that if we seek them we seek
them for their own sakes and not because they form a part of some
imaginary harmony which a baseless optimist idealism has led us to
expect and the attempts to introduce which into the world have
already cost it so much needless suffering and frustration.
With philosophy the case is different. There absence of freedom
is literally fatal. Human beings are liable to ask themselves
questions - about how the world is made and about how they
should lead their lives, about what constitutes truth and how their
thoughts relate to the real world, about the foundations of the arts
and the sciences, about the concepts and categories in terms of
which they think and speak. So long as they ask these questions
they will claim a natural right to get them answered. This natural
right, like all natural rights, flows from the fact that this is how
human beings are mentally constituted and that the satisfaction of
this kind of curiosity - the pursuit of this province of the truth - is
one of the ends which they pursue for their own sake and which
74 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

make their lives worth living. Any attempt to prevent that activity
- to prevent the upsetting of accepted values, the freest possible
discussion of ultimate issues, by whatever methods and in whatever
terms seem most promising, most illuminating, seem to afford
paths out of the impasses which are philosophical problems, to load
forth out of the dead ends which so many genuine philosophical
perplexities turn out to be - any attempt to do that, whether in the
name of the security and happiness of the community, or of the
sacredness of established traditions, or of one of those great and
hollow abstractions to which human lives have been sacrificed so
often - the claims of nation or race, or manifest destiny, or history
or progress, or the Church or the proletariat, or law and order, or
any of the other catchwords the exposure and destruction of which
has been one of the great glories of critical philosophy - that is a
genuine suppression of a basic interest and need and craving of
human beings.
That is why periods of conformity, of the application and re­
application of methods and categories no longer suitable to their
subject-matter - a process that necessarily becomes mechanical,
and in the end meaningless, through mere repetition, however
scrupulous and sincere - are the blankest patches in the history of
human thought. The Middle Ages in Europe, where the censorship
was the most severe and conformity most effectively promoted and
observed, is a period of this type. Much in it survives and is justly
admired to this day. Its art, its statues and its architecture, its social
institutions, its poetry, and to some degree its prose, even its music,
have a certain eternal value. But its thought is a great and arid waste
compared to that of the periods which precede and follow it. To
that degree the liberal interpretation of history, the notion of these
ages as dark and of the Renaissance as a gradual lifting of the night,
is not a falsification. May Erigena, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Anselm
forgive me - but which of these is of real interest except to
specialists? Perhaps William of Occam, but that is because he
rebelled. Many though the glories of the Middle Ages may be, and
superior though they may be in many respects to the disordered
world of the present, in the province of thought its record is not
equal to those of its predecessors or successors. For all philosophy,
because of its function as a liberator of human beings from the
inevitable perplexities caused by the intellectual predicaments they
get into (because of the continuous development of ideas, and of
the meanings of the words that express them), is necessarily a
 75
P H I L O S O P H Y A N D G O V E RN M EN T R E P R E SS I O N

breaking of bonds. Those who believe that final truths may be

reached, that there is some ideal order of life on earth which may
be attained, that all that is necessary is to establish it, by whatever
means, whether peaceful or violent - all those who believe that
such finality, whether of life or of thought and feeling, is in
principle attainable will, however benevolent their desires, however
pure their hearts, however noble and disinterested their ideals,
always end by repressing and destroying human beings in their
march towards the Promised Land.
Against fanatics of this order - the most dangerous to human
freedom, whether they be secular Utopians or theocratic bigots -
philosophy is the surest weapon and prophylactic. For its whole
history is a warning against the assumption that there are perma­
nent questions and final solutions. In each generation it performs
its indispensable task of destroying the integuments of orthodoxies
which are the congealed answers to dead or obsolescent questions;
and to each generation it provides its own new revolutionary
solutions, welcomed, and justly, as revelations of genius in their
own day; but probably destined, like the others, to become
instruments of tyranny after their day is past and requiring to be
overthrown in their turn. There is something arrogant and some­
thing unrealistic in demanding solutions which shall be sufficient
not merely for one day and time and place but for ever. That is
why any attempt to repress philosophers - to replace their tentative
answers with final solutions, to silence them or canalise their
thought along prearranged channels in the name of some perennial
value or fixed scheme of things - is a sure sign that humanity is
about to be slaughtered on the altar of some dogma, some false
belief in an ultimate salvation. That is why philosophical activity, a
perpetual search for new answers in new situations, the recognition
that such human situations are perpetually altering, that the present
must not be sacrificed either to the past or to the future, is so
closely bound up with the existence of a minimum area of civil
liberty within which an individual may think and do what he
pleases because he pleases it.
If there were a final solution, a final pattern in which society
could be arranged, to rebel against which would be sinful, for it
was ultimate salvation, liberty would become a sin. By refuting this
sinister view, by furnishing perpetual examples of its falsity,
philosophy serves the cause of liberty, at least in the work of its
best representatives, more faithfully, because this is part of its very
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

essence and not simply a by-product; it is a necessary condition of

its activity, by contrast with other provinces of human thought. It
needs no justification, it is indispensable to human beings and an
end in itself. And the very notion of justification, of the need for
evidence and proof of the value of this or that activity, is its own
creation. But for those to whom no activity can be self-justified,
who seek some social value in everything which is done before
they let it pass the barrier of their moral judgement, the unique
nexus between philosophical activity and the minimum degree of
liberty which a society needs to be called free at all will perhaps
serve as an answer. Certainly no society will be wholly secure,
wholly safe on rocklike foundations, while philosophers are
allowed to roam at large. But their suppression will kill liberty too.
That is why all the enemies of freedom automatically round upon
intellectuals, like the Communists and Fascists, and make them
their first victims; rightly, for they are the great disseminators of
those critical ideas which as a rule the great philosophers are the
first to formulate. All others may be brought into conformity with
the new despotism; only they, whether they want to or not, are in
principle incapable of being assimilated into it. This is glory
enough for any human activity.
 SOCIALISM AND SOC IALIST THEORIES

S o c iALISM IS a body of Western teaching and practice resting

upon the belief that most social evils are due to unequal, or
excessively unequal, distribution of material resources; and that
these evils can be cured only by the transference, gradual or
immediate, total or partial, of the ownership of property and of the
means of production, exchange and distribution from private to
public control.

Socialist or communist ideas and movements (the terms were

largely interchangeable until the twentieth century) were fed from
many streams: thus the notion that the concentration of power or
wealth in the hands of a minority in a community leads to the
exploitation of, and injustice to, the majority, is almost as ancient
as social thought itself. The Old Testament and the sacred and
secular writings of other ancient faiths and cultures contain
denunciations of the wickedness and rapacity of the powerful ric&
as well as practical provisions against the growth- of excessive
inequalities of wealth. The theme constantly recurs that the pursuit
of riches defeats the proper ends of man and perverts his vision of
his true condition and purpose: hence the total or partial condem­
nation of the ownership of worldly goods in the theory and
practice of the Essene sects among the Jews of the Roman period,
in certain pas sages of ill� New Testament, by some early Christian
teachers, and by the founders of monastic orders dedicated to
poverty and the community of goods as a prerequisite of holy
living. Similarly Plato advocates the abolition of private property
among the guardians of his ideal State because the possession of, or
desire for, private property tends to corrupt the individual, obscure
his moral and intellectual vision and make him incapable of
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

pursuing truth and the rational organisation of society. Platonist,

Cynic, Stoic and Christian writers are at one in maintaining that
private property must be controlled or abolished, not because its
possession is of supreme importance but, on the contrary, because
it is unimportant in comparison with the social or spiritual values
which its existence or accumulation tends to obstruct. Thus Zeno,
the founder of Stoicism, advocated anarchism because political
authority and the right to property were contrary to the life of
reason. The opposite - the cardinal importance of property -
animates those who assail uncontrolled acquisition of property
because of the poverty, oppression and misery which it brings on
the labouring sections of the community. Such explosions as slave
revolts in the ancient world (and social ideas at times connected
with them) and peasant risings during the Middle Ages served to
force upon the attention of the rest of European society the
conditions of injustice and degradation in which the vast majority
of its members were compelled to live.
As feudalism gave way to private initiative and the institutions of
modern capitalism, social thinkers began to condemn the evils of
unbridled competition, less because of its incompatibility with the
spiritual life than because they concluded that property relations
determined other social, political and economic factors in society,
and consequently that any radical reform designed to bring social
justice and happiness, and to remove irrational divisions between
human beings, would have to begin by altering the conditions of
the use and exchange of property in the State. Hence in More's
Utopia, in Campanella's City of the Sun and Harrington's Oceana,
the creation of communal ownership is an indispensable measure,
since the property relations of existing societies are regarded as
being mainly responsible for the injustices prevalent in them, and
the material conditions of human happiness, so far from being
considered to be negligible as compared to spiritual factors, begin
to be regarded as decisive. This tendency grows more marked with
the rise of philosophical and social doctrines which seek to explain
the laws of nature and the behaviour of man by the operation of
material and tangible rather than palpable occult or spiritual causes.
In the ferment of the religious, social and political conflicts of
the seventeenth century and the rationalist or empiricist criticism
of all established institutions in the eighteenth century, the basis of
the right to property was bound to be questioned. Was the right to
property an inalienable 'natural right' of the individual? Or might
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C I AL I ST T H E O R I E S 79
the State dispose of it as it wished? Was it conferred by the
authority of the scriptures, or of natural law, or of a royal
sovereign or of some other human or superhuman institution, and
how did this square with the Christian doctrine that God had given
the earth to all men and not only to some? Was it the result of free
agreement between individuals or simply a matter of brute force?
Locke had advanced the theory that men had a right to property
with which they had 'mixed their labour' and that the value of
commodities was created by the labour expended upon making
them; the consequences he drew favoured the owners of property.
But before him the Diggers led by Winstanley had, during the
Commonwealth, demanded the right of communal exploitation of
State properties on the ground that the entire community and not
specific individuals were entitled to the possession of 'the earth and
all the fruits thereof'; similar views had been uttered by leaders of
Protestant religious sects in Germany and elsewhere. In part this
was still the social protest against the iniquities of the rich and
powerful heard in every generation, but it also derived from a
doctrine gradually growing articulate, that the right to private
property was neither God-given nor inherent nor 'natural', but a
human artifice, and the further view that the only path to happiness
and justice lay through the abolition of private property, and
communal ownership and control.

II

In the eighteenth century these doctrines found explicit formula­

tion: in the works of the abbe Mably private property is denounced
as the chief source of the evil that men do to their fellows and, with
many an example drawn from the semi-communist constitution of
ancient Sparta and from the writings of Plato and his followers, the
thesis is developed that only through communal ownership of the
means of material production can justice be ensured and the
minority of the stron_g preyented from oppressing and thwarting
the full ,..development �nd liberty of the weaker majority. In a
similar strain Morelly in his Le Code de Ia nature develops the
doctrine that the sole source of injustice and misery is the unequal
distribution of property, with the corollary, soon to be drawn by
others, that the political liberty and removal of political and social
privilege for which the great eighteenth-century radicals - Voltaire,
Diderot, Helvetius and the encyclopedistes in general - fought with
8o T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

passion and eloquence would avail nothing unless accompanied by

guarantees against the unequal accumulation of property in private
hands. Morelly declared that this could be secured only by the
establishment of common ownership. Like Mably, he does not
confine himself to general principles. Like all inventors of Utopias
he goes into the minute details of the ideal State, prescribes specific
functions to various classes of its citizens, elaborates a severe penal
code and recommends various transitional measures whereby the
desired transformation of existing society into a rigidly regimented
ideal community may most easily and painlessly be brought about.
Such aspirations were decisively influenced by the deeply stir­
ring and, despite their confusions, illuminating tracts of Rousseau,
who did not advance a coherent, unified social and economic
doctrine but preached on the text that the greatest criminal was he
who first drew a boundary round a field and called it his own.
Rousseau did not advocate the abolition of private property; but he
denounced competition, blatant inequality, the unbridled accumu­
lation of property and power, and the acquisitive instinct which
caused it, as central sources of political and moral evil; from this to
the thesis that property should be held in common was but a short
step.
The French Revolution did not encourage communism: among
the sacred rights of every man and citizen was that of property; and
although Robespierre passed a law which seemed to impose State
control upon the acquisition and enjoyment of resources by the
individual, communism was opposed by nearly all the principal
revolutionary sects. There was, however, at least one small group
of revolutionaries, deeply influenced by Morelly and Rousseau,
who, under the leadership of 'Gracchus' Babeuf, believed that the
Revolution, which had intended to liberate the individual and
introduce equality between all sections of society, had plainly
failed in its purpose, as the most casual glance at the corruption and
despotism prevalent in France during the Directoire would show.
To them it seemed that the Revolution had clearly been betrayed,
and betrayed by those who had put their own wealth and power
before the interest of the people. The vast transfers of the property
which had belonged to the proscribed classes, the aristocracy, the
Church and the enemies of the Revolution, had evidently gone to
fill the pockets of the new rich; there was neither liberty nor
equality; for the f0rmer could not exist without the latter. Robes­
pierre's task must be carried through to the end, and the only way
 S O C IA L I S M AND S O C IA L I ST T H E O R I E S 8r
of guaranteeing political liberty was by securing economic equal­
ity. From this Babeuf and his pure-hearted and fanatical friends
deduced their immediate duty - to abolish private property and
transfer all the resources of France (ultimately no doubt of
mankind) to the community as a whole, to be disposed of by its
democratically appointed representatives in accordance with the
laws of equity and justice. In 1 79 6 they entered into a conspiracy
to overthrow the Directoire and declare a communist republic.
They were betrayed by one of their number and duly arrested; the
ringleaders were executed. Nevertheless the 'conspiracy of the
equals' was an event of cardinal importance. It was the first attempt
to translate communist doctrine, which had previously played its
part merely as an element in the general radical literature of the
time, into actual practice. The shock to public opinion was
considerable, and from that moment communist doctrine began to
be taken seriously as something more than unworldly idealism or a
merely theoretical threat to the existing order. Not all of Babeuf's
followers were executed, and one of them, Buonarroti, survived the
Restoration and impregnated a good many of the revolutionaries
and reformers of the nineteenth century with the simple and
violent ideas of his master.
Socialism, from a doctrine which, whatever view might be taken
of its merits, had earlier almost universally been recognised as too
impracticable to be more than a Utopian dream, began a new career
in the nineteenth century as a revolutionary and, in the view both
of its champions and of its opponents, as a by no means
unattainable goal. A great fillip to socialist doctrines was given by
the general loosening of the social and economic structure of
Europe brought about by the Revolution and by the Napoleonic
conquests and reforms. The Bourbon Restoration frustrated so
great a majority of the newly emancipated French middle class that
it caused a violent intellectual ferment among Frenchmen not
normally of a revolutionary temper. One of the most imaginative
and radical expositions of the new ideas about society which the
Revolution had generated, and the Restoration tried to resist, exists
in the works of the Comte Henri de Saint-Simon.
Saint-Simon is not an enemy to private accumulation, and so not
strictly a socialist, but he originated a great many doctrines which
later socialism took over, and as a pioneer of the new European
(and American) outlook he had an influence second to that of no
other thinker of his time. He was a man of chaotic life and scarcely
 T H E SENSE O F R E A L ITY

less chaotic and undisciplined thought, interspersed with insights

of genius. He was neither a democrat nor a liberal. Unlike the
rationalists of the eighteenth century, he did not believe in the
steady progress of human enlightenment, culminating in the ideals
of the Encyclopedie. One of the first thinkers with an acute sense of
historical evolution, he believed in an alternation of periods of
progress and disintegration; by progress he meant the development
of institutions which fitted and stimulated the growth of tendencies
brought about by technological inventions and discoveries. He was
sufficiently a child of the eighteenth century to believe in the
omnipotence of reason; but by reason he meant the rational
organisation of society, and by rational organisation the planning
of a social order by those whose technical knowledge best
equipped them to understand the material and spiritual needs and
possibilities of their own times. The fundamental factors of history,
according to him, consist in the interplay of economic forces: more
precisely in the interplay and conflict of social classes, each of
which represents a distinct economic, social and spiritual demand
in the society of its time. If in the Middle Ages kings, soldiers,
priests and lawyers represented classes expressive of the dominant
economic forces of their time, and armed with the most advanced
technical resources then available, modern industrial and scientific
development had rendered these classes obsolete. The natural
leaders of contemporary society, representing the new and decisive
social forces which the industrial revolution had released, were
industrialists, bankers, scientists, technicians, artists, international
traders; they and they alone understood and, indeed, incarnated the
new forces at play, they and they alone should be entrusted with
the conscious organisation of the new society. Misery and injustice
sprang from idleness and ignorance and their by-product, ineffi­
ciency. The survivals of a crumbling feudalism could not
adequately serve a society which had, as a result of an unparalleled
advance in scientific techniques, become capable of producing
infinitely greater wealth, together with resources for its exploita­
tion, than any dreamt of in any previous society. Political forms
were but the outer shape of the real connections, social and
economic, between human beings, and it required men of organis­
ing genius to transform these political forms to fit the new social
and economic realities. Unless there was organisation and rational
planning, there would be waste, conflict and misery. The warfare
between economic classes which had shaped previous history was
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C I AL IST T H E O R I E S

not inevitable. Under a rational plan of production and distribu­

tion of material goods, of education, of scientific research, the
interests of all individuals would become reconciled. Idleness is the
deadliest of all sins. The only citizens who truly matter are the
producers, whether manual or intellectual: the rest are drones and
parasites, obsolete survivals from the past, or else the fools and
knaves and misfits who cannot adapt themselves to the new world
created by new forces of production.
Hence Saint-Simon advocated at various stages of his life various
forms of a totally planned society, directed by captains of industry
or finance and scientific experts, and aided by the imaginative
power of artists - the only true benefactors of mankind - who by
acting together would create a world in which the faculties of man,
hitherto frustrated by crippling environments, could at last find a
rich and complete fulfilment. This 'technocracy' would be
founded, not on the unhistorical and therefore often inapplicable
principles of a Benthamite utilitarianism, but on a profound
understanding of the factors, chiefly technological, which deter­
mine social change, and transform the needs and character of men,
and consequently of the particular historical stage which mankind
had reached. It would plan the future of mankind in accordance
with the vast new possibilities of material development which
alone could produce the infinite plenty from which all could draw
inexhaustibly. The abolition of scarcity would lead to a state of
complete economic contentment, without which political liberty
and political equality are hollow slogans.
Saint-Simon, unlike Babeuf, did not advocate the abolition or
even curtailment of private property, nor yet the equality of
mankind. On the contrary, he believed in the virtue of the infinite
expansion of individual enterprise, and the immense superiority of
scientists, bankers, industrialists and artists of genius to the mass of
mankind. But he advocated a completely planned production and
distribution of economic resources. He asserted that individuals,
left to themselves, tend to get in each other's way and diminish
productivity, and denied that they possessed natural rights against
a central planning body. He regarded the moral, religious, artistic
and intellectual development of humanity as directly dependent
upon the progress of the new industrial system, freed from
wasteful class conflict; and he placed all his hopes upon the rational
control of it by men of genius.
These theses, despite the obscure and fanciful imagery in which
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

they are often expressed - or perhaps because of it - profoundly

influenced all subsequent collectivist thought. His followers Enfan­
tin and Bazard repeated their master's denunciation of equality and
unchanging, universal human 'rights', advocated the rewarding of
individuals according to their industry and ability, demanded
association and hierarchical organisation of society - in fact, a kind
of State capitalism, rigidly controlled by scientifically trained
experts - and above all urged abolition of inheritance, whereby in
due course the existing irrational organisation of private property
would come to an end. Saint-Simon's vision is a half mystical, half
scientific Utopia, in which reason is victorious over superstition
and prejudice, and material resources are developed to their fullest
extent under the direction of a kind of world trust or cartel,
regulated by an omniscient, wise, benevolent central planning
board in control of all aspects of social and economic life. At once
scientific and authoritarian, this body will change humanity, will
cause mankind freely to fulfil and realise its whole nature, sensu­
ous, emotional and intellectual, and so end all self-destructive
asceticism, false spirituality and other worldliness, by restoring to
the body its pre-Christian rights - by the 'rehabilitation of the
flesh'. It was a dream destined to have a profound influence upon
the socialist and communist experiments of the twentieth century,
but running sharply counter to the liberal, individualist and
democratic thought of the later nineteenth century, which tended
to look upon it as a despotism too inhuman to be realisable, as J. S.
Mill looked on its later development by Saint-Simon's disciple
Auguste Comte. It was not for nothing that Engels called Saint­
Simon's doctrine 'an administration of things', not of men.

III

Scarcely less important was the influence of an even stranger and

less realistic system builder than Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier.
While Saint-Simon was a nobleman and a man of broad and
sweeping vision, who conceived society in terms of a new,
scientific industrial feudalism with bankers and scientists in the
place of soldiers and priests, Fourier was of lower-middle-class
origin, lived in perpetual financial difficulties and had a far more
intimate acquaintance with the miseries and iniquities of the social
system of his time.
The main problem which troubled Fourier, like other early
 S O C I A L I S M A N D S O C I A L IST T H E O R I E S

nineteenth-century thinkers, was the failure of the French Revolu­

tion to confer the benefits which it had promised so lavishly. But
whereas Saint-Simon was opposed to popular government, which
seemed to him no better than irrational mob rule, Fourier was
more democratically inclined. His criticisms and his Utopian vision
spring mainly from the sense of outrage to his desire for justice and
his natural benevolence caused by the spectacle of human exploita­
tion and brutality, of the stupid waste of effort and resources, of
extremes of frustration and helpless poverty side by side with ill­
gotten wealth, a scene which Stendhal and Balzac painted at a later
stage of its development.
Fourier possessed a violent, unbridled and eccentric imagination;
his cosmological, psychological, botanical and zoological specula­
tions are fantastic to the point of lunacy. In the course of a
penetrating and realistic sociological exposition he discusses the
influence of the putrescence of the moon upon human diet, invents
cycles of twenty thousand ascending or descending orders of
cosmic progress or reaction, foreshadows the appearance of new
races of beasts useful to man, amiable 'ami-lions', busily perform­
ing menial tasks for their masters, 'ami-whales' engaged in towing
ships across the Atlantic in a day (the sea water having been
meanwhile magically transformed into an ocean of lemonade).
Nevertheless Fourier's basic criticisms of industrial society are full
of unforgettably bright flashes of insight, and their influence has
proved remarkably powerful.
Fourier's main thesis is that the root evil in society is competi­
tion: at the very moment in which mankind is producing unparal­
leled quantities of material goods, misery and poverty are increas­
ing by leaps and bounds; the more productive the inventions of
scientists and technicians, the greater the exploitation of the weak
by the strong, of the many by the few; the more primitive and
resourceless a society, the more kindly and patriarchal are relations
between individuals and classes; the more mankind knows and
produces, the more cruelty, suffering and immorality it brings into
the world. There is only one explanation for this. Because men
compete and fight each other instead of working in association,
they have created a system by which success for one man is
possible only through the failure of another. One man's meat can
satisfy him only by being another man's poison. How does the
manufacturer become rich? By selling as much as he can as dearly
as he can. The greater the scarcity in the market, the higher the
86 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

price he can exact. Hence he will build up monopolies and will

even destroy some of his commodities to raise the price of the rest.
Moreover he will be encouraged to adulterate his goods so that
they may be used up as rapidly as possible and thereby stimulate
the demand for more. The shoemaker will see to it that the shoes
he sells fall to pieces as quickly as possible; the builder, that his
building collapses reasonably early. The doctor will hope for the
widest possible spread of disease; he will avoid anything which
cures the patient too quickly or completely; the lawyer and the
judge will hope for the maximum quantity of discord, crime,
litigation. The method of competition is the cutting of throats. So
long as the purpose of society is not welfare but acquisition, the
attempt by each individual to enrich himself must lead to the
maximum of chaos and therefore to waste, conflict and misery. The
middlemen, the bureaucrats, the officials, the soldiers, the journal­
ists produce nothing useful. They can exist only as parasites, by
battening on the destructive instincts, the vices and the follies of
mankind; they have a vested interest in useless ferment and
disorder.
This can be remedied only by inducing men to form themselves
into mutually beneficial associations where the advantage of each
contributes to the happiness of the social whole. Men become
rapacious and hostile to one another, greedy, unscrupulous, ruth­
less, sycophantic and dishonest only because bad education and
bad institutions blind them to the natural harmony of their
interests. Man is by nature good, that is, all his instincts, appetites,
feelings, tendencies can be fulfilled harmoniously provided they are
given the environment and purpose for which they crave. The
purpose of education is to fulfil natural human needs, not to
cripple them by forcing them in unnatural directions. We disap­
prove of theft, but theft is due only to scarcity. Where there is
plenty, the gifts of ingenuity and imagination which at present go
into stealing can be diverted into constructive channels which will
delight their owner instead of, as now, riddling him with fears. We
rack our brains to find ways of getting workers in a factory to
perform so many hours of grinding monotonous labour; fatigue
kills the creative impulse, monotony is the death of the imagination
and productive instinct. Men would achieve far more if their work
were made more varied, if each man were carefully chosen to do
that to which his .natural talents incline him. The despotism of the
capitalist, and the sullen hatred and liability to crime of his
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C I A L I S T T H E O R I E S

brutalised workmen, are due only to maldistribution of talents, the

bad organisation of the productive faculties of man. There is no
character which cannot be successfully canalised into activities
useful to society by a sufficiently careful educationally formative
system.
To put an end to the horrors of industrial standardisation
Fourier advocates that men live in associations of about eight
hundred families - such a co-operative group being called the
'phalanx' - in attractive buildings called 'phalansteries' surrounded
by gardens, fields and groves, in which much of the heavy work is
done by machinery, the lighter tasks by members specially trained,
never working for more than a few hours a day, and provided with
all the necessities and luxuries which a normal well-developed
human being would require to satisfy his material, moral, spiritual
and intellectual needs. The phalansteries, by using methods of co­
operation, will introduce scientific rationalisation; infinitely richer
results will be achieved by centralised, but not over-centralised,
production by means of machinery than by individual handicrafts
and the chaotic scattering of unbalanced resources. Everything
becomes rationalised. The principle of competition is gone, and
happy, free, voluntary association has taken its place. The phalans­
teries are organised into wider and wider wholes, national frontiers
are transcended and mankind becomes a free federation of free
associations of self-subsistent co-operative producers and distribu­
tors, living under healthy conditions and the enlightened guidance
of benevolent educators who have grasped the principle that, to be
efficient, men must enjoy their work, and that there are few tasks
that need doing that someone or other cannot be found or trained
to enjoy}
Fourier's actual Utopia is in many details fantastic; but the basic
theses (which owe much to Rousseau) - that the industrial
revolution produced a society which spent much of its energy in
defeating its own ends; that unbridled competition is not the most
efficient means of producing either prosperity or happiness; that
most men are the victims of man-made institutions whose purposes
they do not understand or have forgotten; that men work best and
are most human when they do that which they enjoy most; that

1 For instance, he says, those who love gossip could be made telegraph
operators, children who love to play in mud could be made happy scavengers -
and so on.
88 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

men are happiest when they are most creative, and that association
conduces to this in many instances more effectively than the
ferocious competition of a laissez-faire society - all these have had
an immeasurable influence upon both socialist and liberal thought
and practice. Fourier's doctrines, which led to the establishment of
idealistically conceived but short-lived colonies in the United
States, profoundly affected radical thought in America; the New
Deal inaugurated by Roosevelt in I 9 3 2 was full of Saint-Simonian
and Fourierist notions. Fourier exercised influence in Russia,
where the ideal of an harmonious and egalitarian association of
producers, that is, workers and planners, in a society free from the
despotism both of the bureaucracy and the police and of that
exercised by a competitive capitalism, struck deep root in the I 84os
and fed both the romantic 'populist' and the 'scientific' socialist
oppositions to the government (indeed Dostoevsky was all but
condemned to death for belonging to an association for the
spreading of Fourierist doctrines). In France he helped to shape the
ideas of Proudhon, and through his works shaped the outlook of
the founders of the anti-political syndicalist and co-operative
movements, whose influence was scarcely smaller than that of
political socialism itself. The emphasis on the virtues of association,
of vocational training and distribution, of industrial psychology, of
the centralisation and rationalisation of economic life in self-subsis­
tent, small, semi-rural co-operatives, rather than the vast, urban
centralised industrial units of Saint-Simon; the ending of purely
private enterprise and moral regeneration through the liberation of
the creative, human faculties of the flesh as well as of the spirit - all
these ideas are seeds of socialism. But Fourier detested communism
and revolutionary methods; he believed in moral conversion and
social peace between opposed classes on the basis of common
ideals; he defended private property and wished to create it in
abundance rather than abolish it. His follower Considerant stressed
the element of class struggle; the development of capitalism threw
more and more propertyless proletarians into the vast reservoir of
pauperised workers with no rights and no hopes: there were 'two
nations' struggling in every community and their interests sharply
conflicted at every point; but this war could be concluded peace­
fully, if need be by State intervention, by the expedient of
guaranteeing a minimum subsistence to labour and the freedom of
religion and association, thought and speech to all citizens; by
 S O C IA L I SM AND S O C IALIST T H E O R I E S

regrouping society into communities of co-operative producers,

eternal peace and plenty could be ensured.
A somewhat similar doctrine but with a greater stress on
collectivism is to be found in the writings of Pierre Leroux. He
believed with a mystical fervour in State control and socially
committed art. The State must regulate economic life and take from
everyone according to his capacity and give to everyone according
to his need. It is contrary to divine law that thirty-four million
Frenchmen should be exploited by some hundred thousand of
their fellows and that the inequalities of income should grow
greater with every year. Leroux's views had a decisive influence on
the social novels of George Sand.
Views similar to those of Fourier (but without the absurdities)
were held by the Welsh manufacturer Robert Owen, who, unlike
Fourier, triumphantly demonstrated their validity in practice. By
improving the conditions of his cotton-spinners in New Lanark, by
establishing minimum wages, creating a unique and boldly original
system of social services at the grimmest period of the Industrial
Revolution, by creating conditions of health, honesty and confi­
dence by the most generous and efficient exercise of paternalistic
control, Owen created a model industrial community. Its standard
of living was higher than any then prevalent either in England or in
Europe and, in view of the very tangible profits which it made for
its owners, it attracted world-wide attention. Not content with this
practical demonstration of the principles of rational and humani­
tarian planning, Owen sought to universalise his experience and
gradually came to the conclusion that unless private property was
abolished altogether - and with it such irrational and anti-social
institutions as marriage and organised religion - mankind was
doomed to the misery spread by ignorance and competition. He
believed, like the rationalists of the previous century, that all that a
man was he owed to his environment, and especially to education
or lack of it, and that the dissemination of the truth would of itself
virtually avail to cure all evils. Like Saint-Simon, Owen ruined
himself financially towards the end of his long and devotedly
altruistic life, spent in preaching atheism, collectivism by free
association and love freed from the marriage bond, as the principles
upon which a new model world must be founded. His 'parallelog­
rams', so called because of the shape of the buildings he advocated,
were the British equivalent of Fourier's phalansteries. As in the
case of Fourier, the fantastic elements in Owen's doctrines were in
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

time forgotten. The fruitful elements - the blessings of co-opera­

tion, the increased productivity and efficiency due to the raising of
material, moral and intellectual standards in the form of health,
educational and other social services, social insurance and so
forth - were the foundation of workers' co-operative movements
in many countries, and of more humane and more scientific
principles and methods of industrial legislation and management;
indeed the term 'socialism' itself occurs for the first time in an
Owenite journal as a vague name for communal solidarity as
against private gain.
The intellectual centre of Europe in the nineteenth century was
Paris, where the next step in the development of socialist ideas was
made by Louis Blanc. His principal innovation consisted in the
thesis that all forms of reform or revolution which sought to
substitute industrial or other forms of co-operation for the action
of the State were necessarily impracticable, as the State had in the
course of time accumulated such powers of control and coercion -
the army, police, financial machinery - that all efforts to overthrow
it by either persuasion or violence in favour of some other
institution must necessarily be vain. Nevertheless Blanc, although
he was opposed to revolution, recognised the necessity of the
radical transformation of society from its condition of chaos and
injustice. He paints a picture, scarcely less horrifying than Fourier's
most lurid descriptions, of unbridled competition in which battles
are fought not merely between employers and employed, but
between the town worker subsisting on the edge of employment
and the poor peasant who leaves the village to compete with him
for the few available jobs, between groups of workers themselves,
between individuals within as well as outside every trade and
profession. The present order of society is that of the jungle: eat or
be eaten, beat or be beaten, every man's hand against his neigh­
bour.
There is only one cure for this. Since the State is too powerful to
be overthrown, it must be turned into an instrument of liberation
and progress. The State itself must take over trades and industries;
by creating model factories, model banks, model enterprises of
every kind, it will, by displaying the qualities of honesty, efficiency
and scientific management of which Owen had shown the utility,
enter into competition with private enterprise, and by its superior
efficiency and resources drive it out of the field. There is no need
for general nationalisation, which can be done only at the cost of
 S O C IA L I S M A N D S O C IA L I ST T H E O R I E S

violence and bloodshed. State capitalism on a limited scale -

although Blanc would have rejected such words - would have the
automatic effect of gradually eliminating and taking over the
necessarily less efficient private firms, and so a painless transition
to State capitalism would inevitably occur. Capitalists would
peacefully capitulate and a rational system would succeed the
present chaos. Agriculture should probably be organised along
Fourierist lines of federated co-operatives.
Still more ambitious is the thought of Constantin Pecqueur. Like
Blanc, he thought the State should take over social and industrial
organisation. Like Fourier, he believed that each man should be
fitted for those tasks to which he was most naturally congenial. In
his scheme the State regulates the relations of producers and
consumers, laissez-faire being condemned as being a mere right to
rob and to destroy. The complete vision of later socialism is
beginning to emerge. The frontiers of a nation are, according to
Pecqueur, an artificial curb to the full free association of all
mankind. When all men are engaged in the tasks to which they are
most suited, the economic causes of war, due to the blind greed of
competition, become eliminated. Heredity, privilege, religious and
social prejudice die in a society organised on rational principles.
Class war is overcome by economic association regulated by the
State. Patriotism is replaced by world loyalty. The division of
labour and production occurs on a world scale. Humanity lives in
one socialised world.
The communism of Etienne Cabet is a variation upon this
theme, but far more rigid and totalitarian. The State owns all the
main sources of wealth and the means of production and assigns
tasks to individual citizens. There is equal pay for all, and a heavy
taxation of the rich. Violence is condemned but complete State
control enjoined in Cabet's ideal State, called Icaria. There is rigid
control of publication and a severe State censorship. All citizens are
equal and their property may not be violently expropriated. The
transition to the perfect State should occur by increased taxation
and abolition of military budgets. Cabet's attempts to establish a
colony of this kind in Texas failed, but the idea of a rigidly
organised communist State probably had its due influence on
Marx.
While Blanc, Leroux, Cabet and their followers confined them­
selves to theorising and social experiment and denounced violence,
Auguste Blanqui organised armed risings. He saw injustice,
 T H E S EN S E O F REALITY

oppression and exploitation round him, distrusted palliatives and

the powers of persuasion and believed in the violent overthrow of
the wicked order by organised revolution. In order to do this he
spent his entire life in perfecting himself as a professional revolu­
tionary, in studying the technique of revolution and in gathering
followers whom, during the intervals between his lengthy terms in
prison, he trained in the art of insurrection. He was a disciple of the
followers of Babeuf, a militant atheist and an advocate of profes­
sionally trained revolutionary elites. He believed in the abolition of
private property, but still more in the abolition of the capitalist
State in which everything, consciously or unconsciously, was
weighted in favour of the possessing classes. His main objective
was to smash the existing order and all its institutions. The
bourgeoisie would not yield without a fight: consequently it must
be attacked by force; this was a democratic procedure, since the
oppressed, in whose name the liberators were acting, vastly
outnumbered the ruling class.
How, after the success of the revolution, society would be
organised, he did not seem clearly to conceive; he vaguely believed
in the direct application of democratic methods on the part of the
liberated agricultural and industrial slaves. While he did not
contribute anything of significance to socialist doctrine, his
criticism of ineffectual reformism and his work as an agitator and
political incendiary left a profound mark upon every branch of
militant socialism. The Paris rising in 1 8 39 , the revolution in June
1 848, and still more the Paris Commune of 1 8 7 1 all bear the
imprint of his technique as organiser and militant activist, above all
in turning scattered discontent into concerted revolutionary vio­
lence.

IV

Parallel to the development of French communist ideas and apart

from the internationally celebrated Owen, there exists a native
British socialist tradition. Among the most prominent names is that
of Thomas Spence, who preached against the evils of excessive
encroachment by landlords over the properties of the vanishing
yeomanry, and offered as a remedy the restoration of the alleged
ancient rights of parishes to communal ownership of the land. His
vision of the government was as a kind of federation of parish
councils with consequent elimination of centralised control and of
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C IA L I ST T H E O R I E S 93
all forms of State bureaucracy. William Ogilvie was a mild
reformer, who denounced the tendency whereby more and more
land was accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, principally in the
hands of the idle rich, whom he calls 'freebooters' and condemns in
scathing language. His remedy is scarcely socialist, since the society
he contemplates is a modified feudalism in which everyone is to
own about 40 acres of land, to which a rent and prescriptive duties
to the overlord are attached. Nevertheless this type of condemna­
tion of ill-gotten landed wealth fed the stream of socialist senti­
ment.
More searching and formidable were five British writers, some­
times classed together as forerunners of Marxism. Charles Hall
pointed out that the fruits of productive labour were distributed to
capitalists and workers in the proportion of eight to one. The fact
that seven-eighths of what was produced should go to the master,
who does not appear to deserve it, is due to the control of the State
by the wealthy, wealth being the power of forcing others to part
with what rightly belongs to them. The exercise of this power must
tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, increasing their
degradation. Education, being in the hands of the owners, tends to
perpetuate inequality. Wars spring from acquisitive motives and
widen still further the existing gulf of inequality. Hall's remedy,
like that of Ogilvie, is the establishment of small peasant propri­
etors on the land and the reform of a system whereby trade largely
consists in exporting the necessities of the poor in order to import
the luxuries of the rich.
William Thompson put into bold relief the conflict between the
'natural right' of the worker to the 'total product of his labour' and
the claims of economic freedom, whereby anything could be
legally bartered by anyone anywhere at any time for anything else,
which justified capitalism. He represents the capitalist as forcing
the workers to live on as little as possible, while he consumes the
residue himself. Thompson offers no clear remedy for this, and is
the first to employ the term, later to be made notorious by
Marxists, of 'surplus value', although here it means the increase in
productivity created by machinery, all of which goes to the
employer and is used by him in conspiracy with other employers,
both in his own country and internationally, to force the living
standard of labour lower still.
This theme is emphasised even more strongly by Thomas
Hodgskin, a former naval officer whose views are a mixture of
94 T H E S E N S E OF REALITY

abhorrence of all State control and interference as such and the

desire to see the control, not the abolition, of private property, by
the elimination of the wholly unproductive owner or middleman
who squeezes unearned income out of the producer; he must be
replaced by the 'master', that is, the manager of an enterprise, and
by the genuine trader, both the last classes being entitled to
remuneration, but one far smaller than that granted them in the
existing order.
In his pamphlet Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy, pub­
lished in 1 8 39 , J. F. Bray, after singing a hymn to labour as the
natural function of everything that lives - animals, plants - points
out that the class of owners avoids this duty at the expense of the
rest of society. The capitalist gets something for nothing: he does
not even expend capital, since his wealth is always growing. The
result is plainly no better than legalised robbery. This is to be
remedied by altering the laws of inheritance and by a curious sort
of communism, whereby everyone enters into a vast, universal
profit-sharing organisation, a kind of joint-stock company of the
universe. It is a hazy combination of Owenite doctrines with
elements of what was later Fabian doctrine.
John Gray formulated a kind of 'iron law' of remuneration,
whereby everyone ends by losing, because everything is done in
competition and all production is for profit rather than for social
use: labour is paid the lowest possible wage; capitalists make the
smallest profit allowed by the violent competition of other capital­
ists; human labour becomes a commodity bought at one price and
sold at another; and all leads to the iniquitous absorption of a
portion of the fruit of society's labours by unproductive idlers who
should be put to socially useful work. Such ideas as the exploita­
tion of man by man, surplus value, the thesis that the distribution
of political power and the educational and ethical ideas in a society
depend upon its economic structure and not vice versa, that social
misery is due to unbridled laissez-faire, emerge clearly and some­
times dramatically in the writings of this group of thinkers. To
them must be added the name of William Godwin, the father of
anarchism, who taught that the rule of reason entitles everyone to
take his just due, according to his rightful needs, independently of
who might happen to possess it under the unjust and irrational
dispensation of the actual social order. His notion of the distribu­
tion of resources according to a rationalist ethic goes back to
 S O C I A L I S M A N D S O C I ALIST TH E O RIES 95
Mably and Plato and forms a strong link in the tradition of
philosophical anarchism.
The ideas of these social rebels fell on fruitful soil. The
combination of economic and political instability in Europe after
the Napoleonic Wars increased discontent with existing regimes,
and this, in almost direct proportion to the degree of political
suppression prevalent in a given State, stimulated the creation of
conspiracies. They began, as a rule, with moderate liberal and
democratic aims but gradually, with the increase of repression on
one side, and economic, social and political bitterness and despair
on the other, began to take more and more uncompromising
forms. In France political censorship under the July monarchy was
relatively mild, so that socialist theses were openly preached by
radical writers and journalists, and even by priests such as Lamen­
nais, the greatest figure in Christian socialism, and the abbe
Constant; revolutionary plots were correspondingly few and
unimportant. Presently these ideas crossed into the German­
speaking States where, owing to the severe counter-measures of
Metternich and the Prussian government, they were driven under­
ground.
A secret society with purely communist aims was established by
German emigres in Paris as early as I 8 3 6. Radical intellectuals, such
as Hess and Griin, spread communist ideas in German middle­
class, especially academic, circles. To some degree these views
infected even the Polish nationalists then struggling against Russian
oppression; in Russia herself, semi-feudal as she was, vague socialist
notions began to grow articulate in the I 8 3 0s among the radical
intelligentsia of Moscow and St Petersburg. In Italy and Spain the
fight against authoritarian governments still took predominantly
nationalist and liberal forms; in England the Chartist movement
represented a clear-cut programme embraced eagerly by the vic­
tims of the Industrial Revolution in their hatred of the utter
degradation and misery which the sudden and sensationally rapid
development of industry had brought on growing sections of
politically helpless factory workers and industrial labourers. From
a mere abstract doctrine advanced by isolated thinkers, socialism
began to be identified with the actual demands of the increasingly
menacing multitude of discontented workers, and socialists began
to look on themselves as the natural political leaders of the coming
final, revolutionary transformation of society. Communist or
socialist ideas - the terms, as mentioned above, were not at that
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

time clearly distinguished - infected equally university intellectuals

(particularly in Germany) and groups of disaffected workers and
artisans. Small semi-legal or illegal circles were established, and
pamphlets and clandestine propaganda circulated: the radical jour­
nalist Heinzen and the apocalyptic itinerant tailor Weitling were
typical representatives of these social groups. But by far the most
eloquent and influential spokesmen of this attitude were Proudhon
in France and, among the Germans, Karl Marx and Ferdinand
Lassalle.
Proudhon emphasised the inevitability of antagonism between
the classes - on the one side the possessors, who controlled the
machinery of public life, political, economic, social, religious and
intellectual, on the other the vast majority whom they mercilessly
and stupidly exploited. He looked upon all States as such as being
pure instruments of oppression and advocated the view that true
liberty, impossible without true economic equality, was unattain­
able until the State was abolished and the productive elements in
society were transformed into free associations pledged to mutual
aid. In language full of paradoxes, derived from a superficial
acquaintance with Hegel, Proudhon maintained that history, like
all other processes of nature, moved not as a smooth progression
but in a path d �termined by, indeed consisting of, the conflict of
contradictory forces; this continuous strife every now and then
mounts to revolutionary leaps - crises whose resolution by an
upward shift of level constitutes progress.
As a characteristic inner contradiction of society, Proudhon, in
the book which opens with his famous paradox, 'Property is theft',
exposes the self-frustrating nature of capitalism - in their despera­
tion to increase their wealth the unscrupulous few have effected the
suppression of the creative instincts of the many, and ultimately
destroy themselves too. To try to remedy this by substituting a no
less authoritarian collectivist communist system whereby the State
still rigidly controls its citizens, albeit in the interests of the
proletarians, as advocated for example by Louis Blanc, is to spread
the disease, since State communism destroys the individual no less
surely than did unbridled capitalism. The State is wholly evil, being
wholly coercive, and is therefore useless even as a weapon against
itself. Proudhon's point of view is diametrically opposed to that
adopted by Blanc.and later by the Russian revolutionary exile Peter
Tkachev, who maintained against advocates of voluntary co-opera­
tion that the State was too powerful to be either ignored or
 97
S O C IA L I S M A N D S O C I A L I S T T H E O R I E S

resisted, and must be turned to its own use by the revolution if the
latter is to be successful.
Proudhon insists on the right to a limited quantity of private
property and on the preservation of the inviolable rights of the
family, of which he takes a patriarchal view, not unlike Rousseau,
with the same insistence on the subordinate status of women: these
are institutions designed to guarantee the individual against the
brutal and excessive encroachment of both the State and rapacious
capitalism. To restore individual and class self-respect and give full
scope to the creative energies of mankind, all central coercive
authority must be destroyed and replaced by a condition of
peaceful economic co-operation. To Proudhon such encroachment
or exploitation means anything which confers undue power upon
the exploiter, whether it be rent, interest or any other form of
extortion, whereby the weaker party, that is, the proletarians or the
poor, are made to give up something for nothing in order to avoid
starvation or the loss of personal freedom. This evil is not curable
by compulsory association in the sense preached by Saint-Simo­
nians or communists, since that would vest too much power in the
hands of the organisers, and so dehumanise - destroy the bodies
and souls of - the workers. This goes with Proudhon's theory of
value, whereby objects should exchange in direct proportion to the
hours of labour spent on their production, and credit should be
widely extended at the lowest possible rate of interest, if possible
none at all, by the freely collaborating combinations of the
producers themselves.
Anything, even war, is good which intensifies a man's individual
qualities, develops his free, creative personality; industrial exploita­
tion, which demeans individuals and crushes their resistance, is the
ultimate evil. This violent individualist self-assertiveness links
Proudhon, in an unforeseen manner, with Nietzsche, Fascist
irrationalism and nostalgic medievalism, through which in Roman
Catholic countries he has had a recognisable influence no smaller
than that of Bakunin. Proudhon's teachings do not form a coherent
doctrine, but the denunciation of unlimited property rights, which
echoes Rousseau and Fourier, and of political centralisation, and
his eloquent pleas for a decentralised economic system founded on
workers' co-operation, have had a profound effect on social
thought and action, particularly in Latin countries, and formed the
basis of the anarchist and syndicalist movements, which became the
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

traditional opponents of centralised political socialism and commu­

msm.

Undoubtedly the most celebrated and influential of all modern

socialist thinkers is Karl Marx. He created the most lasting body of
coherent socialist doctrine, and based an international organisation
with revolutionary aims upon it. The most arresting exposition of
his views is in the Communist Manifesto, which, with Friedrich
Engels, he composed towards the end of r 847 at the request of one
of the small communist groups of exiled German workers then to
be found in Western Europe. As a bold new synthesis of ideas,
which had previously circulated in a loose uncoordinated form -
for example, those of Rousseau, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Hodgskin -
it is a unique polemical masterpiece. Its main theses are these. The
history of human society is a history of the struggle between
economically determined classes - this much was discovered by
bourgeois historians, but they have failed to point out that in our
day it is a struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
which the latter is bound to win. This war takes a political form,
since political power is that whereby one class seeks to defeat the
other, and the modern State is simply the instrument to execute the
will of the dominant class. The vast modern development of
industrial resources has destroyed the traditional feudal and
domestic character of economic life and has created a world market
to feed which immense monopolistic industrial structures have
been built; and these in their turn have, without meaning to do so,
inevitably organised the workers of various countries, races and
ways of life into one huge army of propertyless labour.
What determines the lives of individuals and societies is the
relation in which they stand towards one another in the productive
process. Hence the only true scientific analysis of contemporary
society is an analysis of the historical relationship to one another of
the various participants - producers, consumers, workers, employ­
ers, middlemen - entering into the productive process. As Lenin
was later to say, the basic question for Marx is who exploits whom;
all else is a by-product of this. The intellectual, moral, religious,
artistic activity of an individual or a society is the 'superstructure',
that is, not the cause but the effect of the material factors of
 S O C I A L I S M A N D S O CIAL IST T H E O R I E S 99
production, dependent upon them, and liable to blind men to their
true position in the world, namely, to the material causes which
ultimately, though not always obviously, determine the course of
their lives and their characters. The permanent conflict of which
Hegel had spoken is in truth a conflict between material, economic
and social interests; when these struggles reach one of their
periodic crises there is a revolutionary explosion which means that
the outer relations which form the social, industrial, political,
intellectual, above all economic structure of a society are no longer
adequate for the productive forces working within. A revolution
occurs and new forms, better fitted to aid the development of these
forces, come into being.
The capitalist system is a transient phenomenon riddled with
inner conflict: individual capitalists can develop only by defeating
one another in ever more deadly competition which involves
governments and continents in internecine struggles. In pursuit of
its own industrial purposes it has trained a vast army of workers
whose very organisation makes them at once more and more
alienated from the actual goals and values of the society of which
they are ostensibly members, and, at the same time, progressively
better organised and consequently a more powerful menace to
their masters.
The accumulation of capital rests on the systematic robbery and
dehumanisation of the workers. The value of a material commodity
exchanged in the world's markets is constituted by the socially
required labour expended upon its production. The labourer
himself has become such a commodity, that is, his value is
estimated in terms of the labour required to keep him alive and
adequately efficient; but he produces more than the cost of his
upkeep. The surplus of the value which he creates over the value of
what he consumes is the 'surplus value' which the capitalist takes
away from him. Unlike the workers of the classical or medieval
economies, he is cut off from his tools, from the products of his
own labour, in the end from his own powers of production, all of
which are owned and exchanged by others, whose purposes ignore
or brutally frustrate his own minimal needs as a human being.
Human beings are treated as useful commodities, their gifts are
bought and sold for cash. This is justified by a pseudo-science,
called by the bourgeois 'economics', which treats historically
changing relations between men as timeless, unchangeable laws that
1 00 THE SENSE O F REALITY
govern quantities or processes called goods, commodities, money,
supply, demand and so forth.
As competition grows more and more cut-throat, greater and
greater concentration of capitalist enterprise into monopolies and
cartels is bound to occur in order to lower costs. Capitalists must
progressively grow at once less numerous and more powerful,
workers more numerous, more impoverished, more concentrated,
better organised by the industrial system itself; by a grim Hegelian
paradox capitalism is compassing its own doom, creating its own
gravediggers. The proletariat is bound in the course of time to
acquire such power, centralisation, organisation, international sol­
idarity and effective revolutionary indignation that it will find it
inevitable and relatively easy to take over the whole economic
system by removing the dwindling number of capitalists from their
centralised position of control, thus at last obtaining the full fruit
of its labour for its own use. In this way, as Marx put it in Capital,
'The expropriators are expropriated.'
Since the proletarians are the lowest class in the economic scale,
with their final victory the class struggle will come to an end, for
with the liquidation of the bourgeoisie there will be no other class
for them to oppose. When this occurs, the State, which is the
instrument whereby one class oppresses another, will become
otiose; human energies will be liberated from the struggle between
the classes (the motor of all previous historical change), identical
according to Marxist doctrine with the struggle for economic
power and even existence. With no one to exploit, and the fruits of
agriculture, trade and industry, of the arts and sciences of mankind,
growing ever more plentiful, man will at last enjoy full liberty,
within which he will be able to develop his faculties (no longer
distorted by being turned against one another in the unnatural
wars of men against men which alienate them from their common
human purpose) to their fullest and richest extent: prehistory will
end, human history will begin.
Marx developed these ideas in a series of works beginning with
attacks on the French and German Utopian socialists, on the
Hegelian leftists, on Hess, on Proudhon and on various semi­
liberal sympathisers. Their main errors seemed to him to consist in
misunderstanding the nature of the world in which they lived and
therefore the causes of historical change, which made some of them
suppose that the �existing State could be turned to use by the
revolution; or alternatively that reconciliation between the classes
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C IA L I ST T H E O R I E S IOI

was feasible. This Marx proclaims to be a blunder which inevitably

leads ro the frustration of those who hold it, and to the spreading
of error which must confuse the issue and betray the working class.
The modern State is necessarily a bourgeois instrument and cannot
be employed by workers without perverting their purpose in the
process. As for attempts at reform, these, whether moderate or
extreme, are, according to Marx, equally futile, since they presup­
pose the possibility of values common to the opposed classes, some
sort of common good for which co-operation can be organised:
but this is a fatal illusion with which the masters have bemused the
slaves. The reformers assume by a similar fallacy that the existing
system can be altered without being destroyed, but every existing
institution bears the seeds of its destruction within itself, as Hegel
had taught; until the final dissolution of the class war by the
victory of the proletariat, no institution has more than transient
historical value. Hence ro attempt to improve by reforms, like all
efforts at changing men's habits by peaceful persuasion or educa­
tion, is to build upon a volcano; history will sweep away these
blind attempts to construct edifices out of crumbling materials.
Marx, quite consistently, is opposed to all appeals to moral
sentiment or, except for tactical reasons, to temporary common
interest between the classes. Morality like everything else is
determined by the condition of the productive system. The only
rational appeal is to that future form of human life endowed with
its own proper moral system, which history - the next step, that is,
in the development of the forces of human production and
consequently of the human relations determined by them - will
inexorably bring. By bending all available effort to the enlighten­
ment of the workers about these truths (notably by making them
adequately conscious of the class struggle and of their own position
in it), and by organising them into a militant revolutionary army,
this inevitable process may be accelerated and the birth pangs of
the new society made less painful. These views, originally stated in
treatises composed before r 8 4 8, some of which were published
posthumously (for example, On The Jewish Question, the Eco­
nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The German Ideology, The
Holy Family) found their fullest expression in Marx's later works,
notably A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
Capital, the Critique of the Gotha Programme, as well as in the
more popularly written expositions by Friedrich Engels.
I02 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

VI

The revolutions of I 848 which spread like wildfire over Italy and
France and the German-speaking States soon offered a test of
Marx's analysis. They often began with an alliance of liberal and
radical nationalist democrats with socialists of various hues. Both
in France and in Germany a split between the socialists and the
bourgeois democrats and liberals developed, and the revolutions
ended with the forcible suppression of the socialists, often by an
alliance of liberals and moderate radicals with more reactionary
forces. In the period of profound disillusionment which followed
the failure of the revolutions of I 848-9, socialism appeared to
vanish from the scene and was by many given up for dead.
It was during this period that Ferdinand Lassalle founded his
German Workers' Union. His views were similar to those of Marx.
His most memorable thesis was that 'the iron law of wages', which
he had derived from liberal economists, must always force capital­
ists, under conditions of ruthless competition, to lower the cost of
production so far as economically possible, and with it the
workers' wages. This meant that all appeals to their humanity or
their self-interest were bound to fail, and the workers had only
themselves to lean upon. He accepted Louis Blanc's view that only
political methods can be effective and that the proper aim of a
workers' party therefore must be to recapture the machinery of the
State. Lassalle was also much influenced by the version of the 'iron
law' given by Rodbertus, a Pomeranian landowner, who taught
that untrammelled laissez-faire leads inevitably to the acquisition
of an ever-increasing proportion of social product - goods and
services - by the owners, owing to the operation of a system
whereby the workers are allowed only a bare subsistence wage
while the value of what they produce is continually increasing. It
leads also to indirect taxation, which falls more heavily on workers
than on owners and therefore causes underconsumption and
periodic economic world crises. This can be remedied only by
rational planning of economic life, which only the State can do
effectively. The workers must not demand 'the full fruit of their
labour', because the social process of production, into which
elements other than labour enter, cannot be split up into ingre­
dients; so that unless the social process as a whole is rationally
organised, labour cannot alone expect to get its proper reward. But
this can be realised only by peaceful methods which it may take
 S O C IA L I S M A N D S O C IA L I ST TH E O RI E S I OJ
centuries to evolve. To cover the interval Rodbertus suggested
various palliatives which became the commonplaces of all non­
socialist left-wing parties in Europe.
Marx maintained that the modern State was an instrument of
capitalist oppression and could not, even if captured, be used by
the victorious workers, but must be transformed into the 'dictator­
ship of the proletariat' - a transitional stage wherein the political
party representing the workers' interests would defend the victori­
ous revolution against the revenge of its defeated enemy until the
enemy was rendered powerless and the need for such a dictatorship
disappeared. Lassalle, following Rodbertus, sought direct State
intervention in resisting laissez-faire capitalism and organising the
collective welfare of the workers along socialist lines, and stands at
the opposite pole of thought to that of Proudhon and his
followers, who, like Bakunin and the anarchists, looked on the
State as the embodiment and source of all evil, and advocated solely
non-political economic organisation and pressure upon the gov�rn­
ment. Lassalle was a fiery orator and an immensely capable
organiser. His German Workers' Union became the first formid­
able political party, seeking parliamentary representation by the
votes of the citizens, founded on explicit socialist teaching. It
continued to grow in strength after his death in a duel in I 864.

VII

Apart from this, the decade after I 8 4 8 represents a dead period in

the history of socialism. The unorganised French socialists,
defeated after their abortive rising in June I 848, were persecuted,
exiled or silent. This applied beyond France to all save Lassalle's
followers in the later I 8 5 0s. In the I 86os the men of I 848 began to
show signs of life again, and in I 864 in London Marx helped to
found the International Working Men's Association with which
the history of modern socialism begins. This was composed of
delegates of trade-union and other workers' organisations from
various European countries, pledged not only to the improvement
of working-class conditions but to the transformation of political
conditions. It was dominated by Marx, who found his most
formidable opponent in the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.
Bakunin went further than Proudhon in opposition to all forms
of State control or indeed any coercion at all. He believed that since
the use of organised force was the principal obstacle to justice and
I 04 T H E S EN S E OF REALITY

freedom, anything at all likely to lead men to revolt against their

masters (including man's natural love of destruction, or the
activities of bandits and desperadoes, who are natural enemies of
the imposed political order) should be encouraged, until in one
final revolutionary act all authority was destroyed - after which
man's natural reason, goodness and love of liberty would assert
themselves and people would live for ever in free and happy
federative, co-operative, non-political associations. These views
played a considerable part in creating anarchist and syndicalist
parties.
As a result of the growing conflict between Marx and Bakunin
the First International finally succumbed in 1 876, after some ten
years' active existence, in the course of which it had achieved a
certain degree of international labour solidarity but little else.
Meanwhile a German socialist party, in opposition to the etatiste
workers led by Lassalle, was created by Marx's followers in
Germany. Eventually a fusion between Lassalle's followers and
those of Marx was arranged (at the Gotha congress of I 8 75 and the
Erfurt congress of I 89 I ) and a united Social Democratic Party
emerged in Germany, so formidable that in I 8 7 8 Bismarck took
fright and enacted ami-socialist legislation against it.
In France, the growth of socialism as a revolutionary party of the
workers was given a new direction by the Paris Commune of r 8 7 1 .
This arose after the defeat of France by Germany in r 870 and was a
rebellion by radical parties in Paris against the liberal government
of Thiers. Members of Marx's international organisation took
relatively little part in the revolt. It was mainly organised by left­
wing neo-Jacobin radicals, Proudhonists, the followers of Blanqui,
who believed in terrorism and revolution wherever and whenever
possible, together with less identifiable revolutionary elements.
The Commune was crushed after a brief and furious resistance and
its followers were executed and exiled in large numbers. Although
Marx disapproved of the tactics and theoretical errors of the
Communards, he recognised it as the first revolutionary govern­
ment established to promote socialist principles and establish the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and celebrated its martyrs in two
eloquent pamphlets.
The violence of the Commune so shocked conservative, liberal
and even socialist E;uropean opinion that the avowed adhesion to it
of the Marxists, a9d the less obvious sympathies of socialists
vaguely identified with Marxism, tended to compromise socialism
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C I A L I ST T H E O R I ES 1 05

in progressive circles for some years. When the Socialist (Second)

International was re-established in I 889, a very different mood
prevailed. Economic conditions had improved for the majority of
workers in most European countries. Marx and the militants were
for the most part dead or forgotten. The main purpose of the
workers of European countries, few of which were governed with
a degree of despotism which had been common earlier in the
century and still existed in Russia or Spain, lay in the general
improvement of their economic status, education, social services
and so forth. Independently of each other, but springing from the
same general conditions, there were born a number of national
'reformist' socialist movements.
In England, where there had never been a properly constituted
socialist party, the Social Democratic Federation, which had been
founded by such followers of Marx as H. M. Hyndman and such
quasi-Marxist sympathisers as William Morris and Belfort Bax, and
later the Socialist League, soon yielded in influence to the Fabian
Society, founded by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Sydney Olivier,
Bernard Shaw and other radical intellectuals, and attached more
firmly to Ricardo's doctrine of rent than to the Marxist theory of
surplus value. The Fabians believed, not in revolution, which under
British conditions seemed impracticable, but in the gradual increase
of State and municipal control over individual enterprise and in the
adaptation of already existing forms of social control, for example,
in the civil service, local government and other public organisa­
tions, leading, it was hoped, to a growing process of collective
control by rational experts over the entire social and economic life
of the nation. The Fabians sometimes spoke as if all State control as
such led to socialism; they approved of joint-stock companies,
because these already represented a form of collective organisation
all the easier to nationalise, and they echoed the views of Louis
Blanc in supposing that private enterprise would find itself elimina­
ted, not by specific socialist legislation or expropriation, but simply
by the more efficient working of public corporations, municipal­
ities and county councils, which would defeat the old-fashioned
capitalist by beating him at his own game with his own weapons.
This doctrine of socialism by gradual permeation of government
departments and local and municipal institutions denied the very
basis of Marx's socialism, with its stress on the inevitability of class
war and revolution, and asserted against it the possibility of
piecemeal socialisation and nationalisation.
ro6 T H E S E N S E OF REALITY

Although the Independent Labour Party, founded in r 89 3 , was

more sympathetic to militant Marxism than to the Fabian belief in
the 'inevitability of gradualness', it did not in practice engage in
revolutionary activity. The English trade unions, mainly concerned
with the improvement of their members' standards of living, could
be won, it was thought, only by a party which did not jeopardise
this aim by open conspiracy against the State, and the alliance
between trade unionism and socialism in England was effected by
an organisational and ideological compromise which has lasted to
this day, duly condemned by faithful Marxists as a betrayal of
socialism. Although some Marxists occasionally conceded that the
revolution when it came might not necessarily be violent - a point
which Marx himself had made in connection with highly industri­
alised countries such as England or Holland - yet it was a far cry
from this to faith in the slow process of conversion and enlighten­
ment, held by Fabians and trade unionists, who between them
were most instrumental in founding, in 1 900, the Labour Repre­
sentative Committee from which the British Labour Party devel­
oped.
An interesting but short-lived movement in England was that of
guild socialism, which sought to combine Marxist belief in class
warfare, and the necessity for socialisation of all means of produc­
tion and distribution, with an attempt to return to a somewhat
earlier tradition with its roots in medieval economic organisation,
and which has persisted in syndicalism and the co-operative
movement; namely, the attempt to place control of economic life,
not in the hands of the elected representatives of all the citizens as
such, but in the hands of producers (and, to some degree,
consumers) organised in accordance with their occupation or craft.
Under this doctrine, a man would be represented by elected
deputies in all the aspects of his various activities: inasmuch as he
belonged to more than one association as producer, consumer or
disinterested specialist or amateur, he would be able to vote for
persons who would represent all these various functions of his life.
In order to prevent the danger of a monotonous and uniform
bureaucratic centralisation and the destruction of individual values
by a collectivist State, wider scope and means of self-realisation
would be given to human needs and interests in all their rich
diversity by a reasonable degree of local and functional self­
government, maximum practical de-centralisation, and the encour­
agement of the fullest and most imaginative forms of personal self-
 S O C IA L I S M A N D S O C I A L I ST TH E O R I ES I 07

expression and the liberty of individuals and associations. The

guild socialists accepted the Labour Party's programme of achiev­
ing public control of the means of production, distribution and
exchange in Britain by peaceful parliamentary methods.
In France a more revolutionary tradition persisted: after the
debacle of I 8 7 1 the orthodox Marxists were reorganised by Jules
Guesde and Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, and carried on
political warfare against the ideologically more flexible groups led
by Paul Brousse, who inclined towards a more Proudhonist and
apolitical interpretation of the role of the working class. In I 890
there existed as many as six factions of the socialist party in France,
divided between Marxists, Blanquists, Allemanists, Broussists
(sometimes called 'Possibilists' because of their alleged tendency to
opportunist alliances with non-socialist radicals), and dissident
factions of these. They were as one in being atheist, republican,
internationalist, and in varying degrees stood for communist or
collectivist principles. Only the Marxists, however, were strictly
revolutionary, although this was also claimed by the various
syndicalist bodies which continued the anti-political tradition of
Proudhon and Bakunin; they drew inspiration from the violently
anti-parliamentarian doctrines of Georges Sorel, who warned the
workers against the contaminating influence of liberal democracy
and urged them to confine themselves to implacable economic
warfare by union actions - strikes and other forms of resistance -
within their factories and workshops, which would preserve their
moral purity and heroism, and render them saviours of a corrupt
and decadent society. Like the syndicalist Lagardelle, Sorel set
before them the goal of the 'general strike'; this, like the 'second
corning' to early Christians, was to function as a myth, a flag, belief
in which could inspire all feeling and activity even if it never
actually materialised; Sorel accepted Marx's apocalyptic vision and
his militancy and rejected his rationalism.
The French socialists had begun to elect deputies to the chamber
some years before their British brothers had succeeded in electing a
socialist to parliament; the most violent controversy in their ranks
occurred in I 899 when Millerand, a prominent evolutionary
socialist, had agreed without the authorisation of his pany to serve
in a radical ministry. This split French socialism into the intransi­
gent Marxist Parti Socialiste de France, led by Guesde, and the
Pani Socialiste Fran�ais, led by Jean Jaures, which recognised the
possibility of temporary alliances with non-socialist progressive
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

parties. When however, the conference of the Socialist Interna­

tional in 1 904 condemned all compromises of this type, Jaures
accepted his defeat and helped to reunite the party into a single
organisation. Since then, the socialist party of France has continued
with various fortunes as a legal political party. After the end of the
First World War a great many socialists entered the Communist
Party. The conservative elements of French socialism gradually left
its ranks, and disappeared for the most part into the wholly non­
Marxist party of Radical Socialists.

VIII

In Germany Marxist principles were represented by such men as

August Bebel and Karl Kautsky, who formally subscribed to the
principles of class war and pledged themselves to the revolution.
The gradualist heresy in Germany was enunciated most fully by the
'revisionist' Eduard Bernstein, who in the 1 89os pointed out more
clearly than anyone before him the apparent non-fulfilment of
various Marxist prophecies. Facts were facts, he insisted, and while
Marx had offered a correct analysis of historical change, and had
predicted the universal rise of big business, he and Engels had
misunderstood much else. Thus while control of finance and
industry was indeed being increasingly concentrated in fewer and
fewer hands, the number of small shareholders in joint-stock
companies and other enterprises appeared to be increasing just as
fast; the standard of living of the workers, instead of declining under
the pressure of the 'iron law of wages', was steadily rising; in
agriculture middle-sized individual holdings, so far from being
absorbed in vast centralised estates, were actually increasing in
number, at any rate in Western Europe; the middle class, so far from
being squeezed out by the pincer-movement of labour and big
business, as Marx predicted, was on the contrary absorbing into
itself the workers who, as they grew more prosperous, tended to
become shareholders in these same capitalist enterprises. The gulf
between the classes, so far from widening, was becoming cluttered
up with islands and bridges of various types which transformed its
original nature unrecognisably.
Bernstein saw no reason for believing that the historical process
was as inevitable as the rigid Marxists asserted, nor did he see in the
liberal State the i nstrument used by one class to suppress another;
on the contrary h� viewed even trade unions with suspicion, as
 S O C IA L I S M A N D S O C IAL IST T H E O R I ES

liable to become no less selfish and antagonistic to the interests of

society as a whole than individual capitalists, and preached the
virtues of universal suffrage and the growth of true social democ­
racy, which would enable the workers to satisfy their needs by the
simple expedient of majorities obtainable in parliamentary elec­
tions. On these grounds Bernstein attacked the guild socialists for
suggesting, for example, that factory managers should be elected by
the factory, because this put too much arbitrary control in the
hands of one section of society, the producers against the consum­
ers, and led to inefficiency as well; nor did he subscribe to the
Marxist slogan that the proletarian has no country. He pointed out
that the international solidarity of the working class was not a very
powerful bond when it came to international action, that an
increase of democracy within a country softened its class conflicts
and created an internal solidarity between the citizens, bound to
make the worker in the long run as free and active and influential a
member of his community as anyone else.
This process might take time but it could be shortened only by
the spread of democracy and not by the narrow tactics of bitter
class warfare. The political pressure which the socialist party in the
Reichstag was able to exercise appeared to be reasonably effective
in satisfying individual working-class claims. So far from a wider
chasm opening between capital and labour, capitalism itself
appeared to be in the mood of concession, and if the workers'
movement persisted along the path of gradual political and eco­
nomic development, it had a better opportunity of transforming
society according to its ideals than by fomenting a revolutionary
situation. Bernstein's formula 'the end is nothing, the movement
everything' represented this belief, according to which the mere
growth of socialist public enterprises in a capitalist world, with
corresponding increase of their political and economic power,
would obviate the need for violent expropriation. Nor were some
of the ideals of the average socialist - liberty, political and juridicial
equality, economic security and equality of opportunity, interna­
tionalism, anti-imperialism and peace - so very different from those
of the average left-wing liberal. Hence the desirability of collabora­
tion with other political parties sympathetic to the workers'
outlook, as did in fact occur in Britain, France and the Scandina­
vian countries. Naturally this view earned Bernstein the implacable
hostility of Marxists and revolutionary syndicalists, but it had a
1 10 T H E S EN S E O F REALITY

decisive effect upon the German social democratic movement and

was a cause and symptom both of its strength and of its weakness.
Even in Russia, the political and social condition of which was in
some respects medieval, this gradualist socialism made some
headway. The first properly socialist party in Russia, which had
inherited the tradition of unorganised liberalism, populism and the
revolutionary - to some degree, agrarian - terrorism of earlier
decades, was the Russian Social Democratic Party founded by
Georgy Plekhanov, Leo Deutsch and Vera Zasulich in 1 898. This
was originally a Marxist party which maintained that Russia was to
be saved from autocracy and exploitation only by the organised
proletariat of the growing Russian industries, and not by the
development of the emancipated peasant communes into modern
forms of communal agrarian ownership, as urged by earlier radicals
and revolutionaries, from such gradualists as Herzen and Lavrov to
such 'activists' as Chernyshevsky and the assassins of the emperor
Alexander II. In Russia, too, socialist gradualism had its propo­
nents in such intellectuals as Struve, Prokopovich and Kuskova,
who defended 'economic' and legal trade-union action against the
bitter attacks of such orthodox Marxists as Plekhanov and Lenin.
The earlier tradition of appeal to moral feeling, and the belief that it
was possible to avoid the horrors of industrialism by a direct
transition from the peasant communes to organised agrarian
socialism, was carried on by the Social Revolutionary Party which
did not accept the Marxist doctrine of the inevitability of the class
war, and believed in the possibility of transforming Russia by
democratic, that is, parliamentary, means into a joint industrial and
agrarian democracy, the creation of which individual terrorism
against the unyielding oppression of the tsarist autocracy would
materially assist. Oddly enough anarchism, despite the part played
by Bakunin and Kropotkin, never obtained a real foothold in the
Russian Empire.
In Latin countries the influence of Bakunin and Proudhon was
more powerful than that of Marx: although Italy and Spain had
social democratic parties, the main body of revolutionary socialists
belonged to various syndicalist and anarchist groups, inspired by
faith in economic warfare against the bourgeoisie and in proletarian
self-help, occasionally taking the forms of sabotage and strikes, as
being more effecti,ve forms of social pressure than open political
struggle. In the United States the Industrial Workers of the World,
 S O C I A L I S M AND S O C IA L I S T T H E O RIES III

whose followers occasionally perpetrated terrorist acts, also repre­

sented a form of syndicalist activity.
Certain new tendencies had in the meanwhile made themselves
felt. Social and economic theorists such as J. A. Hobson, V. I.
Lenin, Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg had added to
Marx's theory a doctrine about the uneven development of
imperialism and its effects on class war. Since imperialism in their
view was caused by the pursuit of fields for investment by financial
and industrial capital, and since in this race some countries had
captured territory, native labour and natural wealth before others,
the possibility of conflict between the capitalist classes of various
countries - the new 'hungry' powers against the old 'sated' ones -
had drawn appreciably nearer. Moreover, within the ranks of the
Russian Social Democratic Party a crucial split had occurred.
Lenin, who led the left wing, demanded a greater degree of
authoritarian centralisation on the part of the executive of the
Party, as well as the elimination from its control of all but
professional whole-time revolutionaries who were to lay down the
policy to be followed by the legal and overt trade-union and
political Marxists in Russia itself. Plekhanov, the leading theorist of
the Party, and Martov, one of its best pamphleteers and organisers,
believed in a less hierarchical, more democratic organisation. The
Party split into Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Mensheviks led by
Martov and later also by Plekhanov. On ultimate ends - a
revolution to be followed by a bourgeois republic, with Marxists
remorselessly driving for total socialisation - both sections
appeared to be agreed.
The First World War created a crisis in the ranks of European
socialists: not many days before the outbreak of hostilities, French
and German socialists had pledged each other to avert war by
displaying their solidarity against their respective governments.
This pledge had proved vain, and all but a few socialist deputies of
Germany as of France voted for war credits in 1 9 1 4, although the
former showed some signs of restiveness as the war wore on.
Dissident socialist organisations which had condemned the war as
an imperialist conflict, alien and antagonistic to the interests of the
workers, met in two conferences in the Swiss cities of Zimmerwald
(in 1 9 1 5) and Kienthal (in 1 9 1 6). These were attended by Lenin and
his Bolshevik followers and the 'left Mensheviks' (Martovites),
while Plekhanov and the orthodox Russian social democrats
supported the French comrades led by Guesde, and pledged their
I I2 THE SENSE O F REALITY
support to the Entente inasmuch as it was fighting on the side of
liberty and international ideals against Prussian militarism, autoc­
racy and the suppression of struggling nationalities by Austria­
Hungary.
When the Russian democratic revolution overthrew the tsar in
I 9 I 7, the Mensheviks maintained that Russia must, in accordance
with the Marxist analysis of history, first go through the phase of
bourgeois democracy under which alone its industrial and agricul­
tural organisation could develop along Western European lines,
thereby strengthening and educating the proletariat until the hour
when it became a majority and technological progress had rendered
it ready to take over full control. They maintained that socialism
presupposed far greater industrial development than Russia had
reached; that Marx had warned against coups in conditions of
scarcity as likely to lead merely to the replacement of capitalists by
the State as exploiter of labour; that the proletariat was as yet too
ill-organised, uneducated and weak to be able to govern democrati­
cally. This patently held still more of the peasants, who were
scarcely capable of playing their Marxist part even within the
bourgeois democratic republic. To seize power without adequate
mass support was, according to the Mensheviks, mere Blanquist or
Bonapartist opportunism, and contradicted the democratic basis of
socialism.
Against this Lenin and Trotsky, by now his closest collaborator,
maintained that, unless the socialist party seized power in what was
to them plainly a revolutionary situation and established a dictator­
ship in the name of the proletariat, it would be discredited and
demoralised. The inevitable capitalist phase must indeed occur; but
it must proceed, not under a liberal bourgeoisie harried by the
workers' organisation, but under direct proletarian control; unless
the soviets seized power immediately, as the Commune had done
in I 8 7 I , the revolution would, as in I905 , collapse.
The all-Russian soviet of workers, peasants and soldiers, which,
as in the revolution of I 905 , had been elected with indefinite
functions, now acted as a kind of alternative source of authority by
the side of the provisional liberal government; the Bolsheviks, with
support from the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries, urged that
it alone truly represented the proletariat and the masses, and was
'
therefore the only truly democratic body to be found in the general
chaos. Moreover, had not Marx himself agreed that if a Russian
 S O C IA L I S M AND S O C I ALIST TH E O R I ES 1 13

revolution set off a world conflagration, it might survive without

the necessity of an interim bourgeois democratic phase? Lenin in
1 9 I 7-I 8 confidently believed so: the warning voices of the ortho­
dox socialist parties of Western Europe were not to be listened to;
for they, and the orthodox Russian social democrats with them,
had, in Lenin's eyes, betrayed the cause in 1 9 1 4 .
Lenin's successful seizure of power in October 1 9 1 7 split the
world socialist movement into two sharply antagonistic factions.
Since the leaders of the Second International had not resisted and,
in some cases, had supported the war, since its principal theorist,
the leader of the orthodox German Marxists, Karl Kautsky, had
attacked the Bolshevik revolution as a betrayal by an extremist
minority of social democracy, and for this was denounced by
Lenin as a renegade, the Russian Bolsheviks, who had now taken
the name of Communists, decided to break with the Second
International and the International Federation of Trade Unions
which was connected with it, and created their own rival Commu­
nist (Third) International and their own world trade-union organi­
sation, the 'Profintern'.
Communist revolutions broke out in Bavaria and Hungary.
Abortive attempts in the same direction occurred in Prussia. In
1 9 1 9 the left-wing German socialists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg were assassinated in Berlin, and their comrades Kurt
Eisner and Eugen Levine in Bavaria, where the Communist
republic was suppressed. In Hungary, the Red terror was suc­
ceeded by an even more ruthless and brutal White terror; in Russia,
a systematic extermination of the opposition to the Communist
regime presently took the form of mass executions and imprison­
ments. In every country labour movements were split into those
who declared their solidarity with Lenin's authoritarian dictator­
ship of the Communist Party and disregard of Western democratic
procedures in favour of force and Saint-Simonist direction from
the top; those who resisted it as despotic; and those who in varying
degrees inclined to one or other of these extremes.
After some years of indecision, in the course of which yet
another International sprang up - the so-called '2/'; International',
with a centre in Vienna - a crystallisation finally occurred into, on
the one hand, social democratic parties and their associated trade
unions, which continued to believe in democratic, non-violent
political and economic action and peaceful agitation, and, on the
I 14 T H E S EN S E O F REALITY

other, communist parties dedicated to the overthrow of existing

non-communist regimes - if need be by violence - and bitterly
hostile to all other socialist parties as compromisers and traitors.
Trotsky's expulsion from Russia in 1 928 led to the emergence of
yet another organisation, the Fourth International, which claimed
to be the true descendant of both Marx and Lenin, opposed to
what it described as the bureaucratic corruption, opportunist
deviations and nationalism of the Russian Communist Party
headed by Stalin.
Beside small independent groups - of which there have at
various times been several in Great Britain, the United States and
the Latin countries - there remained outside the socialist move­
ment, but in some ideological sympathy with it, the syndicalist and
anarchist parties which continued either a Proudhonist, non­
revolutionary, peaceful, mutual-aid tradition, or a Bakuninist
tradition of conspiracy, terrorism and opposition to all authority.
To meet some specific crisis, temporary alliances between various
types of socialism have tended to occur. In 1 9 3 5 -8 the popular
front movement in Western Europe sought to unite all anti-Fascist
forces, in particular social democrats and communists, into a
political alliance against the Fascist States and those forces in
democratic countries which might seek to compromise with them.
Similarly during the Spanish revolution and civil war in 1 93 5 -9
intermittent alliances were struck up between left-wing parties in
Spain, ending in the virtual extermination of their rivals by Stalinist
Communists, and the victory of the Fascists, led by General
Franco.
After the Second World War most socialist and labour parties
contained wings or at any rate elements sympathetic to co-opera­
tion on a less or more limited basis with communist parties. These
tendencies were naturally stronger in Eastern Europe, where Soviet
influence was dominant, than in the West, where it was feared.
Nevertheless it remained true that the chasm which divided
Communists, including the independent national Communist
regime of Yugoslavia, from other socialist parties was wider than
ever. Orthodox socialism with its democratic organisation, its
toleration of differences of view within a common framework, its
belief in the acquisition of power by legal and parliamentary
means, and in gradu al socialisation, above all its steadfast regard for
the civil liberties o(the individual, pursued a path far distant from
 S O C IA L I S M A N D S O C IA L I ST TH E O RI E S II5

Communism with its rigid hierarchical centralisation, its abhor­

rence of any degree of political compromise with non-Commu­
nists, its rigorous discipline, its machinery for the physical repres­
sion of all differences of view or policy among its adherents, above
all its faith that the supreme end - the overthrow of all the forms of
capitalism - justifies any and every means towards it. As for the
foundations of doctrine, no important alteration has occurred in
any of the forms of social democratic (non-Communist) belief
since 1 9 1 9, the last occasion on which it was compelled to
formulate its position in the face of the charges made against it by
the leaders of the Communist lnternational.1

1 This essay was first published in 1950, and reissued with revisions in 1 966.
Some further changes have been made, but it has not been revised again in
substance to take account of more recent events, especially the collapse of
Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
 MARXISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE FIRST International Working Men's Association was created

in St Martin's Hall in London on 28 September 1 864. Its rules were
adopted in the last week in October of the same year by a score of
individuals, exceedingly obscure at that date, the majority of whom
are, if anything, even less familiar one hundred years after the
event! How many, even among well-informed students of nine­
teenth-century social history, could call to memory the lives, even
the names, of Limousin, Dupleix, Lessner and Hermann Jung,
Schapper and Bobczynski, or even Levy of Geneva or Major Luigi
Wolff? Who remembers the names of the rest of the Communist
League? The careers of Tolain, Fribourg, Varlin, De Paepe,
Eccarius, Howell, Odger, Cremer may be somewhat better
2

known. Still, it seems unlikely that even the part played by these
founding fathers would linger in the memory if it were not for the
central figure behind this organisation. It was he who made of this
scattered collection of individuals, not over-rich in ideas, or even in
organisational ability, an instrument which, if it did not itself alter
history, laid the foundations of a movement which did exactly this.
Karl Marx lived in London. He stood head and shoulders above
such minor German exiles of communist views as the artisans
Eccarius, Lessner, Schapper, who naturally looked up to him as
their intellectual leader. The British working-class leaders, such as
they were at this time, did not know him well, but some of the
more enterprising among them looked on him as a learned
revolutionary theorist good at providing and formulating ideas for
an international workers' association: consequently he (with his
friend Engels) was brought into the movement, played a leading

1This was written in 1964.

2It is worth noting that Eccarius, whom Marx tended to trust as a true
revolutionary socialist, seems to have turned out to be a paid agent of the Pruss ian
government.
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I I7
part in its British section, and so, after fifteen years of obscurity,
finally entered as a dominating figure on the public stage of
European and world history.
It is ironical to reflect that these crucial moments in the history
of international socialism, I 864 and I 903 - when, in this same city,
Lenin created the Bolshevik Party - should have occurred in a
country whose inhabitants remained, then and later, totally
unaware of the historic events that were occurring in their midst, in
particular of the fact that decisions were being reached on the basis
of doctrines largely founded upon their own social and economic
history - decisions in which, in defiance of the part cast for them
by Marx and Marxism, they did not, and still do not, play any truly
significant role.
Let me recall the circumstances of the time. The period of social
reaction which followed the debacle of I 848 was, on the continent
of Europe, by no means spent. In I 864 workers' movements were
very weak. Lassalle's striking successes in Germany showed what
could be done by genius and energy in the face of legal and social
obstruction, but his example was unique. Neither the Frenchmen
nor the Englishmen, nor the Belgians nor the Swiss who gathered
in St Martin's Hall, had anything like the influence of even
secondary leaders of the political parties of their time. Proudhon
was in impotent exile in Brussels, Bakunin was engaged in
imaginary conspiracies in London or Switzerland. Marx was a
poverty-stricken chief of a non-existent sect, burrowing away in
the British Museum, author of works none too familiar to
professional socialists, let alone to the educated public.
What then was it, it may be asked, that made the First
International, and the Marxist doctrines so strongly represented in
its preamble, statutes and rules, impress themselves upon men's
imaginations; and, more than this, achieve a concrete influence
greater than all the other organised social movements of the time -
Comtean Positivism, for example, or Utilitarianism or the Saint­
Simonian movement, or Christian Socialism, or Liberal Reform­
ism, or the League of Peace and Freedom - some of which were
based on clearly argued, clearly stated, all-embracing, reasonable
and persuasive doctrines, offering a solution to the perplexed and
the oppressed, no less comprehensive, or at times magnificently
apocalyptic, than Marxism itself? What, in short, made for the
impetus, the success, the overwhelming impact of the Marxist
I I8 THE SENSE O F REALITY
movement? Was it its doctrine or its organisation, or a combina­
tion of the two? I shall not attempt an answer, even in brief, to this
question, which seems more vital to the survival and prospects of
all mankind today than a century ago. Despite the fact that the
International was far from being a Marxist organisation in its
views - throughout its brief existence it remained a very uneasy
alliance of highly disparate ideas, Proudhonist, Jacobin, Bakuninist,
populist and, in the case of the trade unions, sometimes too vague
to be classified - yet its historical importance derives from its
association with Marx's name and doctrine. It was this that created
the image and the myth: which historically are at least as potent as
the bare truths round which they grow. The phenomenon has a
triple aspect: the organisation itself; Marx's doctrines, for which it
acted as a platform, and with which it later came to be, a little
mythically, identified; and its notoriety and prestige, which Com­
munism as such derived from the deeds and sufferings, and above
all the name, of the Paris Commune. Let me begin with the ideas to
which the organisation gave so great an impetus.
I propose to discuss these under five heads:
(i) The claim of Marxism to account for human history, and in
particular conflict, oppression and misery, in terms that claim to
be at once scientific and historical and to lead to foreknowledge
of a bright future - the reign of liberty, equality and prosperity
in the entire world - in other words a synthesis of scientific
method, historical realism and a guarantee of ultimate rewards as
real and as certain as any offered by religion or philosophy in
the past.
(ii) The provision of concrete ends, in both the short and the
long run, which it is natural for men to pursue; in particular the
identification of a specific enemy, triumph over whom alone can
inaugurate the liberation of mankind.
(iii) The clear division of men into the children of light and the
children of darkness; with the corollary that the nature of
objective facts, and not free, revocable human decisions on the
part of men, are responsible for the fate of the children of
darkness, a multitude condemned by history itself to perish;
from which it follows that humane efforts to save it are of
necessity known to be futile, and therefore irrational.
"

(iv) The expression in the general values of any society of the

 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I 19

interests of a particular class in power; and, in consequence, the

inevitable transformation of human morality into a new code,
corresponding to the rise of a new class engaged in the final
struggle against the forces of social inequality and exploitation, a
class whose requirements, since they are identical with those of
men as such, overrule all other ethical considerations.
(v) The identification of the interests of a specific human group
or class, the workers, the exploited proletariat, perhaps even
more simply the poor, with the interests of all mankind as such.
What in fact was created by Marx was a new ecumenical
organisation, a kind of anti-Church, with a full apparatus of
concepts and categories, capable, at least in theory, of yielding clear
and final answers to all possible questions, private and public,
scientific and historical, moral and aesthetic, individual and institu­
tional. The gospel of this new establishment, of what Saint-Simon
and Comte had dreamt, but which Marx and Engels created, was
addressed to the reason and the passions of real persons to whom
the expanding industrialism of Europe had already given self­
consciousness as a body united by common sufferings and com­
mon interests. These were workers in factories and shops, and on
the land - those, in short, who did not own their own instruments
of production, men whose condition formed the heart of what, in
the nineteenth century, came to be called the social question.
While I do not propose to expound the familiar principles of
Marxism, I think it as well to remark that they rest upon a
metaphysical foundation which is by no means self-evident, a vast
assumption which Marx took over from Hegel and classical
philosophy, and which he did not himself trouble to argue. This
assumption, important not only intrinsically, but on account of the
vast influence it has had, is the monistic conception of history.
The Russian Marxist Plekhanov was perfectly right in so
describing Marxism, for which, as for the classical thinkers, reality
is a single rational system. Not only do those who think in this
fashion see history and nature - the two great dimensions of
human experience - as explicable in terms of a single, all-embracing
system of discoverable laws which govern men and inanimate
nature alike, although each branch of the school formulated its
own laws, which it claimed to be the first to discover, but Marxism
in addition claims (in this respect like Comtean Positivism) that
these laws alone could account for the errors in thought and
1 20 THE SENSE O F REALITY
failures and sufferings in practice that have attended the history of
mankind thus far;1 and furthermore can alone distinguish what is
progressive from what is reactionary, that is, what is conducive to
realising the proper, rationally demonstrable, goals of men from
that which obstructs or ignores them. Marxism is based on the
assumption that all human problems are capable of solution; that
men are permanently so constituted (this is offered as an axiom,
both psychological and sociological) as to seek after peace, not war,
harmony, not discord, unity, not multiplicity. Strife, conflict,
competition between human beings are essentially pathological
processes: men may be so built that these tendencies are, at a
certain stage of their development, inevitable; what makes them
abnormal is that they do not fulfil those ends that men as men
cannot avoid having in common - the common and permanent
purposes that make men human.
It is this assumption that all human beings have a common
nature, change as it may, definable in terms of certain very general,
specifically human goals - a doctrine at the root of Aristotle and
the Bible no less than Aquinas, Descartes, Luther and the atheists
of eighteenth-century Paris - that makes possible talk of frustra­
tion, degradation, distortion of human beings. Men have perma­
nent spiritual and material potentialities which they can realise only
in one final set of conditions: when they cease from mutual
destruction, when they turn their energies from fighting one
another and unite them to subdue their environment according to
reason; reason being understood as that which understands and
seeks the satisfaction of needs that men cannot help possessing,
needs misconceived for historically explicable reasons in the past,
and misused to justify aggression and oppression. The central - and
uncriticised - assumption is that all human ends are, in principle,
harmonisable and capable of satisfaction; that men are, or can be
and will be, such that the satisfaction of one man's 'natural' ends
will one day not frustrate the quest for similar satisfaction by his
brothers.
This entails the falsity of all theories that accept the inevitability
of conflict, or even, as in the case of Kant, maintain that without
strife there is no progress, that it is the struggle for the light which

1 Past errors and suffering are seen as an inevitable prelude, as so many signs
and evidences of future felicity: a necessary episode in the great drama of human
history, not accidents, not meaningless disasters.
 MARXISM IN THE N I N ETEENTH CENTURY 121

each seeks to shut out from the other that makes trees grow taller.
It is directly opposed to every form of 'Social Darwinism'; it denies
the hypothesis that it is original sin or inherent evil, or natural
aggressiveness, or even the sheer variety and incompatibility of
human wants and ideals, that destroys the very possibility of a
seamless harmony, a complete unity of wholly rational beings
leading lives of frictionless co-operation towards universally accep­
ted and harmonious ends. Hence it is radically opposed to the
corollaries of earlier ideas, for example, that the end of political
action is not some static perfection, but the adjustment of interests
and activities as they arise, when they arise; since, according to such
ideas, it is natural to men to pursue different and, at times,
incompatible ends; nor is this an evil, for diversity is the price - and
perhaps the essence - of free activity. Hence all that political action
can achieve is the creation of machinery for the prevention of too
much friction, the suffering caused by too many conflicts and
collisions, without attempting to suppress them wholly; for to do
this, at whatever cost, is to crush men into a bed of Procrustes, to
press them into an artificial uniformity that leads to an impoverish­
ment, and occasionally the destruction, of the human spirit.
Marxism is opposed to this.
The history of political thought has, to a large degree, consisted
in a duel between these two great rival conceptions of society. On
one side stand the advocates of pluralism and variety and an open
market for ideas, an order of things that involves clashes and the
constant need for conciliation, adjustment, balance, an order that is
always in a condition of imperfect equilibrium, which is required
to be maintained by conscious effort. On the other side are to be
found those who believe that this precarious condition is a form of
chronic social and personal disease, since health consists in unity,
peace, the elimination of the very possibility of disagreement, the
recognition of only one end or set of non-conflicting ends as being
alone rational, with the corollary that rational disagreement can
affect only means - the upholders of the tradition of Plato and the
Stoics, the philosophia perennis of the Middle Ages, Spinoza and
Helvetius, Rousseau and Fichte, and classical political theory. Marx
was a faithful son of this tradition from the beginning to the end of
his life: his emphasis on the contradictions and conflicts inherent in
social development are mere variations on the theme of the
uninterrupted progress of humans conceived as a system of beings
1 22 THE SENSE O F REALITY
engaged in understanding and controlling their environment and
themselves.
From these classic premisses he drew the most original of all his
conclusions, and the most influential - the celebrated doctrine of
the unity of theory and practice. What you do is not merely the
best evidence of what you think - a better criterion for discovering
what you truly believe than anything that you yourself say or
think about your own convictions or principles. Marxism has at
times been reduced to truisms of this kind, but to do so is to
perpetrate a caricature. The Marxist doctrine is that what you do is
what you believe; practice is not evidence for, it is identical with,
belief. To understand something is to live, that is, act, in a certain
fashion; and vice versa. If such understanding and knowledge
belongs to the realm of theory, then it is the activity of thinking
along certain lines; if it occurs in the world of action, then it
consists of readiness to act in a certain way, the initiation of a
certain type of behaviour. Belief, thought, emotion, volition,
decision, action are not distinguishable from one another as so
many activities or states or processes: they are aspects of the same
praxis action upon, or reaction to, the world.
-

This entails a view of values, and of moral, political and aesthetic

goals, that has not always been understood by the simpler-minded
of Marx's disciples, and has indeed at times been reduced to vulgar
truisms. To be rational, for Marx, is to understand myself, the
situation I live in, above all its class structure, and my relation to it.
This pattern develops historically into the society of which I am a
member; it is as it is in virtue of the relations of its members to one
another, relations that are themselves determined by their connec­
tion with the productive process. To understand anything is to
understand what part it plays in this process, a process that has as
its ultimate, objective, unalterable purpose (for Marxism is nothing
if it is not teleological) the satisfaction of the true and discoverable
interests of men. Moreover to understand is to see the world in the
light of it: to live in a certain fashion. There can be only one true
answer to any given problem, whether theoretical or practical, one
path that is not self-destructive, one social policy or way of life that
is rational in any given situation; whatever it may be it must
always be directed towards the elimination of strife, to the
organisation of human energies, as Saint-Simon had taught, for the
attainment of p �'fer over nature, not over men, for this fails to
fulfil the ends of · men, which consist in a harmonious society in
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1 23
which all the ends of all its members are fully realised. This
solution alone is rational. All other forms of behaviour are not
rational, that is, they lead to various kinds and degrees of self­
distortion and frustration. To know what I must do I must know
what and where I am in the pattern of the processes of production
which determine the shape of every society and of the lives of its
members. Values are falsely divorced from facts by the philoso­
phers: for to value is to act. A rational valuation is the correct
assessment of ends, means, situations, agents involved in them. To
discover these truths is to apply them. It is not, on this view,
possible to analyse a situation correctly and fail to behave accord­
ingly, or vice versa, though the process need not always be a self­
conscious one. If I cannot know what my true goal is and how to
obtain it, I cannot be rational and I cannot determine myself to act
in the light of such knowledge.
This is not the crude utilitarianism (sometimes mistakenly
attributed to Marx) according to which I say to myself: 'Certain
objective laws govern the world and history; I had better find out
what these are and adjust myself to them, otherwise I shall be
crushed by the Juggernaut of History; and no rational being can
want that.' Against this kind of appeal to inevitable forces men's
moral consciousness has revolted in every age; for moments occur
when men know that it is morally (or even politically) better to
defend their absolute principles against any odds, rather than give
in and follow prudential rules, and this knowledge remains
unshaken when its precepts are called quixotic or Utopian or
inexpedient. The Marxist position is a more sophisticated one. Like
Hegel, Marx looks upon the division between facts and values as a
shallow fallacy: every thought embodies a valuation, no less than
every act and every feeling; values are already incarnate in my
general attitude to the world, in the total outlook that shapes or is
perceptible in all that I think, see, believe, understand, discover,
know, say. The notion of value, indeed of the possibility of a value­
free activity - detached contemplation, passionless description of
what there is, without any attribution of value - is, according to
this view, an absurdity. I see what I see with eyes that belong
uniquely to my age and its ideals, my culture and its values, my
temperament and its drives, and above all, of course, my class and
its interests. A realism which rests on the assumption that the facts
are objective entities, out there - in neutral space, as it were - and
can be viewed as they truly are without any assessment or
1 24 THE SENSE O F REALITY
interpretation of them - that is, without evaluation - is tantamount
to denying that men are end-pursuing, purposive, intention-form­
ing creatures. The notion of the dispassionate observer, free from
the historical stream that determines him to seek this and avoid
that, causes him to belong to a particular group involved in its
traditions and outlook, or else in revolt against them; the notion, in
short, of the self as a static entity and not as a perpetual activity,
that is, as a perpetual effort to do or be thus and thus - to behave in
this or that fashion vis-a-vis things, one's own characteristics,
above all other persons - is profoundly fallacious. Worse: it is a
disguise for retreat - escape from reality posing as dispassionate
detachment - what Sartre called bad faith. Consequently, only that
valuation, and the activity that expresses it, will be rational which
springs from a correct grasp of my historical position, that is, of
my position in the process determined by whatever is the domi­
nant factor in it - God or the laws of nature, or State, or Church,
or class - and consists in the choice of only those means which,
given this process, can alone effectively promote those ends which
as a rational being I cannot help seeking; cannot help, not in some
mechanical sense in which, say, I cannot help digesting, but in the
sense in which I cannot help reaching logically correct conclusions
if I employ logical methods of reasoning, in which I cannot help
trying to protect myself against dangers if I truly believe that they
threaten me and my purposes.
George Lichtheim is thus perfectly correct in asserting that Marx
did not believe it to be rational to work for the revolution, simply
because it was inevitable; but that he believed it to be inevitable
because the tension between the new state of the forces of
production and old legal or political or economic forces grows
literally unacceptable to those who have grasped what a rationally
organised society must and will be. 1 Thus the conflict between the
increasing socialisation of the means of production on the one
hand (an example of conscious, rational, free human activity
embodying a realistic grasp of how to realise ends that I cannot
help pursuing), and, on the other, the non-socialised means of
distribution, surviving from an earlier economic phase, must issue
in an explosion and a rational solution. This is the deeper, cosmic
sense in which la raison a toujours raison (Plekhanov's favourite

1 George Lichtheimr Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (London and

New York, 1961; 2nd ed. 1 964), p. 5 5 ·

 MARXISM I N THE N I N ETEENTH CENTURY 1 25
quotation). This tension, for Marx, makes certain an ultimate revolt
by a given society against frustrations which spring from its own
unavoidable ignorance or stupidity, and take the form of maintain­
ing institutions originally created by itself in response to real needs,
but now no longer capable of fulfilling them, and so transformed
into mere impediments to human progress, to the satisfaction of
basic human needs in the form which the social process has given
them. No doubt this pattern of partial fulfilment breeding its own
tensions, and diseases generating their own remedies, is itself
inescapable: but it is explicable in terms of men's own nature - the
miseries and splendour of men's reason and invention - and not of
some external non-human power which shapes men as it does,
whether they like it or not. The play is predetermined, but the
actors are not marionettes controlled by strings pulled by some
outside agency: they determine themselves. Their lines are set them
by their predicament, but they understand and mean them, for the
ends are their own.
This position, which, on the face of it, is clear, coherent and
rounded, conceals an explosive force, a dialectical twist not often
explicitly admitted by Marxist thinkers. Facts and values are fused
together; men are made what they are by the interplay of historical,
social and material-natural factors, and their values are determined
by the tasks that history sets any rational creature that possesses, in
common with other rational creatures, certain common social ends
which it is of the essence of its rationality to have, to understand, to
strive for. So far, so good. But if history is a process of perpetual
change; if men by pursuing their historical goals alter not merely
their environment but themselves also in the course of it, as Marx -
following Hegel - argued with brilliance and depth; and if the
central motor impulse of human development is class conflict; then
social ends, that is, rules, principles, values, during the historical
process that leads to the Revolution, must perpetually be altered by
the changing relations of classes to each other and of individuals
within those classes (for in the end classes are but collections of
individuals, and their structure is a function of these individuals'
interaction); then there cannot, while the class struggle goes on,
exist universal, common human goals. No end or principle can be
so immutable and sacred that in a specific situation the demands of
the next step in the ascent of self-transforming humanity - a step
that, precisely because men are changed by their own efforts, they
cannot ever foresee, cannot fully know until they have reached it -
1 26 THE SENSE O F REALITY
may not justifiably overrule it. This is so until the final rational
order of society is reached, and what Marx called 'prehistory'
achieves its ultimate goal.
According to this conception the ultimate human end is the
freedom of men self-determined by their own unfettered reason, so
that progress is to be identified with the triumph of a given section
of mankind - say the proletariat - as sole carriers of this rational
development; and so it will follow that its interests, because they
are identified with the interests of all mankind, are paramount.
But - and this is a very crucial 'but' - since these interests, and
concrete demands, alter from moment to moment in the vicissi­
tudes of the struggle, if only because they are interests of men who
themselves, with their ideals, outlooks, scales of value, are in a state
of constant flux, what they dictate cannot be predicted; may differ
from everything held sacred today. It is, in the end, this that
outraged those who found particular Marxist positions immoral or
despotic. No matter how genuinely Herzen and Bakunin, Kropot­
kin and Lavrov, Jaures and Martov, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl
Liebknecht may have recognised the validity of the class analysis of
history, it is evident that they in fact did not believe that values
were nothing but functions of changing concrete situations, and
directly deducible from them;' could not bring themselves to
swallow the axiom that the interests of the proletariat as interpreted
by competent Marxist analysts acted as a compass pointing inexor­
ably to the morally as well as practically correct policy (for the two
must necessarily coincide), in the literal way that truth has often
been identified with the varying pronouncements of a privileged
priesthood by those religions which believe their Church to be the
ultimate and infallible depository of all truth and validity.
Some among these thinkers may at times have believed some­
thing resembling this in their studies or on a public platform: but
when it followed that, in a particular country and situation, the
claims of the peasants were to be ignored because the theory
pronounced them - not implausibly - to be a reactionary class; or
when the theory - in the name of the historical dialectic - ordered
the suppression of the democratic rights of members of working­
class parties in favour of the pronouncements of a chosen elite of
leaders; or commanded you to sabotage a war fought against men
and institutions whom you knew to be enemies of a civilisation

1 Karl Liebknecht was an avowed neo-Kantian.

 MARXISM IN THE N INETEENTH CENTU RY 1 27
which enshrined human values, or without which life seemed to
you scarcely worth defending (in 1 9 1 4 and in 1 9 3 9 ), or to suppress
elementary human rights if this was required by the Revolution (as
sanctioned by Plekhanov in 1 903 ), or to obey a dictatorship of self­
appointed Party leaders (as condemned by Rosa Luxemburg in
I9 8); or required perjury, falsification, alliance with Hitler, mur­
I

ders and massacres of the innocent - all the familiar enormities

which provoked the moral crises and bankruptcies and secessions
within the Communist Parties - the root of the sense of outrage is
always, it seems to me, some lingering belief in the existence of
human values more permanent (whether or not absolute) than a
constantly altering superstructure determined by a constantly
altering economic base. It is this that the earliest heretics, Hess and
Griin, Proudhon and the anarchists, could not give up: it was for
this that they were anathematised and excommunicated. It was the
return to this, relatively non-evolutionary, notion of moral princi­
ples that made Bernstein's revisionism appear so serious a danger
to orthodox Marxists: his adherence to universal ideals far more
than the budget of theoretical errors, false prophecies, tactical and
strategic fallacies with which he charged the uncritical disciples of
the master. What divided him from the orthodox was his unbreak­
able conviction that men remote in time and circumstances never­
theless understand each other in terms of a nucleus (or overlapping
nuclei) of common human values, that it is possible to understand
Hebrew prophets or Greek philosophers or medieval churchmen,
or Indian, Chinese, Japanese institutions, despite the vast differen­
ces in productive systems that divide these societies from our own.
Indeed, Marx too may in his actual life and writings have
demonstrated his own acceptance of this undoubted fact, on which
all human communication rests: but his doctrine entails the
opposite, or at least seemed to do so to some of his most fanatical
disciples. When Jules Guesde refused to support the defenders of
Dreyfus on the ground that this was an internal quarrel of the
bourgeoisie of no possible concern to the proletariat, his behaviour
was that of a faithful Marxist doctrinaire. A doctrinaire is a man
who is liable to suppress what he may, if he comes across it, suspect
to be true; indeed his everyday conduct is based on what his
doctrine directs him to think and feel and do. Consequently when
Lenin was accused of 'boundless cynicism' by Martov or others of
his associates, this was not perhaps entirely just. No one denies that
the whole purpose of Lenin's working life was the triumph of the
128 THE SENSE O F REALITY
proletarian revolution as he conceived it. He could and did justify
every one of the acts considered as cynical - from devious political
tactics at the meetings of the Russian Social Democratic Party to
the defence of armed robbery or blackmail by Party members - on
the grounds, considered by him sole and sufficient, of the require­
ments of the revolutionary movement. If this is condemned as
cynicism, it is so as an offence against a scale of values not
identified with the immediate needs of the militant section of a
class struggling for victory; otherwise it is not cynical, but the code
of a consistent revolutionary Marxist. Lenin may have made
mistakes about tactics; he may, as his opponents said and still say,
have mistaken the true interests of the class he served, or the proper
role of the leaders of this class: but what truly appalled his critics,
including those on the extreme left wing of socialism - Rosa
Luxemburg or Martov - were not intellectual or tactical errors, but
enormities - unforgivable sins against both socialism and morality.
What morality? What had Marx ever said - or Engels, for that
matter - that Lenin specifically denied either in theory or in
practice? At most it could be said that by establishing his rule when
he did, he deviated sharply from doctrine contained in the classical
Social-Democratic schema of the form of the proletarian revolution
in a society in which industrial conditions had not ripened
sufficiently to generate a proletarian majority technically equipped
to take over. But this at worst was a theoretical deviation, a
misreading of history. But cynicism? Or brutality? Those who
used these terms evidently still carried within them traces of an
older moral outlook not compatible with that strictly revolution­
ary Marxist morality which latter-day champions of Marxist
humanism, based on the early writings of the master, do not stress.
Evolutionary relativism is an intrinsic element of Marx's
thought, early and late. One of the main sources of strength, at
least politically, in Marxism is that despite anything said by Engels,
or Kautsky, or Plekhanov, or the textbooks of Marxism derived
from their writings, there is in Marx's teaching a bold and startling
combination of absolute authority and evolutionary morality: men
in their struggle to subjugate nature change it and themselves and
their values; but what is declared and commanded by those who
direct the struggle and grasp the new values (namely the Commu­
nist Party, or those, who are held to be its leaders, the elite who
alone fully understapd the direction of history) - that is absolute
for their own time. This relativity, whereby each stage of the
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I 29
process that culminates in the triumph of the proletariat has its
historical values, not assimilable to those of another stage, is
central: what Marx condemned in bourgeois values was not that
they are objectively false, as, let us say, phlogiston theory is false, in
the sense of being refutable by timeless criteria, but that they are
bourgeois; and therefore false in the sense of expressing or leading
to a view of life and a form of action that conflicts with the pattern
of human progress, and therefore cannot but distort the facts.
Truth, in this sense, resides in the vision of the most progressive
men of the age: these are, ipso facto, those who identify their
interests with those of the most progressive class of their time. The
proof of the fact that they see the facts correctly lies in action; the
correctness of their interpretation of history and its demands is
success in practice, success in advancing humanity towards true,
that is, the only truly attainable, human goals. The rules which the
crew of the ship obey will change, but the word of the captain and
officers, who alone know their destination, is final and irrevocable,
and defines what is true and right. This identification of truth and
authority with the activity, theoretical or practical, of an identifi­
able group of human beings had never hitherto been maintained by
secular thinkers. Churches have claimed this, indeed, but only by
appeal to supernatural sanctions. Marx's epoch-making move was
to substitute for the God of the Churches (at once one and
absolute, but revealing different aspects of his essence at different
moments) the movement of history: to stake everything on this, to
identify its authorised interpreters, and to make absolute demands
in its and their name. It is this notion of truth as the authority of
the group over the individual, or, for practical purposes, of the
leaders of the group over the group, that is now1 prevalent
wherever Marxism is dominant, where it has replaced the older
notion of an objective truth, for all men to seek and find, testable
by public criteria open to all. This is what Marxism has in common
with some of the great dogmatic Churches of the world: something
that not even Comtism or Saim-Simonianism, not to speak of
liberalism or utilitarianism or democratic socialism, or all the other
secular - anti-clerical - systems competing with Marxism for the
capture of the liberal, progressive and revolutionary section of
European opinion (especially those who believe Marxism to be
based on the laws of natural science), could successfully compete
I JO T H E SENSE O F REALITY
with. Marxism liberated its adherents from the old, permanent
'bourgeois' morality as effectively as Nietzsche or Nechaev could
have demanded. It does not follow that in practice some Social
Democrats and Marxists, at least before our own time, could not be
good and decent men. This was taken for granted - too much so
for some.

II

To live is to act. To act is to pursue goals, to choose, accept, reject,

pursue, resist, escape, be for or against an entire form of life or
some ingredients of it. The self-conscious know this, the unself­
conscious merely do it; values are therefore part of the very texture
of living that includes thinking, feeling, willing; we do not begin by
placing ourselves on some Archimedean point outside the world,
whence we choose this or that ideal at will, like goods in a shop; we
are, as Aristotle had maintained, born into a world and a society;
we find ourselves committed to them by the way in which we
normally act, by the fact of being where and when and as and what
we (and our societies) are; in becoming aware of this we perceive
contradictions between facts and our notions or fancies, or
between our ideals, or between ends and the means adopted to
serve them; and can - that is what being rational consists in - seek
to remove these by a fuller understanding of the facts. If we are
Hegelian idealists the 'facts' are constituents of a spiritual-cultural
process of activity; if we are materialists, they consist of material
objects and the laws they obey and efforts by concrete human
beings in time and space - themselves natural entities also - to
dominate these external objects, including their own bodies and
each other. These efforts are designed to achieve the agent's
freedom from uncontrolled factors, to enable him to direct himself
by 'harnessing' whatever his life depends on, in the first place food,
shelter, security, but ultimately whatever else he can control within
the physical and psychological boundaries imposed by nature.
Hence to divide facts from values as Hume and others have done ­
the description of what is from what should be - is impossible.
Any description of what is, embodies an attitude, that is, a view of
it in terms of what should be: we are not contemplating a static
garden; we are involved in a movement with a perceptible direc­
tion; it can be correctly or incorrectly described; but any descrip­
tion must embody a valuation, that is, a reference to the goals
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IJI
towards which the movement proceeds, and in terms of which
alone it can be 'understood', goals that we have not chosen, but
which are part of our essence and determine what we ourselves
choose or reject.
That is the metaphysical basis equally of the Aristotelian,
Hegelian and Marxist systems, nor would the Young Hegelians of
the 1 8 3 os and early 1 8 4os have dissented from any of it. Nor is the
conception of history as based on social classes novel. As Marx
himself conceded, this had been a powerful instrument in the hands
of the French liberal historians during the Restoration, who had
explained social development in terms of the conflicts of classes
conceived in more or less economic terms. What was original in
Marx's analysis was the notion of bourgeoisie and proletariat as
historical categories, due to arise and to vanish at specific historical
stages. Proletarians are a class of persons - workers - who are
separated from their tools - their means of production - as well as
from their raw materials and their product, all of which were
owned or taken away from them, by the master; a master who in
effect owned his workers, inasmuch as the worker had become,
without the institution of legal slavery, a creature whose labour
power was itself bought and sold on the market like any other
commodity. This class - the proletariat - had lost its moral or
social function in society; it was no longer conceived as an element
in a social whole with its own unique contribution to the common
purpose of this whole to which all the members of a society
consciously contributed. According to Marx, labour, or the
capacity for it, had become mere material to be 'exploited' - an
object, not a subject, a commodity, treated (whatever men might
say or think) as if it were a thing, a non-human entity, like wool or
leather or a piece of machinery, as something usable, not as a user,
as 'human material'! not as persons for whose sake everything
that is done is, or at least should be, done. This thesis, whether or
not it was valid, had important political and moral corollaries.
To begin with, it served to identify the enemy. The motor power
of history was held to be the class struggle, a pathological
condition for which no one in particular was 'responsible', and one
due, according to Marx (and others before him - Adam Ferguson

1 A phrase that later Marxists were quite naturally to use in a non-pejorative,

descriptive sense - this marks the distance of Bukharin, for example, from Marx
himself.
1 32 THE SENSE O F REALITY
for one), to the division of labour which the struggle to control
nature created, a struggle that itself sprang from the de facto
physical and mental constitution of men, and more broadly the
facts studied by physics and biology. If class war, then, was the
motor force of human history, it followed that one of the two
struggling classes (why only two? - but that is what Marx taught,
unlike Hegel, who, contrary to popular misconception, allowed a
many-sided conflict) embodied progress, that is, the stage of
human development that came closest - to date - to control over
nature and the self; while its antagonist represented an earlier stage,
further from the goal, and therefore had to be defeated as a class
before the possibility could arise of any further advance towards
the goal - whose absolute validity for its own stage of evolution
could not be questioned. The outlook, beliefs, ideals, institutions,
cultures, religions of men are part and parcel of the historical
situation, that is, conditioned by the development of productive
forces, and are at once active elements in, and the clearest
symptoms of, the particular stage which the class struggle has
reached. Ideals, codes of behaviour, are weapons in the struggle,
conscious or unconscious; that is to say, interests, though often
disguised in the form of lofty abstractions; interests of a particular
class, though often posing as universal human goals; functions of a
particular time and situation, though often 'masquerading' as
unalterable, eternal, universal, natural laws exempt from change.
To show them in their true guise is to 'demystify' them, to unmask,
'demythologise'. But Marx's boldest, and politically most decisive,
stroke was the identification of one particular class with mankind
as such. All previous classes pursued sectional interests: despotic
oriental bureaucracies, Roman patricians and knights, feudal lords,
capitalist accumulators. But the exploited, degraded, dehumanised
proletariat of modern times - the lowest class of all - having no
class below it, represents man as such; its class interests, being the
minimum needs of men as such, are the interests of all men, for it
has no interests that conflict with those of any other human group;
deprived to the highest degree compatible with the preservation of
life and animal activity of all sources of human satisfaction, what it
needs and claims is what men as such must have if they are to lead
lives capable of being described as human.
This leads to a conclusion and a prophecy of radical importance.
All other classes-are historical formations destined to pass away,
together with the particular interests of their time and situation, no
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I3J

matter how much they may look timeless and unalterable. They
will perish and with them will vanish the institutions that came
into being to serve their particular needs, although they pretended
to be embodiments of eternal justice (the legal system) or the
eternal laws of supply and demand (the economic system) or
eternal truths about man, his purpose and his destiny (priesthoods
and Churches). The temporary and class-conditioned character of
all these institutions and creeds can be unmasked - history is full of
broken relics of such pretensions. But there exists one class - the
proletariat - whose interests, since it has no characteristics which
are not shared by all other men as such, are the interests of all
mankind; its ideals are not a masquerade for something else -
concealed sectional interests. It was a brilliant and telling stroke to
identify the interests of one particular class with the interests of all
men; so that while all previous beliefs and institutions which
belonged to this or that social order could be represented as so
many conscious or unconscious falsifications of reality - various
kinds and degrees of illusion, self-deception or deliberate trickery,
designed to prop up the domination of a particular class - one set
of beliefs, one form of social structure was exempt from this
inexorable decree: those of the working classes, at least those which
embodied the acts and opinions of the men who understood the
true position and prospects of the proletariat, whether they
themselves belonged to it or not. In their case what would
necessarily have been the fantasies of any other class turned out to
be truths, a correct view of reality and a correct guide to action. An
interest is to be classed as mere interest only when it conflicts with
other interests; where it is truly universal, it ceases to be a 'mere'
interest, and becomes the proper, universally valid, end of man.
The liberating knowledge of the truth which earlier doctrines had
discovered in the soul of the true believer, or in sacred books, or
the pronouncements of the Church, or metaphysical insight, or
scientific enlightenment, or the general will of an uncorrupted
society, Marx had lodged within something much more concrete ­
the minds and activities of working men who (with his help) have
arrived at an understanding of the world in which they live, its
machinery and the unalterable direction of its growth.
One cannot exaggerate the political results of this move: Marx
provided the angry, the miserable, the poor, the discontented with
a specific enemy - the capitalist exploiter, the bourgeoisie. He
proclaimed a holy war which gave the poor and the exploited not
1 34 T H E SENSE O F REALITY
only hope, but something specific to do, not simply the task of
self-education in the positive sciences (as recommended by, say,
Comte) or political pressure through legitimate channels as permit­
ted by constitutionally established authority (as advocated by Mill
and the liberals), still less contempt for the values of this world and
the attainment of serenity and happiness by unworldly spiritual
resignation (as recommended by some at any rate among the
Christian teachers), but organisation for ruthless war: with the
prospect of blood, sweat and tears, of battles, death and perhaps
temporary defeats; but, above all, the guarantee of a happy ending
to the story. For the stars in their courses are fighting for this
consummation. This none of the rival prophets promised or
demanded: Proudhon came nearest to it, but his deep hatred of
centralisation led him to prohibit mass organisation and political
action. It was as plain to Marx as to Bismarck that the only way to
fight power is by power: and power in the modern world requires
the organisation of as many human beings as is practicable, and the
employment by them or on their behalf of the only instruments
capable of crushing resistance - political and military measures. If
the institutions and the force of the enemy were to be overcome, it
could be done only by the conquest of political power; the enemy
could be finally crushed only by an act of coercion, by revolution.
The ends of the victors might not themselves be political at all;
the State for Marx (as for Bakunin) was always only the jackboot,
an instrument of oppression to be done away with as soon as
feasible; but the means remained necessarily political, for these
were the only effective weapons of the contemporary world, made
so by the particular phase of the productive forces and relation­
ships that determined the shape of, at any rate, European society ­
the particular modern form imposed upon the class war by the
intelligible pattern of history herself. This doctrine gave the
workers a concrete programme, and more than this, a total
Weltanschauung, a morality, a metaphysics, a social doctrine, a way
of testing and measuring everything that they were offered by
teachers and clergymen and politicians and books and all the other
forces that form opinion, the total system by which we live, a total
substitute for the rival schemas - those offered by the Christian
Churches or by liberal atheism, or by nationalism, or by the many
confused and uneasy mixtures of all these.
Let me make , this point even more sharply. Marx's unique
achievement was to split mankind into two worlds, more deeply
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 135
perhaps than had occurred since the rise of Christianity against
paganism. Before Marx it is, I think, true to say that there had
existed since, let us say, the Greek Stoics a general assumption in
the Western world of the existence of certain common values,
values common to all mankind. The assumption of Christian
attempts to convert pagans or of Protestant arguments against
Catholics, or even between enemies in wars or revolutions, was
this: that any man could, in principle, unless he was mentally
deficient, understand any other man; that if men were in error, they
could be converted by argument; that though a man might be deep
in heresy and illusion, something could always be done, or at least
attempted, to bring him back to sanity; in extreme cases coercion,
torture, might be needed to destroy the obstacles to the perception
of the truth - or even death, which would at any rate liberate the
heretic's soul and allow it, in the world to come, to see that light
which shines equally for all men. In wars and revolutions the
appeal might sink to the level of sheer expediency, but still it was
assumed that the conquered would surrender by an act of rational
choice - because they were endowed with the capacity, present in
all men, to understand their own good - to see that in this case they
would lose more by resistance than by acknowledging defeat.
Whether the argument rested on universal principles, scientific
truths founded on observation and reasoning, or sheer superior
power, the assumption remained that communication could always
be established - the purpose of terror or violence was, at least in
theory, conversion to, genuine acceptance of, the point of view of
those who used these weapons. The number of those who must be
destroyed because they would not be saved must be few: the
incurably fanatical, the abnormal, the mad.
But if the class-conflict theory of history was correct, this basic
assumption was not true. If I think as I think and act as I do it is
because what makes me what I am, whether I know it or not, is my
membership of a particular class that is engaged in a struggle for
victory or a hopeless attempt at survival in a particular phase of
human development; I can scarcely be expected, then, to see the
world through the spectacles of another class, the elimination (or at
least neutralisation) of which is the whole raison d'etre of my own
class. I am what I am because I am involved in the objective
situation of my class on the historical ladder; I cannot be expected
to understand even the language used by a spokesman of a class
differently conditioned; for try as I might to listen, I am bound to
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
translate it into my own conceptual schema and behave accord­
ingly; so that there will be no true communication. But if this is so,
then it is no use trying to explain to the others the errors of their
ways, no use arguing, no use hoping that if one can only convince
the other side of the hopelessness of their position, of the fact that
they are historically doomed, they will abandon the struggle and
succumb and be saved. It is still more absurd to bring home to
them their wickedness - for this presupposes a minimum universal
standard of morality or moral understanding which ex hypothesi
does not exist, if each class is held to have its own morality.
This, if it is valid, is a radical discovery: for it undermines the
basic assumptions of rational dispute, of the possibility of
uncoerced consensus which alone justifies democratic government.
In a class-divided society, there is in principle no possibility of a
rational compromise between groups incapable of understanding,
indeed of not seeking to destroy, each other. Hatred, historically
inevitable hatred, blows up the entire basis of a unitary State, of
society, government, justice, morality, politics, as hitherto con­
ceived. Those whom history has doomed, it has deprived of
understanding. They are like the pagans whom Israelites were to
eradicate in their entirety, condemned by God utterly. Others had
spoken in terms of class conflict - Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen,
Weitling, the 'True Socialists', Hess, Rodbertus, Proudhon, Baku­
nin had done so. But they allowed the notion to slip in that a
pacific solution was, at least in principle, thinkable - that enough
argument, enough rationality on everyone's part (however difficult
to achieve in practice), and perhaps the other side would under­
stand and abdicate. So Saint-Simon had thought the Jacobin Terror
in the great French Revolution could have been avoided if the
Jacobins - and 'the rabble' - had not been so uneducated, so stupid
as to ignore how much they could have achieved if they had not
cut off Lavoisier's head or caused Condorcet's suicide, but on the
contrary placed themselves under their guidance. This for Marx
was precisely the unhistorical attitude that reduced these thinkers'
doctrines to absurdity: for it militated against the deepest of all his
beliefs, that history was the history of class struggles. This for him
meant that men were formed by their objective situation in history,
and could not po,ssibly see what their situation made them unable
to see: the Jacobins, however confusedly, represent interests not
reconcilable with those of the class to which Lavoisier and
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH C ENTURY 137
Condorcet belonged, i n terms of whose interests, however invol­
untarily, they thought and acted. Class consciousness was all.
Let me illustrate this by three images. If I am on a mounting
escalator, as it were, I can afford to look at the facts without terror,
for whatever happens will be evidence, true evidence, of the ultimate
victory of my class, if I made my prognosis correctly, as Marx and
Engels thought they had done, for my awareness of ascending is not
illusory. But if I am on the descending stair I cannot be expected to
see the facts in a true light: for they are too frightening. Men, as has
so often been remarked (especially by Christian thinkers), cannot
face too much reality. Marx thought this true only of those whose
defeat was imminent, the downward-tending groups. They try to
rationalise their position by every possible means: defend their
'mere' (that is, class-bounded) interests as universal ideals, see their
class-created and class-preserving institutions as just or rational,
and, indeed, as eternal and unalterable, regard these ephemeral
works of men, structures in which men have embodied their
temporary vision, religions and Churches, laws and systems of
justice, arts and philosophies and social and economic structures, as
possessing the stability and inevitability of natural forces, and so
treat them as embodying absolute standards of value and truth. This
fallacy he called reification, and those who worship such man-made
institutions as supernatural, or natural and therefore unalterable,
forces he described as being 'alienated', divorced from their own
creations, from a society which is their own or their ancestors'
handiwork transformed into an external entity, a transcendent
authority, an idol to be worshipped.
My second image is that of a man who is drowning: that is surely
not the moment to ask him about the temperature of the water, or
indeed his views about anything else; he will do anything to save
himself, even if it is wholly futile. This, for Marx, is the contempo­
rary position of the bourgeoisie. Debarred as it is by its historical
position from seeing reality correctly, it cannot be argued with,
cannot be convinced. It can only be despatched to its doom as
effectively and swiftly as is feasible, if the next stage, the emancipa­
tion of all mankind, is to be achieved as painlessly and rapidly as
possible.
Perhaps my third image - from therapeutic medicine - will
convey this notion best: a man who understands reality, the nature
and incidence of the class conflict that determines the thought and
action of entire classes, is like a psychiatrist who understands both
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
himself and the patient; the patient understands neither himself nor
the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has nothing to lose by looking at
reality - for only knowledge makes it possible to choose rationally
between alternatives. In this case he is the self-conscious proletar­
ian (still more his leaders) who sees that his interests are those of all
mankind, that by pressing for them he is pushing open the door to
general liberation, that given the inevitable pattern of history he
need not shrink from looking: for everything that happens is grist
to his mill. The patient, the poor deranged patient, is the doomed
capitalist regime which cannot view the facts correctly, for its
vision has been impaired by its historical role: it harbours delusions
to which it clings pathetically, since they alone enable it to live and
think and act at all; if it could see things as they truly are, it would
see that it was doomed. Hence it is idle to ask it what it thinks
about itself or anything else; the only value of the patient's own
observations and ideas is as so many symptoms of its psychical
condition which are of help to the physician; as descriptions of
reality they are wholly valueless. Yet the madman may, of course,
have enough sheer strength left to hurt or destroy the psychiatrist
if he does not take care; the psychiatrist must overpower the
lunatic; he must provide him with a strait-jacket or kill him, if he is
to make the world safe for sane men. Above all, it is no use
preaching to the bourgeoisie: it cannot hear, it cannot understand,
history has rendered it deaf to reason and blind to reality. That is
how classes fall before their successors.
This conception, at one blow, undermines the entire notion of
the unity of mankind, the possibility of rational (or any other kind
of) argument among men of different outlooks and persuasions:
the notion of man which is the heart of all previous views of life;
the central pillar on which the entire Western tradition, religious
and secular, moral and scientific, had hitherto rested. The Marxist
doctrine is a terrible new weapon, for its truth entails that there are
entire sections of mankind which are literally expendable. It can
only be false humanitarianism to try to rescue classes irrevocably
condemned by history. Individuals, of course, can avoid this
destruction, and may even be helped to escape - Marx and Engels
themselves did, after all, abandon the sinking ship on which they
were born for the seaworthy vessel of the proletariat; they crossed
over to the party of humanity; so did others. But the class as such is
doomed and cannot be rescued. There cannot be mass conversions,
 MARXISM IN THE N I N ETEENTH CENTURY 1 39
for the fate of human groups depends not on free actions - the
movements of the spirit - in the heads of men, but on objective
social conditions, which guarantee the salvation of one class and
the destruction of its rival.
This nee-Calvinist division of mankind into those who can (and
will for the most part) be saved and those who cannot, and will (for
the most part) perish, is novel and somewhat frightening. When
this separation into the elect and the evil who cannot help
themselves was translated into racial terms, it led, in our century, to
an enormous massacre - a moral and spiritual catastrophe unparal­
leled in human history. The fact that the rationalist Marx would, of
course, have fought this irrationalist wave with all his might as a
monstrous nightmare is beside the point at issue. The division of
mankind into good sheep and evil and dangerous goats, incapable
of turning into sheep, with no hope of salvation, enemies of
mankind - and the claim that this sentence of death is based on a
scientific examination of the facts - is a turning-point in human
history. A doctrine which identifies the enemy and justifies a holy
war against men whose 'liquidation' is a service to mankind
releases the forces of aggression and destruction on a scale hitherto
attained only by fanatical religious movements. But these, at least
in theory, preached human solidarity: if the infidel accepted the
true faith he was to be welcomed as a brother. But Marxism, since
it spoke of objective conditions and not subjective convictions,
could not allow this. Neither Marx nor Engels ever spelled out this
doctrine: but their followers understood and believed it in the most
effective fashion possible - by realising it in practice. The fact that
these implications may well have been remote from the minds of
the group of men gathered in St Martin's Hall under the eye of
Professor Beesly, a left-wing Comtian, who presided over it with
great benevolence, does not diminish their validity and historical
importance: Lenin, who acted on these assumptions with his
customary single-minded consistency, did not in any particular
betray the principles of his master. Those who recoiled from such
practices recoiled, whether they knew it or not, not from some
peculiarly fanatical exaggeration of Marxist doctrine, but from
Marxism itself. It was for failing literally to identify moral
standards with the changing needs of a particular body of men that
Proudhon and Hess, Herzen and Lassalle, were denounced as fools
or knaves.
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY
III

This may have led us far afield from Marxism as a movement in the
nineteenth century, and it is of course true that the full force of
Marx's philosophical ideas, rich and comprehensive but sophisti­
cated and at times none too clear, was scarcely realised by the
majority of even his closest followers, not to speak of the founding
members of the First International. Such thoughts as those that I
have outlined were not likely to have been present in the minds of
Tolain or Jung, Odger or Cremer, or even the faithful Eccarius,1
who simply looked on Marx as a learned and implacably radical
German thinker, champion of the rights of the working classes,
thunderer against exploiters and bosses and their regime, a man
likely to have more arresting ideas and greater powers of exposi­
tion than they themselves, and a capacity for drafting a programme
for international consumption which they did not feel themselves
sufficiently competent to aspire to. Even Engels and Liebknecht
did not fully rise to the height of Marx's terrifying vision. Marxism
in their hands was modelled on the natural sciences as they were
conceived in the nineteenth century. Engels' expositions bear a
strong family resemblance to Comtean positivism: nature and man
obey inexorable laws, not invented by them, but which they
cannot alter, and it is as well to understand these laws, which
explain the past and predict the future, if one is to be effective in
action. In Engels Marxism became a materialist-positivist sociol­
ogy, with laws different, indeed, from those proposed by Comte or
Buckle, but laws in the same sense; and generations of Marxists,
from Plekhanov onwards, adopted this simplified version, which
omitted the heart of the doctrine, that of the absolute unity of
theory and practice. They uttered the words, they spoke of
'dialectic'; indeed Plekhanov, as is well known, invented the term
'dialectical materialism'. But it would be idle to look into his works
or those of Lenin, or Kautsky, or Mehring, or Bernstein or Guesde
or Lafargue, for a satisfactory explanation of these terms or the
parts they played in Marxist thought. For that we have had to wait
for Marxists in our own century, who have given us a Marx very
different from the Darwin of the social sciences of Engels' sketch,
or the calm sociologist drawn by Kautsky or Plekhanov, or the
supreme political strategist, tactician and revolutionary of the later
Russian tradition: All this is so. Nevertheless, something of the real
(

1 But see p. I I 6 above, note 2.

 MARXISM I N THE N I NETEENTH CENTURY 141

Marx did penetrate into the First and Second Internationals. I t is

this unique something, it seems to me, that gave them their unique
characteristics.
To begin with the theory of class war: the attitude of 'we' or
'they'; above all, the doctrine of the impossibility of social
compromise between one class and another. This is in principle
different from the either/or positions of earlier extremists, leaders
of religious or political movements and parties - Catholics or
Calvinists, Babeuf or Maistre, Blanquists or radical anarchists. For
these, while they proclaimed the total incompatibility of opposed
doctrines, did hold out the possibility - indeed the prospect - of
ultimate unity, of the salvation of the enemy by his conversion. In
drafting the address to the First International Marx allowed the
formula 'simple laws of morals and justice, which ought to govern
the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the
intercourse of nations',1 but in so doing he was all too conscious
of making a purely tactical concession to the absurd notion of a
universal morality, which foolish idealists who did not understand
history, like Moses Hess or the still more foolish liberals, believed
in. Marx wrote to Engels that he had been compelled to insert
some phrases about rights and justice which 'can do no harm'2 -
and this was not, as it was sometimes interpreted, a mere revulsion
against the cliches and commonplaces which every liberal and
socialist group, every movement for the improvement of mankind,
had automatically adopted and thereby deprived of all force and
meaning - it was a genuine hostility to their morality, that is, to the
notion of the existence of ultimate human ends, common to all
men as such.
To Marx this was the most dangerous of all heresies, inasmuch as
it held out the possibility of conciliation, collaboration with the
enemy - not only temporary armistices, in which he believed,
tactical retreats pour mieux sauter, in order to launch even more an

1 References for quotations from Marx are given, by volume and page, to two

editions, one in German, one in English: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke
(Berlin, 1 9 5 6-8 3; hereafter MEW); Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works
(London, New York and Moscow, 1975- ; hereafter CW). The translations from
the German used by the author do not necessarily follow the English edition,
which is cited for the convenience of English readers. If the passage was originally
written in German, the MEW reference is given first; and vice versa. The reference
for this passage is CW xx I J , MEW xvi I J .
2 Letter from Marx to Engels, 4 November 1 864: MEW xxxi q , C W xlii 1 8.
142 T H E SENSE O F REALITY
effective attack, preferably (as Lenin afterwards insisted) from deep
within the rear of that enemy, but genuine harmony of interests,
peaceful liquidation of differences, not ending in the total elimina­
tion of one class by the other. For Marx any real concession to
them would ruin the appeasers, for it would inevitably be con­
demned by the march of events - by the emergence of the new
revolutionary men. This is why Lassalle, who had left nothing to
be desired in the ferocity of his campaigns against the bourgeoisie,
is damned nevertheless for supposing that the workers could use
the State - always a class instrument with which to crush class
resistance - as an instrument of progress for the workers, who
would, gradually, by political action, grow to control it and would
turn it to their own purposes.
Lassalle had already shown the cloven hoof in fearing a Franco­
Prussian war because he held that it was a danger to the unity and
advance of European culture, as if there were such a thing as a
single European culture and not a class culture and a class State that
must first be destroyed before anything else could possibly be built
up. Plekhanov had plainly shown a similar attitude to Germany in
1 9 1 4; he was a genuine internationalist - no one could accuse him
of temporising with the tsarist regime - yet the victory of the
Central Powers threatened the foundations of European civilisa­
tion, to which he was clearly committed, and from this he
instinctively, for all his revolutionary words, recoiled, no less than
Guesde, for whom the triumph of Marxism was bound up with
those democratic and anti-clerical principles for which France
stood, imperfectly it was true, but Germany and Austria did not
stand at all.
I believe that Lenin was fundamentally right in supposing that
Marx would have attacked such an attitude root and branch. He
detested the entire structure; the kingdom of freedom could not be
entered before the cities of the Philistines had been laid wholly
waste. In his account of the civil wars in France Marx insists over
and over again that the entire monstrous structure must be
destroyed and nothing be kept, that what is shot through with the
ideology of one class is useless to its conqueror and successor. That
is why he insisted upon the importance of trade unions (which for
Lassalle hampered the rational and centralising activities of the
State), because, however reactionary or blind, they could one day
be turned into representatives of a class interest, whereas the State
was incurably national. The State must not be captured alive, it
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1 43
must be eliminated, not, of course, as the majority of the anarchists
wanted, by opposition to political action and by terrorism, but by
organised political action, which alone is effective in the world.
This became historically important. Wherever the respect for the
State was part and parcel of the national tradition, wherever it was
interwoven with the deepest and innermost strands of national
culture and myth, as in France and Germany, the class content of
Marx's doctrine became watered down. There were plenty of brave
words: but it remained true that not only J aures and Vandervelde,
Bernstein, David and Vollmar, but the orthodox and the intransi­
gent - Kautsky and Bebel, Guesde and de Paepe - did not really
hate the State and did not really find it impossible to communicate,
and even cooperate in a limited way, with other classes. It was a
different story in Poland and Russia, Asia and Africa, where the
State was an external bureaucracy and had no emotional hold upon
either workers or intellectuals. Georges Sorel caught this element
in Marx and turned it to his own uses, but it remained correspond­
ingly remote from Jaures' generous, all-inclusive, democratic,
unfanatical humanism.
Marx gnawed continually upon this bone. In the Critique of the
Gotha Programme he does not merely attack the notion that there
could be a 'free State' for workers1 - for the State is much too free
already, free to forward the interests of the bourgeoisie, and, since
it is by nature a form of coercion, useless in a classless society - but
he objects to the phrase 'brotherhood of nations'2 on the ground
that nations cannot be brothers, only workers can. All talk of
ultimate principles and universal morality infuriated him. This
comes out most sharply in the famous words used about rights -
another trap for the unwary - which so delighted Lenin later,
'Right can never be higher than the economic structure and the
cultural development which this determines', so that equal rights ­
defences against coercion or encroachment - will become unneces­
sary when the 'narrow horizon of bourgeois right' will be left
behind;3 only when class structure and warfare has been overcome,
and co-operative, socialised endeavour has ensured the all-round
development of every individual.
This position went a long way towards justifying ruthless

1 MEW xix 27, CW xxiv 94·

2 MEW xix 2 3-4, CW xxiv 89-90.
3 MEW xix 2 1 , CW xxiv 87.
I 44 THE SENSE O F REALITY
political conduct that went counter to the normal moral principles
of the average, decent German or French or Russian social
democrat. Before the objective conditions which created the
'narrow horizon of bourgeois right' had been done away with -
and who could say how long that would take? - there could be no
absolute standards to appeal to, only the standards of class interest;
and class interest was a matter for the class itself or its best
representatives - the party, the strategists in charge of its cam­
paigns - to determine. I have laid emphasis upon this aspect of
Marxist thought because it is this formidable quality of cutting
oneself off from the mass of respectable mankind into an organisa­
tion that openly defies political respectability, with a loyalty not to
the present but to the future, that enabled the First International,
despite all its internal conflicts, its Proudhonists and Bakuninists
and its relative ineffectiveness and weakness, to make a powerful
and somewhat terrifying impression on the imagination of Europe.
The concrete achievements of the First International were not
great. It led workers' groups of one country to help strike action or
agitation in other countries; it kept foreign strike-breakers from
being shipped from one country to another; there was more co­
operation than ever before between workers of different lands in
pressing for social benefits and reforms. All these efforts were
novel and not useless. It was also credited with plots, emeutes and
disturbances with which it had little to do - culminating, of course,
in the Paris Commune, in which Marx's followers played a small
part compared to the neo-Jacobins and Blanquists. Nevertheless,
the International, simply by existing, made a great impression, and
not on the workers alone. Even Dostoevsky, in remote St Peters­
burg, saw it (particularly after the Paris Commune) as the great
enemy, the great anti-Church, a world organisation openly based
on the old detestable principles of the philosophes materialism
-

and the possibility of a paradise on earth created by unaided

human hands - as serious a rival to true Christianity, as dangerous
and universal and wicked, as the hated Roman Catholic Church
herself.
Dostoevsky voiced sentiments which had earlier appeared in the
Russian Press. The Congresses of Geneva in I 8 66, Brussels in I 868
and Basle in I 869 did not pass unnoticed. The liberal Press
reported them with nervous objectivity; the right-wing organs
were more hostile: After I 87I the censorship suppressed references
to them. The International became a bogey to the police. When the
 MARXISM IN THE NIN ETEENTH CENTU RY 1 45
Spanish government demanded international action against the
International, the Russians - and they alone - responded favour­
ably. In 1 8 7 1 a harmless English merchant was arrested in Odessa,
suspected of being the litterateur Karl Marx in disguise. Rightly or
wrongly the organisation was regarded as a force in Russia, as it
was not, for example, in England. This much impact, then, the
International did make upon Russia. It played a part in the history
of Russian revolution too. Its specifically Marxist section was
peopled by obscurities: Utin did make himself notorious then and
later; but A. D. Trusov, E. L. Tomanovskaya, V. V. and E. G.
Bartenev/a - these figures have been consigned to deep oblivion,
perhaps not wholly undeserved. Marx himself represented the
Russians in the General Council, and the populist hero Hermann
Lopatin - a really doughty revolutionary, who was himself a
member of the Council - although friendly to Marx, was no more
Marxist than Lavrov, who represented Batignolles. Still, it was the
First International that allowed the Russians to break through their
own obsessive national problems and enter fully into the ecumeni­
cal movement; until 1 9 1 4 no more genuinely internationalist body,
nor one more loyal to the world movement, existed than the
Russian members, Menshevik and Bolshevik equally. To this
extent the First International Working Men's Association played a
direct and crucial role in creating a tradition which had a decisive
influence, if not on the social situation, at any rate on the men and
the ideas by which the Russian Revolution was made.
The national sections of the International, it is true, mainly
functioned as platforms from which Marx fought rival tendencies,
and which occasionally displayed too much independence and
factionalism for him. If Lassalle had not died in the very year of its
creation and Proudhon shortly after, Marx might have had even
more trouble; even as it was, Bakunin proved a hard nut to crack,
and the Proudhonists and his own more naive followers could make
themselves unimpressed and obstructive. It is customary to attrib­
ute the quarrels by which the International was torn to Marx's own
authoritarian and intolerant character. This does not seem to me a
sufficient explanation, though it obviously did play a part in the
final duel, and the death of the organisation. Marx never intended
to create an organisation for short-term ends. He wished to make a
world revolution. He wished, therefore, to train the cadres for it.
He was convinced of one thing, as Lenin was convinced after him:
that any serious movement, to be successful, must have a clear and
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
solid theoretical base; that where there is no discipline in ideas
there is no effectiveness in action; that while clear theoretical
foundations are not enough, they are indispensable; that one of the
reasons for the ineffectiveness of the communist dubs and sects
from the 1 8 3 os to the I 86os, of Proudhon's or Blanqui's neo­
Babouvists, of Mutualists after I 848, as of all the other socialist and
radical groups which spoke their word and then disintegrated, was
the absence of a philosophy based on a scientifically demonstrable
theory of human history and human potentialities, without which
no movement could be serious or lasting. Even Lassalle's splen­
didly organised German workers' party, Marx was convinced, was
doomed to come to nothing so long as it rested on the rickety
intellectual foundations on which Lassalle, who was no master of
theory, had erected it. Hence the sacrifice of almost everything,
including in the end the International itself, to the claims of
orthodoxy. Better correct principles without a movement than a
movement without correct principles; for on the strong foundation
of correct principles a new movement can be built, but a movement
resting on unsystematic expediency, opportunism, a tendency to
conciliate enemies in order to attain short-term objectives, or still
worse on a false doctrine, is built on shifting sands: it wastes men's
substance and blood to no effect, and its inevitable defects weaken
the resolution to victory.
Marx was implacably determined to establish the International
on sound foundations or not to establish it at all. And he did
succeed to this degree: he created an organisation with a clear and
intransigent doctrine, which not merely excited intellectual assent
or de facto co-operation, but, because of the controlled but
passionate language, at once concrete and evocative, of which on
occasions he was master, was capable of stimulating faith, mobilis­
ing what was non-rational as well as rational in men's minds. He
and he alone did lay the foundations of a world-wide mass party of
the left; and of a cause capable of being presented in simple, indeed
often over-simple, language: and he provided concrete formulae,
that is, formulae with specific indications of the type of action to
which they were meant to lead, which could be used by propa­
gandists and agitators who could be effective without reaching the
mental level of the founders or leaders of the movement. Moreover,
he welded some' flesh-and-blood trade unionists to the movement,
and did something to protect their status from the contempt of
intellectuals and theorists, and therefore gave it a greater possibility
 MARXISM I N THE N IN ETEENTH CENTURY I 47
not only of concerted industrial action, but of continuity after
setbacks or government suppression, which movements composed
of individual ideologists could seldom preserve. He established its
central ·Bureau' in tolerant, uninterested but liberal England, in
that London in which, as we have noted, by some peculiar quirk of
fate, there took place two of the most important events affecting
internal Russian history - the birth of the International in I 864 and
of the Bolsheviks in 1 903 .
Marx was a man of war, and his own militant energy communi­
cated to his organisation and its successors a revolutionary impetus
which they never wholly lost. The essential thing was to identify
the movement with organised class warfare. Hence Marx's compa­
rative benevolence towards Blanqui, who was far from Marxist in
doctrine. At least Blanqui fought, and fought fearlessly and
intelligently and ruthlessly. Thus, too, he disapproved of the Paris
Commune in the beginning - he had little to do with its
establishment - but in the end, after its defeat, he annexed it. The
Commune stressed loose federation and decentralisation, and free
election of its central group; the last, by a species of intellectual
acrobatics, was later represented as the embryo of the dictatorship
of the proletariat. Yet the Jacobins were not committed to the
proletarian cause; the Blanquists played scarcely any part in the
International; none of it was Marxist in inspiration or substance; it
accomplished very little in the way of social legislation; Marx
charged it with not being tough enough, not violent enough to
blackmail the forces of Versailles into some compromise. Yet it had
the root of the matter in it: it was revolutionary, collectivist,
egalitarian, anti-bourgeois; it was not afraid of pulling down by
shedding blood; so he incorporated it boldly into the mythology of
his party. No one else wanted to claim it: it was viewed with horror
by European public opinion in general; even the radicals, Louis
Blanc, Mazzini, Mill, could not swallow its acts of terrorism. Marx
did not favour its tactics, but, like the workers who fell at the
barricades in 1 848, the Communards were martyrs, victims in an
anti-capitalist war. Hence Marx firmly claimed it as a triumph,
short-lived but the first in history, of the young but growing and
menacing army of the new working class that would inherit the
world. The Commune was full of anti-Marxist heretics; but after its
death he magnetised its remnants into his orbit. This alone gave the
International, on the one hand, notoriety as a band of terrorists,
but, on the other, clothed it in the dignity of a great historic force,
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
almost a European power with which governments must reckon.
This was not the case. But the force of Marx's personality and of
his strategic gifts created a myth and an illusion which played a
decisive part in the moulding of the future.
The principles had been laid down; the movement could claim its
saints and martyrs: the most serious danger came from subversion
from within, from heresy or weakness. The war had been begun.
Bakunin threatened to disrupt his party; Marx had no hesitation
about burying it in hope of later resurrection. The German
Marxists preserved the sacred flame. The men who, led by Wilhelm
Liebknecht, met at Gotha were not a world movement, but they
were equipped with realistic directives, strategic and tactical, and
they had a bible: this was more than Proudhon or Bakunin,
Blanqui or the left-wing Chartists left to their followers. The men
of Gotha ended by swallowing the Lassalleans, who did possess
organisation, but little theoretical equipment: the latter turned out
to be historically more important than the pragmatists imagined. It
is true that the Lassalleans under Becker had developed a strong
tradition, and influenced their Marxist partners to a high degree:
hence their tolerance towards the Prussian State, and a degree of de
facto collaboration with the government on the part of the German
social democrats far greater than could ever have been palatable to
Marx. In r 88o Guesde duly created a Marxist party in France
which, although it was never more than one among many branches
of the French socialist movement, embodied the full orthodoxy of
Marx's approach, and engaged in mass agitation. Marxism as a new
political movement was launched before the death of the founder;
by the time of Engels' death it was world-wide.

IV

Let me return for a moment to Marx's ideological achievement.

What he succeeded in doing even in his lifetime (still more after his
death) was to translate the sense of human atomisation, of the
dehumanisation of which vast impersonal institutions, bureauc­
racies, factories, armies, political parties were at once a cause and a
symptom, with a consequent feeling of mounting suffocation to
which Nietzsche, Carlyle and Ibsen, Thoreau and Whitman,
Tolstoy, Ruskin and Haubert had, in their very different ways,
given profound inelignant poetical expression - he translated this
horror of anthill life, not into Utopian dreams, like Fourier or
 MARXISM IN THE N I N ETEENTH CENTURY 1 49
Cabet, or liberal protest, like Tocqueville or Mill, nor into attempts
to save human freedom by loose co-operative textures, like the
followers of Proudhon or Bakunin or Kropotkin (for approaches
of this type he regarded as rearguard operations doomed to
failure), but into an inevitable phase in human development,
possessing its own powerfully creative aspects in the concentration
and the rationalisation of human brain-power and energy. Capital­
ism is for him neither a wilful crime nor an impersonal disaster: it is
rationally explicable and therefore unavoidable and (since history is
a rational, though not a wholly self-conscious, process), in the end,
beneficent. Like all other class-based institutions, it is engaged in
digging its own grave; hence the intelligent historical student can
extract from the process as a whole an eschatological assurance that
from the bones of the old, new institutions would spring, made
inevitable by their predecessors, free from the defects of all
previous human establishments, with no seeds of death or mortal­
ity in them, destined to last for ever.
This was to prove irresistible to those who were disillusioned by
the libertarian slogans of the pre- 1 84 8 period, which rested on
moral ideals alone, and had been rendered bankrupt, in the eyes of
the realists, by the failures of these revolutions. The disillusioned in
all lands were now looking for the opposite: not for idealistic
eloquence, however noble and moving, but drier light, realistic
plans, an assessment, such as Machiavelli had provided in his day,
of what the facts were, and what could be done by real men rather
than angels. The very harshness of Marx's vision of history, its
insistence upon the seamy side of the social process, upon the need
for long, tedious, painful labour, the anti-heroic realism, the
mordant, deflationary epigrams, the deliberate and ferocious anti­
idealism of tone, themselves came as a welcome antidote to the
huge emotional and intellectual inflation of the preceding period,
particularly when, after the long reaction of the I 8 5 0s, opportuni­
ties for practical action once again seemed to present themselves,
on however modest a scale.
When the Second International came to be founded in I 889,
there was an attempt to preserve this same intentness upon brass
tacks as against what were deemed to be syndicalist and anarchist
fantasies of the French Possibilists and Allemanists, Anarchists
and Syndicalists and various types of proto-Revisionism, which
were already at work, particularly in Germany and England. It is
usual to say that the Second International was a tame affair
1 50 THE SENSE O F REALITY
compared to its predecessor, that despite Engels' tutelage over its
early years, it lacked bite, and leant heavily upon the splendidly
organised and vote-getting German Social Democratic Party.
Certainly it discussed all the burning issues, intelligently and
clearly; it was genuinely internationalist; Germans and Frenchmen,
Russians and Japanese acted as brothers here, and here alone; it even
agreed to united action - a general strike, abstention from partici­
pation in the unthinkable case of war. But when 1 9 1 4 came it
collapsed ignominiously into its national sections, each of which
patriotically voted war credits for its own respective government,
and thereby discredited International Social Democracy for ever,
leaving each country to grope its way back to its own peculiar
forms of socialism.
There is, of course, much truth in this. Nevertheless, let the
following also be remembered:
I . The International, because it contained actual representatives
of trade unions, became the foster mother and nurse of socialist
parties and labour parties in many lands. The German party
might have progressed without it; but other parties owed a great
many of their initial ideas to the sense of solidarity which It
undoubtedly bred amongst its members.
2. It was the only international organisation in which anti­
conservatives and anti-clericals, those who believed that social
justice was unattainable in either an individualistically organised
or a class-riven society, egalitarians and radicals of many kinds,
found a common home.
3 · Its internationalism was, despite all that has been said against
this, perfectly sincere. The leaders knew, as many of them know
now - behind the Iron Curtain1 even more clearly than in our
world - that national solidarity among their followers was
stronger than their international allegiance. Whether this could
have been otherwise, whether nationalism could, in practice,
have been defeated by socialist internationalism, however it was
organised, whatever its strategy, seems doubtful. (I return to this
below.)
Let us remember the situation in 1 9 1 4 . It was one in which
Victor Adler in 1 9 1 4 knew clearly that the Austrian workers would
�

1 This was written, I must remind the reader, in 1 964.

 MARXISM IN THE N INETEENTH CENTURY I5I

simply not follow him if he declared himself against war, or even

used its outbreak, as his son Friedrich wanted, as an opportunity
for revolution. The German Social Democrats Scheidemann, Mul­
ler, Helphand could cite Marx's implacable opposition to the
Tsarist Empire as the central reservoir of world reaction, and his
defence of wars against it as at least not unjustified - more justified,
in his judgement, than the war against Napoleon III (of which
Marx, after all, had not exactly disapproved). This was a situation
in which the French socialists saw themselves engaged in defence of
the Republic, which, if not as democratic as they could wish,
nevertheless held out higher hopes of this ideal, malleable as it was
to workers' political pressure, than the cast-iron establishment in
Germany, which, despite a splendid workers' party - the pride of
International Labour - yielded not at all, conceded very little. Were
they to sabotage a war (or make an effort to do this) which no one
in France could doubt was a purely defensive war against all that
was most reactionary and brutal in Europe? If such seasoned
Marxists as Plekhanov or Vera Zasulich sincerely believed this,
why not Guesde, still more Jaures or Keir Hardie? What were
these leaders to do? If they wished to save their souls they could do
so only at the expense of their bodies, that is, the body of the
political movement. Their fate, had they denounced the war or
attempted to resist it, would most probably have been that of
Herzen when he supported the Polish rising in I 86 3 , something
that does him undying moral credit, but cost him his influence in
Russia, and split the opposition to tsarism. And he led no
movement, and had no agonising practical problems to solve.
The First International partly owed its notoriety and impact to
the fact that, in an age of conscription and mobilisable patriotism -
when States depended for their power on national sentiment and
not on mercenaries and professional armies - they boldly struck
against this: but anti-patriotism was weakened exactly by the
degree of success of Western labour movements in influencing and
integrating themselves into national policies, as syndicalists and
anarchists had always warned. Anti-patriotism was high only in
lands whose socialists were persecuted.1 The proposition that
Jaures and Kautsky, had they chosen to do so, could actually have
averted war by affirming their anti-war resolutions of the year
before seems highly unplausible; I know of no reputable historian

1 Russia, Poland, the Balkans, Asia etc.

 THE SENSE O F REALITY
prepared to defend this proposition. I do not say that the socialist
parties acted rightly, but Lenin's incredulity and Rosa Luxem­
burg's protests could in a sense come only from persons who were
not at the head of mass movements playing an effective part - as
advocated by Marxists against anarchists and syndicalists - in the
day-to-day political life of their respective countries. Indeed, I
should like to repeat that I still think that the internationalism of
the International was perfectly genuine: not simply as an abstract
dogma, but as a belief that played as effective a part in these men's
actual conduct as, in the circumstances, could have been expected.
When Jaures 'surrendered' to the Germans in 1 904, in order to
preserve the unity of the movement, when Plekhanov, during the
Russo-Japanese war, demonstratively shook hands with the Japa­
nese socialist Katayama, these were not empty gestures. The fact
that nationalism, in the event, proved stronger than socialism, that
it proved victorious when in conflict with it - a remarkable but
undeniable feature of the entire nineteenth and twentieth centu­
ries - and the corollary of this, that socialism or communism later,
for example in Africa and Asia, succeeded only when they marched
in alliance with nationalism - this may be deplored or gloried in or
dispassionately recorded: but it is not a fact for which the
International can, as such, be held accountable or blamed.
What weakened the International from the point of view of the
intransigents and the revolutionaries was neither the weakness of
the leaders' characters nor their own or their followers' hankering
after fleshpots, nor Bernstein's or the Fabians' demonstrations that
Marx had been mistaken. It is true that Bernstein and others had
argued convincingly that the wages of the workers, whether
conceived in absolute or relative terms, were not declining as,
according to the doctrine, they should have been, but, on the
contrary, rising; that landowning was, even if Bernstein had
exaggerated this process, not becoming concentrated in a few
powerful hands to nearly the degree that the theory demanded;
that the workers were obtaining more benefits by peaceful meth­
ods than by fighting the State every inch; that the gaps between the
lower bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of skilled workers were
gradually becoming obliterated; that, as Engels himself had
remarked, workers in general were getting more by exploiting the
legal system, now that Bismarck's laws had been lifted, than by
fighting it. All tliis, together with arguments designed to point
to the same 'revisionist' conclusions, was, indeed, urged by Fabians
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1 53
i n England and, i n part, by the 'economists' i n Russia. But it i s not
this that was the main factor in taming the German socialists. Nor
is there any need to resort to such doubtful expedients as national
character. What lowered the militancy of German Social Democ­
racy was its very success. Marx had advocated political action; a
mass movement; not sects of fanatical conspirators, with a politique
du pire, setting the masses on fire in the manner of Blanqui, or
refusal of all political participation in the manner of the Syndica­
lists and Anarchists. Did not the 'General' himself - Friedrich
Engels - make the following famous remarks in an essay written in
the 1 8 9 os?

The methods of 1 84 8 have become obsolete . . . The time has passed

for sudden emeutes, revolutions made by a small conscious minority at
the head of the unconscious masses. The task of totally transforming
the social structure must engage the masses themselves, they them­
selves must understand the point of the struggle, what it is for which
they shed their blood and give their lives. This is the lesson of the past
fifty years. 1

'The time has passed . . .' - for whom? Engels did not specify
the West; and Plekhanov and the Russian Marxists can scarcely be
blamed if they regarded Lenin's turning of a blind eye to this
particular directive as heretical: since then this formulation,
whether regarded as a description or as a recommendation (a
distinction in principle not recognised in Hegelian-Marxist doc­
trine) has been more honoured in the breach than in the observ­
ance.
The German party carried out this programme; but found it all
too easy to do so compatibly with its non-violent, solidly demo­
cratic traditions. By using parliamentary methods for acquiring
power, and by increasing its representation in the Reichstag from
election to election, through the I 89os and into the early part of the
twentieth century, it was inevitably brought into contact with the
general political life of the State, in particular other parties. It was
not merely a question of social security or educational policy. Its
extraordinary achievement - for good or ill - was the creation of a
world within a world, an independent almost self-contained
society within the framework of the middle-class establishment.

1 From Engels' introduction of 1 89 5 to a new edition of Marx's The Class

Struggles in France 1848-IBJo: MEW xxii 5 1 3, 5 2 3, CW xxvii p o, po.

1 54 T H E SENSE O F REALITY
The members of the German Social Democratic Party lived largely
within their own strongly built, all-providing welfare organisation,
with their own schools and educational and sporting organisations;
they attended their own lectures and picnics and concerts, and were
provided with all else that a respectable German needs. Inevitably,
this led to a certain degree of comfortable complacency; it was the
price of the exercise of power, and therefore of responsibility. It
was the German Rechtsstaat a genuinely law-abiding society -
-

that despite all its shortcomings made them peaceful, optimistic

and believers in gradualist methods. In it they found themselves,
without knowing it, a growing pillar of a developing society; it was
not, therefore, altogether unreasonable for Bernstein to say (and
for Kautsky to believe, though he did not admit it) that, if things
went on like this, there might be a painless transition to socialism
in a foreseeable period.
Marx had indeed conceded that the revolutions need not be
violent; that in highly industrialised States a seizure of power could
occur without terror and atrocities; what exactly 'the dictatorship
of the proletariat' meant, after the early 1 8 5 os and the dreams and
hopes of the ephemeral German 'Communist League', had never
been made clear in circumstances where it did not seem likely to be
actualised. Marx, after all, did not describe the Commune, either in
his critique of the Gotha Programme or on any subsequent
occasion, as embodying any such dictatorship; that was Lenin's
gloss on Engels. What Marx would have attacked violently was not
the Social Democrats' lack of interest in dictatorship, but the idea
of a slow embourgeoisement, the gradual acquisition of all the
attributes and enjoyments of a bourgeois life by the workers as
part of their slowly increasing prosperity and political strength.
Whatever else Marx wanted, he demanded a radical transformation:
he was no less anxious than, say, his opponent Herzen to put an
end to the world of sordid bourgeois values by some one great
cleansing act. That is what he meant when he spoke of revolution
as a necessary cataclysm through which a society must pass in
order to wash off from itself the filth of the earlier, degraded
period, the march through mud and blood which, for him, the rise
of capitalism necessarily entails. This apocalyptic vision was totally
lacking in the coherent, idealistic but not very revolutionary
writings of Kautsky and his henchmen, still more in the moderate
demands of Vollmar or David, or for that matter Jaures and
Viviani, or Vandervelde and Bebel, or John Burns or Daniel de
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 155

Leon, not to speak of Samuel Gompers or the average American

labour leader of the time, with their essentially syndicalist and anti­
political outlook.
But if that was Marx's true goal, it was not destined to be
realised in the industrialised countries which he designated as the
theatre of the revolution. For here a fatal dilemma raises its terrible
horns: if it is only on the expanding base of increasingly efficient
productivity that a rational socialist system can be built, as every
social democrat, reasonably enough, insisted over and over again, it
would neither need, nor be likely to issue from, a revolution; this
was not the climate in which revolutionary forces throve. Marx
believed that class war was likely to reach its highest point of
exacerbation in industrial societies, because it was there that the
embattled economic classes truly came face to face, as they could
not do in less developed countries. He insisted that it was in
conditions of mounting monopoly and concentration of the means
of production, exchange and distribution that the explosion would
occur, with fewer and fewer capitalists controlling vaster and vaster
empires, their number reduced by constant internecine warfare,
until the proletariat, trained by them, unintentionally but inevita­
bly, into ruthless social and technological efficiency and unity,
with a mere flick of its wrist removed them and took charge. We all
know that this did not occur. Concentration and monopoly grew
apace hut, whatever their evil social consequences, they did not
include the increasing alienation of the proletariat into a disciplined
revolutionary force. In so far as both Internationals were built on
these presumptions they rested upon a miscalculation. The nature
of this error concerns the most fascinating and crucial issue of our
time.

. . . the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopoliser

of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of
servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and
political dependence . . . the economical emancipation of the working
classes is therefore the great end to which every political movement
ought to be subordinate as a means . . . 1

So ran the Provisional Rules of the International Working Men's

1 CW xx 1 4, MEW xvi 1 4 ·
1 56 THE SENSE O F REALITY
Association published in November I 8 64. In I 8 9 I the united
German Social Democratic Party spoke of 'an ever more enormous
army of surplus workers, an ever sharper conflict between
exploiters and exploited', and 'an increase in insecurity of liveli­
hood, in misery, oppression, enslavement, debasement and exploi­
tation' If it is industrial nations that are the subject of these
.1

propositions, then this represents a genuine triumph of doctrine

over facts. Even in Germany it was absurd to speak, in I 89 I , of an
actual growth in poverty, enslavement, insecurity and so on. There
was no criterion in terms of which German workers were worse off
economically or politically than in I 8 64; and by the end of the
decade the growth of organisation, prosperity, security had
increased very greatly. If there was 'debasement' it could be due
only to the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the Party itself, to
the general nature of industrial society in all its layers, and not to
the specific activity of the oppressor class. The facts, as Bakunin
prophesied, pointed to decrease, not increase, of tension in the
great industrial nations of the West. Economically, and socially
too, German Social Democracy, its institutions quietly woven into
the texture of the German State system, had become the envy of
working-class workers everywhere, and the scarcely criticised
model of such incorruptibly orthodox socialists, free from all taint
of liberalism, as Plekhanov, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Jules Guesde.
In England the Reform Bill of I 86 7 seems to have deflected the
energies of British trade union leaders from the international scene
towards self-improvement, a process only accelerated by their
reluctance to be associated with the notorious Communards of
I 8 7 1 . It was trade union legislation of the late I 8 6os (roughly
I 8 67-7 5 ), and the social legislation that followed, that must have
been responsible for making Fabian proposals seem more plausible
to labour leaders than Marxist recipes, to a greater extent than such
factors - often blamed by disappointed radicals - as some deeply
non-revolutionary element of the British national character, or the
insularity of the workers, or their traditional loyalties, or the
power of religious Non-Conformity.
In a sense it was Marxism, in these countries and at that period at
least, that acted as its own grave-digger, rather than the capitalism

1 In the 'Erfurt Programme' ('Programm der Sozialdemokratischen Partei

Deutschlands beschldssen auf dem Parteitag zu Erfurt 1 8 9 1 '): p. 4 in Protokoll

uber die Verhandlungen des Parteitages der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutsch­
lands (Berlin, 1 89 1 ).
 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I 57
for which that role had been cast. The more effective the political
organisation of the Western workers, the more concessions they
were able to wring from the State, the more drawn they were into
the path of peaceful reform, the more solidarity they inevitably felt
with institutions which proved to be not the stone wall of
reactionaries of the Marxist prognosis, condemned by history to
resist, however blindly and uselessly and suicidally, but a far more
flexible and concession-minded entity. Resistance stiffens, peaceful
penetration softens, the discipline and theoretical fanaticism of
militant parties. In France Millerand's acceptance of government
office in a bourgeois administration was roundly condemned by
the International; nevertheless, a situation in which this proved
possible, in which bourgeois parties were prepared to buy off their
opponents in this fashion, not only flattered their self-esteem, but
provided concrete evidence of the growing power of the working­
class opposition.
The twentieth century is beyond my ken: but the best account of
its development vis-a-vis Marx's prophecies is contained in an
analysis given by that very honest and intermittently intelligent
thinker, the late John Strachey, who, in what was almost his last
book,1 dealt critically with Marx's basic supposition, namely that
internal competition between capitalists would make it objectively
impossible for them not to press wages down to the lowest level
compatible with the workers' survival. This proved untrue: conces­
sions were made; the tycoons and soldiers, who in Marx's predic­
tions would never yield, proved apt pupils of Maynard Keynes,
and successfully averted the final crisis which Marx believed to be
so near. His own iron law of wages, different from Lassalle's, but at
one with it at least in supposing that capitalists are compelled by
objective forces to extract the maximum surplus value out of
labour, proved erroneous. Marx had obviously gravely overesti­
mated the inflexibility and stupidity, and perhaps the very power,
of the military-industrial complex against which, from opposite
ends of the political spectrum, Burckhardt and Wright Mills have
warned us. Concessions to unions, radical social legislation carried
through by Lloyd George in England and Franklin Roosevelt in
the United States, progressive social policies in Scandinavia and
Welfare-State England, Keynesian and post-Keynesian economic
policies in general are not allowed for in any Marxist prognosis in

1 Contemporary Capitalism (London and New York, 1956), chapter 5·

q8 THE SENSE O F REALITY
the pre- I 9 I 4 period of which I speak. Many a mistake was made by
the Soviet Union, owing to the faithful adherence of its leaders,
not, as is commonly thought, to mere Machiavellianism or tough­
minded opportunism, but to over-literal Marxist analyses of the
economic aspects of the world situation, with consequent miscal­
culations about Germany in the I 9 3 0s, Europe in the later I 94os,
and great tracts of Asia and Africa as well. It may be argued that,
had Marxism not existed and become fundamental to the outlook
of political parties, bourgeois democracies could not have reacted
as imaginatively and effectively as they did, both by repulsion and
attraction. If this is so, it is an unexpected twist of the dialectic,
whereby Marxism has generated its own antibodies - an interesting
topic for historical sociology.
The real triumphs of Marx's strategy occurred, as everyone
knows, not in the highly industrialised societies but in their polar
opposites, those economically backward lands which formed a
field of exploitation for the advanced industrial countries - Russia,
Spain and China, elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and then Cuba. It was
none other than Bakunin, whom Marx held in such intellectual
contempt, who took the view that the kind of revolution in which
both he and Marx believed - one that would destroy the whole
system completely and usher in a new world - could be made only
by truly alienated, desperate men, not organically tied by strands of
interest and sentiment to the world which they were committed to
destroy. He therefore viewed Marx's conception of an orderly
party as itself fatally bourgeois in spirit; for solid, serious, intelli­
gent workers, with families and regular employment, organised
into a tidy, efficiently functioning party machine under proper
intellectual leadership (Bakunin's 'pedantocracy'), would surely
think twice before they set out to destroy a society which, after all,
had made it possible for them to attain to the level of education,
organisation, prosperity and above all respectability which alone
had made them politically effective. He therefore concluded that
the only effective revolutionaries would be those who, for one
reason or another, had no stake in existing society, had never had
one, or had been robbed of it, and had nothing to gain from the
development of their society along existing lines, and had therefore
nothing to lose by the most extreme upheaval. Underdeveloped or
backward societies, therefore, had far better prospects of revolu­
tion than hierarchically organised, industrial ones; oppressed,
"
unorganised, dark, illiterate peasants, wherever they might be -
 MARXISM I N THE N I N ETEENTH C ENTURY I 59
Russia, the Balkans, Italy, Spain - had really nothing t o hope for
from the State or the bourgeoisie or industrial development - they
were a doomed class, as well as criminals, outlaws, rootless
vagrants, sinking into greater and greater squalor, and resembled
the proletariat, who had nothing to lose but their chains as
described by Marx - a description based too much perhaps on the
conditions of the I 8 3 os and I 84os - more than the workers even of
the late I 86os and I 87os.
History has to some degree borne this out. It is Marx's doctrines
of I 84o-5 o which the Second International adopted, half-heartedly
perhaps, and without any intention of implementing them, doc­
trines which Marx himself later quietly withdrew in favour of a
more gradualist approach. Yet it was this earlier doctrine, the semi­
Blanquist revolutionary tactics, that proved effective in the end,
not indeed in the \Y/est, but in underdeveloped societies, in Russia
and Asia, of which Marx in I 847- 5 0 could scarcely have been
thinking. This doctrine - preached to the Rhineland revolutionaries
in I 849 and the small communist groups in the following year - is
that in economically pre-industrial societies, those who wish to
make a proletarian revolution must begin by collaborating with the
bourgeoisie in turning out the economically backward, reactionary,
semi-feudal regimes, and allow, indeed actively co-operate in
bringing to birth, the bourgeois democratic republic in which alone
working-class organisations can grow in relative freedom. The next
step - after the bourgeois democracy is in being - is to harry their
erstwhile allies mercilessly until the moment comes when they too
can be turned out neck and crop. This is the policy of the gradually
expanding Trojan horse - the policy of the proletarian cuckoo in
the liberal-democratic nest. So long as the proletariat is too weak in
numbers and in strength to seize power and to govern, it needs the
only conditions in which it can peacefully grow to maturity, that
is, a tolerant bourgeois democracy, in which it is nurtured to health
and strength. This is to go on until the proletariat has become
literally the majority of the population, when it can seize power,
with or without violence, as circumstances dictate. The Erfurt
Programme lost sight of all this, reasonably enough, since, as
Engels said, no one could fail to note the difference between the
Germany of I 89 I and the Germany of I 849· Despite all its tough
talk about revolution, there is nothing in this document about
dictatorship of the proletariat, illegal methods, or denunciation of
the State as such. The prospect of that head-on collision between
1 60 THE SENSE O F REALITY
the classes to which the whole Marxist strategy was hitherto
directed became a good deal dimmer than even so mild a man as
Kautsky, let alone Engels, can have supposed.
But in Russia a very different situation prevailed, and one far
closer to the Germany with which Marx had been most intimately
acquainted. There the regime was such that some kind of a
revolution was objectively probable. The proletariat counted for
little: the middle classes for rather more than Marxist historians
allow. Political tension between the holders of real power - the
middle classes on the one hand versus the nobility and the tsarist
bureaucracy on the other - grew steadily. Sooner or later it would
come into open collision. In the Russian Empire the ruling class -
the landowners and the bureaucrats - really did behave as Marx
mistakenly supposed capitalists would be bound to behave in the
West: like men caught in their own system, who, even if they catch
sight in a moment of terrible insight of the catastrophe for which
the system is headed, cannot manage, can scarcely begin seriously
to try, to extricate themselves from their predicament.
This is the situation in which concessions seem to the men in
power to lead to a revolution as fatally as blind obstinacy, for this
last might - who knows ? - still manage to hold back the awful tide,
at least for a while. This is how the monarchist ideologists -
Leontiev, Pobedonostsev - actually talked. Here, by contrast with
the West, there really existed a situation in which the ignorance and
misery of the small but growing proletariat, but far more, of the
vast, inert peasantry, was such that it made sense to speak of an
intellectual elite of committed socialists guiding an amorphous
mass, if not of proletarians, at least of 'the naked and hungry',
towards a major revolution. Here there was a blindly reactionary
government against which it was not difficult to mobilise liberal as
well as working-class and peasant groups, in which deliberately
treacherous alliances with the bourgeoisie seemed a rational and
feasible stratagem. The Russian bourgeoisie itself was, if stronger
than many suppose, yet by no means powerful; all parties were
united in common fear and hatred of the government; it was not
absurd to suppose that, if the proletariat was properly organised, it
could, when the hour struck, make itself an embarrassing but
indispensable ally of the liberal democrats, helping them into
power only in order to oust them in a second revolution, which
must be the last. This is perhaps why Plekhanov suppressed Marx's
 MARXISM IN THE N I N ETEENTH CENTURY r6r
embarrassing letters t o the Russian Narodniks,1 i n which, how­
ever grudgingly, he allowed the possibility of some non-social­
democratic path to socialism. For here it became necessary to play
down Marx's remorseless rejection of liberal slogans, of words like
'freedom', 'moral regeneration', 'altruism', 'human solidarity';
these stock terms may have seemed meaningless and even nauseat­
ing hypocrisy in the West; yet the Belgian Marxists, for example, in
r 8 9 3 , insisted on including them in their programme because they
were not prepared to work for socialism on any other terms; and
what was true in B elgium was far truer of Russia, where these
phrases still expressed genuine human demands in a totally oppres­
sive system, and did not ring false in the mouths of committed
revolutionaries.
In an underdeveloped territory caught in a world of rapid
growth, governed by men unwilling or unable to adjust themselves
with sufficient rapidity to counteract the danger to their country's
national integrity, or at any rate to its economic interests - a danger
constituted by potentially predatory, fast-developing neighbours -
a revolution is, as nearly as anything that can be predicted in this
world, inevitable. When and how it will occur is another matter.
This was the situation in Japan as well as Russia in the nineteenth
century, in the Turkish Empire and in China, in Spain and
Portugal and in the Balkan countries in the late nineteenth century,
and in the early twentieth, and in our day in Africa and Latin
America. Since, given this pattern of forces, the prospects of
revolution are high, the frustrated middle class is bound to be its
carrier, at any rate in part. It is to this 'conjuncture' that Marx's
recipe of the I 848-5 I period applies, and it was this, indeed, that
Lenin adopted in 1 9 I 7 . Everyone knows how far he deviated from
the path of rigid orthodoxy as expounded faultlessly by Plekhanov
and Kautsky, but that is not my point. My point is that conditions
in Russia in I 9 I 7, and in other underdeveloped countries at other
corresponding moments, made the Marxist tactics of I 84 8-5 I more
applicable than the situation of industrial countries in, let us say,
the late nineteenth century (or at any time) made the later Marxist
formulae and tactics of the revised Marxism of Marx himself. The
earlier formulae applied to the backward Russia: the later formulae

1 e.g. Marx to the Editorial Board of Otechestvennie zapiski, November I 877

(not sent); Marx to Danielson, IO April I 879 and I9 February I88 I; Marx to Vera
Zasulich, 8 March I 88 1 .
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
applied neither to the Europe of the 1 8 7os, nor during the half
century that followed. The fact that Marx's disciples recoiled from
seeing this, or at least from formulating it, recalls the cynical Ignaz
Auer's celebrated remark to Bernstein apropos of the latter's
critique of Marxism: 'One does not say such things; one simply
does them.'

VI

There is another factor, mentioned briefly above, 1 which cannot

be left out of account if the melancholy petering out of the Second
International is to be justly estimated: nationalism. All authors of
original theories tend to exaggerate. Perhaps it is impossible to
break through the orthodoxy and prevalent opinion of a given time
without such exaggeration. Most great thinkers have done so, and
Marx is no exception. No one will wish seriously to deny the
originality and critical importance of his great Saint-Simonian
insights - he and none other burnt into our consciousness the
theorem that socialised production is not compatible with individ­
ualised machinery of distribution; he foresaw the rise of Big
Business earlier than others. More than this, he translated into
concrete terms Saint-Simon's insight that men transform them­
selves and their lives, as well as their social and political organisa­
tion, by technological innovation. He made very clear the role
played by men's own past handiwork in hampering their own later
progress, the role of those 'fetters' upon productive forces that are
constituted by institutions or systems of belief or ways of behav­
iour which men have made but which delude later generations into
taking them as objectively valid and eternal; a delusion which can
be dispelled only by asking cui bono ? - who are the groups or
classes whose power or survival is, whether they know it or not,
enhanced by these institutions, the more if they retain their
hallowed status? Marx and none other stressed the importance of
social organisation, not as a timeless, socially useful weapon, but as
something inevitably brought forth by the process of industrialisa­
tion itself. It was he too who inured us, to our doom as some
would say, to the need to break eggs, however sacred, for the sake
of various social omelettes, brutalities and massacres of innocents
from which many recoil, but which Marx not merely regarded as
.

1 See p. 1 50 above. '

 MARXISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY I 63
inevitable, but at times carne near to representing as positively
desirable. Marx's particular doctrines of the relations of thought
and action, of words and their real meanings and social role, as they
are uttered now by this, now by that class or its representatives -
all these are transforming notions which, even though some were
pushed too far, and some are positive fallacies, have for good or ill
altered our world. The Second International absorbed these ideas
and somewhat tamed them, but never lost them entirely. Without
Bebel and Kautsky and Plekhanov, the stress on orthodoxy and the
expulsions of heretics, neither Lenin nor Mao nor the particular
forms which the death throes of the old colonialism took would
have emerged as they did. The tradition of Marxism, pure and
undiluted, never died: yet what it gained from the intensity of its
vision, its intellectual coherence and its drive for revolutionary
unity and organisation it has paid for - very dearly - in terms of
blindness to social realities. I have mentioned its underestimate
of the elasticity and social inventiveness of intelligent capitalism, of
the enterprise which the State itself can show, whether for social
progress, as in Scandinavia or English-speaking lands, or for
repression and war, as in Germany and Italy in the period before
the great wars.
I return again to what seems to me to be the most powerful
factor of all: nationalism. Even more than choice of secu rity against
liberty on the part of individuals and groups, even more than
historical feeling or the power of tradition or inertia, which were
systematically underestimated or explained away by dogmatic
Marxists, nationalism grew to be a vast influence despite all the
forces for international unification at work in the last hundred
years. This is not the place to examine its roots. It is perhaps
enough to recall what everyone knows - that, whatever shoots of
liberal internationalism may have sprung up in Germany towards
the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century, they withered in the blast of ami-Napoleonic nationalism
by I 8 I 5 . The revolutions of I 848 were destroyed with its help.
Without the collision of chauvinisms in Austria-Hungary, without
wounded nationalism in France in I 8 70 (and there was a powerful
dose of it even in the Commune of I 8 7 I ), without the alliance of
national and capitalist interests in the imperialism of I 8 64-I 9 I 4,
without the identification of the Revolution with the cause of
Russia's national integrity in I 9 I 9, the history of our world would
surely have been very different.
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
The history of European working-class organisation cannot be
divorced from the fortunes of the party created by Lassalle, from
the shape given it by a man whom Marx rightly suspected of
tenderness towards the Volksgeist, and something very like roman­
tic German nationalism. The workers were, in virtue of their very
degree of economic and social progress, drawn into this tide, and
could scarcely be expected to swim successfully against it. Lenin
and Rosa Luxemburg sustained a profound shock when 1 9 1 4 blew
up the pretensions of the Second International. But this was, at
least in part, because in the Russian Empire the workers were in a
relatively pre-industrial stage, walled off from the rest of Western
society and its nationalism, so that their nationalism was compara­
tively feebler, at any rate among Russian factory workers. Where it
was deeper - for instance in Poland - it was equally impotent
against the Russians, Austrians and Germans: if anything, it allied
itself with Austrian Russophobia. We know that Lenin and Rosa
Luxemburg and Martov were personally entirely free from this
sentiment. For Lenin, no less than for Trotsky (despite false
contrasts that have been drawn), the importance of the Revolution
in Russia resided more in the fact that it was to be the snapping of
the weakest link in the enemy's chain of command - the beginning
of a world-wide revolution - than that it occurred in Russia.
Socialism in one country was no part of the original design; Lenin
was no more a Russian nationalist than Stalin was a Georgian one,
or Martov a supporter of embryonic Jewish nationalism, which he
fought in all its forms with particular ferocity. Yet the lesson of
history thus far seems to me to be that social revolutions succeed
best in situations where the social and the national enemy can be
identified, where deprivation of political and human rights, pov­
erty and injustice coincide with some degree of national humilia­
tion: where these ills can be attributed to foreign exploiters as well
as domestic tyrants. Perhaps the fact that Marxist movements seem
weakest in Britain and the 'White Commonwealth', in Scandinavia
and North America, is not unconnected with those historical
factors which prevented a coincidence of mounting social injustice
with inflammation of nationalist wounds in these uninvaded
countries: a combination which seems almost invariably to lead to
revolutionary transformation.
Thus by a curi,ous paradox it was the doctrines of the Russian
neo-Jacobin Tkac�ev, whom Engels denounced so harshly in 1 8 7 5 ,
that formulated a programme o f action which Lenin, whether
 MARXISM IN THE N IN ETEENTH CENTURY 1 65

consciously or not, implemented in 1 9 I 7; while it was the plans of

the semi-Marxist, gradualist and democratic Lavrov, which Engels
regarded with a benevolent eye, that proved impractical in Russia
and, so far as they did prove practical in Western Europe, modified
militant Marxism and turned it into relatively peaceful and semi­
Fabian channels. If these are the dialectical turns of history they are
scarcely those that Marx anticipated. No man spoke more often or
with greater penetration of the unintended consequences of human
acts; yet one may allow oneself to wonder what, despite his belief
in the use of force, he would have made of the fact that his
doctrines were destined to come into their own, thus far at least, in
underdeveloped countries, by methods and in forms inevitably
determined by the immaturity and barbarism surviving in such
societies, when his own vision was one of a free society as the
ripest fruit of human civilisation - the crown of the richest possible
development of the most advanced productive techniques wielded
by men rendered free and classless by rational control of their
environment. It was the doctrines of I 848-5 0 that triumphed in
Russia, in China, in the Balkans, where there were no masses in the
Marxist sense, where the socialist leaders had no extensive social
and political responsibilities, where there were no worlds resting
upon their shoulders; where socialist parties could act on their
own; where they were composed largely of intellectuals.
I should like to suggest, however tentatively, that it worked in
Russia, in part at least, because men in prison, cut off from reality,
believe more fiercely; their ideas are narrower, clearer and more
intense, their faith is more genuine. That is how Blanqui believed;
that is how Gramsci believed; this was the position of German
revolutionaries in the r 84os and I 8 5 os, and this was the position of
Russian revolutionary socialists in the I 8 9os. By this date there
were in Germany and France, in Austria-Hungary and Britain, in
Belgium and Holland, masses indeed, but there were also national­
ism and respected religious organisations, growing prosperity and
hope of economic security, and consequent faith in gradualist
methods. The walls between classes grew to be thinner than in
theory they should have been, and the leaders felt responsibility for
the day-to-day lives of hundreds of thousands of members of large,
elaborately organised, peaceful, social-democratic or respectable
labour party establishments. There the doctrine of no collaboration
with the bourgeoisie, no reformism or gradualism - the workers
must win solely by their own efforts or not at all - was not
1 66 THE SENSE O F REALITY
practicable; in underdeveloped countries it was, for obvious rea­
sons, far more so. Despite the great relevance of the Marxist
analysis in the 1 8 8os, during the period of decline of free trade and
of social mobility, the increase of protectionism, of bureaucratic
State control, of military imperialism and interlocking power elites,
including trade unions and nationalist associations - in spite, in
other words, of a growth of centralism which Marx had analysed
and predicted with skill and insight - these other factors proved
countervailing. Labour leaders, even Marxists, were drawn, per­
haps against their will and without their knowledge, into the
peaceful arena in which interests were adjusted rather than driven
into collision, and the notion of conciliation, pluralism, an imper­
fect but not intolerable modus vivendi with other classes, was more
or less taken for granted. And so the faith in one group of human
beings - the proletariat - as being representative of the whole of
future mankind, as the chosen instrument of history, to obstruct
whose real will (as interpreted by its leaders) was lese-humanite ­
sin against the spirit of man - became weakened, and Marxism
itself tended to be reduced to a kind of crudely materialistic
positivism, a mere theory of history which did not claim to supply
ultimate values and so could be attached - soldered on - to other
moral systems: neo-Kantianism, Christianity, egalitarianism or
nationalism. This is how the Second International petered out -
slowly and dismally, not with a bang, even though the assassina­
tion of J aures was sometimes represented as precisely that.
Yet to the despised old Second International, more than to any
other source, we owe the strongest formulation of the most
agonising problems which are today more agonising than ever:
such questions as the relations of freedom and centralised author­
ity, forced upon us, whatever our professed theoretical allegiances,
by industrialism itself (a relationship which is not made clearer or
more tolerable by being called dialectical); the vitality of national
versus international forces; the relations of trade unions and
socialist parties; direct economic action versus the activities of
political parties; the consequences of conspiratorial methods under
repressive regimes; the conflict of new nationalisms (and racisms),
born out of the struggle against imperialism, with the optimum
utilisation, under centralised direction, of the resources of underde­
veloped territories for all mankind; the part played by purely
economic factors �s against national or imperialist sentiments (not
themselves directly created by economic forms) in causing wars
 MARXISM IN THE N I N ETEENTH CENTURY 1 67
and revolutions; the possibility of the prevention of wars by
'industrial action' - general strikes and other interventions by
workers' organisations - not to speak of the many questions of
social legislation, immigration policy, penal reform, the rights of
women with which all those long congresses with their intermin­
able speeches, in Paris and Brussels and London and Amsterdam,
Stuttgart and Copenhagen and Basle, were occupied from I 8 8 9 to
I 9 I 4.
In spite of all the vast transformation of Marxism since I 9 1 8 , it is
the case that in our part of the world these ancient problems are far
from obsolete today. Is this because we lag behind the times, and
are ourselves a huge, anomalous anachronism, the last prehistoric
men, whose final disappearance will mark the birth of the new
world? Or is it, perhaps, as I cannot help thinking, because Marx,
like many pioneers of genius, wildly exaggerated, and overstressed
the historical relativity and the transience of all social questions in
the face not merely of the process of time and change, but of men's
ability to end them once and for ever by finding a single final
rational solution: whereupon our problems will be relegated to the
museum of antiquities (to use Engels' phrase) and the vast act of
revolutionary transformation will, if not today, then tomorrow,
close for ever the great and terrible debate, and human history will
begin at last? Since a good many of Marx's specific prophecies have
not been fulfilled, perhaps the great all-embracing vision will, as I
believe, prove no less delusive.
 THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTION

A Crisis in the History of Modern Thought

MY S UBJECT is a turning-point in the history of Western political

thought, and indeed more widely, in the history of human thought
and behaviour in Europe. By a turning-point I mean a transforma­
tion of outlook. This is something different from the kind of
change that occurs when a discovery, even one of crucial impor­
tance, solves even the most central and tormenting questions. A
solution to a question, set in terms of that question, does not
necessarily alter the categories and concepts in terms of which the
question presented itself; if anything it gives these categories added
authority and life. Newton's discoveries did not subvert the
foundations of the physics of Kepler and Galileo. The economic
ideas and methods of Keynes did not break the continuity of the
subject created by Adam Smith and Ricardo. By a turning-point I
mean something different: a radical change in the entire conceptual
framework within which the questions had been posed; new ideas,
new words, new relationships in terms of which the old problems
are not so much solved as made to look remote, obsolete and, at
times, unintelligible, so that the agonising problems and doubts of
the past seem queer ways of thought, or confusions that belong to
a world which has gone. � � c 3/J/r'; - ,-:,.' r '/ ' ,--" - ;: ,... ·" '' c�c. ;;; v::
. .� ·

In the history of Western political thought there have occurred

at least (it seems to me) three major turning-points of this type.
One is usually placed in the short but mysterious period between
the death of Aristotle and the rise of Stoicism, when, in less than
two decades, the dominant philosophical schools of Athens ceased
to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of
social life, ceased to discuss the questions connected with public
and political life that had preoccupied the Academy and the
Lyceum, as if these questions were no longer central, or even
significant, and s� ddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner
 THE ROMANTIC REVOLUT I O N
experience and individual salvation, as insulated entitles whose
virtue consisted in their capacity to insulate themselves still further.
This great transvaluation of all values - from the public to the
private, the outer to the inner, the political to the ethical, the city to
the individual, from social order to unpolitical anarchism, and the
corresponding change in ideas and language, could scarcely have
taken place only in the fifteen or twenty years after the death of
Alexander allotted to it by historians of thought. We do not know,
and perhaps shall never know, how much systematic opposition to
the outlook embodied in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle existed
during the preceding hundred years. We know too little about the
thought of the early Cynics, Sceptics and Sophists who looked on
public affairs as insusceptible to objective reason. All we know
about these predecessors and opponents of Plato and Aristotle, or
nearly all, is learned from the writing of their enemies; it is as if all
we knew about the doctrines of Bertrand Russell came from Soviet
textbooks, or of the Middle Ages from the doctrines of Bertrand
Russell. However that may be, this was certainly one major
turning-point in the history of human thought, after which
nothing was the same. 1 <:.. -:; : "..<
:;-<._· ,�/J �"- --:J"
•. · �"'· ,.;
:. , - .· ;-

An overturn of equal dimensions seems to me to have been

inaugurated by Machiavelli. The sharp division between the natural
and the moral virtues, the assumption that political values not
merely are different from, but may in principle be incompatible
with, Christian ethics, the utilitarian view of religion, the discredit­
ing of theology, and of metaphysical and theological justification,
of the very notion of an ideal commonwealth as a logical contradic­
tion in theory and necessarily disastrous in practice - all this was
something new and startling. Men had not previously been openly
called upon to choose between irreconcilable sets of values, private
and public, in a world without purpose, and told in advance that
there could in principle exist no ultimate, objective criterion for
this choice, since the two paths often led in opposite directions,
which had little in common. I will not here enlarge upon the vast
consequences of this dagger plunged into the body of the Euro­
pean tradition, as Meinecke has called it.
The third great turning-point - it seems to me the greatest yet,
since nothing so revolutionary has happened since - occurred
towards the end of the eighteenth century, principally in Germany;
and although it is well enough known under the name of
'romanticism', its full meaning and importance have not been
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
appreciated even now. I should like to state my thesis in its
simplest form - too simple to be altogether accurate or just. It is
this: that the eighteenth century saw the destruction of the notion
of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or
absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also - truth and
validity as such - with vast and indeed incalculable results. The
movement we call romanticism transformed modern ethics and
politics in a far more serious way than has been realised.

II

During the entire span of the central tradition of Western thought

it had been assumed that all general questions were of the same
logical type: they were questions of fact. Therefore they were
answerable by those who were in a position to know the relevant
data and to interpret them correctly. The belief that if a question is
not in principle answerable it is not a genuine question at all, that
somewhere there exists a solution for every problem, though it
may be concealed and difficult of access, like hidden treasure
(which was taken for granted by positivism in the age of Enlighten­
ment and in the nineteenth century, and also in our day), is the
major assumption that is presupposed in the whole of Western
thought up to the point of which I speak. Moral and political
questions, in this respect, did not differ from others. Such ques­
tions as 'What is the best life for men?', 'Why should I obey you or
other persons?' (perhaps the most central question of political
philosophy), 'What are rights?', 'What is freedom and why seek
it?', 'What are obligations, power, justice, equality?' and the like
were regarded as being in principle answerable in the same way as
more obviously factual questions such as 'What is water composed
of?', 'How many stars are there?', 'When did Julius Caesar die?',
'Which foot did he put first when crossing the Rubicon?', 'Why
did Hitler exterminate so many human beings?', 'Does God exist?'
I may not myself be able to tell how far Lisbon is from
Constantinople, or whether the patient will die of this disease, but I
know in what region to look for an answer, what to do, what
authorities to consult. I know what kinds of propositions could,
and what could not, be answers to my question. That is what I
mean by saying that I know that the true answer must be
discoverable in p,rinciple, although I may not know it, and, indeed,
nobody - save an omniscient being - may know it.
 THE ROMANTIC REV O LUTION
There were violent disputes among the rival claimants to such
knowledge. Some looked for the truth in individual revelation, or
dogmatic faith, or sacred books; or in the pronouncements of the
expert interpreters of such truth - witch-doctors, priests,
Churches, prophets, men in touch with unseen forces. All the
Churches might not always return the same answer, but it was
assumed that some such answers must be discoverable: if not the
pronouncements of this sect or religion, then of another one. Some
men looked for the answer to the insights of metaphysicians, or of
the individual conscience, or to the immemorial wisdom of the
tribe or culture, or the uncorrupted heart of the simple good man;
some listened to the voice of the people met in assembly, some to
the divine king or leader. Some thought the truth was timeless,
others that it evolved historically; it was searched for in the past or
in the future, in this life or the next, in the pronouncements of
reason or of mystics and other irrational sources, in theology, in
the application of mathematical methods to the data of experience,
in the conclusions of common sense, or the laboratories of the
natural scientists. Wars of extermination were fought over rival
claims to be able to answer these questions truly. It could not be
otherwise when the reward was the solution of questions of life
and death, personal salvation, living according to the truth. This is
the faith of Platonists and Stoics, Christians and Jews, thinkers and
men of action, believers and unbelievers of every shade, to our day.
In spite of the vast differences that separated these outlooks, one
great presupposition underlies them all, or rather three branches of
one presupposition. The first is that there is such an entity as a
human nature, natural or supernatural, which can be understood
by the relevant experts; the second is that to have a specific nature
is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by
God or an impersonal nature of things, and that to pursue these
goals is alone what makes men human; the third is that these goals,
and the corresponding interests and values (which it is the business
of theology or philosophy or science to discover and formulate),
cannot possibly conflict with one another - indeed, that they must
form a harmonious whole.
The greatest embodiment of these assumptions is the conception
of natural law, classical, medieval and modern. They were accepted
by everyone: they were not questioned even by some of the
sharpest critics of natural law - sceptics, empiricists, subjectivists,
or believers in organic or historical evolution. An ancient Sophist,
1 72 THE SENSE O F REALITY
according to Aristotle, had indeed observed that fire burned both
in Athens and in Persia, whereas social and moral views changed
before our very eyes.1 Similarly Montesquieu had said that, when
Montezuma told Cortez that the Christian religion might be best
for Spaniards, but the Aztec religion was best for his people, what
he was saying was not absurd.2 This was thought scandalous by
all who believed that moral or religious or political truths were
valid for everyone, everywhere, at all times; that is to say, both by
the Christian Churches and by dogmatic materialists and positi­
vists such as Helvetius and Condillac and their friends. But even
the relativists and the sceptics said no more than that individuals
and societies had different needs in accordance with different
geographical or climatic conditions, or different systems of law and
education, or general outlooks and patterns of life - all that
Montesquieu had called the spirit of the laws. Nevertheless
objective answers to such questions were, of course, discoverable:
you needed only to know the conditions in which men lived.
Given these, you could say, with a claim to eternal objective truth,
that since the needs of the Persians were different from those of the
Parisians, what was good in Persia might be bad in Paris. But the
answers were still objective, the truth of the prescription for Persia
did not contradict the prescription for Paris. I beat my wife in
Bukhara, I do not beat her in Birmingham: different circumstances
dictate different methods, although the goals are much the same; or
differ according to differing stimuli.
This remained equally true even for so thoroughgoing a sceptic
as Hume: to find out the right way of life it is of no use to look for
innate ideas or a priori truths. The former do not exist; the latter
give no information about the world, only about the way we use
our words and symbols. But is there nowhere to look? Indeed
there is. Values are what men seek: they seek satisfaction of their
needs. The science of empirical psychology will tell you what men
want, what they approve and disapprove, and sociology or social
anthropology will tell you about the differences and similarities
between the needs and the moral and political values of (and
within) different nations, groups, classes, civilisations. Even the
German historical school, which denounced most fiercely of all the
notion of immutable, universal principles, substituted for them a

1 Aristotle, Nicomacpean Ethics, I I 34b26.

2 De /'esprit des lois, book 24, chapter 24.
 THE ROMANTIC REVO LUTI O N 1 73
sense of the continuity of a specific 'organic' entity - a particular
nation, or tribe, or tradition, but, at any rate in the early doctrines
of this school, in the writings of Herder, Savigny, Niebuhr (and
indeed, in England, Burke), did not say or imply that these various
patterns of development were hostile to one another, or not
elements in one grand universal whole, a vast unity in difference.
The paths might be necessarily different; but the goal was one for
all men: it combined peace, justice, virtue, happiness, harmonious
coexistence. That is the heart of Lessing's famous parable of the
three rings, which spoke for the entire Enlightenment.
Holbach said that man was a thing in nature like other three­
dimensional entities: that ethics was a science which discovered,
firstly, what human nature was, then what it needed, and finally
how to satisfy these needs; and politics was this science applied to
groups - morality and politics are the sciences of breeding and
satisfying human animals, or, to change the metaphor, the agricul­
ture of the mind, as Helvetius said. Le Mercier de la Riviere
declared that human ends are given: given by the constitution of
human nature. We cannot alter them, only understand their laws
and act accordingly. Politics is navigation - it requires knowledge
of seas and winds and rocks and the ports which one cannot but
wish to reach: that is what being rational means. 'The despotism of
the laws and the personal despotism of the lawgiver are one and the
same: that of the irresistible power of evidence,' said Le Mercier.•
The legislator is merely the builder: the plan has been laid down by
nature. Helvetius said he did not care whether men were virtuous
or vicious; it is necessary only that they be intelligent - for if they
are intelligent they will in fact pursue happiness by the most
effective means, whether they realise this or not, whatever their
interpretation of their own conduct may be. Montesquieu thought
that the ways of achieving such ends as happiness or justice or
stability, which were common to all men, would differ in different
circumstances; Hume that these ends were subjective and not
demonstrable a priori; Herder that they were not universal or fully
rational, and depended upon the stage in the organic development
reached by a given society pursuing its own peculiar, unique path.
But if the ends, subjective or objective, uniform or variable, are
given, by God, by reason, by tradition, then the only genuine

1 L 'Ordre nature/ et essentiel des socihes politiques (London, 1 767), vol. 1,

p. J I I .
1 74 THE SENSE O F REALITY
questions left are those of means. Political questions turn out to be
pure questions of technology.
Again, there might be differences on another plane. Some,
following Plato, believed that these ends could be discovered only
by specially trained experts: sages, or divinely inspired seers, or
philosophes, or scientists, or historians. Condorcet saw no reason
why progress should not be made in human affairs by a govern­
ment of experts in the sciences of man, if only the same methods
were applied to men as had been applied to societies of bees and
beavers. Herder disagreed profoundly, because human societies
develop and transform themselves by pursuing spiritual goals,
whereas those of bees and beavers do not. But he said nothing that
went against Condorcet's proposition that 'Nature binds by an
unbreakable chain truth, happiness and virtue';1 for otherwise
there was no cosmos. If you could show that truth, for example,
might not be compatible with happiness, or happiness with virtue,
then, if all three were regarded as absolute values (and this in the
eighteenth century, as at most other times, was a truism), it
followed that no objectively demonstrable answer could in princi­
ple be given to the questions 'What goal shall we pursue?', 'Which
is the best way of life?' Yet unless these questions can in principle
be answered, what precisely was it that we were asking? Kant and
Rousseau broke away from Plato in asserting that answers to
questions of value were not matters of expertise at all, since every
rational man (and any man could be rational) could discover the
answer to these fundamental moral questions; and moreover that
the answers of all rational men would of necessity coincide. Indeed,
their belief in democracy rests upon this doctrine.
The point I wish to make, and it seems to me a crucial one, is
that all these diverse schools agreed that questions of value were a
species of questions of fact. Since one truth - say the answer to the
question 'Should I pursue justice?' - cannot be incompatible with
another truth - say the answer to 'Should I practise mercy?' (for
one true proposition cannot logically contradict another) - an ideal
state of affairs embodying the correct solutions of all the central
problems of social life could be worked out, at least in principle.
Any obstacles to its realisation must be empirical or contingent. All

1 Esquisse d'un tablfaU histon"que des progres de /'esprit humain, ed. 0. H.

Prior and Yvon Belaval (Paris, 1970), p. 228.

 THE RO MANTI C REV O LUTI ON 1 75
human weakness, error, idleness, corruption, misery, all conflict
and therefore all evil and all tragedy, are due to ignorance and
error. If men knew, they would not err; if they did not err, they
could - and, being rational, would - pursue the satisfaction of their
true interests by the most efficient methods. These activities, being
based on reason, could never collide; for there is nothing in the
nature of men or the world which makes tragedy unavoidable. Sin,
crime, suffering are forms of maladjustment due to blindness.
Knowledge, whether it is conceived as scientific or mystical,
empirical or theological, on earth or in heaven, creates beauty,
harmony and happiness. There are no incongruities in the world of
saints or angels.

III

Virtue is knowledge. This central, Western faith, with all its

ramifications, which survived the breakdown of classical Greek
philosophy, the rise of Christianity, which survived the barbarians
and the medieval Church, the Renaissance and the Reformation,
and indeed shaped them all in one form or another, this strongest
pillar of European rationalism, the central leg of the great tripod,
was undermined, or at least cracked, by the romantic movement. It
seems to me, first, that certain among the romantics cut the deepest
of all the roots of the classical outlook - namely the belief that
values, the answers to questions of action and choice, could be
discovered at all - and maintained that there were no answers to
some of these questions, either subjective or objective, either
empirical or a priori. Secondly, there was for them no guarantee
that values did not, in principle, conflict with one another, or, if
they did, that there was a way out; and they held, like Machiavelli,
that to deny this was a form of self-deception, nai"ve, or shallow,
pathetic and always disastrous. Thirdly, my thesis is that by their
positive doctrine the romantics introduced a new set of values, not
reconcilable with the old, and that most Europeans are today the
heirs of both opposing traditions. We accept both outlooks, and
shift from one foot to the other in a fashion that we cannot avoid if
we are honest with ourselves, but which is not intellectually
coherent. To trace this momentous shift in outlook could be a life's
work. Here I can make only a few excessively oversimplified
points to indicate the contour of this revolutionary phenomenon.
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
IV

The destructive element - the earliest tremor of the cormng

earthquake - is first traceable in the innocent pages of Rousseau
and Kant. Everyone knows that, according to both Rousseau and
Kant, to discover what I ought to do I have to listen to an inner
voice. This voice issues commands: it orders. Rousseau calls it
reason. Kant also calls it rational, and indeed offers criteria
whereby its injunctions can be discriminated from those of other,
rival voices - those of the �friotions, for example, or self-interest.
Yet both these thinkers, despite their deep disagreements with
certain aspects of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, largely still
belong to it, in that whatever the inner voice of reason commands
is for them obj ective, universal, timeless, true for all men, in all
places, at all times, as the tradition of natural law had taught. Yet,
in Kant's teaching, this voice acquires certain peculiar characteris­
tics. His central concept is that of individual responsibility. The
very formulation of the question, concerning what a man should
do (and by a natural transference - which he was politically too
timorous to stress - also the community), implies that a man or
group can always act in one way or another; in other words, can
choose. A man's choice, to be properly so called, must be free; if he
is determined to act by forces over which he has no control,
whether they be physical, as some seventeenth-century philoso­
phers had maintained, or psychological - desires, fears, hopes - as
well as physiological and biological, as the eighteenth-century
materialists had taught, then the notion of choice is, for Kant,
vacuous, and no significance can be attached to such words as
'should', 'goal', 'duty' and so on. Rousseau, too, looks on the
individual as embodying the essence of his freedom - to curtail a
man's freedom, however benevolently, in his own putative interest,
as recommended to the enlightened despot by the eighteenth­
century reformers, is to kill the individual's humanity, to turn him
into an animal or an object. To be truly free, a man, for Kant, must
be free to go to the bad as well as to the good; otherwise there is no
merit in (rationally) choosing the good, and the notion of desert
becomes empty. To be free is to be self-directed. If I am
determined by something over which I have no control I am not
free. But the cro:�;ving for happiness can be an external controlling
factor of this type: I may be unable to control it. Moreover
happiness is something which I may or may not achieve: it depends
 THE ROMANTIC REV O LUTI ON 1 77
upon too many circumstances over which I have no power. If it is
my goal, or duty, to perform a particular action, I must be able to
do it; I cannot be blamed for not doing what is beyond my powers.
Only if I am able to choose freely can I (or, so it follows, my
culture or nation) be regarded as having obligations or responsibili­
ties, indeed as a moral agent at all. If the source of moral or political
rules is external to me, I am not free, not capable of rational choice.
The values of rational creatures must, therefore, according to this
line of thought, be enjoined upon me by myself, for if they issue
from some outside source, I depend upon that source, and am not
free. This is what Kant means by saying that autonomy is the basis
of all morality: to be at the mercy of some outside force, whether
blind nature or some transcendent power, God or nature, that
orders me as it wills, is heteronomy, a form of dependence on
something that I do not control, slavery. I, and I alone, must be the
author of my own values. I must indeed obey rules, but I am free,
as Rousseau taught, because the rules are of my own making.
Extraneous commands degrade men; indeed it is because men, and
they alone, are the authors of values, that they are themselves
supremely valuable; to use men for ends that are not their own,
hence to exploit human beings, degrade them, humiliate them, is to
deny their human essence, to deny that they are men; and this is
the most heinous of all sins. To justify coercing or enslaving or
crushing a creature I must plead that I do so in the name of a value
higher than the creature whose freedom I violate. But if ex
hypothesi there can be no such values - for all values are created by
free (rational) human choice - then to perpetrate this is to trample
on the highest value of all - the ultimate ends that human reason
proposes for itself: reason and rational choice are the essence of
men's humanity, of their dignity as human beings, of their
difference, as free beings, from things and beasts. It is this that
causes so violent a revulsion in us, whoever we are, when we see
creatures like ourselves manipulated, trampled on, dehumanised,
treated as, or turned into, brutes.
Kant speaks as if these rules were the commands of reason, and
therefore if they hold for me they must hold for every other
rational creature, for it is the essence of reason, whether theoretical
or practical, in the sciences and in life, to be universally valid.
Whether in a religious or a humanistic guise, this and this alone is
the basis of our notion of moral rights and moral rules, of the
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
liberty, equality and dignity of all men as such. He calls these rules
categorical imperatives.
Perhaps Kant did not, like Hume, consciously intend to draw a
sharp distinction between imperatives and statements of fact: but in
any case his formulation had revolutionary consequences. Com­
mands or imperatives are not factual statements; they are not
descriptions; they are not true or false. Commands may be right or
wrong, they may be corrupt or disinterested; they may be
intelligible or obscure; they may be trivial or important; but they
do not describe anything: they order, they direct, they terrify, they
generate action. Similarly a goal or a value is something that a man
sets himself to aim at, it is not an independent entity that can be
stumbled upon. Values are not natural growths that a science, say
psychology or sociology, can study, but are made by men, are
forms of free action or creation.
Kant does not indeed move towards this conclusion; indeed it
goes counter to all that he believed - that is, the universality of
reason, the possibility of rational demonstration of moral values.
But some of Kant's romantic successors drew out the full conse­
quences of the view that values are commands, and that they are
created, not discovered. The old analogy between moral (or
political) and scientific or metaphysical or theological knowledge is
broken. Morality - and politics so far as it is social morality - is a
creative process: the new romantic model is that of art.
What does the artist do? He creates something, he expresses
himself; he does not copy, imitate, transcribe (that is mere crafts­
manship). He acts, makes, invents; he does not discover, calculate,
deduce, reason. To create is, in a certain sense, to depend solely on
one's own self. One invents both the goal and the path towards it.
Where, asked Herzen, is the song before the composer has
conceived it? Where is the dance before it has been danced, where
is the poem before the poet has uttered it? They are not there - in
some external sphere - to be discovered, whether by experts or by
the common man. All creation is in some sense creation out of
nothing. It is the only fully autonomous activity of man. It is self­
liberation from causal laws, from the mechanism of the external
world, from tyrants, or environmental influences, or the passions,
which govern me - factors in relation to which I am as much an
object in nature as trees, or stones, or animals.
If the essence o( man is self-mastery - the conscious choice of his
own ends and forffi' of life - this constitutes a radical break with the
 THE ROMANTIC REV O LUTI O N 1 79

older model that dominated the notion of man's place in the

cosmos. The notion of natural laws as flowing from the need for
harmony with nature, the functional conception of man as fulfilled
by finding his place in the universal orchestra - the unquestioned
foundation of European moral and spiritual cosmology from the
pre-Socratics to Rousseau - is destroyed; for to seek to adjust one's
self to something that obeys its own laws, whether it is conceived
as static or dynamic, as an unchangeable reality beneath the flux of
experience or as a purposive process realised in nature or history, is
tantamount to obeying something that one cannot determine, laws
that dictate from without; or if they speak from within as well, at
any rate not created, nor freely alterable by individuals or societies.
If to be free is the condition of being human, and to be free is to
issue laws to myself, then it is not authority from without, no
maner how sublime the source, that constitutes the validity and
truth of principles of action, but the fact that it is ordained by a free
agent.
This is a reversal of the notion of truth as correspondence, or at
any rate a fixed relation to the rerum natura that is given and
eternal, which is the basis of natural law. The traditional view of
the world is transformed. Art is not imitation, nor representation,
but expression; I am most truly myself when I create - that, and not
capacity for reasoning, is the divine spark within me; that is the
sense in which I am made in God's image (sicut Deus). Nature is no
longer Dame Nature or Mistress Nature, neither the despot of the
materialists nor the governess of the deists, nor Hume's kindly
housekeeper, nor Shaftesbury's natura naturans, 'All-loving and
All-lovely, All-divine!',' but, in whatever guise I meet her, she is
the counterpart of act or spirit, the matter upon which I work my
will, that which I mould.
This image haunts the German romantics, Wackenroder, Tieck,
Jacobi, Schiller, Navalis, the Schlegels, Schelling. Its most original,
and perhaps most vivid, expression is in the early writings of
Fichte, who developed the notion of the categorical imperative
beyond and against Kant. I become aware of my own self, said
Fichte, not as an element in some larger pattern, but in the clash
with the not-self, the Anstoss, the violent impact of collision with
dead matter, which I resist and which I must subjugate to my free

1 The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody (London, 1 709), part J, section 1 ,

p. 1 5 8.
r 8o THE SENSE O F REALITY
creative design. The self is activity, effort, self-direction. It wills,
alters, carves up the world, both in thought and in action, in
accordance with its own concepts and categories. In Kant this was
a preconscious activity of the imagination. In Fichte it is a
conscious creative activity. 'I do not accept anything because I
must,' said Fichte (as previous thinkers, say Descartes or Locke,
had said), 'I believe it because I will'/ and again, 'If man allows
laws to be made for him by the will of others, he thereby makes
himself into a beast, that is, he injures his inborn human dignity.'2
I am a member of two worlds, that is to say, of the material, ruled
by cause and effect, and of the spiritual/ where 'I am wholly my
own creation.'4 Josiah Royce, summarising this aspect of Fichte's
views, wrote: 'The world is the poem . . . dreamed out by the inner
life.'5 Our worlds are literally different if we differ spiritually. To
be a poet, a soldier, a banker is to create different worlds. My
philosophy depends on the kind of man I am, not vice versa. In
some sense my world must depend on my free choice. The material
- dead nature (including my body and its functions) - is given.
What I make of it is not: if it were, I too should go through the
repetitive cycles - cause, effect, cause - that govern inanimate
matter, or the evolutionary pattern that determines organic nature,
plants, animals, my own body, my sensuous self, all that I cannot
control freely.
This is stated in the great rhetorical climax of Fichte's famous
speeches to the German nation (delivered in his later phase), the
basic text of all German nationalism:

Either you believe in the original principle in man - a freedom, a

perfectibility . . . or you do not . . . All those who have within them a
creative quickening of life, or else, assuming that such a gift has been
withheld from them, at least reject what is but vanity, and await the
moment when they are caught up in the current of original life, or
even, if they are not yet at this point, at any rate have some confused
presentiment of freedom - have towards it not hatred nor fear but a

1 ]ohann Gottlieb Fichte 's Sammtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin, r 84 5-6)
(hereafter SW), vol. 2, p. 2 56. Subsequent references to Fichte are to this edition,
by volume and page, thus: SW ii 2 5 6.
2 SW vi 82.

3 e.g. SW ii 282, 288.

' sw ii 2 5 6.
s Josiah Royce, Thf Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston and New York,

I 892), p. 1 62.
 THE ROMANTIC REVOLUT I O N 181
feeling of love - these are a part of primal humanity . . . All those who,
on the other hand, have resigned themselves to represent only a
derivative, second-hand product, who are but the annexe to life . . .
considered as people they are strangers, outsiders . . . All those who
believe in freedom of the spirit . . . they are with us . . . All those who
believe in the arrested being or retrogression, or putting inanimate
nature at the helm of the world . . . they are strangers to us. 1

Fichte's attempt to show that the Germans are creative and the
French are dead does not concern us here: what matters is his thesis
that values are made, not found. In his early, politically radical,
writings, while Rousseau was his master, he thought that values are
created by the rational individual, and because reason is identical in
all men, the laws and values of the life of reason are binding on
them all. In his later works the self is successively identified with
the transcendental demiurge, the great creative spirit, of which we
are all aspects or fragments, that is to say, God; then with man in
general; then with the German people, or any 'creative' group or
community, through which alone the individual can fulfil his true,
inner, timeless, creative self. 'The individual does not exist,' Fichte
.
declared, 'he should not count for anything, but must vanis h
completely; the group alone exists.'2 'The life of reason consists in
this, that the individual forget himself in the species - to risk his life
for the life of all and sacrifice his life to theirs.'3 The function of
freedom is to realise 'complete freedom, complete independence of
everything which is not ourselves, our pure ego'.4 If this ego is
identified with 'the people', then the people has the moral right to
realise its destiny by every weapon of cunning and of force.
I am not drawing attention to this strand in Fichte's thought in
order to indicate one of the sources of mystical nationalism, or to
demonstrate the perversion of his earlier individualism, but to
show how the essence of man is now identified, not with reason,
which must be one in all men, but with the source of action, the
will; the wills of men can conflict as the products of reason - true
descriptive statements - logically cannot. I have cited only Fichte,
but there is scarcely a romantic writer who does not abound in
passages of this type: the break with the objective classical world -

1 SW vii 374- 5.
2 SW vii 37-8.
3 SW vii 3 5·

4 SW vi 86-7.
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
the image of the world common to Plato, Aquinas and Voltaire - is
very dramatic.
Many corollaries that are new politically, as well as aesthetically
and philosophically, issue from this. Fichte's 'pure ego', identical in
all the scattered eanhly selves, gives way to the bold, unbridled
individual artist or creative personality, who conceives his own
values and lives and dies for them because they are his values - for
there is no other source from which they can arise. The free,
anarchic spirit, worshipped in Friedrich Schlegel's novel Lucinde
and in Tieck's William Lovell, leads in its socialised form to the
notion of autarky - the closed, centrally planned society of Fichte
and of Friedrich List, and that of many socialists, which insulates
itself against outside interference in order to be independent and
express its own inner personality without interference by other
men. This self-insulation - concentration on the inner life, on that
which alone I can control, together with the definition of my self
or my community in terms of something not subject to external
influences - is, no doubt, historically connected with the defeats
and devastation inflicted upon the Germans by Richelieu and
Louis XIV, and the consequent emotional need on the part of the
humiliated nation to restore its respect for itself by withdrawal into
an inner citadel that could not be taken from it by the conqueror ­
its inner life, the spiritual realm that no tyrant could seize, no
natural disaster destroy. In the twentieth century the selfsame need,
caused by defeat in war, led to a much more violent manifestation
of these defensive-aggressive symptoms, and in due course to the
spread of the disease itself, which has had the appalling consequen­
ces known to all. However that may be, whether or not it was the
ambition of Richelieu (or Alexander or Julius Caesar), with the
consequent sense of impotence of the average German (or Athe­
nian or Roman) citizen (especially of the intellectuals among them),
that led to the substitution of personal, aesthetic or metaphysical
issues for social or political ones, this process, which began almost
imperceptibly among the pietists in the despotically ruled German
States towards the end of the seventeenth century, led to the
greatest spiritual upheaval of modern times. To set such phenom­
ena in their historical context is, of course, important; but their
influence upon our own age is more radical than any historical
account of them would lead one to suppose.
'
Individual character, will, activity - these are everything. Work
ceases to be con ;eived as a painful necessity, and becomes (in
 THE ROMANT I C REVO LUTION
Fichte) the sacred task of man, for only thereby can he impress his
unique, creative personality upon the dead stuff that is nature. This
leads to the concepts of the dignity of labour and the right to work,
sanctified by man and not by the service of God. The true nature
of man is not passive receptivity - leisure, contemplation - but
activity. Creators are contrasted with mere collaborators in the
creative process, still more with those whom Fichte described as
asleep, or who are adrift with the current of things. Das Gegebene
- the given - is now contrasted with das Aufgegebene the task
-

that I set before me - sacred because it issues from my own

untrammelled 'rational' will. The concept of vocation - Beruf -
which is central to Lutheran social teaching, is retained and exalted
in the romantic philosophy, save that the source of authority is
now not God or nature, but the individual's concern for his
freedom to choose his end, the end which alone fulfils the demands
of his moral, or aesthetic, or philosophical, or political, nature.
'Man shall be and do something.'' To know something to be my
mission (or tha:: of my nation or culture or Church) is not to know
facts or contemplate hypotheses in a scientific or philosophical
spirit, nor merely to be moved by emotion (emotion is not the
heart of romanticism: that is an egregious error made by a great
many historians and critics), but is more akin to the state of the
artist in his hour of inspiration, of personal truth, when he knows
what he must do to realise his inner vision, at once part of himself
and an objective command - issued by himself to himself - to act
or live in a certain fashion. This knowledge is one that all creative
personalities possess: whether they be artists, thinkers, men of
action, whether they create in isolation or collectively. To know
my true goal is not to know the truth as conceived in the thought
of the Enlightenment, according to which you first discover the
truth, then apply it; rather your very action expresses - is one
with - your convictions. Morality and politics are not a set of
propositions: they are action, self-dedication to goals made con­
crete. To be a man is not to understand or reason but to act; to act,
to make, to create, to be free are identical: this is the difference
between the animals and man. The artist creates; he does not
transcribe or discover. But, as Herder had taught, the individual is
plunged in the native stream of his society; the life of a society is
not the mere sum of the lives of its members. Communities, true

1 SW vi 3 8 3 .
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
communities, create collectively. And so the aesthetic model is
translated into the social and political terms that were destined to
play so fateful a part in the history of modern Europe. Fichte says
this much more explicitly than Herder or Burke. The path leads
directly from him to the romantic chauvinism of German histori­
ans of the last century.

A particular variant of this attitude is Friedrich Schiller's attempt to

find the field of freedom in art, conceived as a kind of play. The
material world is a field of cause and effect which imprisons our
bodies, in which our behaviour is determined in the manner that
the natural sciences describe and explain. What then distinguishes
us from the rest of nature? Not that we are determined less
rigorously than the rest of nature, though perhaps in a somewhat
different fashion, which is the answer of older theorists; but that
we have the power of abstracting our spirit from ('rising above')
the world of nature, and constructing one in which different laws
and rules obtain, free, because invented by us. When we are at play,
we ourselves construct the universe and its laws. Children who
play at being Red Indians are Red Indians: nothing obstructs them;
the ordinary laws - social, psychological, even physical - have been
suspended; we can alter anything, even, perhaps, the laws of logic,
as our imagination chooses. This 'noumenal' world is one in which
our imagination and reason have full scope. In this world virtue is
rewarded, goodness, beauty, truth celebrated, vice punished, as
they are not, all too self-evidently, in the so-called real world. Art
is literally a game, invention, creation out of nothing, in which
both the contents of the world and the rules that it obeys are
fashioned in accordance with our own free, untrammelled wishes.
Into this we may escape, whenever we please, and find liberation
from the treadmill of physical life. This is the world of art,
morality, reason. The values of it are not discovered but created,
and the relation of these values are what we please to make them.
So, too, Schelling conceives the world as the continuous creative
activity of the Absolute Spirit, and the degrees of insight or
understanding of men according to their creative capacity. Among
these, as Bergson did later, he includes philosophers, artists, poets,
historians, statesinen, as possessing a far deeper insight into the
history of men "and all the processes of their life, biological,
 THE ROMANTI C REV O LUTION r8s
physiological, psychological, than that of reasoners who attempt to
apply inappropriate models, drawn from the 'dead' sciences of
chemistry or mathematics, to the 'living' flow of life. More than
any other thinker of this time, Schelling conceived of values and
myths, so far from being self-delusion on the part of early peoples,
or deliberate mystifications by priests or poets, as concrete
embodiments of the human impulse to create which man shared
with all nature. Echoing Vico, he maintained that men understood
only what they saw from within, as actors, not from without, as
observers. This served to divide the dead from the living among the
students of nature, history and art alike. As a metaphysical doctrine
Schelling's teaching remained obscure and esoteric; but it had
sufficient influence to feed the already swollen torrent of romantic
politics, especially the notion of the goals of social life as created by
inspired men of genius who proceeded not by careful reasoning
but by flashes of revelation, huge irrational leaps, and carried the
rest of mankind with them in a great creative drive forward, which
released the hidden forces within it.

VI

The political consequences of this are highly novel. If we alone are

the authors of the values, then what matters is our inner state -
motive, not consequence. For we cannot guarantee consequences:
they are part of the natural world, the world of cause and effect, of
necessity, not of the world of freedom. We can be responsible only
for what is in our power. Hence a transformed scale of moral and
political values, something altogether new in the European con­
sciousness. What matters now is motive, integrity, sincerity, fidel­
ity in principle, purity of heart, spontaneity; not happiness or
strength or wisdom or success, or natural beauty, or other natural
values, which are outside the realm of moral freedom, since they
depend on external factors that are largely beyond our control. The
sage, the specialist, the man who knows, who achieves happiness,
or virtue, or wisdom, by means of understanding, or action
founded upon understanding, is replaced by the tragic hero who
seeks to realise himself at whatever cost, against whatever odds,
with no matter what consequences; and whether, in a worldly
� '
sense, he succeeds or does not succeed is immaterial. .) '

All three of the fundamental presuppositions of the old outlook

are destroyed by this reversal of values. In the first place, man has
1 86 THE SENSE O F REALITY
no identifiable nature, whether static or dynamic, for he creates
himself: he creates his own values, and thereby transforms himself,
and the transformed self creates new values, so that we cannot ex
hypothesi ever tell what the upshot will be of his attempt to realise
them; for he can only attempt - he cannot be answerable for the
consequences, or know whether he will succeed or not. In the
second place, since his values are not discovered but created, no
system of propositions can be constructed to describe them, for
they are not facts, not entities in the world; they are not there to be
identified and labelled by a science of ethics or politics, whether
empirically or a priori. Finally, there is no guarantee that the values
of different civilisations, or nations, or individuals, will necessarily
harmonise. There may also be clashes between the values of one
individual at different times, or even at the same time. Who shall
say whether knowledge is at all times compatible with happiness?
To know the world may plunge one into misery; justice may
preclude mercy; equality may bridle liberty; efficiency may kill
spontaneity; virtue may drive out pleasure, or power, or knowl­
edge. Knowledge may not be a moral value at all, even though no
philosopher after Plato made this denial. For it is possible to know
all that is knowable, and yet to embrace evil if one is so minded: if
man were not free to choose evil, he would not be truly free,
creation would become a quasi-mechanical self-propulsion along
the tramlines of infallible omniscience, harmonious and frictionless,
but not consistent with choice or freedom. When a man pursues
his own values, what we have learnt to admire in him is his spiritual
attitude - the sincerity, the intensity, the dedication with which he
seeks to follow the light within himself. We cannot tell whether he
will succeed in creating a work of art, a form of life, a political
movement, a philosophical system. All �h,a� is ;�i! �in his power is
" ,..
to make the effort. There is only one totally unforgivable act - to
betray what one believes in. This creed may take the form of
unbridled fanaticism, and lead to appalling results.
, . The heroic image of the nineteenth century is that of Beethoven:
a man may be ignorant, boorish, self-absorbed, barbarous, at war
with society or himself, but provided he serves his ideal, obeys the
voice within him, he is saved, he is autonomous. Only if he denies
himself, or sells himself for money or position, or comfort, or
power, or pleasure - the goods of the external world - does he
commit the ultimate sin by turning himself into a thing, something
heteronomous, a� natural object. Only the motive, the etat d'ame,
 THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTION
counts. If I believe in one form of life and you in another and these
come into conflict, it is far better that we fight, and one or both of
us are killed, than that there should be a compromise which betrays
what is sacred to each of us. The very concept of idealism as a
noble attribute is novel. To praise someone as an idealist is to say
that he is prepared to lay down his life for ends in which he
believes for their own sake. The question of whether these ends are
correct is no longer intelligible, because all men - and, for those for
whom the creative power is not the individual, but a culture, a
nation, a Church, a tradition, all these - live by their own unique,
particular vision.
This is novel, since it could not have been understood before the
mid-eighteenth century. No doubt it had always been right for a
Christian to die for his faith; but that was because it was the true
faith, and only by it could a man be saved, and therefore it
constituted the highest value in his scale, and not in his alone, but
in that of all mankind. If a Christian killed a Moslem in a crusade,
or a Catholic a Protestant in one of the wars of religion, he would
not, if he was a compassionate man, spit upon his dead adversary's
tomb: he might feel regret that men so brave, perhaps so kind,
could die for a false faith. The fact that they held this faith
sincerely, and gave their lives for it, so far from mitigating their sin,
only made it worse. If the faith was false or wicked, then the more
pure, intense, passionate, 'authentic' the enemy's addiction to his
belief or heresy, the more evil he was, the less entitled to
admiration.
The romantic attitude is the complete reverse of this. In the early
nineteenth century there is deep admiration for martyrs, minor­
ities, those who fight against overwhelming odds, those who, for
the sake of their ideals, court certain destruction. There is a high
premium on defiance for its own sake, on defeat and failure, as
against compromise and worldly success. A man who devotes all
his energies to the expression of what is within him, even if he fails,
and produces not a masterpiece, but, like Balzac's mad painter, a
chaos of colours, has succeeded in preserving his human semblance
and saved his soul, as the fashionable painter who has prostituted
his gifts has not. This would have meant little to Aristotle, who
considered only ach�\Te�e� admirable; and equally little to a
sixteenth-century Christian, who cared only for the truth - public,
objective, universal truth. In the mid-eighteenth century, in Les­
sing's Minna von Barnhelm, the idealist, Major Tellheim, is a
 ! 88 THE SENSE O F REALITY
touching and high-minded - honourably proud - but absurd
figure: twenty-five years later he is the tragic hero, like Karl Moor
in Schiller's The Robbers, and later all the Don Juans, Fausts,
Medeas and other rebellious and satanic heroines and heroes.
This subjectivism leads to a reversal of values: worship of
integrity and purity as against effectiveness or capacity for discov­
ery and knowledge; freedom against happiness; conflict, war, self­
immolation against compromise, adjustment, toleration; the wild
genius, the outcast, the suffering hero, Byron's Giaours, Laras,
Cains against the tame, civilised, respectable or philistine society
shocked by the rebel's claims and standards. It is the morality of
commitment, self-surrender and self-assertion against that of pru­
dence, calculation, realism. It is at this time that the very word
'realism' becomes pejorative and acquires the overtones of ruthless­
ness, cynicism, shabby compromise with inferior values. 'Give all
thou canst,' exclaims Wordsworth; 'high Heaven rejects the lore I
Of nicely-calculated less or more'.1 High heaven accepts those
whom men reject: Schiller's heroes, the lonely thinkers and doers
of Ibsen's plays, as well as the more violent individualists of Kleist
or Stendhal and Balzac - the Prince of Homburg, Julien Sorel,
Rastignac, Carlyle's heroic makers of nations, Steerforth, Dostoev­
sky's diabolic characters.
If the new aesthetic ideal of romanticism is socially relatively
innocuous, the worship of political individualism can take a more
sinister form. The counterpart of Beethoven is Napoleon. Napo­
leon was represented by his romantic admirers as doing with
human beings what Beethoven did with sounds, or Shakespeare
with words. Men are either endowed with creative powers or they
are not, and if they are not, if they are 'asleep or passive', they must
serve the ends of the creators, and achieve their fulfilment by being
moulded by them; and though they may be violated, tortured and
destroyed in the process, yet they are thereby lifted to a higher
level than that to which they could have risen by their own efforts.
Their agony contributes to a great work of art. Napoleon's Empire
is conceived as the counterpart of a symphony, an epic - a vast
creation of a free human spirit. So Hugo and Vigny and Tieck. This
is the doctrine that has underlain nationalism, Fascism, and every
movement that rests on a morality in which the model of freedom
derived from art�stic creation, or from self-realising, vital drives,

l
1 'Tax not the roya Saint', Ecclesiastical Sonnets 3· 4 3 ·
 THE R O MANTI C REVO LUTION
has been substituted for the older model of science or rational
happiness or knowledge; and which conceives freedom as making
free with all that resists me.
This is a vast revolution of ideas. The subjectivism upon which it
is founded still works in us and our political ideas. A counter­
revolution against it was indeed attempted, both by Hegel and by
Karl Marx - an attempt to restore objective values, not indeed
drawn from a 'concept of immutable natural law, but from that of
the objective forces embodied in the historical self-transformation
of society and nation, State or class. These thinkers taught in their
very different fashions that the notion of a natural harmony of
interests was shallow, that conflict, whether conceived as springing
from metaphysical necessity or from the pattern of social develop­
ment, was intrinsic to the individual and society. They maintained
that to resist that which is bound to win because its victory was
entailed by the development of 'reason' itself - for example, the
growth of the State or the interests of a given class - was wicked as
well as foolish because the principle on which such resistance was
founded was anti-rational. The history of institutions was the
history of the growth of human reason, and to try to arrest or
retard this movement was to lean on principles and methods
rendered obsolete by the process of history itself; to cling to what
is obsolete is against morality - indeed, immoral, if morality
evolves with the evolving needs and trends of a humanity pursuing
rational goals. Kant, who first among secular thinkers dug the great
unbridgeable gulf between duty and interest, was sufficiently a
child of the Enlightenment to believe that the just would be
rewarded. This could not be rationally demonstrated: but a world
in which the upright suffered was a bad world, and this possibility
he rejected by an act of faith in the ultimate goodness of God.
Lessing, Chateaubriand, the young Kleist, the middle-aged Schiller
founded their belief in a world order on the same precarious -
Quixotic, non-rational - foundations. For Kleist they crumbled:
like Joseph de Maistre, he saw no rational or personal escape from
the spectacle of life rendered meaningless by increasing and
unexplained violence, cruelty and frustration. Hegel boldly accep­
ted history as the history of mounting conflict - as the 'slaughter­
bench'' of humanity - and with great ingenuity and daring tried
to represent this battlefield as an objective process which, being the

1 Samtliche Werke, ed. Hermann Glockner, vol. 1 1 (Stuttgan, 1 928), p. 49·

1 90 THE SENSE O F REALITY
growth of self-understanding by man, could be represented as the
fulfilment of man as a rational being, a demand of reason - which is
ultimately identical in men and in the external world, and seeks to
achieve an ultimate harmony - and hence as the true realm of self­
direction, of human freedom. Progress - the process of self­
awareness, of self-liberation from whatever hinders the march of
the spirit - must culminate in the triumph of reason, when all will
be clear, real, harmonious. Marx translated this agonised ascent
into material - social-economic - terms: there is in his doctrine too
a golden age, in which mankind, integrated, liberated from illusions
and the servitude of which these are the symptoms, will be happy
for ever. We are back with Plato and natural law and the
philosophia perennis: unless we create the conditions necessary for
understanding - and understand, and act accordingly - realitv will
go on dividing and destroying us.
This attempt to restore objective standards was not altogether
successful; it won no decisive victory. The subjective morality of
the romantic movement entered the European consciousness too
deeply. Men were prepared to revolt, and indeed die, for principles
which they regarded neither as local nor as temporary, nor as the
interests of a given group or civilisation, but as being at the same
time absolute and personal, that is, guaranteed by none of the
objective criteria which verified factual statements or rendered
universal truths universal, objective and binding on all men.
Indeed, it is some such outlook that has revived in modern days
in the form of existentialism, particularly in its atheistic variety.
Values for these thinkers are not facts, the world is wert/rei, free of
values, pursues no goals, entails no evaluative propositions, neither
ethical nor aesthetic nor political. It faces man as a bleak set of facts
in which he can discern patterns, towards which he can have
attitudes, but which itself dictates nothing. To deduce that this or
that moral order or political establishment is better, or more
desirable, or more rational, because of the structure of things in
general, is, for thinkers of this type, mere self-deception - issuing
from a pathetic desire to find support for one's views in the nature
of things. For things have in this sense no nature; their properties
have no logical or spiritual relation to human purposes or action.
The freedom which for existentialists, as for the romantics, distin­
guishes men froD;l objects in nature consists precisely in commit­
ment to this or th<\t course of action, this or that form of life, which
cannot be justified outside themselves. It is mere cowardice - an
 THE R O MANTIC REVO LUT I O N
attempt to take oneself or others in - to look for an alibi outside
the human will in some external authority: natural, historical,
social, moral. Moreover it is a contradiction in terms. Authority,
justification, purpose - these are concepts which arise only in the
course of decisions by individuals to live or act in this or that way;
the transference of them to external agencies, divine or natural, can
spring only from weakness, fear of admitting that we, and we
alone, are responsible for what we do in the area allotted to us, for
which we can give no reason save that that is what we aim at, that
these are the goals that are ours because we have chosen them - for
there is and can be nothing else that we can appeal to, only, as
Benjamin Constant once observed, the echo of our own prayers,
wishes, laments, that come back to us from the brazen dome of an
impersonal world as if they were voices from without. This is not
far from the position of emotive ethics - all that was permitted by
rigorous modern positivism - whereby, also, our political and
moral judgements, so far as they involve values, describe nothing,
although they may express, convey, incarnate attitudes of the most
crucial importance to us, but not in the form of propositions, for
these must be true or false; while ethical attitudes, political beliefs
and allegiances, do not describe anything. Therefore they are not
true or false, are only what they are, forms of life, intentions,
choices, forms of vision, policies, states of mind or feeling or will -
individual or collective, determined or free.

VII

In conclusion, there is this to be said: the new romantic transvalua­

tion of values substituted the morality of motive for that of
consequence, that of the inner life for that of effectiveness in the
external world. What effect has this had upon the ideas of the man
in the street, the unphilosophical members of Western societies ?
Profound, transforming, but not decisive. For it seems to me that
the older morality, which judged the acts of men as did Aristotle,
or the Utilitarians, or all the schools of objective morality (includ­
ing such antinomians as the followers of Hume and Montesquieu,
and Herder too), that is to say, to a large degree in terms of their
consequences - this morality did not go under before this revolu­
tionary wave. Upon what are our own political judgements
founded? Do we truly believe that value judgements are not
judgements at all, but arbitrary acts of self-commitment? Do we
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
believe that the sciences of man are irrelevant to political purposes,
that anthropology, psychology, sociology can instruct us only
about means, about techniques? In Lenin's phrase, 'Who whom?'1
Who gets what, where, when, how? Do we believe that since values
collide there are no reasons for choosing one rather than another,
so that if men, or groups of men, are possessed by different
outlooks, that is the end of the matter, so that war between them is
a more honourable proceeding (for those who believe in honour)
than attempts to find an intermediate solution that fully satisfies
the true beliefs of neither side?
The answer to this seems to me both yes and no. Kant once truly
remarked (in an aside) that out of the crooked timber of humanity
no straight thing was ever made.2 We contrive to believe both in
the morality of motive and in that of consequence. We admire
effectiveness, beauty, intelligence, the natural virtues: like the
Aristotelians, Utilitarians, Marxists, we think well of those who
have, in fact, benefited mankind in terms of values that the great
majority of men, for very long periods of time and in a great many
places, have adopted as their own, and we admire them whatever
their motive. But also, like liberals and existentialists (and I fear I
must add nationalists and even Fascists), we admire the morality of
motive too, we admire those who, whatever the anticipated
consequences of their acts, are moved by ends that we and they
value for their own sakes, without thinking of the consequences.
We admire men stirred by the lust for power or jealousy of
others, or monomaniacal vanity - even though we may detest these
characteristics - if they have brought about what we regard as
benefits to mankind. We admire Peter the Great, Frederick the
Great, or Napoleon, and, however morally low we rate their
motives, we call them great, we study their lives and acts. Our view
of human potentiality is profoundly affected by such study. We
regard the views of those who, like Tolstoy, desire to minimise the
part that they have played, or of those who, like H. G. Wells, wish
to denigrate them because they were moved by ignoble motives, or
followed inferior ends, as being eccentric, irrelevant, subjective,
unhistorical. At the same time we view inquisitors and extermin:t­
tors - Torquemada, John of Leiden or Lenin - even if we abhor

1 V. I 1 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 44 (Moscow, 1964), p. r 6 1 .

2 'Iaee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht' ( 1 784):
Kant's gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 190o- ) (hereafter KGS), vol. 8, p. 23, line 22.
 THE ROMANTIC REV O LUTI O N 1 93
their views, not merely as human agents of this or that degree of
importance in causing historical change, but as human beings to
whom we assign a positive moral (and political) value in virtue of
the sincerity and intelligibility of their motives. We do not regard
them merely as evil because they have caused widespread unde­
served suffering, as the Utilitarians - James Mill or Bentham -
would certainly have had us do, and as their disciples would today.
This is clearly not consistent; but it is the case. We are heirs to
two traditions. The later of these has to a degree subverted the
older; with the consequence that, in the face of those who
stubbornly continue the older tradition, whether in the shape of
Marxism, for example, or of the Roman Church, those who do not
accept such doctrines complain of too much moral indifference to
suffering caused by men to one another, too ruthless an objectivity.
The majority of the civilised members of Western societies con­
tinue in attitudes that cause more logical than moral discomfort: we
shift uneasily from one foot to the other, from motive to conse­
quence, from estimate of character to estimate of achievement. For
the development of this logically unsatisfactory but historically
and psychologically enriched capacity for understanding men and
societies, we have to thank the last great revolution in values and
standards. No movement in human opinion has had a similar
sweep and effect. It still awaits its historians: for unless it is
grasped, no modern political movement appears to me wholly
intelligible. This alone seems to me sufficient reason for paying
attention to this extraordinary, at times sinister, phenomenon.
 ARTISTIC COMMITMENT

A Russian Legacy

MY P U RP O SE is twofold: first, to provide an illustration of a

phenomenon in modern cultural history which seems to me
interesting and important, but not often emphasised, perhaps
because it is too self-evident; second, to offer a defence of some of
the founding fathers of the Russian liberal intelligentsia against the
false charge, too often made against them, that, however unwit­
tingly, they forged some of the chains in which Soviet artists,
particularly writers, were bound in our century. Let me begin with
the first of these theses.

More than one Russian critic in the nineteenth century observed

that every idea of any consequence in Russian thought outside the
natural sciences and other specialised disciplines - every general
idea - came from abroad; that not a single philosophical or
historical, social or artistic doctrine or outlook that had any life in
it was born on Russian soil. This, I think, is broadly true: but what
is more interesting, it seems to me, is that all these ideas, whatever
their origin, fell in Russia upon a spiritual soil so welcoming, so
fertile, that upon it they swiftly grew to vast, luxuriant shapes; and
were thereby transformed.
The historical reasons for this are familiar enough. Because the
number of educated Russians in the first half of the nineteenth
century was small and culturally isolated from the mass of the
population, and therefore forced to look for spiritual sustenance
elsewhere, this, in its turn, generated a hunger for ideas - any
ideas - on the part of this minority, an eagerness increased by
many factors: by the slow but steady spread of education, until it
reached socially aiscontented groups; by contact with Western
liberal ideas through books and salons, but still more through visits
 ARTIST I C C O M M ITMENT 195
to the West, especially since the march of the conquering armies to
Paris in 1 8 1 4-1 5 ; by the search for faith and ideologies to fill the
vacuum left by the erosion of religion and the growing inadequacy
of a naked medieval absolutism in a 'developing' country; and
especially by the painful quest for a solution of the 'social question'
- the wound created by the existence of the vast gulf that divided
the privileged and the literate from the great mass of their
oppressed, poverty-stricken and illiterate brothers, whose condi­
tion moved the human beings among them to a sense of indigna­
tion and intolerable personal guilt.
All this is familiar enough. What I wish to stress, however, is that
the passionate, and often uncritical, enthusiasm with which new
ideas are at times received in culturally backward regions infuses
them with such emotion, hope and faith that in this new, more
intensified, over-simplified state they grow more formidable than
they were in their beginnings in their native land, where they
jostled and collided with other doctrines and theories, forming a
climate of ideas in which no single trend or tendency was dominant
and irresistible. Transformed and vitalised by contact with the
unexhausted Russian imagination - by being taken seriously by
men resolved to practise what they believed - some of these ideas
returned to the West, and made a vast impact upon it. They left it
as secular, theoretical, abstract doctrines; they returned as fiery,
sectarian, quasi-religious faiths. It was so, for example, with
populism, which derived from Herder and the Germans, but in its
Russian guise travelled far beyond central Europe, and has today
become an explosive, world-wide movement; it was so with
historicism, particularly in its Marxist form; it was so, even more,
with the conception of the Communist Party, which, however
closely deduced from principles enunciated by Marx or Engels, was
turned by Lenin into an instrument not dreamt of by the founding
fathers.
I should like to call this the 'rebound' or 'boomerang effect'. I do
not know whether there is any significant parallel for it in the past:
Greek Stoicism, transformed by the Romans, did not return to
transform the world of the Eastern Mediterranean whence it came;
nor can it be plausibly maintained that America's influence outside
her borders has led to a second conquest of Europe by the ideas of
Locke or Montesquieu or Puritanism or the common law. It seems,
rather, that the interplay between Russia and the West has
something sui generis in it, despite the fact that the effect of
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
Western ideas, when they impinge on culturally backward coun­
tries, is itself neither unique nor unfamiliar. It is one of these
boomerang effects that I should like to discuss, namely the
phenomenon of artistic, and in particular literary, commitment, or
engagement as it came to be called, which has dominated so much
of Russian thought and art, and through this medium has had so
profound an effect everywhere in the world, although by now its
influence may have passed beyond its peak.
Of course, the doctrine that the anist is socially responsible -
responsible to society - for what he does is very ancient. Plato,
who is, I suppose, the first European writer to raise the issue (as he
was the first to raise most issues of permanent interest in the West),
took this for granted. In the Ion the poet is the inspired visionary
who knows the truth and speaks it under supernatural influence. In
the Republic he is a gifted liar who does damage. In either case, his
social importance is not denied. Nor, so far as I know, did anyone
explicitly deny or minimise the artist's power and responsibility in
the later classical world or the Middle Ages. The writer, or indeed
any artist, must be either a teacher of virtue or of a skill, or a
glorifier of a custom or a regime, or a provider of pleasure, or an
inspired seer, or, at the very least, a craftsman who provides useful
knowledge or utters useful words. Even in the Renaissance, which
was not inclined towards utilitarian doctrines, the artist at his
highest is semi-divine, sicut deus, because he creates a world
alongside that of God, because he informs his work of art with his
own creative soul, as God informs the real world; and so creation is
marvellous, because it is a form of being at one with the anima
mundi, the spirit that for N eoplatonic Christianity informs and
moves the universe. Dante, Tasso, Milton were seen by their
admirers, and perhaps saw themselves, as divinely inspired seers;
others were conceived as providers of delight - Boccaccio, Rabe­
lais, Shakespeare probably saw themselves in this way. All art has a
purpose beyond itself: to tell the truth, to instruct, to please, to
heal, to transfigure men; or to serve God by embellishing his
universe and by moving men's minds and hearts to fulfil his (or
nature's) purposes.
The doctrine of art for art's sake, and the corresponding denial
of the social responsibility or function of the artist, the doctrine
that the artist creates as the bird sings on the bough, as the lily
bursts into flow�7 to all appearance for no ulterior purpose, and
that the artist is consequently a child of nature, entitled to be
 ARTISTIC C O M M ITMENT 1 97
oblivious, if he so chooses, of the precarious constructions of men
that surround him - the notion, that is, that the justification of art
is art itself - is a late doctrine, a reaction to the older, traditional
view grown oppressive or, at any rate, no longer convincing. The
very notion of ends in themselves - of a goal pursued solely and
purely for its own sake - is not to be found, so far as I know, in the
classical world or, outside it, in the great religions of the West. The
universe and man's activity in it are seen as part of some single
unitary pattern, however it is conceived: a static harmony outside
time and space, or a cosmic drama moving towards some apocalyp­
tic or transcendent climax; or in more humanistic and less teleolog­
ical terms, as the search for happiness or truth, or knowledge or
justice or love, or the realisation of man's creative capacities - some
great monistic scheme of total self-fulfilment. The notion of an end
to be pursued for its own sake, irrespective of the consequences, no
matter whether or not such pursuit accords with other activities, or
the course of nature, or the structure of the world - that springs
from a strain in Protestantism (and, it may be, Hebraism) first
made fully explicit in Germany in the eighteenth century, perhaps
even before Kant. Once the principle of duty for duty's sake had
been enunciated, the spell of unity was broken, and acceptance of a
plurality of independent, perhaps even incompatible, goals became
a possible ideology. Beauty for beauty's sake, power for power's
sake, pleasure, glory, knowledge, the expression of the individual's
unique personality and temperament - all these (or their opposites)
could be conceived as ends in themselves, independent of one
another; to be pursued not because they were objectively recog­
nised as indispensable ingredients in some universally accepted
human purpose, but because they were one's own - the individu­
al's, or those of a nation, a Church, a culture, a race. The rise of
self-expression as the dominant category, whether individual or
collective, as against the quest for objective truth to which the
seeker must submit, is at the heart alike of romanticism, national­
ism, elitism, anarchism, populism.
This is the soil from which, in due course, there sprang the
doctrine of art for art's sake. It was born as a protest of the artist
against attempts to harness him to some extraneous purpose he
found alien or constricting or degrading. This is the position of
Kant, Goethe, Schelling, the Schlegels. It is anti-utilitarian and anti­
philistine, it is directed against efforts on the part of Jacobins, or
the Directoire, or Napoleon, to mobilise artists, and, particularly
 THE SENSE O F REALITY
during the Restoration, to curb subversive ideas and direct thought
and art into politically or religiously desirable channels. After I 8 3 0
it takes the form of a vehement outcry against the commercialisa­
tion of art, the domination of the bourgeois consumer, the
conception of the artist as a purveyor for a mass market, the
rejection of the hardly veiled demand that he sell his integrity, his
gifts and his independence for gain or fame or popularity or official
favour. The romantic revolt against uniformity, laws, discipline,
conformity to any rules not freely self-imposed (or, better still,
spontaneously generated for his own ends by the creative artist)
becomes fused with the denunciation of the brutal levelling
processes of industrialism, and its effects - the regimentation,
degradation and dehumanisation of men. The heroic images in the
mythology of protest are those of the lonely artist whose real life is
within him, in his art, of Chatterton, Lenz, Beethoven, Byron, men
contemptuous or defiant in the face of the solid ranks of the
enemies of art and culture - the corrupt and philistine public, the
barbarian mob, the Churches, the police, the military jackboot.
Even such lions of romanticism as Scott, Balzac, Hugo are
denounced by the more extreme wing of the 'pure' for betraying
their sacred calling, prostituting their art to the taste of the masses,
writing for money or for fame, like Dumas or Eugene Sue.
The philosophical basis for this is provided by critics and
professors under the spell of Kant's proclamation of disinterested­
ness as a condition of all ultimate values - truth, rightness, beauty.
This is the message of the Parisian lawgivers, Sacy, Quatremere de
Quincy, and later of Cousin and Jouffroy and, indeed, of Benjamin
Constant, who looked on the Jacobin Terror and the regimentation
of the individual as a nightmare, and spoke of 'art for art's sake' as
early as I 804. If, in the beginning, the enemy of the free artist was
the establishment - the State, the Church, the market, tradition - it
was not long before a second front was opened against him from
the left: from the early collectivist movement, inspired by Saint­
Simon and Fourier, which from its attack on the irresponsibility of
the frivolous, hedonistic eighteenth century moved on to attack its
nineteenth-century emulators. Schiller had said that in a divided
society, where men have wandered from their true, integral souls
that once were whole and harmonious, it was the function of art to
avenge insulted n ature, and seek to restore men and societies to
"
themselves. Only art, only the imagination, can salve the wounds
 ARTIST I C C O M MITMENT 1 99

inflicted by the division of labour, the specialisation of function, by

the growth of mass society, the increasing mechanisation of man.
The function of art, therefore, becomes therapeutic, the recrea­
tion of unbroken men. Even Goethe, with all his hatred of
anything faintly utilitarian, tends towards this Rousseau-ish view,
the idea of art as Bildung the formation of integral human
-

character. Saint-Simon went further. Stupidity, ignorance, irre­

sponsibility, idleness caused the great disaster of the Jacobin
Revolution - the destruction, by the brutal mob, of intellect and
genius, the triumph of the forces of darkness. Common sense, even
genius, is not enough. Society must be rebuilt on new, 'adamantine',
rational foundations provided by social experts - men who
understand the nature and goals of social processes: artists have an
essential part to play in the peaceful reconstruction of society. For
an artist to participate in the creation of a new rational society is
not to divert his art towards some alien goal.
The Saint-Simonians were the first group of thinkers to develop
something like a coherent doctrine or an all-embracing ideology:
art, they taught, is nothing if it is not communication; it is intended
to express a man's consciousness of his needs and his ideals,
conditioned by those of the class to which he belongs, which are in
their turn determined by the particular stage of the technological
development of the society to which it belongs. Since all expres­
sion in words or other media is inevitably an attempt to act, to
convince, exhort, denounce, expose, warn, to put forward a
particular vision, this must be rendered conscious, and used to
serve a coherent ideal of life founded on true, that is, scientific,
understanding of the historical process. Such understanding alone
can determine the true goals of a given society and the proper parts
to be played by this or that individual or body of men if they are to
avoid illusions, unmask false prophets, and so fulfil their potential­
ities to the fullest degree, in the social context in which they
cannot, in any case, help living and acting. This is the doctrine later
adapted, developed and codified by the Marxist schools. Naturally
enough those of Saint-Simon's disciples who discussed the func­
tion of art, especially Buchez, Pierre Leroux and their allies, looked
on remoteness from, or neutrality about, social problems not
merely as frivolity or egoism, but as being itself a moral attitude
and a vicious one - as disdain for values which the artist ignores or
rejects either because he is blind to them, or too weak or cowardly
200 THE SENSE O F REALITY
or morally distorted to face the social reality of his time, and act in
the light of what he sees.1
This is the faith of European radicals of the I 8 3 0s. Hence the
attacks on eighteenth-century literature, of which Carlyle's denun­
ciations were only the most violent and notorious. Young France,
Young Germany, Young Italy, even Wordsworth and Coleridge in
England, and of course Shelley, were steeped in the religion of art
as a form of salvation, personal and political, public and private.
Art is the sacred function of spiritually gifted beings - poets,
thinkers, seers - who possess, as Schelling taught, a deeper insight
into reality than scientists or politicians or ordinary, bourgeois
philistines. The idea of social responsibility which this conferred is
the substance of the left-wing attack of the I 8 3 0s upon the doctrine
which held that the artist was either wholly independent or he was
nothing, that he must be dedicated to the light within him and to
nothing else, whether or not it is recognised by others, or has
social, or moral, or religious, or political implications, as conceived
by the expounders of the traditional outlook.
It is against this Saint-Simonian conception of the artist as a
priest of a social religion, as well as against cruder pressure for
social conformity, that the famous diatribe of the most eloquent
defender of the new doctrine of art for art's sake, the poet and
novelist Theophile Gautier, is directed. It is to be found in the
famous Preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin:

No, imbeciles! No! Fools and cretins, a book will not make a plate of
soup; a novel is not a pair of boots; a sonnet is not a syringe; a drama is
not a railway - those forms of civilisation which have caused humanity
to march on the road to progress.
By all the bowels of all the popes, past, present and future, no! Ten
thousand times no!

1 'The artists of present-day society', 1wrote X. Joncieres in Le Globe (8 April

I 8 3 2), '. . . have never understood the alliance of poetry and society. We, on the
other hand, wish to link everything to politics in its broadest sense . . . We are
quickly relating all to it which comes into our hands. Literature is there and it
must obtain citizenship rights and occupy a place in our political life.' Compare
this from another contributor to Le Globe ( 1 0 March 1 8 3 1 ): 'The function of art,
understood in its sacred sense, is to accompany, anticipate and incite mankind
ceaselessly in its march to a more and more beautiful destiny sometimes with
harmonious music, at others with a rough and strict voice.' These passages are
cited and translated ip George G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority (The Hague,
1 9 5 8), p. 1 73 ·
 ARTISTIC C O M M ITMENT 201

You cannot make a hat out of a metonymy, and you cannot make a
simile in the form of a bedroom slipper, and you cannot use an
antithesis as an umbrella . . . An ode is, I have a feeling, too light a
garment for the winter . . .1

Gautier's philippic, directed though it may have been against all

forms of positivism, utilitarianism, socialism, and in particular
against what in his day was called 'realism', and later 'naturalism',
was merely the loudest salvo in a controversy which has from that
day never ceased. The insistence that an was not art unless it was
useless; that the beautiful was an end in itself, and so too was the
ugly, the monstrous, anything but the juste milieu of the July
monarchy, the world of bankers, manufacturers, swindlers, career­
ists, or the stupid or corrupt conformist majority; that to use an as
a social or political instrument for ends external to it was to
prostitute it - this view was echoed by Musset, by Merimee, and in
his later days by Heine, who, despite his Saint-Simonian phase and
the political radicalism of his young days, reserved some of his
bitterest gibes for those who advocated the conscription of art to
the service of political purposes. Flaubert and Baudelaire, Maupas­
sant and the Goncouns, Parnassians and aesthetes fought under
this banner against the advocates of social concern - preachers and
prophets, naturalists, socialists, moralists, nationalists, clericals,
romantic Utopians. But the most passionate and, in the event, the
most influential counter-attack on the doctrine of pure art came
from the latecomers to the feast, the untutored barbarians beyond
the Eastern marches - Russian writers and Russian critics - still, at
that period, almost totally unknown in the West.

II

Russia had, in her day, fallen under the spell of the doctrine of art
for art's sake. Pushkin in I 8Jo, in his marvellous poem 'To the
Poet', says: 'You are King: live alone. Take the free road wherever
your free spirit takes you.'2 'The purpose of poetry is poetry,' he
declares, 'as Delvig says (if he did not steal it from someone else).

1 The novel was published in r 8 3 5 , the Preface dated 1 834. This passage
appears on p. 19 in the edition published in Paris in r 8 8o.
2 A. S. Pushkin, Sobranie sochinenii, r o vols (Moscow, 1 974-8) (hereafter SS),
II 225.
202 THE SENSE OF REALITY
Ryleev's Meditations always have an aim and always miss.'1 This
attitude (of which the most celebrated expression is, of course, the
credo of the poet in his 'The Poet and the Mob') holds not of
Pushkin alone, but of the brilliant group of aristocratic amateurs,
his companions, born and largely rooted in the eighteenth century.
Their sympathies for the Decembrist movement did not, for the
most part, in spite of Ryleev and perhaps Kiichelbecker, entail the
ideal of a civic art. Contrast with this the words written a few years
after Pushkin's death by Belinsky, who, whatever else may be
thought of him, spoke for an entire stratum of Russian society
when he said:

No one save men of limited vision, or men who are spiritually un­
grown-up, can order the poet to be obliged to sing hymns to virtue or
punish sin by writing a satire; but every intelligent man has the right to
demand that a poet's poetry either give him answers to the questions
of the time or at least be fi lled with the sorrow of these weighty,
insoluble questions.2

This is the opening shot in a controversy which raises profound

issues and whose day is anything but over. Turgenev in his
memoirs gives a touching and amusing description of Belinsky
pacing up and down as he read Pushkin's disdainful lines, ad­
dressed by the poet to the mob: 'The kitchen pot is dearer to you I
Because in it you cook your food.'3 'Yes,' says Belinsky, glaring
and striding rapidly from corner to corner - 'yes, I do cook my
food in it, and my family's food and another pauper's food. I must
feed my family and myself before I prostrate myself in front of
stone effigies, even if they are carved by some marvellous super­
Phidias: and let all your indignant gentryfolk and versifiers go
hang, one and all!'4 His violent anti-aestheticism in the 1 8 4os
represented, as so often, a complete and painful repudiation of his
own earlier views. He had once believed with (as he supposed)
Fichte, and before and after that with Schelling, that art constituted
self-liberation, the escape of the spirit from empirical reality into a

1 ibid. ix 146.
2 V. G. Belinsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols (Moscow, 195 3-9)
(hereafter PSS), vii 345·
J Pushkin, SS ii 1 67.

4 I. S. Turgenev, Pplnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, 28 vols (Moscow/Lenin­

grad, 196c:>-8) (hereafter PSSP), Sochineniya xiv 4 5-6.
 ARTIST I C C O M M ITMENT 203
pure sphere of spiritual freedom in which the human soul could
contemplate the ideal which even the basest creature reflected in its
soul. Capacity to rise to this vision, beyond the spectacle of chaos,
ugliness, conflict - the accidents of the everyday world, of the
senses - was the attribute of an elite of free spirits, able to
contemplate true reality.
Belinsky's writings are, in the late r 8 3 os, filled with passionate,
fanatical, Neoplatonic aestheticism, as refracted through Schelling,
and preached to Belinsky (who had little German) by his mentors,
Stankevich and Bakunin. Nor did his conversion to Hegelian
quietism in 1 8 39 or 1 840, which he maintained with so much
agony of spirit, greatly modify his view of the independence, the
self-justifying character, of all true art. If 'the real is the rational'; if
(as Hegel's anticipator, Pope, held) all evil is but good misunder­
stood; if to understand something is to grasp its rational necessity,
and therefore its justification; if reality is intelligible as an all­
embracing pattern of the progress of the spirit, so that what on a
short view seems brutal, ugly, unjust, repulsive will be seen, if
viewed from a higher standpoint, to be an indispensable element in
a more inclusive harmony achieved by the moral spirit in its
dialectical ascent (that is, the unending effort of the spirit to
understand both itself and the external world, which is but its own
true self split off, alienated, from itself) - if all this is so, then all
protests against the social order, all attempts to direct art towards
the immediate improvement of the human lot, are vulgar, short­
sighted, premature, ineffective, un-grown-up, a misconception of
the deepest interests of the human spirit. Hence his sharp denunci­
ations of the Schiller of the early plays, of Victor Hugo (who after
the suppression of his Le Roi s'amuse swung back from the right
to the left opposition), George Sand, Leroux and the whole school
of social criticism and social art in France. In a similar (somewhat
Burkean) spirit, he denounced Griboedov and other Russian critics
and carpers who failed to rise to a height whence rational spirit can
perceive why what is must be as it is, why it is irrational to wish to
alter it overnight to suit childishly Utopian, capricious, subjective
whims. The contents of true poetry, he says in 1 840, 'are the
problems not of the day, but of the ages; not of a country, but of
the world; not of a party, but of mankind'.1 And in the same essay

I PSS iii 399·

204 THE SENSE O F REALITY
he writes that art 'serves a society by expressing its own conscious­
ness - it serves it not as something that exists by and for itself - its
purpose, its reason, lies in itself' .1 There is nothing here that
Gautier or Flaubert would have found amiss. This was the view, at
this date, not only of Belinsky, but of the philosophical circle
round Stankevich (whose last year of life this was), of Turgenev no
less than of Bakunin; of Katkov, Botkin, Panaev, of the Slavophils
no less than the Westerners: all but the Saint-Simonian hotheads
like Herzen and Ogarev.
Yet it is not to be wondered at if a man of Belinsky's
temperament and, perhaps, origins did not long remain indifferent
to the claims of social criticism. He did violently reject Hegelian
acceptance of a morally intolerable reality - 'reconciliation' to a
world of oppression, injustice, brutality and human misery, in the
name of a harmonious reality, beyond the stars, in which all things
are seen to be rationally necessary, and, to the wise, wholly
intelligible. Whatever offers a man no comfort when he is in
torment, gives no answer to those who cry for justice, is for him,
now, a deception and a mockery. Even while he was forcing
himself to stifle his doubts during his Hegelian moment, he could
not swallow the view of art that the master expounded in his
lectures on aesthetics. 'The art of our time', he wrote in 1 843, 'is . . .
the realisation in aesthetic form of modern consciousness, of
modern thought about the meaning and purpose of life, the path of
mankind, the eternal truths of existence.'2 Yet only 'professional
art lovers' can be satisfied by art for art's sake.3 'Like truth and
goodness, beauty is its own end';' 'To miss this moment is never
to know what art is. But to stay in this position is to have a one­
sided notion of it.'5 He goes further: 'Our age is especially hostile
to this tendency in art. It resolutely denies art for art's sake, beauty
for beauty's sake.'6
These quotations directly echo the 'committed' Saint-Simonian
position in the great controversy which then divided the Paris
journals. They show that by 1 843, in the essay on Nikitenko's
'Address on Criticism' - what he calls his vigorous philippic

I ibid. 397•
2 PSS vi 2 8o.
J ibid. 277.

' PSS iv 497·

5 PSS vi 276.
6 ibid. 277.
 ARTIST I C C O M M ITMENT 205

against the aesthetes - the die is cast: 'Reality is the first and last
word of our time.'1 George Sand, whom he had once rejected
with Hugo and Schiller and Griboedov as a shallow protester,
blind to the majestic vision of the slow unfolding of rational
reality, is now declared to be 'surely the Joan of Arc of our time,
star of salvation, prophetess of a magnificent future'.2 He became
a devoted, uncritical admirer of her art and her lyrical socialist
populism; and not he alone. Herzen's novel Who is to Blame? was
written under her direct influence. There was a time when
Turgenev, Saltykov, even Dostoevsky, regarded her as a towering
genius. Pisemsky got into trouble with the censor for dangerous
views evidently inspired by George Sand's Jacques; even the 'pure
aesthete' Druzhinin owed her a debt in his novel Polin 'ka Saks; the
whole of Young Russia in the Moscow and Petersburg of Nicholas
I appears to have been at her feet. Yet this did not lead to
capitulation to some species of proto-Marxism, or even to proto­
Zolaism. In I 843 Belinsky - then at the height of his infatuation
with the Paris socialists - declared that art gains nothing from
being told that it is intelligent, truthful, profound, but unpoetical,
and again, that the ideal is 'not an exaggeration, a lie, a childish
fantasy; it is a fact of reality as it is, but a fact not copied from
reality, but passed through the poet's fantasy, illuminated by the
light of very general (not isolated, particular and contingent)
significance, "raised to a pearl of creation"3 and therefore more
like itself, more faithful to itself than the most slavish copy of
reality is to its original'.4 Art for art's sake may be a fallacy, but if
a work of art is not art if it does not pass the aesthetic test, and no
amount of morally worthy sentiment or intellectual acuteness will
save it.
This conviction he never abandoned. Four years later, during
one of his most radical periods, he compares Herzen's novel Who is
to Blame? with one of Goncharov's novels published at the same
time. Herzen 'is first and foremost a philosopher,' Belinsky says,
'and only a little bit of a poet' In this respect, the most complete
.5

contrast with him is offered by Goncharov, the author of An

Ordinary Story. The latter is a poet and an artist and no more. He

1 PSS vi 268.
2 PSS xii I I 5 .
1 A n image from Gogol's Dead Souls, chapter 7·
' PSS vi p6.
5 PSS X p6.
206 THE SENSE OF REALITY
feels neither love nor hatred for the characters he creates; they do
not amuse or irritate him; he offers no moral lessons either to them
or to the reader. His attitude is this: 'if they are in trouble, that is
their look-out - no concern of mine':

Of all contemporary writers he alone, only he alone approaches the

ideal of pure art, while all the others have departed from it immeasur­
ably - and in so doing prosper. All contemporary writers have
something over and above talent, and this something is more impor­
tant than talent, and constitutes its strength; Mr Goncharov possesses
nothing but talent; he much more than anyone today is an artist-poet.
His talent is not of the first order, but it is powerful and remarkable.2

And again:

In Iskander's [that is, Herzen's] case what dominates is always the idea
- he knows in advance what and why he is writing - he depicts a scene
from reality with marvellous fidelity only in order to say his own
word about it, to pronounce some kind of judgement. Mr Goncharov
paints his figures, c haracters, scenes in the first place to satisfy his own
inner demands, to extract pleasure from his own capacity for painting;
to discuss, judge, draw moral consequences - that he must leave to his
readers. Iskander's pictures . . . are remarkable not so much for the
fidelity of his painting, for the skill of his brush, as for the depth of his
understanding of the reality he depicts; they are remarkable for their
realism more than for their poetical truth. What makes them attractive
is a style which is not so much poetic as executed with intelligence,
thought, humour, wit, which are always arresting because of their
originality and novelty . . . For Goncharov, poetry is the primary and
only factor.3

Goncharov tells us in his reminiscences that Belinsky sometimes

attacked him for showing no anger, no irritation, no subjective
feeling:

'For you it is all one, a scoundrel, a fool, a monster or a decent kindly

character - you paint them all the same: neither love nor hate for
anybody! ' He used to say this with a kind of good-natured fury, and
one day put his hands affectionately on my shoulders and added,

I ibid.
2 ibid. 3 2 6-7.
J ibid. 343-4·
 ARTIST I C C O M M ITMENT 207

almost in a whisper, 'and this is good, this is necessary, this is the sign
of an artist' - as if afraid that he might be overheard and accused of
sympathy with an uncommitted writer.1

Perhaps Belinsky preferred Herzen, but Goncharov was, in his

view, an artist and Herzen, in the end, was not.
Belinsky's position is crystal clear: 'No matter how beautiful the
ideas in a poem, how powerfully it echoes the problems of the
hour, if it lacks poetry, there can be no beautiful thought in it, and
no problems either, and all that one may say about it is that it is a
fine intention badly executed.'2 This is so because the artist's
commitment 'must be not only in the head, but above all in the
heart, in the blood of the writer . . . An idea . . . which has not
passed through one's own nature, has not received the stamp of
one's personality, is dead capital not only for poetry, but for any
literary activity.'3 But he cannot rest in this. We have already
noted his declaration in his essay of I 844 on Pushkin: 'every
intelligent man has the right to demand that a poet's poetry either
give him answers to the questions of the time or at least be filled
with the sorrow of these weighty, insoluble questions'.4 This is
only a little less extreme than the notorious verdict of I 84 5 : 'In our
age art is not a master, but a slave. It serves interests outside
itsel£.'5 Even though he adds that this applies only to 'critical'
ages - the Saint-Simonian name for transitional periods when the
old is grown intolerable, and is undermined and doomed, and the
new is not yet - it is nevertheless a genuine cri de coeur. It is only a
violent version of his words in I 84 3 : 'our time craves for convic­
tions, it is tormented by hunger for the truth'6 and 'our age is all
questioning, all questing, all a search and yearning for the truth'/
This is the earliest and most poignant formulation of the disquiet
and, at times, agonised self-questioning that tormented the Russian
intelligentsia for ever after. Henceforth no Russian writer could
feel entirely free from this moral attitude: even if he rejected the
demand, he felt obliged to come to terms, to settle his account,

1 I. A. Goncharov, Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols (Moscow, 1972), vi 427.

2 PSS X JOJ.
J PSS X 3 I 2.

' loc. cit. (p. 202 above, note 2).

5 PSS ix 78.

6 PSS vi 267.

7 ibid. 269.
208 THE SENSE OF REALITY
with it. Yet in 1 846 Belinsky tells us apropos of Pushkin's 'The
Stone Guest' that it is a marvellous masterpiece, that to true art
lovers it must seem 'artistically the best and highest creation of
Pushkin', 'the pearl of Pushkin's creations, the richest and most
magnificent diamond in his poetic crown', and adds that this kind
of art cannot be popular, it is made for the few, but these few will
love it with 'passion' and 'enthusiasm', and he counts himself
among these few.1 Those contradictions, or what appear to be
such, multiply towards the end of his life. In the review of Russian
literature of 1 847, from which I have already quoted - a stupen­
dous essay which is in a sense his swan song - appear the most
famous lines of all:

To take away from art the right to serve the public interest is not to
elevate it but to debase it, because it means to deprive it of its most
vital force - of thought - to transform it into the object of some kind
of sybaritic enjoyment, the plaything of lazy idlers. It even means to
kill it, as the sorry condition of painting in our time bears witness.
This art, as if it did not notice the life that is seething around it, has
closed its eyes to everything that is alive, contemporary, actual, and
looks for inspiration only to the lifeless past, seeks ready-made ideals
from it, ideals to which people long ago became indifferent, which
interest no one any longer, which do not warm, do not inspire living
sympathy in any one.2

But a little further on he observes, in a passage part of which I have

already quoted:

A good many people are fascinated now by the magic word 'commit­
ment' [napravlenie], people think that is all that matters, and do not
understand that in the sphere of art, in the first place, no commitment
is worth anything at all unless there is talent, and in the second place,
that commitment itself must be not only in the head, but above all in
the heart, in the blood of the writer, it must above all be a feeling, an
instinct, and only then perhaps a conscious idea - this commitment
itself must be born, just as art itself must be. An idea that one has read
in a book or heard, even if one has understood it quite correctly, but
which has not passed through one's own nature, has not received the
stamp of one's personality, is dead capital . . . if you have no poetic

1 PSS vii 5 69.

2 PSS X 3 I I .
 ARTIST I C C O M MITMENT
talent . . . your ideas and purposes will remain rhetorical common­
places}

The images or words of a true writer which have 'passed through

his own nature and received the stamp of his personality' - even
the most formalist critic would not be required to deny the claim
of these to being works of art, even if they treat the 'accursed
questions' - the proklyatye voprosy - of the day.2 But Belinsky
appears to go further. He asserts that social conditions impose
specific obligations upon the writer: that in such times he is not
free to compose purely for his own enjoyment - that hedonism is
not enough, that the reader has the right to demand that burning
social questions be discussed. And even though Belinsky may have
said this only once, there is his fatal pronouncement that in terrible
days like ours art must be a servant, serve outside purposes - the
very enormity which drove the defenders of pure art in France to
such violent and surely merited counter-attacks. And yet Belinsky
is clear that Goethe's art is even for him art par excellence: like all
great art it reflects the deepest tendencies of its time. But it has no
napravlenie; nor has 'The Stone Guest', the 'pearl' of Pushkin's
creation. As for Onegin - the 'encyclopaedia of Russian life'3 - its
'direction' is, if anything, mistaken: Pushkin is denounced for
making Tatiana continue with a loveless marriage to her husband,
for preaching conformity to the false values of her society, much as
Anna Ahkmatova once complained that Tolstoy killed Anna
Karenina to satisfy not his own moral code - for he knew better -
but that of his Moscow aunts. Yet Belinsky does not dream for a
moment of denying the supreme genius of Pushkin's purest, least

1 ibid. 3 1 2 . Cf. PSS vii 3 1 1 : 'With the man who is not a poet by nature, the idea
he conceives may be profound, true, even holy, but all the same his work will turn
out petty, sham, false, distorted, dead.'
2 Although 'voprosy' was widely used by the 1 8 3os to refer to the social

questions that preoccupied the Russian intelligentsia, it seems that the specific
phrase 'proklyatye voprosy' was coined in 1 8 5 8 by Mikhail L. Mikhailov when he
used it to render 'die verdammten Fragen' in his translation of Heine's poem
'Zum Lazarus' ( 1 8 5 3/4): see 'Stikhotvoreniya Geine', Sovremennik 1 8 58 No 3,
p. 1 2 5 ; and p. 2 2 5 in Heinrich Heines Samtliche Werke, ed. Oskar Walzel, vol. 3
(Leipzig, 1 9 1 3). Alternatively, Mikhailov may have been capitalising on the fact
that an existing Russian expression fitted Heine's words like a glove, but I have
not yet seen an earlier published use of it. Ed.
3 PSS vii 503 .
2 10 THE SENSE O F REALITY
socially 'directed' poetry; he does not complain of Pushkin's
aestheticism.
What then is he saying? Is he the muddled, over-excitable, half­
educated student, expelled from the university for lack of mental
capacity, a mere bundle of burning but uncoordinated, undisci­
plined emotions, a living proof that sincerity and vehemence are
not enough, the pathetic autodidact that later critics - Volynsky,
Aikhenvald, Chizhevsky - have represented him as being? Such
critics say that he received his ideas ready-made from others, that
he poured them out without thought or restraint or organisation,
as they came, helter-skelter; that he was a man who should,
perhaps, be forgiven because he had to work in desperate haste to
earn his daily bread, though his views do not thereby become
entitled to serious respect; a decent, even noble, soul, but not an
authority, not even an original figure; at most a symptom of the
intellectually half-baked, anxiety-ridden youth of his time, a critic
not fit to touch the hem of Schlegel's or Sainte-Beuve's or even
Gershenzon's garment. So, too, in our own day he has, at times,
been charged with originating, or at any rate creating conditions
for, the dreary utilitarian or didactic criticism, or the crude and
violent onslaughts on the theory and practice of art as an end in
itself, which came pouring out from his epigoni and ended in the
government inspectors of the Soviet literature of our own time.
This is, in effect, the view of the contemporary American critic
who, in my view, has written the most perceptive and original
work on this subject, Rufus Mathewson, whose The Positive Hero
in Russian Literature1 strikes me, even when I disagree with it, as
a masterpiece of critical penetration. Yet I do not think that
Mathewson's verdict that Belinsky was neither authoritarian nor a
totalitarian, but that he was indispensable to the emergence of
both, is just.2 What Belinsky was doing, in effect, was not to deny,
even at his most violent and anti-aesthetic, that art was art, to be
judged by aesthetic criteria. The contrast he draws between
Goncharov and Herzen seems to me, in this respect, crucial. He is
moved by Herzen, he accepts his napravlenie with all his heart, he
has no particular sympathy for Goncharov's point of view; but it is
Goncharov who is declared to be the artist, and not Herzen. And

1 Rufus W. Mathevrson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, 2nd ed.

(Stanford, 1975).
2 ibid., p. 42.
 ARTISTI C C O MM ITMENT 211

his decisive service to Russian literature - the crowning of Pushkin,

the celebration of Gogol, the discovery of Dostoevsky, Gon­
charov, Turgenev, the final sweeping out of the way of the Kukol­
niks, Marlinskys, Zagoskins, Senkovskys - this famous and literally
epoch-making operation was conducted without reference to the
social concerns of these writers, without use, conscious or uncon­
scious, of the criterion which Mathewson brilliantly formulates for
distinguishing the radical position from the liberal: the former
viewing the writer as a function of his ideology, as opposed to the
latter - the view of ideology as a function of the individual
temperament and personality of the writer.1
Of course Belinsky was socially concerned, no one more so; and
he doubtless did want the best artists of his time to respond
morally to the social reality of which they were necessarily more
conscious, to which they were more sensitive, than others. He may
have preferred Goncharov not to be so cool and detached an
observer of the moral and social attributes of his characters, and
supposed, rightly or wrongly, that profound moral concern does
not necessarily restrict artistic achievement. He knew, and he said,
that Grigorovich was an inferior artist, even while he praised him
for revealing the horrors of the life of the peasant; he would have
preferred Pushkin to have broken from what he regarded as the
conventional morality of his class and rank and education. All this
is so. But he is never, it seems to me, betrayed by these concerns -
which I admit I do not find wholly unsympathetic - into denying
or misrepresenting the artistic quality of the writers whom he
analyses, some of whom he did, after all, discover before anyone
else.
Belinsky's mistakes seem to me to be mainly errors of taste
rather than expressions of social or political or moral bias; he does
not artificially promote progressives at the expense of reactionaries,
conservatives, vacillating liberals or uncommitted neutrals. Goe­
the's Faust is for him the expression of the spirit of its age and
society because it is a great work of art: it is not a great work of art
because its author has given it a conscious social direction. Belinsky
felt profound contempt for Goethe's chilly character and his
conformist, timid, conservative life, but this did not for a moment
cause him to doubt Goethe's genius in contrast to the inferior gifts
of such socially committed writers, concerned with the insulted

I ibid., PP· 94-5.

212 THE SENSE O F REALITY
and the oppressed, as, say, Hugo or Eugene Sue or Grigorovich,
even if he did, like everyone else, vastly overestimate the gifts of
George Sand. Mathewson rightly supposes that the doctrine of
social commitment is artistically repressive, if only because it
works against problematic, ambivalent art. He quotes Chekhov to
the effect that the business of the artist is to state the problem fairly
before the reader, not to provide solutions1 - precisely what
Belinsky supposed Goncharov to be doing. In the last analysis
Belinsky does not demand of the artist anything save the gift of
creation and authenticity, the investigation and expression in
images of whatever is most real in his own experience. He
condemns only what seems to him falsification: for example the
substitution for this reality of idylls, fantasies, pseudo-classical
pastiche, inflation, extravagance, archaism - all evasions of any­
thing that has not been 'lived through' by the writer. Hence the
occasional furies against romantic antiquarianism, enthusiasm for
regional cultures - for him these are desperate expeditions to
remote or exotic corners of life, anything to avoid self-knowledge.
And this does entail a morality of art, the notion of the artist as in
some sense responsible - as being on oath to tell the truth. But this
is not tantamount to tolerating, let alone inviting, social or political
control or even state patronage of art, even to the degree that
Sainte-Beuve, of all people, pressed it on Napoleon III.
Let me go further: Belinsky's view does commit him to the belief
that art is a voice speaking, a form of communication between one
human being and another, or between anonymous groups of men
who created the Eddas or the temples of Angkor Vat. This
genuinely contradicts the rival view, of which perhaps Gautier is as
good a spokesman as any, that the whole purpose of the artist is to
make a beautiful object, whether it be an epic poem or a silver box,
and that the artist's personality, his motives, his life, his concerns,
his character, the social or psychological courses which shape him,
are altogether irrelevant to the work of art itself; for, as T. S. Eliot
believed, it lives by its own radiance. This is certainly what the
classical critics of the seventeenth or eighteenth century believed, a
doctrine which, in various forms, Baudelaire and Flaubert, Mal­
larme and Eliot, Pater and Proust, and indeed Goethe himself
consistently defended. It does not lack for defenders today. '

1 ibid., p. 9 3 : the p�ssage is from a letter of Chekhov to A. S. Suvorin, 27

October r 8 8 8 (Mathewson gives the wrong date).

 ARTISTI C C O M M ITM ENT 213
This to Belinsky was a disastrous fallacy: but not for the reasons
that animate Freudians, or Marxists, or cognate schools today.
Belinsky believed that man is one, and not compounded of
compartments or roles. If what a man says in one capacity is
incompatible with what he says in another, then there is something
that has been falsified or, at any rate, trivialised; turned into a
mechanical or conventional gesture. If what a man says, it does not
matter in what capacity - as an artist, a judge, a soldier, a chimney­
sweep - would be rendered false or insincere if he uttered it in
some other capacity - as a father, a revolutionary, a lover - then it
is false or shallow in its original context. There is no region in
which a man is exempt from responsibility as a man because he is
merely exercising a function or a metier or performing a part. If
you choose to suppress the truth, to substitute fantasies, to
adulterate your material, to play on human responses like an
instrument, if you choose to excite, amuse, frighten, attract, you are
turning your gifts into a means for the acquisition of power or
pleasure or profit, and this is a betrayal of your humanity to
politics - politics in some base and odious sense - an unscrupulous
trampling on, or at least evasion of, what you and all men know to
be the true goals of mankind,
Art is not journalism and it is not moral instruction. But the fact
that it is art does not absolve it, or rather the artist, from
accountability. Nor is artistic activity a set of garments which one
can don and doff at will: it is the expression of an undivided nature,
or it is nothing. To be a creative genius and a philistine is not
impossible - the morality of Hermann and Dorothea, or of The
Elective Affinities, have demonstrated this in Goethe's case, and so
did Hegel's personal character and life. What alone matters is what
the work of art expresses, whether it is the fruit of conscious
organisation or of a dark instinct: for the work is its creator, his
truest voice, himself. Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Raphael,
Gogo! are to him their works; their private lives do not directly
concern him: only the vision of life that they carry, their depth,
their validity, their relation to the central problems that have
agonised men at all times.
This position, which after I 842-3 he never again abandons,
derives from Saint-Simon or his disciples rather than from Feuer­
bach. Its ultimate source is Schiller's conception of the artist as the
avenger of insulted nature, the restorer of the integral human being
whom convention has distorted or destroyed - that, and August
214 THE SENSE O F REALITY
Wilhelm Schlegel's image of him as a kind of burning-glass in
which the deepest and most characteristic tendencies of his society
and age are collected, crystallised, and translated into an intense
and quintessential expression of reality, which the reproduction of
the scattered fragments of daily experience cannot approach. The
historian of Russian literature will find here the beginning of a line
that leads to Turgenev and Tolstoy, to some of the best critical
writings of both Mikhailovsky and Plekhanov - at the opposite
end of the scale to the men of the '6os and the reductive
materialism of Chernyshevsky, the ideological radicalism of
Dobrolyubov, the scientism and exaggerated contempt for artistic
aims in Pisarev, not to speak of the mechanical patter of official
Soviet formulae. This central current in Russian thought and
writing, with its incalculable influence on the West during the last
hundred years, springs, I believe, directly from the Saint-Simonian
polemic with the champions of art for art's sake. The social roots
and implications of this fateful confrontation is another story.

III

Yet there is something more to say. Belinsky's cry, isolated as it is,

that 'In our age art is not a master, but a slave',' or that 'pure art is
impossible in our age'/ is not identical with saying that the artist
and therefore his art are necessarily rooted in a particular social
situation, and cannot be torn from it without withering or turning
it into mere entertainment. It goes much further - far beyond the
French originals - and does lend credence to the claim of, at any
rate, Dobrolyubov to be descended from Belinsky. The truth is, I
think, that, to use Turgenev's image, Belinsky was Don Quixote,
passionate, single-minded, ready to die for his ideas, but at the
same time a Quixote torn by an inner conflict which cannot be
resolved. On the one hand he adored literature: he possessed a
marvellous instinctive sense of what was literature and what was
not; it has stood the test of time; and made him the most original,
influential, and (despite several stupendous failures of taste) the
most just and penetrating Russian critic of the century. Literature
is the first and last love of his entire life: the need to enter wholly
into the world of the writer, to live through his experience,

1 loc. cit. (p. 207 abQve, note 5).

2 ibid. 77·
 ARTIST I C COMMITM ENT 21 5

surrender totally to his vision, is personal and subjective, a capacity

for psychological, aesthetic absorption, an exercise of what Herder
called Hineinfiihlen,1 free from the demands of the social situation
and the historically changing needs of men. At the same time he
sought for an all-embracing and indestructibly valid ideology; the
golod istiny is a universal phenomenon in his time; no one was
more deeply agonised by the injustice, the misery, the brutal
arbitrariness of Russian life, which his letters convey as well as they
have ever been conveyed by any human being. Consequently he
was obsessed by the search for answers to the questions of what
man should be, how life should be lived; and he hoped and wished
that every human faculty, but especially literature, which was his
life, should concern itself with these questions and offer help to the
seekers after these truths. He is ready to sacrifice himself to his
vision, he is ready to fight to the death against the enemies of the
doctrine which he has won with so much torment. He knows this
in himself: he knows that he is liable to overestimate the purely
social significance of a piece of writing, that if the work has no
artistic merit, then, however laudable its purposes, it may be
something, but it is not a work of literature. He reiterates this until
his dying day. But he confesses to an inner predilection. In a
celebrated letter to Vasily Botkin he says that even if a story lacks
art and poetry, then, unless it actively 'smacks of a dissertation' or
'falls into allegory', if it has any substance in it at all, 'I do not
simply read, I devour it . . . The main thing is that it should raise
problems, make a moral impact on society.'2 He admits that even
an inferior piece of belles-lettres, if it is socially important, if it
contains ideas, raises problems, may at times engage him personally
more deeply than a work of art. My point is that he does not
confuse these genres: art remains art, whether or not it is socially
relevant, and retains its immortal value whatever its social worth;
while no degree of concern with social problems, no matter how
intelligent and sincere the writer, can by itself make a work of art.
Schiller is nobler and more sympathetic than Goethe, but Goethe is
the greater artist. Belinsky has no doubt about that.
These agonised discussions affected his contemporaries pro­
foundly. Belinsky was not read abroad; but the great novelists,

1 Herder's sammtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, I 877-191 3), vol. 5,

P· 5 ° 3 ·
1 PSS xii 44 5 ·
216 THE SENSE O F REALITY
who were formed during these years, and later the social preachers,
did in due course affect thought in the West. This is a case of what
I have called the 'boomerang effect'; to ignore it is to leave the
cultural history of the West incomplete.

IV

The fortunes of the Saint-Simonian movement in France are well

known: some of the master's most immediate disciples, inspired by
the vision of planned centralised industrialisation, became highly
successful railway kings and bankers, and organised the digging of
the Suez and Panama canals. The doctrine developed into the
positivism of Saint-Simon's disciple Auguste Comte, deeply
affected Marxism, but also permeated the more moderate socialist
and radical doctrines of the second half of the century. Saint­
Simonian ideas, radiating from this source, took their place along­
side other currents of thought, conservative, liberal, monarchist,
Marxist, clerical, anti-clerical, with which they entered into various
combinations to form the social, economic and intellectual history
of the Second Empire and the Third Republic.
In Russia the effect was less obvious but deeper and more
revolutionary. It was the first coherent ideology discovered by an
intellectual and morally sensitive minority in search of a set of
principles to guide action, particularly as expounded in the writings
of the Saint-Simonian left - the socialist tracts and articles of
Pierre Leroux and his collaborators in the Revue Independante,
the indignant denunciation of capitalism by their devoted disciple
Lamennais, but above all the socialist novels of George Sand. The
moral idealism of this movement affected Herzen, Belinsky and
their friends during their most impressionable years, and, no matter
how much they changed their specific views, this humane and
civilised radicalism, with its genuine hatred of social inequality and
the brutal exploitation of the weak by the strong, dominated them
to the end. It was this concern, in its institutionalised, organised
forms - Marxist or positivist - that Dostoevsky, who had in his
youth been under the similar influence of the narrower but socially
even more radical doctrines of Fourier, later mocked and
denounced.
I do not mean to imply that if Herzen and his friends had not
read Saint-Simon, or if Belinsky and Turgenev had not read
George Sand whe� they did, or if tracts by Pierre Leroux or Louis
 ARTISTI C C O M M ITM ENT 2I7

Blanc, or, for that matter, Fourier or Feuerbach, had not been
smuggled into Russia, there would have been no movement of
social protest, no repentant gentry in the 1 8 4os, no conspiracies or
repression or beginnings of an organised revolutionary movement
in the 1 86os. This would be an absurd thesis. I wish to assert no
more than that Russian literature and thought took the forms that
they did largely because of the impact that these French doctrines
and the controversy over them, especially in the field of art, made
on that particular milieu in Russia in the I 8 3 os and 1 84os. I do not
know whether this should be called a cause or a mere occasion of
what occurred: at any rate the Saint-Simonian ferment and the
opposition to it are what set Herzen and Belinsky off in a direction
which neither ever abandoned. The process which planted this
particular seed in the exceptionally fertile soil of young Russian
intellectuals in search of the ideal played, I should like to maintain,
a more decisive role in the growth of both Russian liberalism and
of Russian radicalism, moderate and revolutionary, than is com­
monly allowed; with the corollary that it did so through its
transforming effect on the central figure of this period - the purest
case anywhere to be found of a morally concerned writer -
Belinsky, the power of whose influence, by both attraction and
repulsion, on both thought and action in his native land, and
thereby on the rest of the world, seems to me still underestimated.
This is one thesis. To this I wish to add a second one, namely
that neither Belinsky nor any of his friends was ever betrayed into
the view, by now familiar enough, of supposing that art, and in
particular literature, fails as art unless it performs a direct social
function - is a weapon in the achievement of the goals of the
progressive section of mankind. No matter how near Belinsky
occasionally came to demanding that art abandon its proper end
and tend to other needs, he never confused it with morality, still
less with propaganda, of whatever kind. In this respect Cherny­
shevsky and Dobrolyubov, Plekhanov and the Soviet commenta­
tors, who took from him only what they needed, distorted his
Image.
Perhaps an even more instructive case is that of his friend and, in
some degree, disciple Ivan Turgenev. Of all Russian prose writers,
Turgenev came nearest, perhaps, to the Western ideal of the pure
artist. If he held any consistent belief in his life, it was that the
highest art is not the vehicle of the artist's conscious convictions,
that art is a form of 'negative capability', as it is in Shakespeare, of
2I8 THE SENSE O F REALITY
whom Schiller spoke as a god concealed by his works, fulfilling
himself in them as an end in itself. The mainspring of Turgenev's
dislike for Chemyshevsky (apart from his disdainful contempt for
him as a man and critic) was the latter's utilitarian insistence that
art must be subordinated to politics, to science, to ethics, because
the primary purpose of art is action - transformation of society, the
creation of the new socialist man. When Turgenev makes Rudin
say 'I repeat, if a man has no firm principles in which he believes,
no ground on which he is firmly based, how can he determine the
needs, the significance, the future of his people? How can he know
what he must do himself, if . '1 it is Bakunin, or some other
. .

typical Russian radical of the I 84os, who is speaking, not the

author; this is not his voice. The most essential Turgenev seems to
me to speak in a letter to Pauline Viardot of I 848, in which he says:

life, reality, its whims, its accidents, its habits, its evanescent beauty . . .

I adore all that. I am rooted in the earth. I would rather look at the
hurried movements of a duck, as it stands at the edge of a puddle and
scratches the back of its neck with its moist foot; or at the long,
gleaming drops of water as they fall slowly from the jaws of a cow,
knee-deep in water, motionless, after it has drunk its fill - I prefer all
this to anything that the Cherubim . . . can see in the sky . . . 2

Why is this? Because the sky is not the earth, because tt ts

'eternal, limitless emptiness'/ universal, abstract, unparticularised,
unrelated to the terrestrial world of things and persons, sensations,
feelings and ideas, colours, scents, actions, birth and death - the
world of nature, which, however evanescent and coldly indifferent
to the joys and sorrows of human beings, is all there is; the rest is
mere talk, mere smoke.
Yet he lived when he did, and the impact of the social sermons
from the West had done their work on him and his contempora­
ries. With Belinsky's eye upon him, both in the I 8 4 os when they
were close, and after Belinsky's death, the 'accursed' social ques­
tions are at the heart of all his novels. I need not enlarge on this:
On the Eve, Virgin Soil and above all, of course, Fathers and Sons
are far from irrelevant today - Fathers and Sons has perhaps fully
come into its own only in our day. At the same time Turgenev

1 PSSP, Sochineni:ya vi 263.

2 PSSP, Pis'ma i 297-8. (The letter was written in French.)
J ibid. 297·
 ARTISTIC C O M M IT M E N T 2I9

insists that he takes u p no position - h e i s merely a creator; he

knows that when the author, rightly, does not express his own
sympathies, the reader, abandoned to his own devices, without
direction, without a napravlenie, is puzzled; what is he to think?
To be left to arrive at his own conclusions irritates him: reality -
the chaos of reality, its unevennesses - exasperates the reader, since
he wants a guiding hand, positive heroes.
Turgenev proudly refuses to provide this; writers who, like
Shakespeare, or like Gogol, create characters who detach them­
selves from their authors and live their own independent lives seem
to him to belong to a higher order than those whose characters are
not self-propelled, whose bonds with the author are patent; these
latter convey more warmth, more heart, more sincerity, more
personal but less objective truth, possess less mastery, less art.1
Yet, in I 8 5 5 , seven years after Belinsky's death, he writes to
Botkin, by this time a passionate defender of art for art's sake,
'There are epochs where literature cannot be merely art - there are
interests higher than poetry', and he declares that moments of self­
knowledge, of self-criticism, are just as necessary in national as in
personal life.2 So, too, he tells Tolstoy in 1 8 5 8 that it is not 'lyrical
twittering' that the times call for, not 'birds singing on boughs'.3
He declines to take part in a journal dedicated to pure art, free from
contamination by social issues, which Tolstoy at this time was
meditating: 'You loathe all this political mess: true, it is a dirty,
dusty, �lll lgar business. But then there is dirt and dust in the streets,
and yet we cannot, after all, do without towns.'4 Finally there is
the celebrated passage about Fathers and Sons in the letter to
Saltykov: 'I am ready to admit that . . . I had no right to give our
reactionary riff-raff the chance of seizing on a nickname, a name;
the writer in me should have made this sacrifice to the citizen.'5
Even if this was written, as has been suggested, because Turge­
nev wished to justify himself to the stern Saltykov, it is still a sign,
a symptom, of the long conflict between the claims of art as they all
understood it - they did not disagree about its essence, these
writers of the 1 8 5 os and '6os (save perhaps Nekrasov, who never
comes wholly clean about this) - and the claims of personal

1 PSSP, Sochineniya v 368.

2 PSSP, Pis'ma ii 282.
J ibid. iii 1 8 8 .

• ibid. 2 1 0.

1 ibid. xi 1 9 1 . The 'nickname' Turgenev refers to is 'nihilist'.

220 THE S E N S E OF REAL ITY

morality or political conviction. The conflict was not so much

between the 'aesthetes' and the 'naturalists' - although this did, of
course, take place - as within the individual writers themselves:
Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Pisemsky were all torn by it,
peacefully or with torment, according to temperament. This had
little enough to do with the critics of the radical Sovremennik
('Contemporary'). What respect had they left, by the late I 86os, for
Chernyshevsky or Dobrolyubov, or Antonovich, or even Nekra­
sov? Herzen did not take it upon himself to guide, from London
or Geneva, the literary conscience of Russian writers, even of those
who were most intimate with him. It is surely the ghost of
Belinsky, that terrible, incorruptible presence, that haunts them - it
is he who once and for all, for better and for worse, set the moral
tone of socially conscious literature, and the debate about its nature
and its value, in Russia in the second half of the century and, in a
sense, until our own day.
This was a genuine crisis, a crise de foi, not a mere dispute, a
series of partisan assertions and counter-assertions. Even the young
Chernyshevsky is not totally deaf to the claims of art: when
reviewing Tolstoy's Childhood and Adolescence and his Military
Tales in I 8 5 6, he says:

We want novellas to describe social life as much as anyone does. But

one must still understand that not every poetic idea permits social
questions to be introduced into the work. One must not forget that the
first rule of artistry is the unity of the work, and that consequently in
depicting 'childhood' it is precisely childhood that one must describe,
not something else, not social questions, nor military scenes, nor Peter
the Great, nor Faust, nor Indiana, nor Rudin, but the child with his
feelings and his concepts. And people who express such narrow
demands talk about the freedom of c reative art! It is amazing that they
do not seek Macbeth in the Iliad, Dickens in Walter Scott, Gogo! in
Pushkin ! One should understand that a poetic idea is destroyed when
elements foreign to the work are introduced into it, and that if
Pushkin, for example, had thought of depicting Russian landowners or
his sympathy with Peter the Great in his 'The Stone Guest', 'The
Stone Guest' would have turned out to have been an absurd work, so
far as art is concerned. Everything has its proper place: scenes of
southern love in 'The Stone Guest', scenes of Russian life in Onegin,
Peter the Grean in The Bronze Horseman. Thus, too, in Childhood or
in Adolescence, only those elements that are characteristic of that age
are appropriate, while patriotism, heroism, military life have their
 A RTISTI C C O M M ITMENT 221

place in the Military Tales, a terrible moral drama i n The Notes of a

Billiard Marker, the portrayal of a woman in Two Hussars. Do you
remember that marvellous figure of the girl sitting by the window at
night? Do you remember how her heart beats, how sweetly her breast
is overcome with the premonitions of love?1

Then he goes on to praise Tolstoy for introducing nothing

irrelevant into his work. Tolstoy is a poet, a master of real beauty
and real poetry. But despite the commonplace sentiments and more
than commonplace style, all this is still compatible with Belinsky's,
Turgenev's, even Grigoriev's criteria.
This did not last, however. It is when we get to the notorious
essay on Turgenev's Asya that we meet the classical Chernyshev­
sky of 'Forget about them, these erotic questions! The reader of
our time cannot be bothered with them, occupied as he is with
problems of administrative and judiciary improvements, of finan­
cial reforms, or the emancipation of the serfs'/ or the famous
passage which states that the chief value of marine paintings is that
they will afford the inhabitants of our interior provinces a sight of
the sea which they might otherwise never obtain.3 It is _s':!_ch_
monstrosities on the part of honourable but aesthetically[ungifted,
critics - martyrs to Russian socialism - together with Dobrolyu­
bov's conception of criticism as concerned with the assessment of
literature solely as a weapon of sociological analysis, leading to
promotion of revolutionary remedies, that opened the path which
led to Plekhanov, Lenin and all that followed. If Belinsky is the
ancestor of this trend, so too are Turgenev, Tolstoy, Saltykov, even
Apollon Grigoriev if one takes into account his ecstatic pages
o-·
J
about the supreme genius of George Sand :-�cr "'la:P
·
•· � '
· lC ·-

Let me repeat once again: the critical turning-point seems to me

to have occurred in the early 1 84os when the Saint-Simonian
doctrines, having secured a response in the heart and blood of the
agonised, unceasingly responsive critic Belinsky, radically influ­
enced other major writers, not always sympathetic to his views.
What B elinsky seems to me to have imprinted upon his successors
was a genuine hatred of self-protective fantasies, of anything that
falls between the writer and his object, that leads him away from

1 N. G. Chernyshevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 1 6 vols (Moscow,

1939-53), iii 429-30.
2 ibid. v 166.

J ibid. ii 77·
222 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

the vision of what is most immediately real to him. Hence his

furious rejection of archaism, sentimental regionalism, and roman­
ticism about exotic and remote cultures in general, and the idyllic
Slav past in particular, and, as part of this, his passionate emphasis
on authenticity, on the fact that only two things are required of a
writer: that he possess artistic talent - however this comes about,
perhaps as a gift from heaven - and that he does not sin against the
truth, that the work should be generated by an Erlebniss of the
writer, or have been lived through by him in reality or in
imagination. From this follows a corresponding disparagement of
mere skill, craftsmanship, of the intrusion of the discursive intel­
lect, inimical as it is to the free play of the creative imagination; and
finally a demand that the author should recognise the moral centre
of the situation that he is describing - grasp its universal signifi­
cance for human beings as such as against its transient significance
for readers whose ephemeral desires and circumstances will soon
be over. The influence of these canons on Turgenev is evident
enough. But he possessed another, more formidable, although
indirect and certainly unconscious disciple.
Tolstoy was a notorious victim of his artistic genius and his
social conscience. There was a time when his passion for pure art
and his hatred of politics, encouraged by Fet and Botkin, were at
their height. In 1 8 5 8 he says:

The majority of the public began to think that the task of all literature
consisted only in denouncing evil and discussing and correcting it . . .
that the days of the story and of verse have gone for ever, and that the
time is coming when Pushkin wilt be forgotten and will no longer be
read, that pure art is impossible, that literature is only a tool for the
civic development of society and so forth. One could hear, it is true,
during that time, the voices of Fet, Turgenev, Ostrovsky muffled by
the political uproar . . . but society knew what it was doing, continued
to sympathise with political literature alone, and considered it alone as
literature. This enthusiasm was noble, necessary, even temporarily
just. In order to have the strength to make these enormous strides
forward which our society has made in recent times, it had to be one­
s ided, it had to get carried away beyond the goal in order to reach it, it
had to see that single goal ahead. And actually how could one think
about poetry when for the first time a picture of the evil surrounding
us was being unveiled before one's eyes, and when the possibility of
putting an end to it was being presented to us? How could we think
about the beautiful, as we fell ill ? It is not for us who make use of the
 ART I S T I C C O M M I T M E NT 223
fruits of this enthusiasm to reproach people for it . . . But however
high-minded and wholesome this one-sided enthusiasm might have
been, like any enthusiasm it could not endure. The literature of a
people is its fu ll, many-sided consciousness, in which must be reflected
equally the national contemplation of beauty in a given epoch of
development, and also the national love for goodness and truth.1

Nevertheless, and this belief he never abandoned, in addition to

'political literature' there is another kind of literature 'which
reflects eternal, universally human interests, the most precious
heartfelt consciousness of the people, a literature accessible to men
of every nation, of every epoch, a literature without which no
people possessing strength and richness has ever developed' .2
Seven years later he said in a letter to Boborykin:

If I were told that I could write a novel whereby I could establish

beyond any possible doubt what I consider to be the correct view of
all social questions, I should not devote even two hours to such a
novel; whereas if I were told that what I write would be read by
today's children in about twenty years time, that they would cry and
laugh over it, and love life, I should give to this all my life and all my
powers.3

In spite of all that followed - his condemnation of all art, which

does not help to heal the moral wounds of men, as vanity and
corruption - his artistic impulse cannot be suppressed. When, later
in life, he had written Khadzhi-Murat, someone asked him how he
came to do this - what was the moral or spiritual message of this
work? He replied very coldly that he kept his artistic work distinct
from his moral exhortation. He did not demand moral sermons
from Chekhov; and, on the other hand, despite the fact that
Bernard Shaw could not be accused of a lack of clarity or
directness, or of avoiding social problems, or of lacking positive
convictions, he would have none of him. Shaw wrote to him in
admiration: after all, he had attacked some of the same enemies as
those denounced by Tolstoy. But the old man refused to regard
Shaw's writings as anything but vulgar, superficial, above all
profoundly inartistic. His efforts to achieve a single and coherent

1 L. N. Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 90 vols (Moscow/Leningrad,

1 928-5 8; index 1964), v 27 1-2.
2 ibid. 272.
3 ibid. !xi r oo.
224 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

philosophy of life founded upon i �f;lli bl ; t;� ths were even more
heroic and did more violence to his own instincts and cravings and
insight than the similar efforts of Belinsky or Turgenev, and he
ended in a correspondingly more terrifying failure. This same
dilemma - this attempt to square the circle - forms the substance of
Blok's late essays on 'The Intelligentsia and the People' and 'The
Shipwreck of Humanism'. The problem is, if anything, even more
agonising in Dr Zhivago and the published, and perhaps unpub­
lished and, it may be, unwritten, works of Sinyavsky and his
compamons.
To return to Tolstoy's peculiar relation to Belinsky. In I 8 5 6
Tolstoy was, with difficulty, induced to read him by Druzhinin,
who abhorred him, and Turgenev, who admired him. He declared
that he had one night dreamt that Belinsky had maintained that
social doctrines were true only if they were 'pushed to the end';
and that he accepted this. He was delighted by Belinsky's articles
on Pushkin, and particularly by the idea that if one is to
understand a writer, one must immerse oneself in him completely -
and see only him and nothing else. On 2 January I 8 5 7 he notes in
his diary, 'Read Belinsky in the morning, and I am beginning to
like him';2 and although in later years he thought him a tedious
and ungifted writer, the principles which he had enunciated entered
Tolstoy's outlook for good. It seems to me no accident that
Tolstoy carried out Belinsky's critical behests with such singular, if
unacknowledged and perhaps unconscious, fidelity. No word is
more pejorative in Tolstoy's critical vocabulary than 'contrived';
only directness, only simplicity, only clarity - if the writer is quite
clear about what it is that he wishes to say, and if his vision is
unimpeded, the result will eo ipso be art. This goes further than
Belinsky at his most extreme was prepared to go; Belinsky never
abandoned the view that artistic genius was something wholly sui
generis, and therefore that authenticity - the fact that a man's
vision is his own and no one else's and that he expresses what he
sees clearly and directly - is not by itself a sufficient condition for
the creation of a work of art. Tolstoy's view is, as so often, a
simplification and exaggeration of an already simple thesis.
The insistence on authenticity, the charges of what in our day,
under neo-Hegelian and existentialist influence, is spoken of as

1 ibid. xlvii 198.

2 ibid. ro8.
 A RTIST I C C O M M ITMENT 225

false consciousness and bad faith, occur most frequently in Tol­

stoy's devastating criticisms of other - especially nineteenth-cen­
tury - writers. Thus Goethe, for example, is condemned for
viewing his creations from too remote a standpoint; hence his
novels and his dramatic works, because they have not been 'lived
through', however exquisitely composed these may be, however
absolute the author's mastery over himself and his material, remain
unconvincing - magnificent but cold and withdrawn, unable to
achieve the direct communication of feeling which, for Tolstoy, is
the primary idea, the sole purpose of art. This charge of complacent
and disdainful self-sufficiency, the ironical references to Goethe's
Olympian calm in the midst of social upheavals, his frigid self­
satisfaction, his caution, his determined invulnerability, echo Belin­
sky; they are repeated by Turgenev, despite his admiration for
Goethe's genius, both in the essay on Faust and elsewhere. No
Russian writer wrote better about Goethe than Turgenev: nor was
he by temperament as unsympathetic to him as, say, Herzen or
Tolstoy. But the Saint-Simonian potion had done its work: he
preferred Schiller, Byron, George Sand, and proclaimed this. In
similar vein, with typical irony, Tolstoy says that he asks himself
whether Flaubert - Flaubert who has described so exquisitely how
St Julian the Hospitaller embraced the leper, the leper who was
Christ - would have behaved similarly in this situation; this doubt
undermines his confidence in the writer, the belief in his genuine­
ness which, for him, was the basis of all true art.
This approach, whether one thinks it acceptable or absurd, is the
kind of moralism in Belinsky which his followers admired, and his
opponents detested. So too, when Tolstoy wishes to pillory the
shortcomings of some of the most respected writers of his time, the
poisoned arrows that he aims so unerringly are drawn from
Belinsky's quiver. He undertakes to judge them in terms of three
desiderata: seriousness of the problem; moral sincerity; and artistic
capacity. Thus he informs us that Turgenev has certainly 'lived
through', suffered in his innermost person, the experiences which
he describes so vividly and artistically. But are these sad reflections
and feelings of members of the decaying Russian gentry, as they sit
in their country houses and brood, and discuss their personal
relationships with other landowners as decadent, as unrepresenta­
tive of humanity in general as themselves - are these of sufficient
worth to occupy the thoughts of a serious, 'healthy' being, a
peasant, a decent worker, a morally 'sound' man or woman?
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

As for Nekrasov, who can deny that he is a writer endowed with

immense artistic skill? The problems with which he deals - the
misery, the oppression of the peasants, the violence and injustice to
which they are exposed - who can deny the importance or human
significance of this terrible topic? But sincerity? Has Nekrasov
truly lived through these experiences in reality or in imagination?
Does he convey to the reader the feeling that he is personally
involved? Are the poems not merely genre pictures, by a skilful but
detached painter, in fact an owner of serfs, whom he shows no sign
of wishing to liberate, whose private life and real, personal
concerns lie far from the sufferings of the victims, from the social
and moral squalor of the life which he is so good at turning into
verse, without any real personal, self-identifying engagement on
his part? The dismissal of Nekrasov as insincere because he is
insufficiently committed again goes beyond Belinsky's view of, for
example, Goncharov. Tolstoy pushes the point further than Belin­
sky, with his scrupulous desire to know the truth, however
complex, ever went, even on the rare occasions when his social
conscience carried him away.
Finally, there is one of Tolstoy's verdicts on Dostoevsky: he is
acknowledged to be dealing with problems of the greatest spiritual
importance; his attitude, Tolstoy concedes, is profoundly sincere;
but alas, he does not pass his (and Belinsky's) primary criterion, the
possession of artistic gifts, that is, the capacity to express an
individual vision simply and clearly. After all his characters have
been paraded on the stage, the rest (Tolstoy declares) is a mere
working out of the mechanism of the plot: for pages and pages it is
all predictable, tedious, inartistic; Dostoevsky has a great deal to
say, but he cannot write or compose.

I have cited these instances from both Turgenev and Tolstoy

because these authors are not commonly thought to stand in the
tradition of social criticism initiated by Belinsky - and my thesis is
that the collision between the claims of art and the claims of society
did not, in Belinsky's case, simply end in the victory of the latter,
and so originate the clear, radical tradition of Chernyshevsky,
Pisarev, Plekhan<;>v and their Marxist epigoni; but, on the contrary,
remained unresolyed; and initiated the dilemma in which Russian
writers and artists were caught from his time onwards, and which
 ART IST I C C O M M ITMENT 227

henceforth deeply affected the entire movement of Russian thought

and art, and indeed of action too, and tormented liberals and
conservatives, 'progressives' and those who, like Tolstoy or the
populists, or the 'decadents' of the turn of the century whom he
loathed and despised, condemned political activity and sought
salvation elsewhere.
Perhaps the clearest statement of Belinsky's final position is to
be found in his essay on criticism of 1 84 3 : 'We may be asked: how
can one and the same piece of criticism organically combine. two
different points of view - historical and artistic? Or how can one
demand of a poet that he freely follow his inspiration and, at the
same time, serve the spirit of his time, not venturing to step out of
its magic circle?'1 Belinsky declared that this question is easily
soluble, both theoretically and historically:

Every man, and consequently the poet too, undergoes the inevitable
influence of time and place. He imbibes with his mother's milk the
principles and the sum of concepts by which his society lives. This is
what makes him a Frenchman, a German, a Russian and so forth; this
is why, if he is born for example in the twelfth century, he is piously
convinced that it is a sacred duty to burn alive men who do not think
as others do, while if he is born in the nineteenth century he
religiously believes that nobody must be burnt or slaughtered, that
the business of society is not to avenge the victims of a crime, but the
correction of the criminal through punishment, by means of which
the society that has been injured will be satisfied and the holy law of
Christian love and brotherhood will be fulfilled. But mankind has not
suddenly leapt from the twelfth to the nineteenth century: it has had to
live through a whole six centuries, in the course of which its
conception of truth developed in its various stages, and in each of these
six centuries this conception took on a particular form. It is this form
that philosophy calls a stage of development of universal truth; and i t
is this stage that must be the pulse of the poet's creations, their
prevailing passion (pathos), their main motif, the basic chord of their
harmony. One cannot live in the past and through the past with one's
eyes closed to the present: there would be something unnatural, false
and dead in this. Why did European painters in the Middle Ages paint
only Madonnas and saints ? Because the Christian religion was the
dominant element in the life of Europe at that time. After Luther all
efforts to restore religious art in Europe would have been i n vain.
'But', we shall be told, 'if one cannot get out of one's own time, there

1 PSS vi 284.
228 THE SENSE O F REALITY
cannot be any poets who do not belong to the spirit of their time, and
therefore there is no need to take up arms against something that
cannot occur.' 'No,' we reply, 'not only can occur, but does so,
especially in our own time.' The cause of this phenomenon lies in
s ocieties whose conceptions are diametrically opposed to their reality,
which teach their children in schools a morality for which people now
laugh at them when they have left school. This is a state of irreligion,
decay, fragmentation, individuality and - its inevitable consequence ­
egoism: unfortunately features of our age which are all too pro­
nounced! When societies are in this state and live by old traditions
which are no longer believed in and which are contradicted by the new
truths discovered by science, truths which are brought about by the
movements of history; when societies are in such a state it is
sometimes the case that the noblest and most gifted personalities feel
themselves cut off from society, feel themselves solitary and the
weaker brethren among them drift off amiably into becoming the
priests and preachers of egoism and of all the social vices, in the belief
that evidently this has to be, that it cannot be otherwise, that it did not,
they say, begin with us, and will not end with us either. Others - and
these, alas, are sometimes the best men of their time - escape into
themselves and turn their backs in despair upon this reality which has
insulted all feeling and all reason. But this is a false and selfish means
of salvation. When there is a fire in our street one must run towards it,
not away from it, in order to find the means, together with others, for
putting it out; we must work like brothers to extinguish it. But many,
on the contrary, have elevated this egoistic and craven feeling into a
principle, a doctrine, a rule of life, and in the end into the dogma of the
highest wisdom. They are proud of it, they look with contempt upon a
world which, they ask you, please, to see, is not worth their suffering
and their j oy. Ensconcing themselves in the embellished tower of the
castle of their imagination, and looking out through its many-coloured
glass, they sing like birds . . . My God ! Man becomes a bird! What a
truly Ovidian metamorphosis ! And this is reinforced by the fascina­
tion of German artistic doctrines which, despite much depth, truth,
and light, are also exceedingly German, philistine, ascetic, anti-social.
What is bound to come of this ? The death of talents who, given
another direction, would have left vivid traces of their existence in
society and who might have developed, gone forward, and reached
manhood. Hence the proliferation of microscopic geniuses, tiny great
men, who do indeed display much talent and power, but who will
make a bit of noise and then fall silent and soon die even before their
death, often in full bloom and at the height of their powers and
activity. Freedom of creation is easily reconciled with serving contem­
porary needs: but to do this it is not necessary to force oneself to write
 A RTIST I C C O M M ITMENT 229

on ready-made themes or do violence to one's fantasy; one needs only

to be a citizen, the son of one's society and one's time, to identify
oneself with its interests, make its needs one's own; one needs
sympathy, love, a healthy, practical sense of truth, which does not
divorce belief from action, a work of art from life. What has entered
and gone deeply into the soul will emerge of its own accord.'

This is not, and could not be, Belinsky's final position. In the
very same year, I 84 3 , he began the essays on Pushkin; in the fifth
of these he develops the thesis which moved Tolstoy so deeply -
that truly to read a writer one must see only him, to the exclusion
of the rest of the world. This, then, is how one must see 'The Stone
Guest', or 'The Gypsies', which have as little to do with the
deepest interests of the nation as the glacial masterpieces of Goethe
or, at a lower level, Goncharov's An Ordinary Story. Yet he knew
these to be true works of art by men who did not run when there
was a fire in their street. I have quoted the passage from the essay
of I 84 3 at such length because it seems to me the nearest that
Belinsky ever came to saying, not indeed what art was or could or
should be, but what he and those who thought like him wished it
to be: what warmed their hearts, even though they knew that this
position was not absolute, but, in the end, subjective, historically
conditioned, likely to be shaken by events, by counter-examples,
by wider sympathies.
Still, this statement, which like the famous letter to Gogol is a
profession de foi, is, however it is interpreted, not Chernyshevsky's
demand for serving the immediate needs of society; it is equidistant
from both formalism and Marxism. Doubtless it would have been
rejected indignantly by Flaubert or Baudelaire or Maupassant. It
would have meant little to Stendhal or Jane Austen or Trollope, or
even to James Joyce, despite his early socialism. It could not be
accepted without heavy qualifications by Marxists; it was not cited
by the men of the '6os. But when Korolenko said that his 'native
land was above all else Russian literature'2 (not Russia herself),
this was a remark that any Russian writer could have made at any
time in the last hundred years. And this, it seems to me, derives
ultimately from the impact of the Saint-Simonian controversy
about the functions of the artist upon Belinsky and his circle: it is

I ibid. 284-6.
2 /storiya moego sovremennika, chapter 27: vol. 4, p. 270 in V. G. Korolenko,
Sobranie sochinenii v pyati tomakh (Leningrad, 1 98 9-9 1).
230 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

due to this impact more than to any other single cause. If some
contemporary of Korolenko in England, let us say Arnold Bennett,
had said that his country was not England, it was English
literature, what could this possibly have meant? How could he
have said it? If even so socially conscious a writer as, say, Upton
Sinclair or Henri Barbusse had said: 'My native land is American
literature' - 'French literature' - this would have been obscure to
the point of unintelligibility.
This is the difference that was made by the Russian doctrine of
commitment of the I 84os, Russian because it entered the hearts and
blood of its defenders, more deeply than those of its original
begetters in Paris or elsewhere. This sentiment is perfectly intelli­
gible today in Asia or Africa and nearer home, and is what the
intelligentsia - and I use the word in an entirely laudatory sense -
everywhere has always been concerned with, whether it is liberal
and reformist or radical and revolutionary. The reader, said Goethe
as cited by Belinsky, 'should forget me, himself, the whole world,
and live only in my book'. Belinsky comments: 'Given the
German's apathetic tolerance of everything that is and is done in
the wide world, given his impersonal universality which by
acknowledging everything can itself become nothing, the thought
enunciated by Goethe makes art an end in itself and thereby frees it
from any connection with life, which is always higher than art,
because art is only one of the innumerable manifestations of life.''
This position can be accepted or rejected, doubted or debated, but
it is not obscure. It seems to me that the centre of the conflict lies
between this affirmation and that which Belinsky, with many a
sideways glance at art which is free from anxiety, remote from the
pressures that belong to the 'critical' periods of history, sought to
defend; a position of which his 'manifesto' of 1 84 3 seems to me the
fullest statement. This is where the battle-lines have been drawn
now for many decades: here, and not between the wooden
directives with which a later generation of Russian positivists and
Marxists tried not so much to solve as to dissolve the issue.
The two positions that I have tried to outline are to be found
both between the 'pure' and the 'socially committed' Russian
critics and artists, and within them. The major writers - Turgenev,
Tolstoy, Herzen, Belinsky - were involved in this conflict and

1 PSS vii 3 0 5 . The editor of PSS cannot establish the source of the quotation

from Goethe.
 A RTISTI C C O M M I T M E N T 2J I

never achieved a resolution of the issue. This, in part, is what gives

their theoretical discussions vitality, when the arguments of many
of their Western contemporaries, Leroux and Chasles, even Taine
and Renan, seem dead. For it is an issue which is central to modern
society's social conflicts, but acute only in relatively backward
communities, without the discipline of a rich and strong traditional
culture, driven forcibly to adjust themselves to an alien pattern,
while they are still free, at any rate as yet, from the exercise of total
control over their life and art.
 KANT AS AN UNFAMILIAR
SOURCE OF NATIONALISM

Beings who have received the gift of freedom are not content with the
enjoyment of comfort granted by others.
Immanuel Kant, The Quarrel Between the Faculties (1 798)1

AT FIRST SIGHT nothing would seem more disparate than the idea
of nationality and the sane, rational, liberal internationalism of the
great Konigsberg philosopher. Of all the influential thinkers of his
day, Kant seems the most remote from the rise of nationalism.
Nationalism, even in its mildest version, the consciousness of
national unity, is surely rooted in a sharp sense of the differences
between one human society and another, the uniqueness of
particular traditions, languages, customs - of occupation, over a
long period, of a particular piece of soil on which intense collective
feeling is concentrated. It stresses the peculiar links of kinship that
unite the members of one national community with each other, and
it emphasises the differences between them and that which obtains
elsewhere. In its pathological forms, it proclaims the supreme value
of the nation's own culture, history, race, spirit, institutions, even
of its physical attributes, and their superiority to those of others,
usually of its neighbours. But even in its moderate forms, national­
ism springs from feeling rather than reason, from an intuitive
recognition that one belongs to a particular political or social or
cultural texture, indeed, to all three in one - to a pattern of life that
cannot be dissected into separate constituents, or looked at through
some intellectual microscope; something which can only be felt and
lived, not cont�mplated, analysed, taken to pieces, proved or

1 KGS, vol. 7, p. 87, line 19 (for 'KGS' see p. 192 above, note 2).
 KANT AS AN U N F A M I L A R S O U R C E O F N AT I O NA L I S M 233

disproved. The language used to describe it is usually romantic or,

in extreme cases, violent, irrational, aggressive; and, especially in
our own century, liable to end in cruel and destructive oppression,
and, in the end, hideous slaughter.
Immanuel Kant stands for the exact opposite: calm, rational
thought, hatred of all exclusiveness and privilege founded on mere
immemorial tradition or on obscurantist political dogmatism, or
anything that cannot be brought into the clear light of day and
examined by rational men in a rational and systematic fashion. He
defends nothing so firmly as the timeless, unchanging rights of the
individual, whoever he may be, whatever his time, whatever his
place, his society, his personal attributes, provided he is a man, the
possessor of reason, and, as such, obliged to respect reason in all
other men, as they respect it in him. Kant detested emotionalism,
disordered enthusiasm, what he called Schwarmerei; it is indeed
this kind of sentimental rhetoric, as it seemed to him, that in his
view marred the outpourings of his contemporary and fellow
Prussian Johann Gottfried Herder, the father of cultural (and
ultimately every kind of ) nationalism in Europe. Herder's constant
talk about the uniqueness of each national tradition, of the strength
that a man draws from being a member of an organic community,
from being the child and carrier of its national spirit, its national
style, Herder's hatred of cosmopolitanism, universalism, anything
which flattened out differences between one community and
another in favour of universal principles, which seemed to him
nothing but huge straitjackets - all this seemed to Kant confused,
uncritical, the substitution of emotion for reason, un-grown-up.
Kant is a man of the Enlightenment, of its universalism, its belief in
the dry light of reason and science, which transcends local and
national boundaries, something the conclusions of which any
sensible man can verify for himself, without benefit of a particular
language or soil or blood in his veins. He hated inequality, he hated
hierarchies, oligarchies, paternalism, no matter how benevolent.
Many in Germany had welcomed the French Revolution. Kant
never abandoned his faith in it, and its proclamation of the
universal rights of man and citizen, even when it degenerated into
terrorism and bloodshed, which Kant condemned, and which made
most of its original liberal-minded supporters in many lands shy
away from it in horror. His strictly political writings are celebrated
models of liberal rationalism: thus, the ground of my obeying the
law is that it orders, or should order, what any rational man, in my
234 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

situation, would command himself to do or not do; States should

devote their resources to education, culture, the moral improve­
ment of their citizens, and not to increasing their material power
and conquest; he elaborated a famous project for a league of
nations, and for perpetual peace among them.
What greater contrast can there be, it might well be asked, than
that between, on the one hand, the deep, dark, non-rational forces,
fired by fanatical religious separatism and, perhaps, by the German
sense of national humiliation in the face of the far grander, more
powerful, enlightened and magnificent French, and, on the other,
Kant's unswervingly rational universalism, with its deep suspicion
of mystical or poetical language, of metaphorical talk, of insights
and visions?
And yet, wildly paradoxical as this may seem, there is indeed a
connection between Kant's view and the rise of romantic nationai­
ism: a traceable line of influence, and, in my view, an important and
central one. The fact that Kant would have abhorred the very idea
of so disreputable a connection does not, I am afraid, make it less
real. Ideas do, at times, develop lives and powers of their own and,
like Frankenstein's monster, act in ways wholly unforeseen by
their begetters, and, it may be, directed against their will, and
sometimes turn on them to destroy them. Men, least of all thinkers,
cannot be held responsible for the unintended and improbable
consequences of their ideas, for plants that grow from seeds that
fall on propitious soil, and bloom, sometimes hideously, in a
favouring climate which the sower never knew, or could never
imagine. Many complicated, even accidental, factors conspire to
generate a single movement; even orthodox Marxism did not grow
out of Marx's doctrines alone. It would be absurd to charge Hegel,
for instance, with the sinister shapes into which some of his
notions have turned in our day. So, too, I wish to suggest, it has
been with the greatest of modern philosophers. It is the odd career
of one of Kant's noblest and most humane doctrines in the
turbulent nineteenth century, its influence on the modern world
and on our own lives - a career that would have horrified Kant
himself - that I should like to discuss.

II

As everyone k�9ws, Kant's moral philosophy (which probably

produced a deeper immediate impact than even his theory of
 23 5
KANT AS AN U N FAM I L I A R S O U R C E OF NAT I O N A L I S M

knowledge or of the nature of human experience) is founded upon

the conviction that the most important distinguishing characteristic
of human beings is their freedom to act, to choose between, at the
very least, two courses of action, two alternatives. Unless a man can
be said to be the true author of his own acts, he cannot be
described as being responsible for them, and where there is no
responsibility, there is, for Kant, no morality at all. Morality, for
him, largely consists in the recognition of rational, that is, universal
rules, binding upon every rational being, according to which men
have an obligation to perform particular acts, and an obligation to
refrain from contrary ones. But you cannot tell anyone save a free
being that he is obliged to act thus or thus: things, plants, animals
are not obliged, because they are not choosers, they are determined
to behave as they do by causal forces outside their control. The
same applies to human beings who are unable to control their
bodies or their minds: infants or idiots or men put into an
abnormal state by the influence of drugs or hypnotism or sleep, or
whatever cause prevents the agent from being able to make rational
choices. The very notion of an agent entails, for Kant, freedom of
the will to act rightly or wrongly, virtuously or viciously. And he
goes further than most defenders of free will in maintaining that it
is not only 'external' factors - physical, chemical, biological,
physiological, geographical, ecological - that can prevent or
destroy freedom, but 'internal' psychological ones, too. If a man
says that he could not act otherwise than as he did because he was
overcome by passion, because of irresistible emotional drives,
because his upbringing or his character, being what they are,
caused or determined him to act as he did, he is proclaiming
himself to be unfree: a mere 'turnspit',1 to use Kant's term, at the
mercy of causal forces, external or internal, physical or mental, a
mere object in space, or at least in time, not, in the end, different in
this respect from plants or animals, or, indeed, inanimate objects;
part of a cosmic causal mechanism in which he is at best a mere cog
or wheel. Nor would the latest scientific categories, which abolish
precisely determinable causal sequences in favour of functions of
probabilities, or statistical predictions, have made any difference to
Kant. He would have dismissed as so much irrelevance the
mountain of loose metaphysical talk which has been built on a
crude misunderstanding of the implications of indeterminism in

1 KGS, vol. 5> p. 97, line 1 5 ·

 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

physics, or quantum mechanics. Like other attempted compro­

mises with determinism, he would have called it nothing but a
'miserable subterfuge'} Unless a creature can determine itself, it is
not a moral being: whether it is causally determined, or floats
about at random, or is subject to statistical laws, it is not a moral
agent.
Kant is absolutely definite on this point. There is at least one
respect in which man is, for him, absolutely unique in the universe:
although causal laws may affect his body, they will not affect his
inner self. It is central to Kant's thought that physical laws apply
only to what he calls the world of phenomena or appearances,
which is for him the external world, the only world dealt with by
the sciences. 'If appearances were things in themselves,' he
declared, 'freedom could not be saved';2 and again, 'that my
thinking self . . . in its voluntary actions should be free and raised
above natural necessity . . . is among the foundation-stones of
morality and religion'.3 If there were no freedom, there would be
no possibility of moral law.4 Freedom is not merely the feeling of
freedom. A clock might, if it could speak, claim that it runs on its
own motive power, but this would be an illusion; it runs only
because it has been wound up. If man were so made, freedom, and
therefore morality, 'could not be saved'. But moral principles can
be known a priori; they are certain: hence determinism must be
false. Moral laws are not imposed upon us by some outside
agency - not even by God himself - they are, as Rousseau had
made clear, imposed by ourselves on ourselves, acting rationally
and freely. That is why they are principles or rules, not natural
laws: even while we submit to them, we remain free; for we need
not have submitted; and we can break them, if we choose, at the
price of acting irrationally. From this a great deal follows.
Man's unique property, what distinguishes him from every other
entity in the universe as he knows it, is his self-government, his
autonomy. Everything else is in the realm of heteronomy.
Autonomy means giving laws to oneself - freedom from being
coerced, from being determined, by something that one cannot
control. Heteronomy is the opposite: obeying laws that issue from
something outside oneself - for example, the material world, in

1 ibid., p. 96, line 1 5 .

2 Critique of Pure Reason, A536/B 564.
J ibid., A466/B494. �

' KGS, vol. 5, p. 4, line 36; p. 97, line 5·

 2 37
KANT AS AN U N FAM I LI A R S O U R C E OF N AT I O N A L I S M

which causality reigns, the realm of the natural sciences; this

includes the sphere of empirical psychology - whatever in our
psychic life is governed by natural laws. The doctrine that man is
an end in himself, and not a means to anything not himself, derives
from this view: since he is the ultimate author of the rules to which
he freely submits, to make him submit to something that does not
proceed from his own rational nature is to degrade him - to treat
him as a child, an animal or an object. To deprive a human being of
his power of choice is to do him the greatest imaginable injury.
This will be so, no matter how benevolent the intention with
which it is done. Kant's doctrine is directed against all paternalism
- in particular, against enlightened despotism, like that of his own
king, Frederick the Great of Prussia - and against the utilitarian
materialism of the leading French thinkers of the day.
In a short but remarkable essay called 'An Answer to the
Question: "What is Enlightenment?" '1 Kant declares that to be
civilised is to be grown-up, that is to say, not to be content to
abdicate one's responsibilities to others, not to permit oneself to be
treated as a child, or barter away one's freedom for the sake of
security and comfort. And elsewhere he says: 'a paternalist govern­
ment', based on the benevolence of a ruler who treats his subjects
'as dependent children . . . is the greatest conceivable despotism'
and 'destroys all freedom'.2 And again: 'The man who is depend­
ent on another is no longer a man, he has lost his standing, he is
nothing but the possession of another man.'3 This is an echo of
Rousseau, directed against the materialistic utilitarians who, like
Helvetius or Holbach, maintained that in order to secure peace,
happiness, harmony, virtue itself, it was necessary to institute a
rational, legal and educational system, armed with appropriate
rewards and punishments, which would condition men to avoid
anti-social conduct, and cause them to behave in the manner
desired by the enlightened educator or legislator - much in the way
that one breeds and tames domestic animals. Ethics is the agricul­
ture of the mind, said Holbach; Helvetius said he did not care
if men were virtuous or vicious, provided they were intelligent -
that is, knew what makes them happy and unhappy: the rulers can

1 KGS, vol. 8, pp. 3 1 -42 .

2 ibid., p . 290, line 3 5 .
3 KGS, vol. 20, p . 94, line 1.
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

create an arrangement of sticks and carrots that will generate the

desired character and behaviour.
These men wished, above all, to stamp out ignorance, prejudice,
superstition, which they thought to be the causes of cruelty, misery
and injustice. They believed in the power of discovery and
invention, in universal enlightenment. Yet even they might have
recoiled from the modern versions of the methods of re-education
they recommended: psychological techniques of conditioning
human beings, from subliminal suggestion to threats or brainwash­
ing or shock treatment. In this respect, the methods advocated by
B. F. Skinner in Beyond Freedom and Dignity are fully in the spirit
of Helvetius or La Mettrie: the purpose of them all is to produce a
peaceful, well-adjusted, contented flock of human beings.
Kant was intensely concerned about precisely dignity and
freedom. Hence his constant insistence that human personality
literally means independence of the mechanisms not only of men,
but of nature too. No act can be described in moral terms, indeed it
can scarcely be described as an act at all, unless it is freely chosen by
me. To act and not be acted for or upon; to choose and not be
chosen for; to be given the opportunity of choosing badly rather
than not choosing at all; that is, for Kant, a fundamental human
birthright. 'All other things must: man is the being that wills,' said
Friedrich Schiller,1 the poet and dramatist, who was a faithful
disciple of Kant: even God cannot take away this power from us,
without destroying us as human beings. 'Beings who have received
the gift of freedom are not content with the enjoyment of comfort
granted by others.'2 This saying is the key to Kant's entire ethical
outlook. That is why Kant, who doubtless disliked other vices too ­
cruelty or cowardice or lack of principle - nevertheless reserved his
harshest words for what we now call exploitation: the use of men as
means, not as ends in themselves; that particular form of inequality
whereby you make other men - by persuasion or coercion, or
something in between - pursue courses the goals of which you
know, but they do not. The whole terminology of exploitation,
degradation, humiliation, dehumanisation and, as against this, the
ideals of social or economic or individual emancipation of workers
or women or artists or oppressed groups or nationalities - the entire
language of liberal and socialist ideology, in the last two centuries,

1 Schillers Werke, vt�l. 2 1 (Weimar, 1963), p. 3 8, line 8.

2 loc. cit. (p. 2 3 2 above, note 1).
 2 39
KANT AS AN U N FA M I L I A R S O U R C E O F N A T I O N A L I S M

stems from this passionate plea for self-determination, insistence on

the development of moral freedom, even if it leads to suffering and
martyrdom.
With this, the entire modern attitude to nature and the natural
order was changed. The central tradition, at any rate in Western
thought, both in its classical Graeco-Roman form and in many,
though not all, of its Christian and Moslem forms, incorporates the
belief that there is a world structure in which man has a definite
place established by God or nature. It is only when, through
blindness of some kind, man does not know what this place is that
he loses his way, goes wrong, becomes vicious and causes misery to
himself and others. According to some thinkers the world is a great
natural hierarchy, a pyramid, with God at its apex, and, at
descending levels, the realms of angels and men and the higher
animals, and finally the amoeba, plants, and the lowest orders of
inanimate nature. According to others, the world is a great
organism, in which every element is a function of every other; or,
again, it is a marvellous system of mathematically expressible
harmonies, as Pythagoras and many subsequent thinkers and
mystics have supposed; or else an orchestra with a score for each
player; or after ,Qescartes and Galileo a marvellous machine, or a
factory with ca'"g:s' and wheels and pulleys. These images are found
among eighteenth-century materialists, influenced by the triumphs
of Newtonian science; and, after them, among a good many anti­
vitalist thinkers, until our own day. What is common to all these
systems is the notion that everything has its appointed place;
everything follows unbreakable laws; man is no exception.
Deluded through their own ignorance or folly, or deliberately
deceived by unscrupulous men seeking power or some other unfair
advantage, or as a result of variously changing conditions, techno­
logical or geographical, racial or climatic or institutional or what­
ever, men are caused to stray from the path of reason or nature, to
neglect the illumination that God (or nature) alone provides. The
problem, then, is to get men to understand nature, with themselves
as parts of the natural world - say, by destroying the social
conditions in which their ideas are necessarily perverted, and
substituting some other system in which they will know the truth,
and live in its light, and so be enabled to be happy and harmonious
for ever after. But if Kant is right, and the forces of nature, if we
surrender to them, reduce us to mere turnspits (as, for him, things
and animals are), then the very notion of nature is revolutionised.
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

Nature is no longer what it was for the French Enlightenment - the

beautiful model which, with the help of science, we shall under­
stand and accept, and ourselves fit into frictionlessly. For Kant,
nature is either neutral stuff that we must mould to our own
purposes as free, choosing creatures; or something more sinister
and ambivalent: a power which, even while it provokes us to
valuable emulation and progress, by setting us against one another,
also threatens our freedom, and is therefore to be kept at bay, to be
resisted, if we are to rise to our full human stature as free, self­
determined moral beings.
This is indeed a dramatic break. No doubt the roots of this view
go back to the Christian doctrine of grace as against nature; to the
Hebraic notions of life as a sacrifice, if need be, to God's
commandments, irrespective of whether it will bring us rewards -
happiness or fulfilment of our natural desires; back to Protestan­
tism with its stress on the voice within, irrespective of what the
external world is like. It may be traced to the political consequen­
ces of the Reformation in Europe, which destroyed the vision of
one great spiritual society governed by a single set of universal
principles that rule over inanimate nature, the animal kingdom and
man alike; of the union of reason and faith, of which Church and
State, Pope and Emperor, were, or should be, expressions. Socio­
logically, it is perhaps a consequence of the accumulating resent­
ment of men in German-speaking lands against, as it seemed to
them, the contemptuous domination of French culture and French
power, in every field of public endeavour - particularly after the
havoc and humiliation of the Thirty Years War. But there was one
region which even the proud French had no access to, that of the
spirit, the true inner life - the free, autonomous human spirit,
which they, the Germans, had preserved inviolate, the spirit that
seeks its own path to fulfilment, and will not sell itself for material
benefits. How have all those powers and dominions, all those
glittering prizes, been won? Were they not gained at the price of
spiritual death - enslavement to an inhuman, soulless, machine-like
political, social, cultural system, all those arrogant French officials
with whose aid the renegade Francophile King Frederick in Berlin
is trying to crush all that is spontaneous and original in Prussian
lands? This prote�t against secular progress and the victories of
science, which couLd be heard among pious Germans, especially in
economically backward East Prussia, and in Rousseau, too, after
 KANT AS AN U N FA M I L I A R S O U R C E OF NAT I O N A L I S M 241

his own fashion, in the mid-eighteenth century, this outcry against

the intellect now echoes round the world.
Kant was, of course, in no sense a romantic enthusiast who
appealed to the untramrnelled will against reason and order. Far
from it. He hated undisciplined, passionate, dishevelled attitudes of
this kind, hated them as deeply as any thinker of the Enlighten­
ment. At the centre of his entire teaching is the doctrine that men
are endowed with reason, and that this faculty enables any man, in
the moral as well as the theoretical sphere, to arrive at answers
about what is to be done, how life is to be lived - answers that are
valid for all other rational creatures in the same circumstances,
wherever and whenever and however they live. Only upon this
rock of universal reason - mutual respect for the common rational
humanity in all men - can any harmonious arrangement, peace,
democracy, justice, human rights and liberties, rest securely. Some
such assumptions are common to Locke and Rousseau, Jefferson
and Hegel, and indeed most of the champions of liberal democracy,
socialism, idealistic anarchism, communism, every form of belief in
peaceful world organisation, until our own day; at least, this is so
in theory, even if not, as we know to our terrible cost, in practice.
Nevertheless, there is another strain, too, in Kant, which comes
from his Lutheran, pietist, ami-Enlightenment upbringing: the
immense stress on independence, inner-directedness, self-determi­
nation.
Pietism, the ancestor of Methodism, arose in German lands
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a time of humilia­
tion and political impotence for the Germans in their divided land,
ruled over by over three hundred petty princes, not too many of
whom were either competent or well-intentioned. The more
sensitive among their subjects reacted to this much as the Stoics did
to the conquest of the Greek city-states by Alexander: they
retreated into their own inner life. The tyrant threatens to take
away my property I will train myself not to want property. The
-

tyrant wishes to rob me of my horne, my family, my personal

liberty - very well; I shall learn to do without them. Then what can
he do to me? I am the captain of my soul; this, my inner life, no
outside force can touch. Yet nothing else matters. By contracting
the vulnerable area, I can make myself free of nature and of man, as
early Christians did who escaped to the Theban desert or remote
monastic cells from pagan persecution or the temptations of the
world, the flesh and the devil. This is, of course, in the end, a
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

sublime form of sour grapes; what I cannot have, I pronounce to

be of no value. If I cannot have what I want, I shall want only what
I can have. Political impotence means spiritual freedom: material
defeat means moral victory. Since I cannot control the consequen­
ces of my acts, only that which I can control - my motives, my
purposes, the purity of my heart - that alone counts.
This note of austere self-insulation is very deep in Kant. In him
it takes quietist forms. But in his successors it becomes defiance,
resistance against anyone and anything that seeks to diminish or
degrade my inner kingdom, the sacred values by which I live, and
for which I am prepared to suffer and to die. This lies at the heart
of romanticism - the worship of the heroic martyr, the lonely
thinker or artist in a vulgar and philistine world, dominated by
values that are alien to him, alien because they are not born of the
inner spirit, but forced upon him by brute force or the commercial
market-place. Above all, one must remain true to one's inner
vision, one must never sell out, never compromise for the sake of
success or power or peace or even survival. This is indeed a
transformation of values. The traditional heroes of mankind had
once been those who were successful, those who knew the correct
answers, whether in theory or practice - sages, men who had
discovered the objective truth about what there is in the universe,
or about what one should do, about what is real, good, worth
making or admiring - priests and prophets, philosophers and
scientists, depending on one's view of how and where the truth is
to be found. Or, alternatively, they were men of action - founders
and preservers of States or Churches, conquerors, lawgivers,
leaders, doers and makers who dominate their fellow men, shape
their lives. In the place of these, the new hero was the man who
was ready to lay down his life for his convictions, for the inner
light, ready to be defeated rather than give in, who would not
calculate the odds against him, the exemplar of heroic - if need be,
tragic - integrity.
It takes but two steps to reach the romantic position from Kant's
impeccably enlightened rationalism. The first is to hold that, when
I act and live in the light of certain values, this is not because they
are made or discovered by the reason that is present in all fully
developed men, and therefore guaranteed by it, and universally
valid for all rational creatures. No: I do indeed live by such values,
not because they ' are universal, but because they are my own,
express my partic�lar inner nature, the particular vision of the
 243
KANT AS AN U N FAM I L IA R S O U R C E O F N ATI O N A L I S M

universe that belongs to me; to deny them in the name of

something else would be to falsify all I see and feel and know. In
short, there is now some sense in which I can be said to create my
own values. I do not find them as objective constituents of the
universe which I must obey: I choose them freely myself, they are
my values because I am 'I', and have, when I am at my best, freely
chosen them.
This is, in effect, despite all his talk of universality and reason,
what Kant's unfaithful disciple Fichte, the true father of romanti­
cism, came near to saying. 'I do not', he declared, 'accept anything
because I must, I believe it because I will.'1 Or again, 'I am not
hungry because food is placed before me; it is food because I am
hungry for it.'2 In other words, it is my hunger that makes
something a good for me - if I were not hungry it would not have
this attribute. Kant was certainly horrified by this direction of
Fichte's thought (Fichte's first book, ironically enough, was at
first attributed to Kant). But one can see how, out of Kant's
enormous stress on the value of autonomy, of determining my
own moral conduct, some such existentialist position could begin
to develop.
The second, and even more fatal, step is the new conception of
the chooser - of the choosing self. For Kant it is still the individual,
even though he attributes to the moral will a transcendent status
outside space and time - outside the lower realm of blind, causal
necessity. For Fichte this self becomes a timeless, transcendent
activity that is often identified with a world spirit, an absolute,
divine principle, at once transcendent and creative. But there is also
another development of the notion of the self in the pages of
Fichte, which becomes more prominent after the invasion of
German lands, first by French Revolutionary armies, then by
Napoleon, during the passionate revulsion and patriotic resistance
which this provoked in many lands in Europe east of the Rhine.
Herder had maintained that a man is shaped by the river of
tradition, custom, language, common feeling, into which he is
born; he is as he is in virtue of the impalpable relationships with
others, of his social milieu, which is itself the product of the
endless, dynamic interplay of historical forces. It is this constant
interaction that makes each age, each society, each tradition, each

1 SW ii 256 (for 'SW' see p. r 8o above, note r ).

2 sw ii 264.
244 T H E S E N S E OF REALITY

culture unique in character, different in unmistakable but unana­

lysable ways from other, equally organic, social, linguistic, cultural,
spiritual wholes. It was not long before Fichte, writing in the early
years of the nineteenth century, declared that the true self is not the
individual at all: it is the group, the nation. Soon he began to
identify it with the political State. The individual is but an element
in the State, and, if he cuts himself off from it, is a limb without a
body, a meaningless fragment that derives its significance only
from its association with - the place that it occupies in - the
system, the organism, the whole. This is the secular version of the­
old Hebraic-Christian House of Israel, the mystical community of
the faithful who are parts one of another. Some tended to identify
it with a culture, some with a Church, some with a race or nation
or class. It is this collective self that generates the form of life lived
by individuals, and gives meaning and purpose to all its members;
it creates their values and the institutions in which these values are
embodied, and is thus the eternal, infinite spirit incarnate, an
authority from which there can be no appeal. Fichte, Gorres,
Muller, Arndt are the fathers of German and, in due course,
European political nationalism. Peoples (and social classes) which
had been victims of oppression or aggression or humiliation lashed
back like a bent twig at their oppressors - the simile is, I believe,
Schiller's - and developed a defiant pride and a violent self­
consciousness which ultimately turned into burning nationalism
and chauvinism.

III

Of course Kant would have repudiated this misbegotten by-prod­

uct of his deeply rational and cosmopolitan philosophy; but the
seeds of it are there, not, indeed, in his political writings, but in his
more significant ethical works. For it was his ethical views, with
their uncompromising moral imperatives, that made the deepest
impact on human thought. In the first place idolisation of nation or
State derives, however illegitimately, from his doctrine of the
autonomous will, his repudiation of the objective hierarchy of
interrelated values, independent of human consciousness, which
had hitherto dominated Western thought in many guises - in the
Platonic vision of eternal real Forms, outside the world of change
and decay; in that- of Natural Law, which, after Aristotle and the
Stoics, entered the Christian, and especially Thomist, conception of
 24 5
KANT AS AN U N F A M I L I A R S O U R C E OF N A T I O N A L I S M

God and nature, and man's relation to both; in the metaphysical

conception of nature as a rational structure; in the objective
naturalism of Locke and the Utilitarians and their successors in
liberal and socialist movements. But, in the second place, there was
in Kant's thought something deeper still, of which this doctrine of
the will is, in some sense, an expression.
It was Kant more than Hume, who is usually charged with it,
who cut off the world of nature from the world of goals, principles,
values. So long as values were objective entities embedded in the
nature of reality, the reasons for doing one thing rather than
another - say, for obeying authority, or for fighting wars, or for
sacrificing oneself or other men - were sought in the very nature of
things, the objective rerum natura, the single, coherent structure,
independent of men's wills or thoughts, all the elements of which
could be explained in terms of their relations to the whole. But if
truly moral conduct consists in aiming at certain specific goals for
their own sakes, no matter what the consequences, no matter what
may be the nature of the world - of the facts, events, things which
philosophers or scientists seek to describe and explain - then the
idea is born, or at least gains force (for it derives from Hebraic­
Protestant sources), that life is, or should be, a reaching after, and,
if need be, a sacrifice to, an end or ends that can be described as
ultimate; ends that justify both themselves and everything else,
ends on their own that need no explanation or justification in terms
of any all-embracing system wider than themselves.
In Kant this is, of course, vastly modified by his constant
insistence that categorical moral imperatives of this kind must be
rational in character - universal maxims binding on all rational
beings in a given situation. But the impact made on the European
consciousness, perhaps through the ideas of Fichte and the roman­
tics, was that not of the rational aspect of this doctrine (which was
not new, familiar as it was in the teachings of both the Roman
Catholic Church and the Enlightenment) but of the stern and
vehement tone of the literally inexorable, absolute commandments
- a voice that a man hears within him, for if he does not, then he is
outside morality, blind and deaf to what matters most. It needed
only the transformation of the notion of Kant's rational self into
something wider and more impersonal, and the identification of
this greater entity with an end in itself, the ultimate authority for
all thought and action, to create a more terrifying form of
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

Hobbes's 'mortal God'; a new absolutism. Hence the worship

offered in the nineteenth century by conservative thinkers to
Burke's more empirically conceived, more flexible, politically
accommodating vision (albeit the source of traditional authority) ­
the great society of the living, the dead and those yet unborn.
Hence the deification of the stream of history in which I am but a
drop and outside which I have no significance; or of Herder's
historical spirit of my people, my Volk, of which I and my life are
but passing expressions - in short, the expansion of the notion of
the self into some quasi-metaphysical super-personality that
engages all my loyalty, all my desire to merge my individual self in
a great collective whole, to which I yearn to sacrifice myself and
others, since it will, I feel, lift me to a height that my confined
empirical self could never have risen to.
Once this morality of ultimate goals that I seek to fulfil simply
because they are what they are, and not because of any relation
they may have to some all-embracing system that includes and
explains reality as a whole - once this replaces the older religious or
scientific outlook, the path is open to a variety of such absolutist
faiths. Some preached an absolute personal morality of duty, total
repression of emotion in submission to the moral law. Others were
prepared to sacrifice everything to aesthetic goals - the creation of
works of art - art for its own sake, free of compromise with
personal or social considerations, still less with moral obligations;
and applied, with disastrous consequences, aesthetic models to
social and political life. Yet others believed in the discovery and
propagation of truth, truth for its own sake, no matter how socially
disruptive or painful to individuals it might prove to be, scientific
or social or moral truth with its tearing down of the masks of
convention, its destruction of the myths by which societies
sometimes live.
In the realm of politics, this took the form of the glorification of
the true subject of social growth, whichever it was conceived as
being - of the State, or the community, or the Church, or the
culture, or the social class - but most of all of the nation, conceived
as the true source and perfect realisation of social life. In the case of
the relatively independent, socially developed, culturally progres­
sive societies, this sense of the nation as a central source of moral

1 Leviathan, chapter 1 7: p. 1 20 in Richard Tuck's edition (Cambridge, New

York etc., 199 1 )

.
 2 47
KANT AS AN U N FA M I LI A R S O U RC E O F NAT I O N A L I S M

authority took a relatively mild form - for example, in England or

Holland or Scandinavia and their cultural and political dependen­
cies overseas. In lands where, as a result of economic backwardness
or foreign domination, the upheavals at the turn of the eighteenth
century released an immense current of cooped-up, indignant
ambition and energy seeking to express themselves, to 'be and do
something' (in Fichte's phrase),1 to win a place in the sun, this
took more fanatical and violent forms. Nationalism is, it seems to
me, the sense - the consciousness - of nationhood in a pathological
state of inflammation: the result of wounds inflicted by someone or
something on the natural feelings of a society, or of artificial
barriers to its normal development. This leads to the transforma­
tion of the notion of the individual's moral autonomy into the
notion of the moral autonomy of the nation, of the individual will
into the national will to which individuals must submit, with which
they must identify themselves, of which they must be the active,
unquestioning, enthusiastic agents. The doctrine of the free self
with which Kant attempted to overcome what seemed to him the
danger to moral freedom from acceptance of a mechanical, imper­
sonal, determined universe, in which choice was illusory, became
magnified, and indeed perverted, into the doctrine of quasi-person­
alised history as the carrier of the collective will, the will to growth,
to power, to splendour, a vision half biological, half aesthetic, at the
centre of which is the notion of the interest and the purpose of the
nation or the nation State as a kind of creative, self-developing
work of art. This is a simile which even the rationalistic Hegel uses:
he sees the nation State as the creative force of the spirit - the world
Geist - which cannot and must not be restrained in its victorious
march by any limits or barriers. For everything is subordinate to
the central creative principle, that is to say, to it, to itself.
I do not, of course, mean that it was simply ideas and theories
which led to all this: ideas are not born of ideas only; there is no
parthenogenesis in the history of thought. The Industrial Revolu­
tion and the French Revolution, and the disruption of European
unity by the Reformation, and the backlash of Germany against
France after the humiliations of the late sixteenth and the seven­
teenth century - all these were dominant factors in what occurred.
But neither must the role of ideas be underemphasised. In the vast
awakening of national consciousness among crushed minorities, in

1 SW vi 3 8 3 .
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

oppressed or backward classes and nations in their revolts against

unjust rule, or humiliation, especially by foreign masters, in the
revolts which took place in Latin America and Italy in the
nineteenth century and in Africa and Asia in the twentieth, these
powerful ideas - the autonomy of the will of a nation or a society,
ends in themselves in their socialised forms (ideas that Kant
launched originally only upon the quiet-seeming waters of ethical
theory) - blended with the explosive doctrines of Herder and
Rousseau, and formed a critical mass, which, in due course, led to
terrible explosions. Yet nothing, I must repeat, could have been
further from the thought of that peace-loving internationalist, that
rational and enlightened thinker, with his profound concern for
individual rights and freedom.
Still more remote from anything he contemplated are the
pathological developments of nationalism in our own times - of
that movement (the most powerful, by far, of our century - more
so than ever today) the frightening influence of which no one in
the nineteenth century, however percipient, had predicted. No one,
as far as I know, had ever prophesied the rise of modern national
narcissism: the self-adoration of peoples, of their conviction of
their own immeasurable superiority to others and consequent right
to domination over them. To see this, you have only to compare
the concept of national liberty as preached, say, by democrats like
Mazzini or Michelet with the notion of it as consisting in the
ruthless elimination of all possible obstacles to it from within or
without, that is, the idea of a holy war against all rivals for
power - internal classes or associations, and external forces, namely
other nations. The same is even more true of the terrifying brothers
of nationalism - racism and religious fanaticism. It is a far cry even
from Fichte's fervid Addresses to the German Nation to these
ferocious movements - the most frightening and barbarous phe­
nomena of our own time. Thus do ideas turn into their opposites:
the language of peace into a weapon of war, appeals to reason into
the worship of the limitless material power that is sometimes
supposed to embody it, sometimes to deny and fight against its
claims.
 RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND THE
CONSCIOUSNESS OF NATIONALITY

I AM shamefully ignorant of Indian civilisation, even of what is

most valuable and most important in it, and for this I hope that I
shall be forgiven. I can plead in extenuation only that where one
culture is geographically remote from another, and has been
historically insulated from it, bridges are genuinely difficult to
build and to cross; and what is deepest in a culture, the most direct
and authentic voice in which it speaks to itself and to others, its art,
is difficult to transpose into an alien medium. All those who have,
like me, been educated in England, know that this is the case even
with the classical literatures of Greece and Rome. They lie at the
root of Western civilisation. They have been transmitted uninter­
ruptedly from generation to generation since their very beginnings.
Yet English translations of Homer or Aeschylus or Virgil, no
matter how felicitous, do not begin to convey the genius of the
original. I should like to go further. I should like to assert, perhaps
a little too rashly, that no man has ever truly experienced the
presence of genius in a translation of a piece of lyrical poetry.
Descriptive prose which conveys states of mind or spirit, or ideas,
or situations which are part of the common stock of human
experience - these of course can, to a high degree, be conveyed
even in translation. Men do not have to read Russian to recognise
the genius of Tolstoy, or Hebrew and Greek to be deeply affected
by the Bible. This is to some extent true of dramatic literature, as
well as epics and ballads - of story-tellers whose prose or poetry
draws upon universal human knowledge of character and action.
No one can doubt that the influence of Shakespeare in translation
upon Frenchmen, Germans, Russians has been enormous. Moliere,
Schiller, Ibsen, poets as they were, can be carried over on to an
alien canvas. But even there, where the poetry is in the words more
deeply than in the images or the action - in Racine, Corneille and, I
suspect, Calderon, as well as in the modern masters of poetic
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

drama, Yeats, Hofmannsthal, Eliot, Lorca, Claude! - translations

do not convey enough. We admire the renderings if we know the
original, and think how remarkable the skill, the ingenuity, the
sensibility of the translator; but I suspect that few can be truly
moved by a translation unless it is itself an independent poetical
creation. But then the power of the transformed work comes, as a
rule, at least as much from the imagination and the genius of the
translator, and this is another matter. Such transubstantiations are
commendable, sometimes magnificent, but they are new creations,
not bridges, not that self-effacing medium of a totally faithful
rendering whereby a truly dedicated translator acts and lives - as an
actor does - in the character and the life of the original. This is
above all the case with pure, lyrical, deeply personal poetry.
Translation, in the sense in which it is applicable to prose or verse
which tells a story, here seems to me almost unattainable. The
poetry is in the words, and the words belong to one particular
language, spring from and convey one unique style of life and
feeling, and speak directly only to those who are capable of
thinking and feeling in that tongue, whether it is their native
tongue or not: 'poetry is what is lost in translation' - these words,
attributed to the American poet Robert Frost, 1 seem to me a
precise statement of the truth.
These reflections were intended in the first place as a plea in
extenuation of my own shortcomings in knowing too little of
Indian literature, which, even in its prose and its epics and
philosophical classics, always seems, through the dark glass of the
translator, poetical, and indeed lyrical, in character; but they bring
me also to the heart of the topic which I should like to discuss,
namely Tagore, Tagore and the consciousness of nationality. For
although there are many elements, and factors, and signs, and
criteria of nationhood, yet one of the most powerful, perhaps the
most powerful, of all of these is surely language. It may be
counteracted by combinations of other factors, historical, social
and geographical, but it is very strong. The more developed,
mature and self-conscious a man becomes, the more he thinks and
even feels in words, the less in sensuous images. The late Lord
Keynes, the eminent economist, was once asked whether he
thought in words or images: 'I think in thoughts,' he said. This was

1 In Louis Unterm�yer, Robert Frost: A Backward Look (Washington, 1 964),

P· I S.
 RAB I N D RANATH TAG O RE A N D NAT I O N AL I TY 25 I

a characteristically amusing reply, but it was not true, and not

meant to be taken seriously, perhaps; indeed it was meaningless.
We think in words or in images; we are told that children, primitive
peoples, artists, and perhaps women too, think in images more than
words. But once we begin to communicate coherently, conven­
tional symbols dominate our lives: and these are mostly words.
Tagore, who was a great master of words, seems to me to have
spoken about language, and its connection with social and political
life, with acute insight, and what he said has great interest for us
today.
I do not wish to praise or attack nationalism. Nationalism is
responsible for magnificent achievements and appalling crimes; it is
certainly not the only destructive factor abroad today - ideology,
religious or political, and the pursuit of power by individuals and
interests that are not national, have been, and are still, just as
revolutionary, brutal and violent. Nevertheless nationalism seems
to me to be the strongest force in the world today. In Europe,
where it first grew to overwhelming strength - one of the many
forces released by the great French Revolution - it started in
alliance with other forces: democracy, liberalism, socialism. But
wherever they fell out among themselves, nationalism invariably
won, and enslaved its rivals, and reduced them to relative impo­
tence. German romanticism, French socialism, English liberalism,
European democracy were compromised and distorted by it. They
proved powerless against the torrent of nationalist pride and greed
which culminated in the conflict of 1 9 1 4 . Those who discounted its
strength, whether Norman Angell or Lenin, or the ideologists of
dynastic empires or of world capitalist combines, and especially
those who thought that they could harness it to their own
purposes, failed to predict events, and their adherents were pun­
ished accordingly. Communism, for instance, certainly became a
great force, but except in alliance with national sentiment it cannot
advance. This seems to me the case in China; in the parts of Asia
once governed by France or Holland; in Africa, in Cuba. When
Marxism comes into conflict with national sentiment - we can all
think of examples in recent history - it suffers as an outlook and a
movement, whatever the alliance with nationalism may add to its
material power and success.
One may wish to condemn nationalism outright as an irrational
and enslaving force, as, for example, both Marxists and Catholics,
enlightened internationalists and guilt-stricken ex-imperialists, and
252 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

naturally enough its many victims, of all classes and races and
religions, have condemned it. But it seems to me even more
important to understand its roots. Nationalism springs, as often as
not, from a wounded or outraged sense of human dignity, the
desire for recognition. This desire is surely one of the greatest
forces that move human history. It may take hideous forms, but is
not in itself either unnatural or repulsive as a feeling.
It seems to me that the craving for recognition has grown to be
more powerful than any other force abroad today. This protean
entity takes many overlapping and interacting forms: individual
and collective, moral, social and political. Nevertheless, it preserves
its identity in all its incarnations. Small States demand to be
recognised as sovereign entities with their own past and present
and future, and struggle for equality with the great States, and
claim the right to survive, grow, be free, be allowed to say their
word. The poor wish to be recognised as full human beings - as
equals - by the rich, Jews by Christians, the dark-skinned by the
fair, women by men, the weak by the strong. Within modern
centralised States minorities work and fight for power and status:
this is felt acutely, perhaps most acutely, in affluent societies. There
class-consciousness is one of the most influential forms into which
the demand for recognition pours itself. In my own country, for
example, it is perhaps the deepest root of our social discontents.
The quiet economic revolution that has occurred, both in Britain
and in many parts of Europe, has cured many economic ills, raised
the standard of living, increased the opportunities for economic
advancement and political power over an area and to a height not
known before. In the less unjust orders of our time it is no longer
economic insecurity or political impotence that oppresses the
imaginations of many young people in the West today, but a sense
of the ambivalence of their social status - doubts about where they
belong, and where they wish or deserve to belong. In short, they
suffer from a sense of insufficient recognition.
Such people may be prosperous, take an interest in their work,
realise that the Welfare State protects their basic interests, yet they
do not feel recognised. Recognised by whom? By the 'top people',
by the ruling class. In a society governed by an oligarchy - say by a
hereditary aristocracy (there are scarcely any such in Europe
now) - this can �ake the form of a straight political struggle for
power by one social class against another. In England, and in many
other Western countries, the situation is a good deal more complex:
 RAB I N D RANATH TAG O RE AND NATI O N ALITY 253
there the unrecognised or under-recognised are conscious of the
existence of a group of persons in their society who, without
necessarily being in political control, nevertheless set the tone:
socially or culturally or intellectually. These persons may belong to
conflicting political parties; what they have in common is the self­
confidence born of an assured position as arbiters of the general
way in which life should be lived, of the way in which one should
think, write, speak, look, educate, engage in argument, treat other
human beings, and, in general, conduct public and private life.
Even when they rebel against some given political or social
institution or orthodoxy, they do so in the right tone of voice, they
speak by right and not on sufferance, as members of a natural elite.
No doubt those who stand outside it tend to exaggerate the power
or the close-knit texture of the elite; yet, in unequal societies, men
commonly know who stands in the way of their advancement. The
elite exists. In England it is still to some degree hereditary and tied
to the public schools, to the old universities, to the humanities, and
it possesses a sense of solidarity which those who wish to be
accepted by it envy and admire. They may, as is usual in such cases,
affect to despise it, and describe it as useless, decadent, reactionary,
a doomed class, condemned to disappearance before the forces of
history, but at the same time they envy it and seek its approval
even while they feel the very notion of status to be an unworthy
category by which to classify human beings, and feel angry with
their own inescapable, and resentful, consciousness of their own
social positions.
The excluded are not necessarily poor or politically powerless.
C. P. Snow's concept of 'two cultures' seems to me fallacious; but
what lends it plausibility is the fact that a good many natural
scientists in Anglo-Saxon countries feel kept out of a world which
they imagine to be living more enviable lives than their own. Even
though it is recognised and asserted at all levels that it is they, the
scientists, who are objectively more important, influential, original,
far more crucial to the future of their societies than the humanist
elite and the bureaucrats brought up in it, this gives them little
comfort; for they know who truly dominates the scene. This
paradoxical situation seems to occur whenever one process that
vitally affects the development of a society falls out of step with
some other equally central process or cluster of processes. Injus­
tice, oppression, misery do not seem, at any rate in recent history,
to be sufficient to create conditions for revolt or drastic change.
254 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

Men will suffer for centuries in societies whose structure is made

stable by the accumulation and retention of all necessary power in
the hands of some one class. Ferment begins only when this order
breaks down for some reason (the Marxist hypothesis of the
influence of technological invention is illuminating) and a 'contra­
diction' arises, that is, the development of one factor - say the
possession of political authority or control by a ruling group - is
no longer united to some other equally needed attribute, say
economic position or capacity for administration. Then the equili­
brium of the system is disturbed, and conflicts are set up, with
corresponding opportunities to alter the distribution of power for
those who seek to upset the status quo.
In our world the crisis is caused by the fact that individual talent
and success, economic power and ability, and sometimes even
political influence, have fallen too far out of step with the all­
important factor of the craving for social status. Lack of adequate
status, humiliation of the parents, and the sense of injury and
indignation of the children drives men to social and political
extremism. It may take social or aesthetic, not political, forms: it
was the main force behind such phenomena as 'angry young men',
'beatniks', the addicts of 'hip' in America, and, to a perceptible
degree, what Anthony Crosland called the Aldermaston Move­
ment in England, which, inspired as it clearly was by sincere
political and social idealism, was also driven by a class discontent
and acute status-consciousness on the part of its members.
This is not a novel phenomenon in the Western world. It is by
now a truism that among the causes of the French Revolution is the
wide disproportion between the economic power of the French
middle class in the eighteenth century and its lack of social and
political recognition. The revolutionaries of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries were, as often as not, sons of capable and self­
made men, who had been socially excluded or rejected, or found
themselves in an embarrassing or false position in the social
hierarchy of their time. This was conspicuously true of Russia too.
Among the sources of strength of the Russian revolutionary
movement was the combination of moral and political indignation,
directed against a corrupt and oppressive regime, with a quest for
status by men whqse resources and education entitled them to play
a part that they �ere rigidly denied by the State. The great
entrepreneurs of the rapidly growing trade and industry of the
 RA B I N D RANAT H TAG O RE AND N ATI O N A L I TY 25 5

Russian Empire - men of exceptional ability, imagination, ambi­

tion - could grow rich and economically powerful, but were, by
and large, kept out of positions of honour and responsibility by the
Court and the still aristocratically based regime. Pride and moral
sentiment can, and do, outweigh material self-interest: the sons,
brought up on liberal sentiments imported from the West, tended
to sympathise with, and often threw themselves with passion into,
the revolutionary movement, which was openly directed against,
not merely the political, but also the economic order for which
their capitalist fathers had fought so successfully. This happened in
Central Europe and in the Balkans - young men with sufficient
resources to obtain a far better education, especially abroad, than
the majority of their countrymen were turned by the humiliating
inferiority of the families' social status towards extreme opinions
and courses. I suspect this must have happened too to the sons of
the rich bourgeoisie kept down by the Pashas of Turkey and Egypt
and Syria and Iraq.
This dissatisfaction is, as a rule, directed against an identifiable
elite, pillars of the establishment - the Pashas, as it were - or it may
break out against the very dissentients themselves, the Franklin
Roosevelts, the Stafford Crippses, the Bertrand Russells and many
a revolutionary Girondin or radical of aristocratic origin in France
or Russia or America, men who, no matter how radical their views,
are felt to belong to the ruling class, and possess its confidence, its
manners and its tastes.
But the roots of discontent lie deeper, in loneliness, in a sense of
isolation, in the destruction of that solidarity which only homoge­
neous close-knit societies give to their members. Ruskin and
Morris, and before them Fourier and Marx and Proudhon, have
long ago taught us to see that an increasing degree of industrialisa­
tion and mechanisation leads to the disintegration of society, to
degradation of the deepest human values - affection, loyalty,
fraternity, a sense of common purpose - all in the name of
progress, identified with order, efficiency, discipline, production.
We are all too familiar with the results: the steady dehumanisation
of men and their conversion into proletariats - masses - 'human
material', machine- and cannon-fodder. This, in time, breeds its
own antidotes: the awakening in the most self-conscious and most
sensitive among the victims, or even among the accomplices of this
process, if they have any strength of will, of revolutionary
indignation, fed by an immense desire to restore what they
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

visualise as the broken social unity and harmony and equality

(whether it ever existed or not); and, at the same time, of the kind
of uncalculating love and respect between men on which all true
human relationships rest.
This demand to be treated as human and as equal is at the base of
both the social and the national revolutions of our time: it
represents the modern form of the cry for recognition - violent,
dangerous, but valuable and just. Recognition is demanded by
individuals, by groups, by classes, by nations, by States, by vast
conglomerations of mankind united by a common feeling of
grievance against those who {they rightly or wrongly suppose)
have wounded or humiliated them, have denied them the minimum
demanded by human dignity, have caused, or tried to cause, them
to fall in their own estimation in a manner that they cannot
tolerate. The nationalism of the last two hundred years is shot
through with this feeling. Nationalism is the direct product of
wounds inflicted on a sense of common nationhood, or common
race or culture. Most commonly it takes one of two equally
aggressive forms. The first of these is awareness of shortcomings, a
conviction of backwardness or inadequacy, and an anxiety to learn
from the superior culture or nation, so as to emulate it and reach
equality, to obtain recognition by peaceful means, or to extort it by
violent ones. This is the ambition of new men and new States, to
catch up with, and overtake, to acquire whatever the modern age
requires - industrial might, political unification, technological and
cultural knowledge - until 'they' can no longer afford to look
down their long noses at 'us'.
Alternatively, it sometimes takes the form of resentful isolation­
ism - a desire to leave the unequal contest, and concentrate on
one's own virtues, which one discovers to be vastly superior to the
vaunted qualities of the admired or fashionable rival. This is a
natural form for wounded pride to take, whether in the case of
individuals or nations. The rationalisation of this feeling is pain­
fully familiar. Our own past, our own heritage contain far finer and
richer things than the gimcrack goods of the foreigner - to run
after the foreigner is in any case undignified, and treason to our
own past; we can recover our spiritual and material health only by
returning to the ancient springs which once upon a time, perhaps
in some dim, scilrcely discernible past, had made us powerful,
admired and envi�d.
Students of the history of Russia are acquainted with the
 RA B I N D RAN ATH TA G O RE A N D N AT I O NALITY 257

celebrated debate between Westerners and Slavophils in that

country in the nineteenth century, a paradigm case. The former
pleaded for science, secularism, the march of reason, enlighten­
ment, freedom, all the fruits of civilisation, of which the richest
flowering was to be found in the West. The latter denounced the
West for its chilly inhumanity, its dry, narrow, legalistic, calculat­
ing philistinism, its oscillation between blind (Catholic) authori­
tarianism and individualistic (Protestant) atomisation, the 'jungle'
of capitalist competition, its social injustice, and, above all, the lack
of love in the relations of human beings amongst themselves; they
called for a return to the 'organic', 'integral' society of the
uncontaminated Russian past, when there was no bureaucracy, no
deep gulf between the classes created by Peter the Great's break
with tradition; they invoked the deep sense of fraternity that had
once united the Slav tribes, when men were parts of one another,
and did not clamour for rights - for a right is nothing but a frontier
and a wall between human beings, something that excludes and
extrudes, something that men bound by natural human feeling, like
the members of a family, do not need in order to live together in
peace and dignity and pursuit of the common good. The obvious
point I wish to stress is that the Westerners and the Slavophils
represented two sides of the same coin - the demand for recogni­
tion. Nor did this die in I 9 I 7.
The same pattern of thought and feeling runs through the
German romantics - the writers and thinkers who bound their
spell on their fellow citizens and created the idea of the nation as a
great collective entity that expresses the Volksseele. They substi­
tuted intuitive, 'synthetic' insight and poetical sensibility for
scientific analysis, calculation, 'Cartesian' rationalism and individu­
alism, for the 'arithmetical democracy', the dead mechanical life of
the decaying West - that is, the French, by whom they had been
crushed and decimated in the seventeenth century, and humiliated
culturally in the eighteenth. Even in independent, proud and
prosperous England this mood grows powerful and articulate in
the idealisation of tradition and disparagement of rationalism by
Burke and Coleridge, or the neo-medievalism of those who wished
to return to pre-industrial Merrie England and to the old religion,
or to renew it in the shape of a Tory democracy, or a Christian
socialism which would restore the broken unity of social and
spiritual life. It is to be found almost everywhere in Europe. This is
still a form of the quest for recognition - of what we truly are and
 T H E SENSE O F REALITY

can be, of our mission and value in history - recognition if not by

other nations then at any rate by our own kith and kin. There is
always something of a sour-grapes attitude about such attempts to
withdraw into oneself for inner strength: if 'they' will not recog­
nise 'us', 'we' do not need 'them'; more than that, we despise them,
we think they are doomed, they are the 'rotting \Vest'; indeed, the
very things they think vices in us, our primitiveness, our childish­
ness, our lack of the virrues that they prize - sophistication, or
political sense, or a modern outlook - are not deficiencies at all, but
spiritual and moral virtues which they are too blind even to
conceive.
Something like this seems to me to lie at the back of the resentful
attitude of those new nations which have exchanged the yoke of
foreign rule for the despotism of an individual or a class or group
in their own society, and admire the triumphant display of naked
power, at its most arbitrary and oppressive, even where social and
economic needs do not call for authoritarian control. Liberals
rightly deplore and denounce such developments. Yet it is neces­
sary to try to understand them. To understand is not necessarily to
forgive: but neither may one point a finger of scorn before one has
understood the fact that citizens of ex-colonial territories may
prefer harsh treatment by their own kinsmen to even the most
enlightened rule by outsiders. This is not a strange or a disreputa­
ble feeling. The consciousness that although all oppression is
hateful, yet to be ordered about by a man of my own community
or nation, or class or culture or religion, humiliates me less than if
it is done by strangers, no matter how considerate and disinter­
ested, no matter how far removed from all bullying or exploitation
or patronage - that sentiment is surely intelligible enough.
Yet the desire for self-government, for recognition, for social
and moral equality, is often not capable of being satisfied by the
attaining of political independence. For it may happen that the
foreign culture has made a deep impress upon my own, and even
when, in some respects, it has made inroads upon it, distorted it,
and partially enslaved my own civilisation, yet once I have tasted it,
I cannot expel it from my system without great damage, cannot
reject or blind myself to what is true or good or delightful or noble
merely because it comes from the wrong quarter. Once I have
glimpsed such things I cannot forget them; and if, out of pride or
desire for indepe�dence, I try to purge all memory of them from
my system, this c;n be done only at a high and damaging cost to
 RA B I N D RANATH T A G O R E AND NATI O NA L ITY 2 59
myself, by a great self-narrowing, by forcing obsolete armour upon
my limbs, a deliberate reimposition of provincial standards, with
the certain dangers of intolerance, stunting of growth, aggressive
xenophobia, deliberate suppression of what only yesterday I knew
to be the truth - charges justly urged against chauvinism and
isolationism. That is a problem for all new establishments seeking
to set up in freedom from their old masters, yet not to forget
altogether those lessons which the masters taught them. The
masters, as Karl Marx correctly maintained in the case of England
and India, may not have had altruistic motives: they may have
taught not in the interests of the pupil but in their own; but
nevertheless, if Marx is right, they did drive their Indian subjects, it
may be at times with brutality, through the unavoidable stages of
material and intellectual development, in far less time and with far
greater effect than these populations could have achieved for
themselves.
I have wandered far afield from Tagore, with whom I started;
and I should like to return to him, for these reflections, such as
they are, come from reading essays and addresses by him. I know
far too little about the history of Anglo-Indian relations; what I say
may therefore be false or irrelevant or foolish. But it seemed to me
as I read Tagore, particularly about the tasks of education and
unification in India, that the problems that faced him were not, as I
say, altogether unlike those that troubled critics and reformers in
nineteenth-century Russia and Germany, and in other countries
too - the United States in the twentieth century, and, I feel sure,
Latin America as well. For all these were cultures that, as a result of
long years of foreign domination, found themselves (whatever their
stage of development) in an ambivalent position. For, on the one
hand, foreign models expose a society to the danger of breeding
apes and parrots, and killing native gifts, or at any rate distorting
their proper path of development in the service of alien gods. On
the other hand, the poison, if it is a poison, will have sunk too
deep. The Germans could not be expected to forget the Greek and
Latin classics, Roman law, the writers of the French grand siecle,
which were the very foundation of their education. The Russian
experience is even more instructive. Peter the Great inflicted on his
people a deep traumatic shock. He knocked down walls, blew open
doors and windows, founded the beginnings of an educated class, a
class that from its very birth, because of its un-Russian habits and
outlook, its use of a foreign language - French - was divided from
z6o T H E S E N S E OF REALITY

the main body of the people, which continued to live in medieval

poverty, ignorance, simplicity, and looked on the educated as semi­
aliens.
The wound went very deep: the problem of how it was to be
healed preoccupied every public-spirited, educated man in Russia
for two centuries. The clearer-sighted among them realised that the
effects of cultural invasion by the French or the Germans could not
be solved by ignoring it, or by expelling the invaders - setting the
clock back - for Russia lived in the world, and to barricade all
entrances and exits, to build a Chinese wall, would not long keep
out political and economic forces pressing in upon it from outside,
and responding to similar forces inevitably stirring within it. Some
bold reactionaries preached precisely this: if you stop secular
education, arrest so-called progress, and freeze Russia as it now is,
the fatal Western bacilli may perish, or at least work more slowly.
But this method, the attitude of the Stoic sage - every crack
stopped up against the external world - has never yet succeeded.
Nor is an ancient culture sufficient to keep a modern people going.
The new must be grafted on the old; that is the only alternative to
petrifaction, or the miserable aping of some ill-understood foreign
original. A nation cannot be treated as an exotic plant for long if it
is to grow: it can grow only in the open air, in the public world
that is common to all; one cannot be forced to feed exclusively on
what is gone and dead, in a carefully preserved artificial light, and
achieve anything but a stunted growth.
A not dissimilar problem seems to me, from what I have read
in Tagore, to have faced India towards the end of the last century;
and he never showed his wisdom more clearly than in choosing the
difficult middle path, drifting neither to the Scylla of radical
modernism, nor to the Charybdis of proud and gloomy tradition­
alism. (I know that some have thought Tagore to have yielded too
much to the West. I confess that I did not find this so in those of
his works that I could read in English. He seems to me to have
kept to the centre.) Not to give way at a critical point to the
temptation of exaggeration - some dramatically extremist doctrine
which rivets the eyes of one's own countrymen and the world, and
brings followers and undying fame and a sense of glory and
personal fulfilment - not to yield to this, but to seek to find the
truth in the face of scorn and threats from both sides - left and
right, Westerniser's and traditionalists - that seems to me the rarest
form of heroism. "
 RAB I N D RANATH T A G O R E A N D NAT I O N ALITY 261
On one side England, on the other the marvellous Indian past.
Tagore was very well aware that English literature was a menace as
well as a boon. In an essay entitled 'The Vicissitudes of Education'
he said that those who forget India and identify themselves with
the English that they learn at school are like 'Savage chiefs . . .
when they put on European clothes and decorate themselves with
cheap European glass beads'.1 This occurs where, as Tolstoy said
very sharply and brilliantly in his educational tracts, education has
no relation to the life of the pupils themselves, but only to some
other life, remote, beyond the seas. The inner neuroses which such
conflicts must have created were not confined to India. Certainly
some phenomena in American life may perhaps - though I am not
sure - be directly traceable to the fact that children of immigrants
from non-Anglo-Saxon countries were (and are) brought up on
Shakespeare and Dickens and Thackeray, or Hawthorne or Mark
Twain or Melville: and indeed, what else was there for them to
read? These excellent books told them about forms of life that
could have been lived by ancestors of men of Anglo-Saxon, or
perhaps Dutch or German or Scandinavian, stock, but not
remotely resembling the lives of their grandfathers in Russian or
Bohemian or Greek towns and villages, or the Jewish Pale of
Settlement, or the hamlets of Sicily or Syria, or the African wild.
Tagore says that when this situation occurs, the discrepancy
between education and life becomes acute, and then they 'mock
and revile each other like two characters in a farce';2 and for this
reason he called for a revival of the Bengali language, a natural
medium for at any rate some of his countrymen, not a borrowed
suit of clothes, however grand, however comfortable. Yet at the
same time he realised that it was neither possible nor desirable to
do what some evidently wished to do, to shut the door on English,
to cleanse oneself of the Western disease, to return to the past, to
the primitive simplicity of an age without machines, and reject the
evil gifts of the West - industrialisation and all the degradation and
destruction of natural human values that it brought.
He knew that the relation of India with England, for all its
benefits, was nevertheless a morbid one: the English had come first
as traders, then as masters, and, despite exceptional men who

1 Rabindranath Tagore, Towards Universal Man (London, 196 1 }, p. 45· All

quotations from Tagore are taken from this collection; subsequent references are
by page number alone.
2 P · 46.
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY

served India in a pure spirit and wore themselves out in her service
(and he pays noble tribute to such men), the relation of master and
subject distorted the nature of both, and neither found it easy to
recognise the other as a human being, to like or to dislike him as he
pleased, as an equal, a semblable. Indeed it was this phenomenon
that was marvellously described in his phenomenology by Hegel,
and a hundred years later, in a very different fashion, by E. M.
Forster. Nevertheless, Tagore understood the British character and
British achievement, and he admired them. He judged England and
Europe without passion; his appraisal seems to me calm, acute and
just. What the British had brought must not be cancelled or
thrown away. Nevertheless, one cannot create in a medium that
embodies, and is the vehicle of, an alien experience: such a language
must cramp the stranger, and have the effect of a strait-jacket upon
his thought and imagination, and force it to develop in unnatural
directions - sometimes (as in the case of a Conrad or an Apollin­
aire) into brilliant virtuosity, at other times in painfully grotesque
ways. The first requirement for freedom - independence, aware­
ness of oneself as an equal citizen of the world - is to be able to
speak in one's own voice; better nonsense in one's own voice than
wise things distilled from the experience of others. 'What the
British have set up may be grand but they do not belong to us . . .
It will never do if we seek to use somebody else's eyes because we
have lost our own,'1 said Tagore in his Presidential Address to
Congress in 1 908. English is the window open to the great world;
to shut it would be - I take this to be Tagore's belief - a crime
against India. But a window is not a door: to do nothing but watch
through windows is absurd. The British 'are behaving as if we do
not exist . . . as if we are huge ciphers'2 - even Morley is guilty of
this.
How are Indians to direct themselves instead of being dependent
on the placings of others? Only by acquiring strength. I quote
from Tagore again: 'The only real gift is the gift of strength; all
other offerings are vain.'3 Like Thucydides in the Melian dialogue,
like Machiavelli, like all the great realists he grasped that ignorance
and Utopian escapism, fed by sentimental evasion of the truth, can
sometimes be as ruinous as cynicism and brutality. To illustrate

I P· 1 2 1 .
2 P· 1 1 7·
l p. I 2 J .
 RAB I N D RANATH T A G O R E AND NAT I O N A L ITY 26 3
this he tells the story of the kid and the Lord. The kid, constantly
set upon by beasts stronger than itself, said in despair to the Lord,
' "Lord, how is it that all creatures seek to devour me?" The Lord
replied, "What can I do, my child? When I look at you, I myself
am so tempted." '1 Tagore draws from this marvellous and
devastating fable the moral that one must be strong, for without
strength there will be no equality, no justice. The equality of all
States, great and small, is a piece of idealistic cant. Justice to the
weak, given human beings as they are, is rare because it is difficult;
and to change human beings so that they will not be as they are is
Utopian. One must seek to improve mankind by available means,
not by demanding of them unattainable virtue which only the
saints can emulate.
Men seek recognition; rightly. They will not obtain it until they
are strong. They must obtain strength by co-operation and
organisation, and expect no gratitude. There are other paths to
power, but Tagore rejects them: Nietzschean amoralism and
violence are self-defeating, for these breed counter-violence. On
this he agreed with Mahatma Gandhi and Tolstoy; but he did not
accept Tolstoy's angry simplifications, his self-isolating, anarchist
attitude, nor the Mahatma's essentially (on this I am subject to
correction) unpolitical, unsecular ends. Organisation for Tagore
means, even when he is thinking in purely cultural terms, the
acquisition of Western techniques; moreover it needs the building
of bridges between the educated and the masses, for unless this is
done there will be elitism, oligarchy, oppression, and in the end, as
always, that great and angry cry from the masses for recognition,
which precedes the disruption of the social texture and the
revolutionary upheavals, which may be unavoidable and right
where things have gone too far, but bring justice at appalling cost.
No. Strength must be sought rigorously, even ruthlessly, but by
peaceful means. The English 'hurt our self-respect'.2 They do so
because we are paupers: when we are strong, they will be brothers.
Till then, they will despise us and not fraternise. Only unto him
who hath shall be given. Begging will achieve nothing except
further loss of the sense of our own worth. So long as India is weak
she will be bullied and ignored and humiliated. This is the note -
we have heard it more than once in this century - that heralds the

I ibid.
2 P· I J 7·
 T H E S E N S E O F R E A L ITY

dawn of the awakening social self-consciousness of a class or a

nation or a continent. Only those who respect themselves will be
respected by others. Therefore we must emancipate ourselves, for
nobody else will help us. Indeed, if they help us too much, we
shall, to that extent, remain unfree. The English say that they have
given us justice. This may be so, but what we ask for, what all men
ask for, above everything else, is humanity, and 'to get mere justice
. . . is like asking for bread and receiving a stone. The stone may be
rare and precious, but it does not appease hunger.'' It will not be
appeased until we awaken and set our own house in order.
Internationalism is a noble ideal, but it can be achieved only when
each link in the chain, that is, every nation, is strong enough to bear
the required tension.
It is one of Tagore's greatest merits, and a sign of that direct
vision and understanding of the real world with which poets are
too seldom credited, that he understood this. He understood it at a
time when there was much shallow internationalism in the air.
Races, communities, nations were constantly urged to abolish their
frontiers, destroy their distinctive attributes, cease from mutual
strife, and combine into one great universal society. This was well
enough as an ultimate ideal: it would fit a world where peoples
were of approximately equal strength and status; but so long as vast
inequalities existed, these sermons addressed to the weak - who are
still seeking recognition, or even elementary justice, or the means
of survival - had they been listened to, would merely (like the
doctrines of free trade and disarmament) have achieved for them
the unity which the kid achieved with the tiger when it was
swallowed by it. Unity must be unity of equals, or at least of the
not too unequal. Freedom for the pike is death to the carp. Those
who are scattered, weak, humiliated, oppressed must first be
collected, strengthened, liberated, given opportunity to grow and
develop at least to some degree by their own natural resources, on
their own soil, in their own languages, with unborrowed memo­
ries, and not wholly in perpetual debt, cultural or economic, to
some outside benefactor.
This is the eternally valid element in nationalism, the true and
only case for self-determination - the forging of the national links
without which there is no great chain of all mankind. On either
side of this stand �he two great powerful and attractive fallacies: on

I ibid.
 RAB I N D RA N ATH TA G O RE AND N AT I O N ALITY 26 5
one side the hungry wolves, in the clothing of sincere internation­
alists, preaching to the sheep the evils of petty and destructive
small-power chauvinism; on the other the sick longing on the part
of the sheep to be swallowed by the wolves, to give up the unequal
struggle, to merge themselves in what they fondly imagine to be a
wider unity, and lose their identity and their past and their human
claims - the desire to declare themselves bankrupt, and be struck
off the roll, and lay down the burden of freedom and responsibil­
Ity.
Tagore stood fast on the narrow causeway, and did not betray
his vision of the difficult truth. He condemned romantic over­
attachment to the past, what he called the tying of India to the past
'like a sacrificial goat tethered to a post',1 and he accused men who
displayed it - they seemed to him reactionary - of not knowing
what true political freedom was, pointing out that it is from
English thinkers and English books that the very notion of
political liberty was derived. But against cosmopolitanism he
maintained that the English stood on their own feet, and so must
Indians. In I 9 I 7 he once more denounced the danger of 'leaving
everything to the unalterable will of the Master'/ be he brahmin
or Englishman. He said, in effect, that India must get rid of the
English but must cling to the truths by which the English have
lived. India may be stabbed in the back by her own people in the
course of this - by terrorists or by appeasers. This, he thought,
would not be effective enough. Indians are numerous enough, he
maintained, the land is big enough, to enable them to afford to
press for their goals by peaceful pressure; and if they go on and on,
all the millions of them, they will win in the end. And so it turned
out to be.
It is, as I tried to say earlier, easier to exaggerate, to lean to an
extreme. Perhaps only those who exaggerate are remembered in the
history either of action or of thought. Plato and even Aristotle, the
writers of the Gospels, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant,
Hegel, Marx all exaggerated. It is easier to preach passionately to a
country that it should adopt some vast, revolutionary ideology,
and centralise and simplify and subordinate everything to a single
goal or a single man or a single party. It is not difficult to call for a
return to the past, to tell men to turn their backs on foreign devils,

I p. 1 86.
2 p. 1 93 ·
266 T H E S EN S E OF REALITY

to live solely on one's own resources, proud, independent, uncon­

cerned. India has heard such voices. Tagore understood this, paid
tribute to it, and resisted it. He seems to me, during his long and
marvellously fruitful life, absorbed in concerns more creative than
social or political activity, to have aimed to make only what was
beautiful, and to say only what was true. This entailed self­
discipline, and exceptional patience and integrity. In setting down
his social and cultural and above all educational ideas, he tried to
tell the complex truth without over-simplification, and to that
extent was perhaps listened to the less. There is a remarkable saying
by the American philosopher C. I. Lewis which I have always
treasured. He said, 'There is no a priori reason for thinking that,
when we discover the truth, it will prove interesting.' Nevertheless
it is surely better for words to be true than interesting. I can
understand well that a country, and especially a great country with
a rich past, and perhaps an even richer future, can justly feel proud
of one of the rarest of all gifts of nature, a poet of genius, who, even
in moments of acute crisis, when he spoke to and for his
countrymen, and they craved not for mere reason, but for signs
and miracles, did not yield; but unswervingly told them only what
he saw, only the truth.
 INDEX

Compiled by Douglas Matthews

absolutism, 246 Marx, 103-4, 1 4 5 ; opposition to

Adler, Friedrich, I 5 I State and authority, 1 03 , I07, u o,
Adler, Victor, I 5 0 I I 4, 1 3 4, 1 3 6; in London and
Aeschylus, 7 I Switzerland, 1 1 7; and class conflict,
Aikhenveld, luri 1 . , 2 I O 1 26, 1 3 6; on values, 1 2 6; on easing
Akhmatova, Anna, 209 of tension, q 6; on revolution, 1 5 8;
Albertus Magnus, 64 effect on Belinsky, 203 ; and
Alexander II, Tsar, u o Turgenev, 2 1 8
Alexander the Great, I 69, 2 4 1 Balzac, Honore de, 8 5 > 1 87, 1 9 8
Allemanists, 1 07, 1 49 Barbusse, Henri, 2 3 0
anachronism, 4-5, 7-8, 1 2- 1 3 Bartenev, Victor V., 1 4 5
anarchism, 7 8 , 94, 97, 1 03-4, 1 1 0, 1 1 4, Barteneva, E.G., 1 4 5
1 4 3 · 1 49. 1 5 3 Basle, Congress of ( I 8 69), 1 44
Angell, Norman, 2 p Baudelaire, Charles, 2 1 2, 229
Anselm, 74 Bavaria, 1 1 3
Antonovich, Maxim A., 220 Bax, Belfort, I 0 5
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 262 Bazard, Amand, 8 4
Aquinas, St Thomas, 64, 74, 1 20, 1 8 2 Bebel, August, 108, 143, 1 5 4, 1 63
Aristophanes, 3 4n Becker, johann, 1 48
Aristotle, 1 20, 1 30, 1 6 8-9, 1 72, 1 8 7, Beesly, Edward Spencer, 1 39
1 9 1 , 2 24, 265 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 70, 1 8 6, 1 8 8,
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 244 198
art: and creativity, I 78-9, 1 8 8; as play, behaviour see human behaviour
I 84; purpose, 196-2 0 1 , 2 1 3, 2 1 7 Belgium: socialism in, 1 6 1
Atatiirk, Kemal, 47 Belinsky, Vissarion G., 202-. u , 224-7,
Athens: concept of man in, 1 68 229-30
Auer, Ignaz, 1 62 Bengali language, 26I
Augustine, St, 1 8 Bennett, Arnold, 2 3 0
Augustus Caesar, 3 2, 47 Bentham, Jeremy, 1 93
Austen, jane, 2 29 Bergson, Henri, 49, 1 84
Berkeley, George, Bishop of Cloyne,
Babeuf, Fran'<ois Noel ('Gracchus'), 64
28, 8o- l , 8 3 , 92, I 4 1 Bernstein, Eduard, 1 08-9, 1 27, 1 40,
Bach, johann Sebastian, 70 1 43 , 1 p, 1 5 4, 1 62
Bakunin, Mikhail A.: influence and Bismarck, Otto, Furst von, 3 6-7, 42,
followers, 97, 1 48-9; conflict with 47• 49, 104, I J 4, 1 5 2
z68 T H E SENSE O F REALITY
Blanc, Louis, 9o-- 1 , 96, 1 0 2 , r o s , 147, Chateaubriand, vicomte Franc;ois
1 6 5 , 2 1 6-1 7 Rene de, s, r 89
Blanqui, Auguste, 9 1-2, 1 04, 146-8, Chatterton, Thomas, 1 9 8
1 53 Chekhov, Anton P., 2 1 2, 2 2 3
Blanquists, 1 07 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai G., 1 1 0, 2 1 4,
Blok, Alexander A., 224 2 1 8, 2 2Q- I , 226, 229
Bobczynski, Konstantin, r r 6 Chizhevsky, Dmitri, 2 1 0
Boborykin, Petr D., 2 2 3 choice (human), 1 76-7, 1 9 1 , 23 5-8,
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1 96 243 . 247
Bolshevik Revolution ( 1 9 1 7), 29, 4 3 , class conflict: in Fourierist doctrine,
5 0 , I 1 2- 1 3 , 1 64 8 8 ; Pecqueur on, 9 1-2; Blanqui on,
Bolsheviks, 1 1 1 - 1 2, 1 1 7, 1 47 96; in Marx's doctrine, 9 8 , r oo-- r ,
Bossuet, Jacques Benigne, Bishop of 1 2 5-6, 1 4 1-4, 1 47· 1 49· 1 5 4-5· 1 6 5 ;
Condom, then of Meaux, 42 and liberal reform, 1 05-6, r o8-ro,
Botkin, Vasily, 204, 2 1 5 , 2 1 9, 222 1 3 1-8; and moral values, 1 26; in
bourgeoisie: in Marxist theory, r 3 r , Russia, r 6o; and political control,
1 3 3 , 1 3 7-8, 1 44, 1 5 4, q 8-6o, 1 6 5 ; 2 5 2-5; see also bourgeoisie;
see also class conflict proletariat
Bray, J.F.: Labour's Wrongs and Claude!, Paul, 2 5 0
Labour's Remedy, 94 Claudius, Roman Emperor, 4 7
Brousse, Paul, 1 07 Colbert, Jean Baptiste, marquis de
Broussists (Possibilists), 107, 149 Seignelay, 4 2
Brussels, Congress of ( r 868 ), 144 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 200, 2 5 7
Buchan, John, 20 Collingwood, Robin George, xv
Buchez, Philippe Benjamin Joseph, commitment: as phenomenon, 196-7,
1 99 2 3 0; and Belinsky's aesthetics,
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 3, 1 40 204- 1 2, no-r, 224, 226-9; and
Bukharin, Nikolai 1., r 3 r n Saint-Simonism, 2 1 6-r 7, 22 r ;
Buonarroti, Philippe Michel, 8 r Turgenev and, 2 1 7- 1 9
Burckhardt, Jakob, r 5 7 common sense, 2 s , 3 2
Burke, Edmund, 3 4, p , 1 84, 246, 2 5 7 communal ownership, 78-9
Burns, John, 1 5 4 Commune (Paris) see Paris Commune
Byron, George Gordon, 6th Baron, Communist International see
r 8 8 , 1 98 , 2 2 5 International, Third
'Communist League' (German), r 5 4
Cabet, Etienne, 9 1 , 1 49 Communists: suppress intellectuals,
Calderon de Ia Barca, Pedro, 249 76; after First War, 1 1 3;
Campanella, Tommaso: The City of authoritarianism, r 1 4- 1 5; in Russia,
the Sun, 78 1 9 5 ; and nationalism, 2 5 1
capitalism, 8 5-7, 9o-- r , 99-1 00, 1 03 , competition (economic), 8 5-7, 9o-- 1 ,
1 49 . q 6 1 00
Carlyle, Thomas, q 8 , r 88 , 200 Comte, Auguste: and Marx, xiv;
categorical imperatives, r 78-9, 244-6 cosmology, 3; and scientific
Catherine II (the Great), Empress of method, 34, 3 7, 42, 49, p; follows
Russia, 47, 49 Saint-Simon, 84; doctrines, r 19,
causality: in history, 4-5 I J 4, 1 40, 2 1 6
Cavour, il conte Camillo Bensodi, 3 2, Comtists, 9, 3 7
47, 5 I Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 1 72
Chartism, 9 5 . 1 4 8 Condorcet, M.J.A.N. Caritat, marquis
Chasles, Philarete, 23 / de, xiv, 1 3 6-7, 1 74
 IN DEX
conformity, 74-6 empirical investigation, s6, s8
Conrad, Joseph, 262 Encyclopedie, /', 82
Considerant, Victor Prosper, 88 Enfantin, Barthelemy Prosper, 84
Constant, Benjamin, 9 5 , 19 1 , 198 Engels, Friedrich: on Saint-Simon, 84;
Corneille, Pierre, 249 co-operation with Marx, r o r , I r 6,
Cortez, Hernan, 172 1 1 9, 1 9 5 ; misunderstandings, ro8;
Counter-Enlightenment, the, xx on Lenin's morality, 1 2 8; and class
Cousin, Victor, 1 9 8 conflict, 1 3 7-9• r 6o; and Marxist
creation (artistic), 1 7 8 laws, 1 40; and liberal ideas, 1 4 1 ;
Creighton, Mandell, Bishop of and Second International, I so; and
London, 2 6 improved position of workers, 1 5 2,
Cremer, William, 1 40 1 59; on revolution, 1 5 3; denounces
Cripps, Sir Stafford, 2 5 5 Tkachev, 164; on social transience,
Crosland, Anthony, 2 5 4 167; Communist Manifesto (with
Cynics, 1 69 Marx), 98
England: social elites in, 2 5 3 ; tradition
Dante Alighieri, 196 in, 2 5 7
Darwin, Charles, )6, 42, 49 Enlightenment, the, xiv, xviii-xix, ro,
Darwinians, 8-9 26, 17), I 76, I 8 J , 23 ) , 2 ) 7
David, Eduard, 1 43, 1 5 4 Erfurt Programme, 1 59
Decembrists, 202 Erigena, 74
deductive thinking, 5 7-8 Essenes, 77
Descartes, Rene, 6 r , 64, 1 20, r 8o, 239
despotism (enlightened), 237 Fabian Society, r os-6, r p , q 6
determinism, 2 , 1 2, 2 3 6 facts: historical, 26-7, 36; and
Deutsch, Leo, r r o understanding, 5 6, I J O, 1 3 7-8; and
dialectical materialism, 9 , 140 philosophy, 6o-r; and general
Dickens, Charles, 2 I 3 questions, 1 70
dictatorship of the proletariat, I OJ-4, Fascism: Hegel influences, 67; and
1 59 suppression of intellectuals, 76;
Diderot, Denis, 79 popular front opposes, I I 4i and
Diggers (sect), 79 artistic creation, r 8 8
Disraeli, Benjamin, 47 Faust, J J , 2 1 1 , 2 2 5
Dobrolyubov, Nicolas A., 2 1 4, 2 1 7, Ferguson, Adam, I 3 r
2 2 Q- l Fet, Afanasi A., 222
doctrine: suspicion of, 3 1-2 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 2 1 3 , 2 1 7
Dostoevsky, Fedor, I S, 20, 88, 1 44, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 67, 1 2 1 ,
r 8 8 , 2 0 5 , 2 1 1 , 2 1 6, 226 1 79-84, 202, 243-5 , 247; Addresses
Dreyfus, Alfred, 1 2 7 to the German Nation, 248
Druzhinin, Alexander V., 205 First World War: and socialism,
Dumas, Alexandre, 198 I I I - 1 2, 1 64
Duns Scotus, 64, 74 Flaubert, Gustave, q8, 20 I, 204, 2 I 2,
Dupleix, Charles Fran<;ois, r r 6 2 2 5 , 229
Durkheim, Emile, 6 Forster, E.M., 262
Fourier, Fran<;ois Charles Marie, 42,
Eccarius, George, I r 6, 1 40 84-9 1 , 97-8, 1 )6, 148, 198, 2 1 6- 1 7,
Einstein, Albert, 47 255
Eisner, Kurt, I I J France: r 8th-century challenge to
Eliot, T.S., 34, J 5 n, 2 I 2, 2 5 0 State, 54; development of socialism
elites (social and political), 2 5 3-5 in, I 07- 8, I I r; civil wars in, 1 42;
 T H E S E N S E O F REALITY
nationalism, 142-3 , 1 63 , 234; Gray, John, 94
Marxist party formed, 148; Griboedov, Alexander S., 203, 205
influence on Russian literature, Grigoriev, Apollon, 22 I
2 I 6- I 7; cultural dominance, 240 Grigorovich, Dmitri V., 2 I I-1 2, 2 2 I
Franco, General Francisco, I I 4 Griin, Karl, 9 5 , I 2 7
Frederick II (the Great), King of Guesde, Jules, I 07, I I I , I 27, I 40,
Prussia, 47, 49, 5 I , I92, 237, 240 I 42-3, I48, I p, I 5 6
freedom: and philosophy, 5 s-6 guild socialism, I o6-7, I 09
freedom of speech, 54-5
French Revolution, IO, 28, 42-3, 50, Hall, Charles, 93
8o- 1, 8 5 , I 36, 233, 2 p , 2 54 happiness: as goal, I 76-7
Freud, Sigmund: on unconscious Hardie, Keir, I p
factors, 6; and understanding, 47; Harrington, James: Oceana, 78
on power� of science, 49 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich:
Fribourg, Ernest Edouard, I I 6 cosmology, 3; on cultural diversity,
Frost, Robert, 2 5 0 6; and historical understanding, 9;
on universal as 'concrete', 3 5; and
Galilee Galilei, 28, I 68, 239 scientific method, 42, 49; political
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand influence, 66-8, 96, 99; influence on
(Mahatma), 263 Marx, 1 19, I 2 3 , I 2 5, 234; and class,
Gautier, Theophile, 204; Mademoiselle I 3 2; opposes romanticism, I 89;
de Maupin, 20o-I Belinsky and, 203-4, 2 I 3; and
generalisations, I 8-I 9, 2 1 , 2 3-4, 30, rationalism, 24I; and nation State,
39 247; phenomenology, 2 62;
Geneva, Congress of ( I 8 66), I 44 exaggerations, 2 6 5
genius: and insight, 9, I 6-I 8, 20, 2 5, Hegelians, 5, 9, 37
3 3 n, 46, 6o, 66 Heidegger, Martin, 50, 64
German Workers' Union, I 02-3 Heine, Heinrich, 67, 20 I ; 'Zum
Germany: proposed 'pastoralisation' Lazarus', 209n
of, I I-12; development of socialism Heinzen, Karl, 96
in, I 08-I I , 1 50- 1 , 1 5 3-4, I 56; Helphand, Alexander L., I 5 I
nationalism, I 42-3, 1 63-4, I 8o-2, Helvetius, Claude Adrien, 34, 4 I, 79,
234, 247; labour conditions, I 5 6; I 2 I , I 72-3, 237-8
romanticism in, I 69, I 79, I 84; Henry IV, King of France, p, p
political submission, 24 I, 243, 247 Herder, Johann Gottfried: and
Gershenzon, Mikhail 0., 2 10 historians' subject-matter, xiv-xv;
Gibbon, Edward, 2 6 on folk spirit, 5-6, 246; on cultural
Gladstone, William Ewart, 4 7 uniqueness, I9, I 73; on human
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, comte de, 5 society, I 74; on individual in
Godwin, William, 94 society, I 8 3-4; and objective
Goethe, J.W. von, 1 97, I99, 209, 2 I 3 , morality, I 9 1 ; and populism, 195;
2 I 5 , 2 2 5 , 2 30; Faust, 2 I I , 2 2 5 on commitment, 2 I 5; enthusiasm,
Gogo!, Nikolai V., 2 1 1 , 2 I 3, 2 1 9, 229 233; and nationalism, 2 3 3 , 248; on
Gompers, Samuel, I 5 5 force of tradition, 243
Goncharov, Ivan A., 205-7, 2 1 0, 2 I I , Herzen, Alexander: on Hegel, 67n;
2 20, 2 26; A n Ordinary Story, 2 29 and gradualist reform, 1 1 0; on class
Goncourt, Edmond & Jules, 201 analysis and values, 1 26, I 39· I 54•
Gorres, J. Joseph von, •244 2 I 6; supports 1 86 3 Polish rising,
Gotha Programme, 1 43.. 148, 1 54 I 5 I; on role of artist, I 78; and
Gramsci, Antonio, 1 6 5 literary commitment, 204, 2 1 7, 220,
 I N D EX
230; contrasted with Goncharov, Independent Labour Party, 106
2 1 0; on Goethe, 225; Who is to India: emancipation from foreign
Blame?, 205-7 domination, 259, 26 1-6
Hess, Moses, 95. 1 00, 1 27, 1 36, 139, inductive thinking, 57
141 industrial revolution: effect of, 87, 89
Hilferding, Rudolf, 1 1 1 Industrial Workers of the World
historicism, 195 (USA), 1 1 0
history: direction and patterns of, xiv­ inequality, 77, 79-8 1, 84, 88-9, 93,
xviii, 1-9; imaginative 2 5 3-6
understanding of, xiv, 2 5-7· 3 3-4; inevitability, 37
Marx on, xiv, 1 0 1 , 1 1 9-20, 1 2 5, insight see genius
I 3 1 , 1 49; laws of, 7-Io; forced inspiration, 59-60
change in, 9-1 1 ; uniqueness and International Federation of Trade
generalisation in, 2 1-s, 30, 3 2, 3 5 , Unions, 1 1 3
39; fact in, 26-7; and strife, 96; and International, First, I 04, I I 7- I 8,
class conflict, 1 3 1-2, 1 3 5 I4o-I, 1 44-8, I p-2, l 5 5
Hitler, Adolf: effect on history, 9-1 2; International, Second (Socialist), 105,
uniqueness, 32; and scientific Io8, I I 3, I41, I 49-50, I 5 5, 1 59,
method, 43; political judgement, 47, I62-4, I 66
p; compromises with, 1 27 International, '2 Y;' (Vienna), I I 3
Hobbes, Thomas, 40, 246, 265 International, Third (Communist),
Hobson, J.A., 1 I 1 I I3, I I 5
Hodgskin, Thomas, 93, 98 International, Fourth, 1 1 4
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 2 50 International Working Men's
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron, Association, I03, I J 6, I 4 5. I H-6
4 I , I 73 · 237 intuition, 46
Howell, George, 1 1 6
Hugo, Victor, I 8 8, I 98, 203, 205, 2 I 2 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 1 79
human behaviour: laws of, xvi, 42, 44 Jacobins, 42, 1 3 6, 147, 197-9
human beings: needs, 2; Jahanbegloo, Ramin, xixn
understanding, 23-4; inequality, 77, James II, King of Great Britain, 47
79-80; and individual expression, James, William, 3 7
r 82-3; and motive, 1 8 5-7; Jaures, Jean, 1 07-8, 1 26, 143, 1 5 1-2,
autonomy, 236-7 1 5 4, I 66
human nature: concept of, xix, 1 8-19, Jefferson, Thomas, 241
1 7 1-3, 1 8 1 John of Leiden, 32, p , 192
Hume, David, I 30, 1 72-3, 1 78, 1 9 1 , Joncieres, X., zoon
245 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, 32, 47
Hungary, 1 1 3 Jouffroy, Theodore Simon, I98
Huxley, Aldous, I 4 Joyce, James, 229
Hyndman, Henry Mayers, I 0 5 Jung, Carl Gustav, 6
Jung, Hermann, I I 6, I 40
Ibsen, Henrik, 148, 1 8 8, 249
lcaria (ideal State), 9 1 Kafka, Franz, 20
ideal communities, 8 8 , 9 1 Kant, Immanuel: profundity, 1 7;
idealism, 1 8 7 philosophical revolution, 54-5, 64,
Iggers, George C.: The Cult of 66, 68; on strife and progress, I zo;
Authority, zoon on questions of value, I 74; and
imperatives see categorical imperatives freedom of choice, 1 76-8o, 2 3 5 -40,
imperialism, 1 1 1, r6 3 243, 247; on duty and interest, 1 89;
272 T H E S E N SE O F REAL ITY
on crooked humanity, 192; and anti-war sentiments, I p ; and 1 9 1 7
purpose of art, 197; on revolution, 1 64-5; and outbreak of
disinteredness, 1 9 8 ; and First World War, 1 64; and political
nationalism, 2 3 2-4, 248; purposes, 1 9 2; values, 1 92;
rationalism, 233-4, 24 1-2; moral transforms Communist Party, 1 9 5 ;
philosophy, 2 3 4- s , 244-5; on discounts nationalism, 2 5 1
nature, 240; and romanticism, Leon, Daniel de, I 54-5
24 I -3 ; quietism, 242; and doctrine Leontiev, Konstantin, 1 60
of will, 244-5; exaggerations, 265 Leroux, Pierre, 89, 9 1 , 1 99, 203, 2 1 6,
Katayama Sen (called Yasutaro 23 1
Yabuki), I 5 2 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1 7 3 , 1 89;
Katkov, Mikhail N., 204 Minna von Barnhelm, 1 87
Kautsky, Karl, r oB, 1 1 3, 1 2 8, 140, Lessner, Friedrich, u 6
I 43 , I 5 I , I 5 4, I 6o-I , I 63 Levine, Eugen, 1 1 3
Keats, John, 48n Levy, Gustav, 1 1 6
Kepler, Johannes, I 68 Lewis, C.l., xx, 266
Keynes, John Maynard, 1 5 7, 1 68 , 2 50 Lez, Jacob Michael Reinhold, 1 9 8
Kienthal (Switzerland), 1 1 I liberty see freedom
Kleist, Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von, Lichtheim, George, 1 24
I B B-9 Liebknecht, Karl, 1 1 3 , 1 26
knowledge, 1 8 6 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 1 40, 1 48
Korolenko, Vladimir G., 229-30 Limousin, Charles Mathieu, 1 1 6
Kropotkin, Peter A., Prince, 1 1 0, 1 26, Lincoln, Abraham, 36, p
I 49 Lisbon earthquake ( 1 7 5 5 ), 44
Kiichelbecker, Wilhelm K., 202 List, Friedrich, 1 82
Kuskova, Ekaterina D., I IO Lloyd George, David, p, 1 5 7
Locke, John, 1 7, 64, 1 80, I 9 5 , 2 4 I ,
labour: in Marxist theory, I 3 I-2 245
Labour Party (British), 1 06-7 Lopatin, Hermann, 1 4 5
Lafargue, Paul, I 07, I 40 Lorca, Frederico Garcia, 2 5 0
Lagardelle, Hubert, I07 Louis XIV, King of France, 1 82
Lamennais, Hugues Felicite Robert Luther, Martin, I 20
de, 2 1 6 Luxemburg, Rosa, 1 1 1 , 1 I 3 , 1 26-8,
L a Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 4 I , 2 3 8 I p, 1 5 6, 1 64
Lassalle, Ferdinand, 96, I 02-4, I I 7,
I 39, I 42, I 4 5-6, I 5 7, I 64 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, abbe, 79,
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, I 36 So, 95
Lavrov, Peter L., 1 1 0, 1 26, I 4 5 , I 6 5 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1st
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 63-4 Baron, 2 7
Le Mercier de Ia Riviere, Paul Pierre, Machiavelli, Niccolo, 1 49, I 69, I 7 5 ,
I 73 262, 265
Lenin, V.I.: effect on history, 9, I I ; Maistre, Joseph de: on key to solving
and scientific method, 3 4 , 43; lacks human ills, 34; theories, 49, 1 4 1 ;
political judgement, 47, 5 Ij and and unexplained miseries, I 89
Marx's theories, 98, I 1 o- 1 1 , Mallarme, Stephane, 2 1 2
1 3 9-40, 1 42-3, I 5 6, I 6 I , I 6 3 j Mao Tse-tung, 1 6 3
demands for centralisation, I 1 I ; Martov, Julius, I I 1 , I 26-8, I 64
and seizure of poV{er, I 1 2- 1 3 ; Marx, Karl: on economic and social
creates Bolshevik P�rty, 1 1 7; factors in history, xiv, 5-6, 9, 1 3 1 ;
accused of cynicism, I 2 7-8; and cosmology, 3 i and scientific
 INDEX 273
method, 42i theories, so, S2i and Meinecke, Friedrich, I 69
organised communist State, 9Ii Mensheviks, I 1 1-1 2
influence and doctrines, 96, 98-Io6, Merimee, Prosper, 20I
I 08, I I6-I9, I 2 I-6, 1 28, I 3 I-40, Metternich, Fi.irst Clemens W. Lothar
I4o-I, I43• I47-9, I 5 3-5, I 5 7-9, von, 9 5
I 62-3, I 65-7; and Russian Michelet, Jules, 27, 248
Revolution, I I 2; and First Middle Ages: philosophical thought
International, 1 1 6-I 8, 1 42-8; in in, 74
London, 1 1 6-I7; on unity of Mikhailov, Mikhail L., 209n
theory and practice, I 22; on facts Mikhailovsky, Nikolai, 2 I 4
and values, I 23-5, I 29; Mill, James, I93
evolutionary relativism, 1 2 8-9; on Mill, John Stuart, 84, I J4, I 47• I 49
class conflict, I 3 I-9, I 4 I-4, I 49• Millerand, Alexandre, I 07, I 57
I 5 5 > I 6o; moral revolution, I 3 8-42, Mills, Wright, I 57
I 44i Strachey criticises, I 57; appeal Milton, John, I 96, 2 I 3
in underdeveloped countries, I 5 8-9, Moliere, Jean Baptiste Poquelin, 249
I 6 I ; letters to Russian Narodniks, Mommsen, Theodor, 27
I 6o-I; on inevitability, I 62-3; and monism, I I9
Lassalle, I 64; exaggerations, I67, Montesquieu, Charles Louis de
265; opposes romanticism, I 89-9o; Secondat, baron de, 5, I 72-3, I 9 I ,
and Communism, I 95i on human I95
degradation, 2 5 5 ; on oppression, Montezuma, I 72
2 5 9; Capital, I oo; The Communist morality: romantic view of, I 78, I 8 3,
Manifesto (with Engels), 98; I 9o-I; see also values (moral)
Critique of the Gotha Programme, More, Sir Thomas: Utopia, 78
I43 · 1 54 Morelly: Le Code de la nature, 79
Marxism: and historical sense, 5> 8-Io; Morgenthau, Henry, I I
and economically determined Morley, John, Viscount, 262
classes, 28; on inevitability, 37-8; Morris, William, I05, 2 5 5
Hegel influences, 67; and Paris motive (human), 1 8 6-7, I92
Commune, I o4; and revolution, Mi.iller, Hans, I p , 244
Io6-7; hostility to Bernstein, I09i Musser, Alfred de, 20I
and proletariat, Io9; popular appeal, Mutualists, I46
I I 7-I 9i principles, I I 8-2o, I 22-3,
1 2 6-7, I 29i revolutionary morality, Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Emperor of
1 2 8-30; inflexibility, I 56-7; and the French, 36, p, I 88, I 92, I 97•
economic-social reform, I 57-9, I 64; 243
in non-industrial countries, I 5 8-9, Napoleon III, Emperor of the French,
I 6 I , I 6 5; modified, I 65-7; 1 p, 2 1 2
economic analyses, I 66; Saint­ Narodniks (Russia), I 6 1
Simon influences, 2 1 6; and nationalism: and Counter­
nationalism, 2 p ; on technological Enlightenment, xx; Marxist view of,
i nvention, 2 5 4; see also Marx, Karl I 4 2-3, I 62-4; Fichre on, I 8o- I ,
Masaryk, Jan, 5 I 247; in Germany, I 8o-2; and
Mathewson, Rufus W.: The Positive romantic movement, I 88; Kant and,
Hero in Russian Literature, 2 1 o- 1 2 23 2-4, 248; and creative principle,
Maupassant, Guy de, 20 I , 229 246-8; positive achievements,
Maxwell, James Clerk, 49 2 p -2; and recognition, 2 5 6
Mazzini, Giuseppe, I 47, 248 nationality: and artistic commitment,
Mehring, Franz, I 40 23o-I; consciousness of, 2 5 o- I ,
274 THE S E N S E OF REALITY
2 5 5-6, 2 5 9-6o; Tagore and, 2 5o; in function and effect of, 66-8; need
India, 26 I-6 for freedom, n-6
natural law: concept of, I 7 I , I 79• I 90, pietism, 24 I
244 Pirenne, Henri, 26-7
nature: laws of, 8-9, 24 5; Kant on, Pisarev, Dmitri 1., 2 I 4, 226
240 Pisemsky, Alexei F., 205, 220
Nechaev, Sergei G., I I O Pitt, William, the younger, 42
Nekrasov, Nikolai A., 2 I 9-2o, 226 planning (State), 83-8
New Deal (USA), 88 Plato: and cyclical patterns, 2;
New Lanark, 89 advocates authority of scientists,
Newton, Isaac, 8, I 6, 28, 34, 36, 47, 52; advocates abolition of private
59· 6 I, I68 property, 77, 95; on human unity,
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, I 73 I 2 I ; opposition to, I 69; on human
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 20, 49, 97, I 30, ends, I 74i and objective world, I 8 2;
I 48 on knowledge, I 86; and natural
Nikitenko, Alexander V., 204 law, I 90; on poets in society, I 96;
Novalis (i.e. Baron F. von exaggerations, 26 5
Hardenberg), I 79 play (recreation), I 84
Plekhanov, Georgy V.: co-founds
Odger, George, I I 6, I 40 Russian Social Democratic Party,
Ogarev, Ivan 1., 204 I I o-I I; as theorist, I I I, I 63 ; on
Ogilvie, William, 93 principles of Marxism, I I 9, 1 28; on
Olivier, Sydney, I 05 reason, I 24; on revolutionary
Orwell, George, I4 suppression of rights, I 27i invents
Ostrovsky, Alexander N., 222 'dialectical materialism', I4o;
Owen, Robert, 89-90, 92, I 3 6 internationalism, I 42, I p-2; on
war, I p ; greets Katayama, I p; on
Paepe, Cesar de, I 4 3 revolution, I 5 3 ; and German State
Panaev, Ivan 1., 204 system, I 5 6; suppresses Marx's
'parallelograms' (building), 89 letter to Narodniks, I 6o; Lenin
Pareto, Vilfredo, 3 deviates from, I 6 I , I63; and
Paris Commune ( I 87 I ), 92, I 04, 1 1 2, Russian literary tradition, 2 I 4, 2 I 7,
I I 8, 1 44, I47, I s 6 227
Parti Socialiste d e France, I07 pluralism: principles of, I 2 I ; and
Parti Socialiste Franc;ais, I 07 Marxism, I 66
Pascal, Blaise: and inner life, I 6- I 8; Pobedonostsev, Konstantin P., I 6o
Pensees, I 7 poetry: purpose, 20o-I
past: return to, I , I 2-I4 Poincare, Henri, 6
Pasternak, Boris: Dr Zhivago, 224 Poland: I 86 3 rising, I 5 I
Pater, Walter, 2 I 2 political judgement: and
paternalism, 237 understanding, p; defined, 4o-4;
Pecqueur, Constantin, 9I and theory, 45-53
Peter I (the Great), Tsar, p , I 92, 2 5 7, political science: and understanding,
259 xvii-xviii, 4 5-7; supposed laws of,
'phalansteries', 8 7 4o-3, 5o-2; and progress, I 74i
philosophes, xviii, I 74i see also romantic view of, I 8 3
Enlightenment, the Polybius, 2
philosophy: nature a'ld concerns of, Pope, Alexander, 203
s6-63, 65-6, 69; conformity and Popper, Karl R., 3 3
"'
revolution in, 6 I-8, 7o-2, 74-5; popular front movement, 1 1 4
 INDEX 275
populism, 1 9 5 truth, 26, 1 28-9, 1 67, 1 72;
Porson, Richard, J4n evolutionary, 1 2 S-9
positivism, S, 3 5-6, 1 19, 140, 1 70, 191, Renan, Ernest, 2 3 1
216 revolutions, 2 S-3 2, 45, 1 5 3-4, 1 5 S-6o
Possibilists see Broussists Revolutions of 1 S48, 92, 1 02, 1 q, 1 63
praxis, 1 1 2 Revue lndependante, 2 1 6
production, means of, 9S-9, 1 02, 1 06, Ricardo, David, 1 05, 168
1 24, 1 62 Richelieu, Cardinal Jean Armand du
Profintern, 1 1 3 Plessis, due de, 4, Jl, 42, 1 8 2
progress, 44, 1 2o-1, 1 26, 1 3 2, 1 63-4, Robespierre, Maximilien, J l , J4, 47,
190, 240 5 1, 68, So
Prokopovich, Sergei N., 1 1 0 Rodbertus, Karl Johann, 1 02-3, 1 36
proletariat, 1 3 1-3, 1 3 S , 1 5 5-60, 166; romanticism: and subjectivity, xix,
see also class conflict; dictatorship 1 S9-90, 242; as revolutionary
of the proletariat movement, 169-70, 1 75-7, 1 S2-3,
property: and private ownership, 1 91-3, 245; and concept of values,
77-SO, S4, 92, 96-7 1 75; and idealism, 1 S 7; Kant and,
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph: Fourier 24 1-3; and nationalism, 2 5 7
influences, SS; on class antagonism, Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 1 1, 47,
96, 1 3 6; doctrines, 96-7, 1 46; on 5 1, s s , 1 5 7· 2 5 5
property, 96-7; Marx attacks, 1 00; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 50, 6S, So, S7,
opposes State and authority, 103, 97-S, 1 2 1 , 1 74; and romantic
107, 1 34; influence and followers, revolution, 1 76-7, 1 S 1 ; and natural
1 1 0, 1 1 4, 14S-9; in exile, 1 1 7; law, 1 79, 236; and human freedom,
supports human values, 1 27, 1 34, 237, 240; and rationalism, 24 1 ; and
1 39; death, 1 4S; on social nationalism, 24S; exaggerations, 265
disintegration, 2 5 5 Royce, Josiah, 1 So
Proust, Marcel, I S, 46, 2 1 2 Ruskin, John, 14S, 2 5 5
Prussia, 1 1 3 Russell, Bertrand, 20, 47, 64, 7 1 , 1 69,
Puritans, p , 1 9 5 255
Pushkin, Alexander S . , 20 1-2, 207- 1 1 , Russia: cultural extermination in, 1 0;
2 24 influence of Fourier in, SS;
Pythagoras, 239 development of socialism in,
1 Io-- 12, 1 6 1 ; acts against First
Quebec Conference ( 1944), 1 1 International, 1 4 5; readiness for
questions: and discoverable answers, revolution, 1 60; nationalism, 1 64;
1 7o-2 Marxist success in, 16 5; artistic and
literary commitment in, 1 94-2 3 1 ;
Rabelais, Fran�ois, 196 imported ideas in, 194-6, 26o;
racialism, 9 oppression in, 2 54-5, 2 5 9-60;
Racine, Jean, 249 Westerner/Slavophil debate, 2 5 6-7;
Ranke, Leopold von, 26, 70 see also Bolshevik Revolution
Raphael Sanzio, 2 1 3 Russian Social Democratic Party,
rationalists, 34 I IQ-1 I, 1 2 S
reality: criteria of, 4-5 Russo-Japanese war ( 1904-5), 1 p
reason: and romantic movement, Ryle, Gilbert, 3 3 n
1 76-7, 1 S 1 , 1S9 Ryleev, Kondrati F., 202
Reform Bill, England ( 1 S67}, 15 6
reification, 1 3 7 Sacy, C.L.M. de, 1 98
relativism: and religious/political Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri, comte de:
 T H E S E N S E O F REALIT Y
o n historical evolution, xiv, 9 , 82; Shakespeare, William, 4-5 , 20, 1 88,
as prophet, 42; advocates scientists I9� 2 I 3, 2 I h 2 1 9, 249
as rulers, p; social doctrines, 8 1-5, Shaw, George Bernard, 105, 223
88, 97-8, 1 1 9, I 22, 1 98-9; influence, Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 200
8 8, 2 1 6-17, 2 2 5 ; financial ruin, 89; Sinclair, Upton, 230
on class conflict, 1 3 6; on change by Sinyavsky, Andrei D. (ps. Abram
technoiogy, 1 62; effect on Belinsky, Tertz), 224
2 1 3 , 2 1 7, 2 2 1 ; and purpose of art, Skinner, Burrhus Frederic: Beyond
214 Freedom and Dignity, 2 3 8
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, 2 1 0, slavery, 72-3
212 Smith, Adam, I 68
Salisbury, Robert Arthur Talbot Snow, Charles P., 2 5 3
Gascoyne-Cecil, 3 rd Marquess of, Social Darwinism, I 2 1
J 6, 5 3 Social Democratic Federation, 1 0 5
Saltykov, Michael E., 205, 2 1 9, 22 1 Social Democratic Party (Germany),
Sand, George, 89, 203, 205. 2 1 2, 2 1 6, 1 04, qo, 1 5 3-4, q 6
221, 225 Social Revolutionary Party (Russia),
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1 24 I I O, 1 1 2
Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 1 73 socialism: and inequality, 77, 88-9;
Sceptics, 1 69 development of, 79-83, 9o-8,
Schapper, Karl, 1 1 6 102-1 5; word, 90; spread of, 95-6
Scheidemann, Philipp, 1 5 1 Socialist League, 105
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph society: supposed laws of, 3 6-7, 42-3,
von: on insight, 9, 200; Heine on 5o-2; and planning, 8 2-5; romantic
revolutionary achievements of, 67; view of, 1 83-5
aesthetic theories, 97, 202-3; Socrates, 54
romanticism, 1 79; and creativity, Sophists, 1 69, 1 7 1
1 84-5; on man and will, 2 3 8 Sorel, Georges, 6, 1 07, 1 43
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich Sovremennik (journal), 2 20
von: romanticism, 1 79; and Spanish Civil War, 1 1 4
freedom in art, 1 84; non­ Spence, Thomas, 92
rationalism, 1 89; on artist as Spencer, Herbert, 43
avenger of insulted nature, 1 98, Spengler, Oswald, 5-6, 42
2 I 3i Belinsky on, 205, 2 q; on Spinoza, Benedictus de, 40, 64, 1 2 1
Shakespeare, 2 1 8; Turgenev Stalin, Josef V.: effect on history, 9,
favours, 2 2 5 ; on reaction to 1 1-1 2; uniqueness, 3 2; and
oppression, 244; in translation, 249; scientific socialism, 43; lacks
The Robbers, I 88 political judgement, 5 1; on State
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 1 79, oppression, 73; heads Russian
I97. 2 1 0, 2 1 4 Communist Party, 1 I 4i non­
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 1 79, I97i nationalism, 1 64
Lucinde, 1 82 Stankevich, Nikolai V., 203-4
scholastic philosophy, 6 1-2 State, the: and control of freedom,
science: limitations, xviii, 48, 50; laws 54-6, 66, 69; and suppression of
of, 2-3; ideal system, 2 1-2 new ideas, 69, 72-3, 7 5 i and
Scott, Sir Walter, 198 property ownership, So; and
self and not-self, 1 79-82, 244 planning, 83-9, 9 1 , 96, I03i and
Seneca, 1 idea of Socialism, 9o-1 ; and class
Shaftesbury, Anthony �shley Cooper, divisions, 98, 1 oo, 1 42; Marx on,
3rd Earl of, 1 79 1 3 4; Marxist hostility to, 1 42-3;
 I N D EX 277
and First International, I p ; and totalitarianism, xviii, 1 I
self, 244; and nationalism, 246-7 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph, 9, 42, 45
Stendhal (i.e. Marie-Henri Beyle}, 8 5> trade unions: in England, I o6, 1 56;
I 88, 229 and economic reform, I 57
Stoics and Stoicism, 78, I 2 I , I J S , I68, translation, 249-50
195· 2 4 1 , 244 Trollope, Anthony, 229
Strachey, John, 1 5 7 Trotsky, Leon, I I 2, I I 4, I 64
Struve, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm, I I O 'True Socialists', the, I 36
subjectivism, xix, 26, 1 7o- 1 , 1 8 7-9 Trusov, Anton D., 145
Sue, Eugene, 198, 2 I 2 truth: as discoverable, 1 7o-I, I 74-5,
symbols: and human assumptions, I 8J ; and natural law, I 79; and
q-I6; and thoughts, 62 romantic revolution, 1 8 3 ;
syndicalist movement, 97, 1 04, I o6, propagation of, 246
I I o- I I, I 14, I 49, I 5 J Turgenev, Ivan S., 202, 204, 205, 2 I I,
2 I 4, 2 I 6-22, 224-6, 230; Asya, 2 2 I
Tagore, Rabindranath: and national tyranny, 7 J , 7 5
emancipation, xx, 2 so, 2 59-66; and
language, 2 5 1 , 26 I-2; respect for Utilitarians, I9 1-3 , 245
British achievement, 262 Utin, Nikolai 1., 1 4 5
Taine, Hippolyte, s. 2 J I Utopianism: unrealisable nature of,
Talley rand-Perigord, Charles Maurice xviii, 2, 53; as anachronistic, 4-s,
de, 47 7-8, I I- 1 2, 39, 4 1 ; and science, 9,
Tasso, Torquato, I96 5 I-2; defined, 36-7; and fanaticism,
Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron, 7I 75; Saint-Simon and, 84; Fourier
Tertz, Abram (ps.) see Sinyavsky, and, 8 s-7; and romantics, 20I
Andrei D.
Thirty Years War, 240 value, theory of, 97, 99, I 02, 1 5 7
Thompson, William, 93 values (moral): as human aim, 1 72-4;
Thoreau, David, I48 romanticism and, I75-8, I 8 I ,
Thucydides, 26, 262 1 8 5-93; objective, 245; see also
Tieck, Johann Ludwig, I 79, I 88; morality
William Lovell, I82 Vandervelde, Emile, I 4 3, I 54
Tkachev, Peter, 96, I 64 Varlin, Louis-Eugene, I I 6
Tocqueville, Alexis de, I 49 Viardot, Pauline, 2 I 8
Tolain, Henri Louis, 1 I 6, I 40 Vico, Giambattista: on historical
Tolstoy, Count Lev: and historical patterns, xiv-xv, 45; cosmology, 3;
process, xvi; and human diversity, on customs and institutions, s; on
xvii; profundity and insight, xvii, cultural uniqueness, I 9; on inner
20, I48; organic view of life, 34, 46, understanding, I 8 5
48, I 48; on limited viewpoint, 68; Vigny, Alfred de, I 88
modesty, I92; Anna Akhmatova Virgil, s. 71
criticises, 209; place in Russian virtue, I 75
literature, 2 I4; Turgenev and, Viviani, Rene, I S 4
2 1 9-2 I ; and Belinsky, 2 2 1 , 224-6; Vollmar, Georg Heinrich, 143, 1 54
artistic commitment, 2 22-7, 230; Voltaire, Fran�ois Marie Arouet de,
Tagore and, 263; War and Peace, 43-4· 79· I 8 2
xvi, 3 3 Volynsky, Akim L., 2 10
Tomanovskaya, Elizaveta L . (ps. voprosy: defined, 209n
Dmitrievna}, I 4 5
Torquemada, Juan de, 192 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, I 79
 T H E S E N S E OF REALITY
Washington, George, 3 2, 42 Wolff, Major Luigi, I I 6
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 105 women: status of, 97
Weitling, Wilhelm, 96, 1 3 6 Wordsworth, William, 48, I 88, 200
Wells, H.G., 2o, p , 1 9 2
Yeats, W.B., 2 50
Whitman, Walt, 1 48
Yugoslavia, I I4
will, 244-5
William of Occam, 64, 74 Zasulich, Vera, I I O, I p
Winstanley, Gerrard, 79 Zeno, 78
Wolff, Christian, 64 Zimmerwald (Switzerland), I I I