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PART I SAN REVIEW
Europe; while it had the crucial advantage of seeming to face the stark
facts of economic evolution at the same time.
Mr. Billington touches only peripherally on this earlier phase of
Populism and, when he does so, tends to underestimate the effects of
Herzen's ideas on later generations ; but this does not mar his picture
of the flowering of the movement in the 1870's. Up to this point, Pop–
ulism was not really a distinct ideology but only one strand of the
surge of unrest known as Russian Nihilism. The intellectual leaders of
Nihilism- Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev- were far less san–
guine about the Russian peasant and the village commune than Herzen;
and radical thought during the 'sixties, without openly rejecting Her–
zen's Populist ideas, played down their Messianic aspects and empha–
sized the necessity for Russia of acquiring the scientific and technical
skills of the West. The early 1870's, however, brought about a sharp
change in the Russian political and cultural climate- a change partly
traceable, as Mr. Billington demonstrates, to the defeat of the Paris
Commune. Just as Herzen's Slavophil-tinged Populism matured after
the defeat of the revolution of 1848 in Europe, so the ideas of Mik–
hailovsky and the later Populists turned back towards Russia when the
Commune ended in disaster and France adjusted itself to the reign of
the hated bourgeois Third Republic.
Mr. Billington's book gives an excellent (but all too brief) con–
spectus of the many areas in which Populist ideas and feelings found
expression. Populism acquired its intellectual rationale in Mikhailov–
sky's attacks on Western theories of progress and particularly on social
Darwinism. Strongly influenced by Lange's neo-Kantian approach in
his
History of Materialism,
Mikhailovsky argued that truth-as-fact was
distinguished from truth-as-ideal. No ideal of progress could be derived
from truth-as-fact because such an ideal could not be merely the out–
come of a blind play of natural (or social) forces ; it had to come from
a goal set by human aspiration or desire, from ethics rather than from
economics or history.
As
such a criterion of progress, Mikhailovsky pos–
tulated the most harmonious and many-sided development of every
individual.
Mikhailovsky successfully defended this "subjective" ideal against
the "objective" Darwinism of Western thinkers; but when he attempted
to explain how this ideal could be translated into social fact, his posi–
tion became much more dubious. For Mikhailovsky the Russian village
commune, with its absolute economic and social equality, came closer
to satisfying the true "subjective" ideal of progress than Western capi–
talism. The Russian village, he said, might still be on a lower "level"
