286
JOSEPH FRANK
of exile, and an ensuing preoccupation with religious mysticism; but he
returned to such problems under the influence of George Sand and
Pierre Leroux, whose own Socialism was strongly tinged with mystical
and religious ideas. The early 'forties brought him into contact with
Hegel, and he thrashed out his final position by prolonged debates with
two groups-on the one hand the nationalistic Moscow Slavophils, on
the other the more liberal Westerners. Herzen personally had a foot in
both camps, though his best friends were among the second group; and
he eventually broke off relations with the Slavophils because, in the last
analysis, they still supported autocracy and orthodoxy despite their
moderately liberal desire for such Western inventions as freedom of
speech, press and thought.
Herzen, however, took from the Slavophils the idea that the Russian
peasant commune, with its completely democratic administration by a
village councilor
miT,
and its periodic redistribution of land, realized
the ideals toward which European society was aspiring in such imaginary
Utopias as the Fourierist phalanstery. His debates with the Westerners,
who refused to go along either with his atheism or his idealization of
the people, made
him
aware of the internal hindrances in European
culture itself-as reflected by its defenders and admirers in Russia-bar–
ring the way to the realization of the brave new world of integral freedom
that he desired. One of the most original aspects of Professor Malia's
book, from the purely historical point of view, is his demonstration of
the effect that Herzen's conflict with the Westerners had on shaping
his predisposition to believe that European culture was incapable of
sloughing off its centuries-old involvement with bourgeois individualism,
private property and a centralized state. By the time he came to Europe
in 1847 this conviction had already begun to harden; and the failure
of the revolutions of 1848 simply confirmed what he already felt. Out of
this concatenation emerged Herzen's Messianic and nationalistic "Rus–
sian Socialism," which counted on Russia and the peasant commune, led
by the enlightened members of the radical gentry, to show the world
the way to the Socialist Utopia of the future. It was this "Russian
Socialism" that became the ideology of Russian Populism up through
the rise of Marxism in 1880.
Malia is not content merely with impressively unrolling the pan–
orama of these events as cultural history; he also attempts to "explain"
them in terms of an elaborate employment of what he calls "social
psychology." He links his method to that of the Left Hegelians, Karl
Mannheim, Max Scheler and the Neo-Hegelian heretical Georg Lukacs
of the early 'twenties; but despite this formidable array of authorities,
