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_p Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik will probably object that he regards the course of development of Russian social thought not from the viewpoint of the struggle of the old against the new, but from that of the struggle of individualism against philistinism. And he will be right in his way, but note: right only in his way, i.e., wrong. For him the intelligentsia is the bearer of the principle of individualism. But what is the intelligentsia? To this question he himself . replies: "the intelligentsia is an ethically anti-philistine, sociologically non-estate, non-class, successive group characterised by the creation of new forms and ideals" (I, 16, italics as in the original).

p Is this not exactly what I said?

p True, and Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik will place great emphasis on the following: the intelligentsia is characterised, according to him, not only by its creation of new forms and ideals, but also "by its active realisation of the latter in the direction of the physical and intellectual, social and personal emancipation of the individual" (ibid., italics again as in the original).

p This addition probably seems essential to him; but he is gravely mistaken: it not only fails to rectify the matter, but makes it even worse.

At best it shows only that our historian does not confine himself to noting the struggle of the new against the old, but also defines what is the new, i.e., what are the ideals for which the innovators are fighting. Let us assume that the definition given by him is clear and accurate, although I do not fully understand what the "personal emancipation of the individual" means. But the point is not what the ideals of the innovators are but what their sociological

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496 equivalent is, i.e., where they have come from, why they have arisen at the given stage of social development.

p This is the most important question of any serious philosophy of the history of social thought, and it is precisely this question that is overlooked, and is inevitably bound to be overlooked, by all those who choose to adhere to Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik’s viewpoint.

p To what extent this is so will be seen from a very simple example. The Russian intelligentsia has indeed concerned itself a great deal with the study of all manner of questions relating to the “individual”, but there was a very definite social reason for this: our “individualism” appeared as a reaction against the enslaving of all and sundry in the Moscow and Petersburg periods of our history. Since no social class (or estate) could appear as the representative of this reaction, due to the undeveloped state of our social relations, it naturally assumed a “group”, i.e., "non-estate and non-class character". Herzen was well aware of this,  [496•*  although, due to a logical error which actually enabled him to become the "father of Narodism”, he regarded this not as our misfortune, but as our advantage over the Western peoples. But for Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik our " individualism”, born of our great historical misfortune, our terrible economic backwardness, acquires, like philistinism, the importance of an eternal category and is therefore not examined in the light of sociology, which alone can reveal the weak points that made it a type of utopianism, until—in recent times—it began to turn into something incomparably worse and most unattractive.

p Another example. For our author philistinism is both the petty-bourgeois spirit which sickened Herzen in the West and the spirit of the barracks,—of the drum civilisation, as Herzen, rich in epithets, puts it somewhere,—which in Russia characterised the age of Nicholas I. These are by no means the same, but for Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik philistinism has a "noumenal sense"  [496•**  and, consequently, is not conditioned by circumstances of time and place, by the phenomena of social life passing through different phases of development.

p I have said, and this will not, of course, be refuted by any “individualists”, that in a society divided into classes the aspirations of the innovators, like those of the conservatives, are always 497 determined by the relations of the classes. In capitalist society the new ideal is that which consists essentially in abolishing all class rule, or, to put it more abstractly, in abolishing the exploitation of man by man, or, evon more abstractly, in "the social emancipation of the individual". Why this ideal develops precisely in capitalist society at certain stages of its development is again explained by the mutual relations between the classes in the given society, but, once having arisen in the capitalist countries of the West, this ideal was imported also into backward Russia, which was not yet capitalist: emancipatory ideas have for a long time been imported to us from the West together with all that "dainty London is retailing for our caprices never-failing".^^143^^ And once having arrived in backward, not yet capitalist Russia, it inevitably, i.e., precisely because Russia was a backward country in which modern class relations were still in embryonic form,—it inevitably took on a most abstract form, i.e., was formulated as "the social emancipation of the individual”. Finally, in this abstract form it entered the head of Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik, who as an “individual” familiar with philosophical terminology immediately gave it a "noumenal sense”. But no matter what we call a rose, it will not lose its scent, and no matter what name our “historian” invents for the most progressive and most shining of all presentday social ideals, this ideal will not lose its birth-certificate. For anyone with the slightest understanding of the matter, it will remain an ideal engendered by certain class relations, and whoever maintains that it originates from unknown “noumenal” parents, that it saw the light of day in a "non-estate and non-class" wasteland, will reveal one of two things: either that he knows nothing about the matter, or that he has some extraneous reasons for distorting the truth.

_p Mr. Ivanov-Razumnik maintains that the intelligentsia can be composed of people of very different social status. This is indeed so, but what of it? Mirabeau and Sieyes were aristocrats, but this did not prevent them from becoming ideologists of the third estate. Marx, Engels and Lassalle were of bourgeois origin, but this did not prevent them from becoming the ideologists of the proletariat. Speaking of the French petty-bourgeois ideologists of 1848, Marx very rightly remarks: "Just as little must one imagine that the democratic (bourgeois.—G.P.) representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic supporters of shopkeepers. In their education and individual position they may be as far apart from them as heaven from earth. What makes them representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds, theoretically, they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, in practice.... This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent."^^144^^

_p 32—0766

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