"what is real is rational": the political philosophy of b. n. chicherin

EHESS

"What Is Real Is Rational": The Political Philosophy of B. N. ChicherinAuthor(s): Aileen KellySource: Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1977), pp. 195-222Published by: EHESSStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27669452 .

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AILEEN KELLY

"WHAT IS REAL IS RATIONAL":

THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

OF B. N. CHICHERIN

Few Russian thinkers have benefited so much from historical hind

sight as Boris Chicherin. Politically isolated, alienated from and often

despised by those whom he sought to influence, he was described by Petr Struve as a "superfluous" figure in the Russia of his time1; and one of his very few sympathisers among his contemporaries, the leader of the right wing of the Kadet Party, V. Maklakov, subsequently expressed regret that Chicherin had had absolutely no influence on the Russian liberal movement2. But a totally different picture is presented in later assessments of his role by Western scholars; here he is given an archetypal significance as an outstanding, even "the most important" theorist of Russian liberalism,3 and "the theoretical forerunner, if not the main

prophet" of the Kadet Party.4 It is true that there is a striking absence of consensus among these

scholars as to the precise nature of Chicherin's liberalism. He has been described as an "ardent individualist", one of "the three theoretical leaders of [. . .] classical Western liberalism in Russia"5 or, alternatively, as "akin to the Rechtsstaat liberals of Bismarck Germany"6. He is seen as having outpaced all the liberal theories of his time,7 or, on the

contrary, as an "old-fashioned" liberal;8 as one of "the more typical" liberals,9 or as "a solitary figure"10 to their right. However, this dis

agreement as to Chicherin's place on the liberal spectrum could in part be attributed to the difficulty of defining liberalism in a country lacking the social and political structures within which liberalism had developed in the West, and there is general unanimity among Western historians as to the fundamental characteristic of his thought: a pragmatic realism of the sort which distinguishes liberals from radicals and conservatives alike: believing like Goethe that life fits theory only as the human body fits the cross, they demand that programmes and ideals be constantly balanced with and adapted to the changing needs and requirements of the given historical moment. It is to this characteristic that Chicherin's isolation from his contemporaries among the Russian intelligentsia is

usually attributed: he is seen to be the victim of the crude thinking of radical ideologists who divided Russian thinkers into two camps?pro

Cahiers du Monde russe et sovi?tique, XVIII (3), juil.-sept. 1977, pp. 195-222.



196 AILEEN KELLY

gressive and reactionary?, and labelled as the latter all who did not

agree with them, without attempting to understand their ideas.* I propose to argue that this interpretation suffers from the defect

which its proponents attribute to Chicherin's Russian critics: it distorts his ideas, the better to fit them into a schema imposed a priori on Russian

thought. Through a r??valuation of his political philosophy within the

specific ideological context of its development I shall attempt to show that the term liberal is wholly inapplicable to it, and that Chicherin was an

ideologist more fanatically intransigent, doctrinaire and extremist than most of his opponents.

The overall schema which seems to have become, implicitly at least, the accepted framework for Western studies of Russian thought can

roughly be said to be the classic distinction formulated by liberal histo rians and based on the experience of Western democracies after the French

revolution?the distinction between proponents of liberal and totalitarian

democracy; the first characterised by pragmatism, moderation, respect for the continuity of institutions and traditions, recognition of a variety of levels of endeavour independent of politics, and a "negative" concep tion of liberty as denoting absence of coercion; the second doctrinaire,

intransigent, holding political programmes as part of an all-embracing ideology centred on a messianic vision of a single harmonious scheme of

things which is held to be "scientifically" demonstrable, and with a

"positive" conception of liberty as deriving from total participation in the chosen cause.11

It is customary, with the hindsight afforded by the Russian Revolu

tion, to attribute the psychology of totalitarian democrats to the Russian

intelligentsia en masse, inasmuch as their goal was a total transformation of all areas of social existence, and to give special significance to a small number of thinkers who incessantly pointed to the seeds of despotism in the revolutionary messianism of the Left, and insisted that freedom could be attained only through gradualism?a realistic adaptation of

ideals to historical circumstances. The most prominent of these was

Chicherin; his arguments were taken up by the authors of the Vekhi

symposium in their famous attack on the revolutionary intelligentsia in 1909.

Hence the importance of Chicherin in Western analyses of Russian

thought: in the absence of an effective liberal party (liberals being often as intransigent as the left in their opposition to the government) he is seen to stand at the head of a tenuous tradition of responsible "realists"

who defended a liberal conception of freedom against the irresponsible utopianism of the Left.12

The danger of this interpretation is that it is less an attempt to discern a pattern of conflict in Russian thought than to integrate conflicts a priori into a borrowed schema, so that a closed circle is formed where the pattern revealed is inherent in the criterion used to discover it; the result is that certain resemblances between Chicherin and Western liberals are emphasised, but striking differences are understated or

ignored. But these differences of themselves invalidate the analogy; for they draw attention to the specific political context of his theories, and remind us that calls to gradualism, realism and compromise in condi



CHICHER?AS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY I97

tions of unlimited autocracy cannot possibly mean anything approaching the same as similar slogans used in the context of a Western democracy.

I believe that the lack of consensus as to the nature of Chicherin's "liberalism" is due to the fact that this is so misleading a label that it can

be made to fit his theories only at the cost of grossly distorting their

meaning. If one examines without preconceptions the nature of the "realism" which was his battle-cry against the Left, it can be seen to

denote a curious ideology, as all-embracing as any to be found on the

Left, and based on an idiosyncratic interpretation of Hegel. The influence of Hegel on his political philosophy is not disputed, but it is not usually held to be incompatible with what is seen as his pragmatic realism in politics. I wish to argue that on the contrary his interpretation of Hegel was so doctrinaire as to make him incapable of realism or prag

matism in any liberal sense of the words, reality for Chicherin being the "rational reality" of Hegelian fantasy.

I

Chicherin's political thought was formed in the conditions of extreme intellectual and social isolation experienced by the intelligentsia of the

pre-reform Russia of the 1830's and 1840's. Chicherin describes in his memoirs how men of independent minds, with no arena of public activity open to them, channelled their energies into philosophical speculation, seeking in it some explanation of their predicament as isolated intellec tuals in a backward milieu.13 When the intellectually precocious Chicherin arrived in Moscow in 1844 at the age of sixteen to prepare for entrance to the University, like many of his contemporaries he found this

explanation in Hegel's philosophy; and it is important for an under

standing of his later thought to realise that when these men announced, as they frequently did, that they had escaped from the world of "abstrac tions" into "reality", they meant by the latter not the world of empirical experience but the "rational reality" of Hegel: a metaphysical framework, a cosmic schema which alone gave meaning and coherence to the disparate phenomena of the external world, by revealing their role in a preordained pattern leading to the realisation of the Absolute in the world.

By the mid-1840's, the Russian Hegelians had divided, according to their interpretation of "reality", into two camps?conservative and

radical?, and it was from members of the former, such as P. Redkin,

professor of law, and the historian T. Granovskii that the student Chiche rin took a view of the dialectic which emphasised the gradual develop

ment of political forms and institutions as necessary stages in the march of Spirit to self-realisation. If for Left Hegelians like Alexander Herzen

"reality" was dynamic tension and conflict, Chicherin in contrast was

"totally seduced" by a vision of the "marvellous harmony" of the eternal

principles of being, in which all social forms had their foreordained place.14 News permeating into Russia of the European Revolutions of 1848

turned Chicherin's attention to politics. Like his mentors, he was shocked by the violence of the revolution, which brought his thoughts "down from the level of ideals to that of reality"15 and led him to dismiss



198 AILEEN KELLY

socialist ideals as Utopian dreams, "the delirium of overheated minds", unable to cope with reality.16 "Realism", defined as the more "sober" view that history could make no jumps, that only those ideals could be realised which accorded with the given stage of development, was to be henceforth Chicherin's slogan in his battle with the Left. But his new "realism" was in essence no different from his old. For it was not an

empirical approach to events which enabled Chicherin to distinguish between realisable and unrealisable ideals, but the determinism of the conservative Hegelian; 1848 merely confirmed him in the belief which, as he subsequently asserts, would be the theme of all his later writings? that historical "reality" was "the actual representation of Spirit, elabo

rating its self-definition according to the eternal laws of Reason inherent in it", and that all events were organically integrated in "a single living picture",17 which, it goes without saying, could be deciphered only by those initiated into the workings of the Spirit.

The first public polemic in which Chicherin applied his Hegelian conservatism to politics occurred in the late fifties. Hegel and 1848 had led him to general agreement with the liberal Westernisers who believed that the ultimate goal for Russia was a constitutional regime modelled on those of the West, and who emphasised that the only path to this was

change from above, initiated by the tsar with the help of the nobility. They were increasingly alarmed at Herzen's propaganda from London for socialism based on the Russian peasant commune. In 1856 Chicherin

joined with Ravelin in a letter to Herzen's organ Golosa iz Rossii denounc

ing this ideal as a Utopian fantasy.18 However, while Ravelin, like the other Westernisers, believed that their common bond with Herzen in

seeking basic reforms was then more important than their differences as to ultimate ideals, Chicherin's opposition to Herzen became increas

ingly vehement. In particular he attacked as too extreme Herzen's

warnings to the new tsar, then wavering between reform and reaction, that if he did not initiate reforms himself, they would come about from below by violent revolution.19 Herzen replied in an article in Kolokol where he described such critics as narrow doctrinaires, much more

concerned with prescribing the path reforms must take than with defend

ing reform itself against reaction20. In a reply printed in Kolokol Chicherin accused Herzen of irresponsibly seeking to arouse the passions of the masses by inflammatory propaganda; instead he should use his influence to persuade them to modify their demands, to mediate between

government and people; for the responsible conduct of public affairs demanded the securing of change by legal means, through patience, a sense of timing and moderation.21

The polemic is usually taken as a paradigm denoting the opposition of two political archetypes, or "temperaments", as Chicherin calls them22

?the responsible liberal pragmatist and the doctrinaire extremist; and it is interpreted (in accordance with the schema outlined above) as

marking the division of Russian thought into opposing liberal and extrem ist strands. But Chicherin's contemporaries took a different view of the debate: in a foreword to Chicherin's letter Herzen emphasises that it comes from an entirely different camp than previous criticism of

Kolokol?the camp of official ("governmental") doctrinairism?and in



CHICHERIN'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY I99

this he was supported by the most prominent of the moderate Western isers who all took his side.23 Ravelin in a letter to Chicherin points out that Herzen had never preached violent revolution as a desirable out

come; on the contrary, emphasising the danger of revolutionary destruc

tion, he had urged the government to forestall it by reform, whereby he was stating the view of all liberals; Chicherin by painting him as a

proponent of violence was playing the game of the tsar's reactionary advisors, providing them with justification for increased repression.24

Herzen 's interpretation of the polemic is usually discounted or

ignored, inasmuch as it does not fit the accepted paradigm; in fact it draws attention to what the latter has completely obscured?the ideo

logical nature of the polemic. In a letter which he wrote but did not send to Chicherin at the time, and which was later published in his

memoirs,25 Herzen treats the dispute as in essence a philosophical one,

originating in the intelligentsia's earlier polemics on the nature of Hege lian "reality". Although he does not refer directly to those polemics, the argument of the letter repeats that of his famous Hegelian article of 1843, "Buddhism in Science", directed against the most extreme of the Right Hegelians, who had used Hegel's axiom

" what is real is

rational" as the basis of their notorious "reconciliation with reality", a justification of all aspects of life under the regime of Nicholas the First, as being inevitable and necessary manifestations of the Absolute. In their use of a deterministic philosophy of history to justify an unjust reality, Herzen had accused them of committing the cardinal sin of all doctri naire Idealists, religious and secular: condoning the sacrifice of real individuals to ideal abstractions, the individual and particular being in their eyes only instruments in the attainment of the ends of the

Absolute. In his letter to Chicherin Herzen depicts him as a doctrinaire of this

type: the basis of his opposition to radical reform being his conviction,

supported by Hegel's philosophy of history, that the modern state is the

supreme stage of development of all human societies, he was logically obliged to oppose all popular aspirations, however justified, which could undermine the existing state. Present reality being an inevitable stage in the unfolding of a "programme" of progress, Chicherin cannot rebel

against it: "You know that if the past was thus and thus, the present must be thus and thus, and lead to that particular future. You reconcile your understanding with [this]." Chicherin is not disconcerted by those who find the given reality intolerable: "Aware of the inevitability of suffering, the doctrinaire stands, like Simon Stylites, on a pillar, sacrificing all the

temporal to the eternal, the living and particular to universal ideas." The intended parallel with the Right Hegelians of two decades before is obvious.

Herzen argues that Chicherin is defending the bureaucratic state not as an efficient means of social organisation, but as the summit of Hegel's "reality", a civil religion, replacing the religious idols of the past. "For

you the heavenly ranks have been replaced by state rank, [. . .] God has been replaced by centralisation, the priest by the policeman." In an

oblique reference to Chicherin's frequently expressed belief that Russia is not yet "ready" for constitutional liberties,26 Herzen asserts that



200 AILEEN KELLY

whatever he might say about liberty, Chicherin is in the tradition of those priestly castes who prescribed to the mass of men the role of a

submissive flock and saw themselves as the sole interpreters of eternal truth.

Herzen's view of Chicherin as a "bureaucratic Saint-Just",27 fanati

cally devoted to the state as the embodiment of the Absolute in the world, is very far from the commonly accepted view of him as a liberal prag

matist. I shall now attempt to show that of the two views, the first is closer to the truth.

II

Due to the problems involved in defining liberalism in a country lacking the social and political conditions within which liberalism had

developed in the West, there is no consensus among scholars on the

precise definition of Russian liberalism as distinct from ideologies to its left and right. For example, it is often asserted that liberals were to be found among those who sought violent overthrow of the existing government,28 while it has been claimed on the contrary that the only "true" Russian liberalism was conservative liberalism which preferred enlightened absolutism to radicalism.29

There is however general agreement that liberalism in Russia as elsewhere entailed adherence to "a theory holding that political authority

must be restrained by law and representative institutions"30 in the name of the rights of individuals; and, while, as I noted earlier, there is wide

diversity of opinion as to what sort of liberal Chicherin was, there is

agreement that he is a liberal in this, the widest sense of the term (a sense which includes the disparate traditions of Locke and Mill, Burke and the proponents of the Rechtsstaat). I shall now attempt to show that even in this generic sense of the term, Chicherin was not a liberal. I will do this by examining the views on which his reputation as a liberal rests: that conception of "liberal conservatism" which he formulated in the late i85o's and early i86o's and which was the basis of his polemics not

only with the Left but also with most of those who passed for liberals in nineteenth-century Russia.31

At the time of Chicherin's polemic with Herzen, liberalism in Russia

was, as G. Fischer has described it, little more than "a state of mind, a hazy cluster of political ideas and programmes";32 it was above all a mood of moral opposition to serfdom, and of solidarity with those calls for reform then being expressed in Herzen's Kolokol. The importance of this common bond made Russian liberals content to treat their differences with Herzen in the pre-reform period as primarily a matter of emphasis. Even Chicherin is surprisingly tentative when in 1858, commenting on his differences with Herzen, he suggests that "here is

perhaps revealed the difference between liberalism and radicalism. . . '\33 It was in order to draw for the first time a firm line between liberal

and radical tendencies in Russia that at the beginning of the i86o's Chicherin defines "true" liberalism, as distinct from two other kinds of liberalism.34 The first of these he dismisses as "street liberalism"?the



CHICHERIN'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 201

attitude of those for whom liberalism meant the rejection of culture and tradition and the removal of all constraints (he is here aiming at the

emerging raznochintsy). But it is the second category, in which he includes Herzen and his liberal sympathisers, who are the main object of his attack. This type he sees as a more civilised version of the first: he too is systematically opposed, in the name of freedom, to the authority of the state and to tradition: "Abolish, dissolve, destroy?that is his

whole system."35 His ideals bear no relation to reality?"The further a given principle is from the existing order, the more general and unde

fined, the more hidden in a mist of hazy concepts. . . the dearer it is to

oppositional liberalism."36 This liberal divides reality into polaric opposites: those aspects of which he approves?the people, self-govern

ment, public opinion; and the embodiment of evil?centralisation, bureaucracy, the state, with which he refuses to have anything to do. It is this attitude that Chicherin held principally to blame for the fact that after the reforms of 1861 government and society remained polarised. It was essential, he asserted, if the reforms were to bear fruit, that there should be a body of opinion independent from the government but

prepared to cooperate with it in reform.37 In Russia after the Eman

cipation, "true liberalism is measured not by opposition, not by the

glorification of liberty, not by advanced opinions, but by devotion to the Edict of 19 February."38 The only true liberalism is therefore "liberal conservatism", whose slogan is "liberal measures and strong

power":39 it respects law and the principle of power on the grounds that a strong government is the only safeguard against anarchy, the precursor of despotism. True liberalism is pragmatic: it "must accommodate itself to life, draw lessons from history, act with an understanding of the conditions of power [. . .] not making irrational demands [. . .] encouraging and restraining where necessary. . .";40 and Chicherin frequently invokes,

against those who see reality only through the prism of their dogmas, a thorough-going "realism": "The whole task [of the political thinker] can be reduced [. . .] to a practical understanding of existing [reality]; one must discern those forces which contain a degree of permanence, and

which at a given moment could form the basis of a social organisation."41 This definition of liberalism seems impeccable, and it was taken up

by Petr Struve, one of the contributors to Vekhi who concurred with Chicherin in describing the mentality of most of those who passed for liberals in Russia as kazachestvo?a Cossack mentality: uncompromising and anarchic hostility to authority in all its forms;42 and Struve's writings have done much to promote the image of Chicherin as a true liberal

pragmatist, swimming against an irresponsibly Utopian stream.43

However, while Struve, seeking in retrospect a tradition in which to set his own thought, took Chicherin's definition of liberalism at face value, Chicherin's contemporaries were much more conscious of its ideological underpinnings, which gave his defence of "realism" and the "laws of life" a far from pragmatic connotation. Chernyshevskii spoke for his

generation when he denounced Chicherin's ideology as "scholasticism,

proceeding from a false foundation by means of twisted syllogisms with utter contempt for [. . .] the facts."44 But liberals were no less conscious of the philosophical underpinnings of Chicherin's liberalism. Ivan Tur



202 AILEEN KELLY

genev sees him as a "doctrinaire";45 while Ravelin, as hostile to revolution as Chicherin, nevertheless had deep misgivings about Chicherin's theory of the state. Writing to M. Katkov, then editor of the liberal journal Russkii vestnik, he agrees with the latter's decision not to publish a

review submitted by Chicherin, because of its "apotheosis" of state

centralism, based, Ravelin believed, on a "terribly mistaken" ideology; "against the new Baal, the idea of the state, to which he offers human

sacrifices, we must take up arms with all our strength. . ,"46

III

The "new Baal" was Chicherin's vision of the Hegelian state: this is the central focus of his political philosophy, and I shall argue firstly, that his

writings on the state present a rigid system which is, as was Hegel's own,

irreconcilably opposed to classical Western liberalism on the question of the source and nature of individual liberty; and, secondly, that in his

application of this system to the Russia of his time, Chicherin departs even from the questionable liberalism of Hegel's system.

Chicherin's first acquaintance with Hegel's works in 1847 was followed

by years of intensive study of Hegel through which "the whole historical

development of mankind acquired significance for me."47 Together with the historians K. Ravelin, S. M. Solov'ev and others, he founded what became known as the ?tatiste school of history, which saw Hegel's doctrine of the dialectical unfolding of Spirit as the key to the historical

process.48 Like Hegel, they saw the progress of Reason in the world as

reflected in the progression of human societies towards the form of the modern state which represented that communality (Hegel's Algemein heit) of social relations which was the premiss of liberty. Like Hegel, they saw the ideal state as a constitutional monarchy with legal guarantees of rights,49 and Chicherin's writings on this theme constitute the "liberal"

aspect of his doctrine. He emphasises that the realm of private law should not be absorbed in the state, and defends the right to private property, freedom of conscience and freedom of contracts. He goes further than most of his Russian contemporaries in advocating a laisser

faire economy, arguing that a large degree of individual economic initiative is essential for national prosperity.50 It is on these views that critics draw to illustrate Chicherin's liberal defence of the individual

against the encroachments of old-fashioned despotism on the one hand, and socialism on the other.51 They pay less attention to the caveats

with which he surrounds them. He is often quoted, for example, as

emphasising that "the free individual with his rights and interests" is the "basic and essential element" of the state;52 however, at the same

time he writes that individual liberty must never reach that "extreme" form where it is seen as the basis of the state structure, as in England at that time where, he asserts, "the overemphasis of the personal principle and the jealous attitude of [the defenders of] liberty towards the govern

ment have led to unwarranted limitations of the state's power."53 The

separation of public and moral law which Chicherin was to uphold against socialists who submerged the private in the public sphere is also, as we




shall see, somewhat at odds with his own interpretation of law as "the moral principle of the state structure".54 "Man is free to do as he likes, but he is not free to go against the laws of Spirit"?55 this Hegelian paradox points to the conservative side of Chicherin's philosophy, the side to which he devotes by far the greater part of his writings. Here he

diverges from other representatives of the ?tatiste school on two crucial

aspects of his interpretation of Hegel?his attitude to the concept of law, and his prescriptions on the hierarchical nature of the state.

Chicherin's emphasis on the importance of law is usually seen as the distinctive characteristic of his liberalism; it is often asserted that he was almost alone among Russian thinkers in pointing to the importance of legal guarantees of rights, the radical intelligentsia in contrast believing that destruction of privilege would of itself ensure individual liberty.56

Those who hold this view, however, fail to mention a curious paradox in Chicherin's defence of law: not only is it rooted in a concept of liberty drawn from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which is diametrically opposed to that of classical liberalism (the tradition of Locke, Bentham and Mill) and which is usually held to be hard to reconcile with liberalism in any form;57 it is also synthesised in Chicherin's thought with a defence of tradition and hierarchy drawn from a conservative interpretation of

Hegel's Philosophy of History?a synthesis representing a crude logical contradiction, opening the way to what is the theoretical basis of the

most authoritarian systems: an absolute philosophical sanction for the status quo.

Chicherin's "conservatism" issued from a Right Hegelian inter

pretation of the dialectic as justifying the maintenance of existing author ities rather than their overthrow. The "succession of organic formations" of which historical development consists are, he writes, the expression of a single spiritual essence.58 Thus, the foundations of society must consist of principles "sanctioned by tradition";59 every state needs a conservative party to preserve those "vital foundations"60 and restrain

more progressive elements.

It is on this Hegelian historicism and not, as is often maintained, on empirical grounds, that Chicherin based his defence of contemporary Russian institutions against those who called for further reforms to follow those of 1861, or even only for full implementation of those which had been promised. He opposes a radical reform of the bureaucracy, because it "has been given to us by history and contemporary life".61 To those who call for greater local self-government he retorts that to demand a weakening of the central power is to go against a thousand

years of history during which Russian society has been dominated by "the principle of power".62

These arguments, in particular the last, can hardly have impressed those who did not share Chicherin's faith in the absolute sanctity of tradition. Equally historicist was his opposition to those who pressed for immediate constitutional reform. Like Hegel, he asserts that the form of a constitutional state cannot be imposed a priori in any society, as it is based on a substructure of beliefs and habits, a level of conscious ness which is the product of a specific stage of development.63 In



204 AILEEN KELLY

Chicherin's view the Russian people would probably not for several

generations reach the level of consciousness necessary for the transition from absolutist to constitutional rule.64

Whatever its relation to the Russian realities of the mid-nineteenth

century, Chicherin's use of Hegel's philosophy of history as a brake on demands for reform has at least a doctrinal consistency. This consistency is lost when he attempts to defend the structure and legality of the Russian state with arguments of a different order?based on the conception of

liberty underlying Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

As Chicherin emphasised in his attacks on Russian liberals, he was

separated from them by a fundamentally different conception of liberty: to their "negative" view of liberty as the absence of constraints, he op posed a liberalism based on "positive" principles:65 a distinction identical with Hegel's distinction between "abstract" or "negative" liberty on

the one hand, and "concrete" liberty on the other. The first concept Hegel defined as that of classical liberalism, which held man to be free only

inasmuch as he was guaranteed an area of activity in which he could do as he liked without interference from others, and had the freedom to consent to or dissent from particular forms of government. Hegel's own concept of "concrete" or positive freedom on the other hand pre supposed constraints. Man could achieve liberty only through the state

which was the embodiment of his self-consciousness or reason, its institu tions being not an external coercive force but the expression of man's

moral nature, the "actuality of the ethical Idea". In the identity of the

personal and the universal will expressed in acts of obedience to law,

Hegel held, "right and duty coalesce".66

Hegel's doctrine of positive liberty was the foundation of his hier archical concept of the state structure. The state being the incarnation of man's rational consciousness, its structure must embody his moral

personality in ensuring the subordination of his subjective interests to the objective, universal will. Thus Hegel's state is a hierarchical struc ture reflecting three modes of consciousness. The agricultural class,

composed of nobility at the top and peasants at the bottom, represents a consciousness circumscribed by quasi-familial relations; the middle class, for whom intelligence is essential, represents a higher, more "objective" level of consciousness, and a rational, modern bureaucracy, the "uni

versal" class (motivated by the interests of society as a whole), plays the crucial role of mediator between subjective wills and the objective, universal goals of the state. Finally, the monarch, standing above the clash of contending forces, expresses in his person the integration of the

subjective principle with the universal will.

As liberal thinkers have pointed out, the doctrine of "positive liberty" can be used to justify despotism of the Left and the Right: once the state is identified with man's higher rational nature, its citizens are regarded as being free even when they are most coerced, their resistance to the force used against them being seen as the expression of their lower, irrational urges.67




Hegel, however, emphasised that the concept of positive liberty applied only to a state whose institutions reflected the self-consciousness of individuals, representing a true integration of subjective and objective

wills. In the system of representation he saw primarily an instrument of mediation between the subjective interests of civil society and the

objectivism of the state: those systems where the balance was disturbed

by excessive centralism he saw as despotic. It seems clear that Hegel saw not even the most advanced constitutional states of his time as

conforming to his conception of liberty; it is not surprising therefore that he seems to have seen the Russia of his time as almost as far removed from his ideal as the despotisms of the ancient East: "A state without a middle class must remain at a low level: Russia for instance has a mass of serfs on the one hand and a mass of rulers on the other."68

Chicherin profoundly admired the Philosophy of Right, seeing it as "the crown of all preceding development of thought".69 No other thinker had in his view defined so well the relations of "the opposing attributes of freedom?law and morality, which [. . .] are opposed to each other and then brought together in a higher unity in the organism of social unions [. . .] in which man [. . .] as a separate personality and as a rational and moral creature attains his highest calling".70

In his enthusiastic appreciation of its subtle dialectic between the

principles of freedom and constraint, Chicherin would seem to emphasise the gulf between the ideal state of the Philosophy of Right, and that absolutist regime which he himself had described as being, in the last

years of the reign of Nicholas the First, an Eastern despotism,71 and to whose continuation for several decades he had, with the help of Hegel's philosophy of history, resigned himself. However, to this legal philos opher, who always believed that the danger to legality was greater from the Left than from the Right, Hegel's arguments against "negative" liberty must have seemed an irresistible weapon to supplement the

Hegelian philosophy of history against what he saw as the increasing threat of anarchism. He clearly saw his doctrine of liberal conservatism as corresponding to the dialectical tensions of Hegel's concept of liberty, and it is perhaps on these grounds that he came to overlook the logical contradiction in his use of this concept to support his conservative historicism. For in his defence of the state order in Russia of the 1860's he applies the principles of the Philosophy of Right with such dogmatic rigidity that in his writings the real and the ideal, the regime of Alexander the Second and the Rechtsstaat of Hegel's imagination, seem often to coalesce. This attempt to fit a highly recalcitrant Russian reality into

Hegel's ideal scheme results in a curious analysis which for all its absur

dity is worth examination, inasmuch as it is on this that Chicherin's

reputation as a far-seeing liberal rests.

Chicherin's concept of liberty is closely modelled on Hegel's. As we have seen, he castigates those liberals for whom liberty is a "limitless

concept",72 who, he claims, feel oppressed by the most essential activities of the state: and he propounds the doctrine of "positive liberty": the state is not an external form imposed mechanically on an aggregate of

people; it is the people itself, as a "moral personality".73 In obeying



206 AILEEN KELLY

the law, man is obeying those "higher forces" which express the free

spirit of the nation.74 But Chicherin's emphasis on the sanctity of law must be seen in

context. At that time, Russian law, archaic and with a long tradition of

arbitrary interpretation and abuse, was only in the preliminary stages of reform. "Law" in the Hegelian or constitutional sense did not begin to exist in Russia until after 1905. The legal reforms completed in 1864 proclaimed the establishment of an independent judicial system and

equality of all before the law, but the incompatibility between the rule of law and unlimited autocracy, and the tsar's determination to keep the latter intact, was to deprive of any effective force all aspects of the reform which encroached on the total obedience which the autocrat demanded of his subjects. Appeals against violation of the law by officials were meaningless when by virtue of his position every order of the tsar and of the officials whose power derived from him alone had

supralegal force; and the shaky juridical guarantees of individual inviola

bility established in 1864 vanished a few years later when all crimes deemed

political were removed from the jurisdiction of the courts to that of the

political police. Given the above factors, it is not surprising that Chicherin's insistence

on the sanctity of the Russian legal system, at a time when these reforms had not even been embarked upon, was met with suspicion even by

moderate liberals as being, at the least, untimely. Nevertheless, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Jurisprudence

at Moscow University in 1861, a lecture which aroused a storm of protest among the progressive intelligentsia, Chicherin invoked his doctrine of obedience to law as the "primary condition of liberty" explicitly against the liberal movement, whose demands were directed to securing that

very legality to which Chicherin refers. The duty of obedience to law, he asserts, extends even to "bad" laws; for, if men obeyed only those laws of which they approved, anarchy would prevail. He clinches his

argument with the assertion: "For a jurist obedience to law is as basic an axiom as 'twice two equals four' is for a mathematician."75 There is notably absent from his argument the proviso which, for a jurist of the kind Chicherin professed to be, is at least as important as the axiom

itself?namely, that this binding character does not extend to edicts

emanating from an unconstitutional authority. Nor is the proviso omitted on the understanding that Chicherin was speaking of a hypothe tical constitutional state. His speech was a political one, delivered from an important public platform and explicitly directed against the enemies of the autocracy; and, as his audience well understood, his trenchant defence of all "law", good or bad, and irrespective of its source, was a defence of the status quo against its critics.76 He supports his argument with a (highly dubious) thesis which he had used in his polemic with Herzen?that in an autocracy which promises reform the obligation to exercise moderation and self-control rests primarily with the subjects of the autocrat. Again, he appears to be confusing the imperfect present

with the ideal future; the inference from these arguments would seem to be the logically absurd proposition that as soon as a despot announces, however ambiguously, his intention to move towards legality, his arbitrary




sanctions, enforced (as Chicherin admits) by corrupt courts,77 become in some way invested with the same morally binding character as those of the hypothetical future constitutional state. Chicherin again makes no distinction between categories of laws when in an article written at this time, he supports his criticism of the opponents of the regime with a more philosophical argument; it is only in the act of obedience to law that man realises his true nature as an end in himself. "The absolute

meaning of the law confers absolute meaning also on the [. . .] personality who recognises it."78 His tendency to confuse reality and the ideal, autocracy and Rechtsstaat, have led him to a monstrous sophistry; he turns Hegel's Philosophy of Right on its head to produce a syllogism

which would have warmed the heart of an oriental despot: if all "law", constitutional or not, emanates from man's moral nature as an end in

himself, then submission to the edicts of an autocrat confirms his subjects in their absolute value and dignity.

Having used Hegel's concept of liberty to defend the legality of the

existing regime against the Left, Chicherin then applies it to another front which was under bitter attack from liberals and socialists alike?the hierarchical structure of the Russian state, and in particular the role of the nobility and the bureaucracy. Of Hegel's three modes of conscious

ness, Russia possessed only two: the nobility and peasants on the one

hand, and the bureaucracy on the other. The formation of the third, a strong middle class, Chicherin sees as an urgent priority; it will "cement" Russian society and strengthen the central power.79 In its absence, Chicherin sees the nobility as representing that "rational force"80 which

gives it the right to political preeminence, as it alone in Russia possesses in its awareness of its rights the germ of a political consciousness. The

bureaucracy, while in need of some reform, must remain as "one of the central supports of the state order".81 Like Hegel, he calls for the

development of corporations, seeing in them (at least until the growth of the middle class) a school of civil life, channelling subjective interests into a universal framework.82

Russia's bureaucracy and nobility were, like its legal system, far removed from Hegel's specifications. At the time when Chicherin was

writing, even the most moderate liberals were at one with Herzen and Kolokol in condemning the attitude of these groups towards reform.

They pointed out that the extreme conservatism and corruption of the

bureaucracy led it consistently to discourage the tsar from reform by exaggerating the threat from the Left; and Chicherin himself, who suffered at its hands in the 1850's, describes it in his memoirs with feeling, as a

stifling and slavish milieu which repelled and disillusioned any gifted and high-minded young men who entered its ranks.83 Chicherin, too, echoes the fear that the nobility would manipulate the reforms for its own self-aggrandizement; indeed, he uses this as an argument against granting a constitution in the near future.84

He is not, however, disconcerted by the poverty of the material at

hand, nor by the gulf between reality and the Hegelian ideal. He recog nises that self-interest is the prime motivation of the bureaucracy and

nobility, but believes that the government will be able to contain their

ambition,85 and at a time when the nobility's caste interests were leading



208 AILEEN KELLY

a large proportion of them bitterly to oppose proposals for land reform and even the emancipation of the serfs, Chicherin advances Hegel's argument that the nobility is especially suited to political preeminence because its hereditary ownership of land makes it, unlike the other

estates, independent of sectional interests. Its traditional position as

the dependent of an autocratic power made it difficult to argue that it

represented a "rational force" in Hegel's sense, and Chicherin resorts to the curious argument that its moral qualification for political dominance lies in its sense of caste honour, its tradition of state service and its

experience, over centuries, of exercising power over serfs.86 Thus, Hegel is given another strange twist?the mentality of the slave-owner

becomes that "rational force", that moral consciousness, on which the state as the expression of man's moral personality is to rest.

Even more unconvincingly, that crucial figure in Hegel's state?the constitutional monarch?has its counterpart in Chicherin's interpretation of contemporary Russian reality. In 1862 he puts forward a view of the tsar which seems designed to meet Hegel's criteria for the head of state even more satisfactorily than Hegel's own constitutional monarch.87

A constitutional monarchy, he writes, is dominated by parties represent ing conflicting interests; the absolute ruler, on the other hand, represents the interests of the state as a whole. Moreover, under such a regime, all the most able men of the state may be called to state service; in a

constitutional regime many of them will be forced into opposition. In a constitutional monarchy, ministers are responsible to a disciplined party; an absolutist government88 can seek a much wider support?that of public opinion. It is true that Chicherin was later to point out that it

was difficult when writing in Russia at that time to discuss all the negative aspects of an autocracy and all the advantages of a constitutional regime (which, he declared subsequently, was always his ultimate ideal);89 but

if we are to accept his frequent assertions that his writings were the

expression of his independent opinion and not of official views,90 we must assume that in the 1860's at least, Chicherin saw autocracy as not

incompatible with "positive" liberty. Two more themes of the Philosophy of Right are echoed in Chicherin's

reflections on the contemporary situation in Russia?a view of political rights as dependent on degrees or modes of consciousness, and an attack on the concept of universal suffrage.

The belief that all citizens should have equal rights to vote and to

political representation springs in Chicherin's view from an "abstract"

conception of equality which does not take into account the differing modes of consciousness of each social group. He rejects the proposal being aired in the early 1860's for a consultative assembly composed of

representatives of all social groups; the peasants' consciousness, he

asserts, does not extend beyond the immediate relations of their commune; nor are the middle class competent to exercise power outside the field of

their immediate interests. However, while in the Philosophy of Right the divisions of civil society were reflected in a system of bicameral

representation (an upper house of members of the nobility and a lower house of elected representatives of the other estates), Chicherin's system of representation is more exclusive. The right to representation and




participation in legislation (in an advisory capacity only?he is still

speaking of an autocracy) should be given only to the nobility, which alone has the necessary universality of outlook.91 As under a constitu tion the modes of consciousness of these groups would presumably remain the same, Chicherin's argument implies even for the future a

system of representation far more exclusive than Hegel's. Moreover, Hegel's system of representation by estates was intended to mediate between the particularism of civil society and the universalism of the state, which he saw as a pluralistic structure. He frequently condemned, as a lifeless machine, the bureaucratic centralism of the France of his time. Chicherin on the contrary admires it.92 His ideal is a strongly centralised state, and he clearly intends limitation of rights and suffrage to contribute to that end. At a time when liberal opinion was united in

calling for greater local self-government through zemstva to counter balance the despotic centralism of the bureaucracy, Chicherin opposes all such demands, on the grounds that local interests would then take prece dence over those of society as a whole, as represented by the central power.93

Here, as throughout in his conception of the state, Chicherin's observance to the letter of the Hegelian law contrasts with his neglect of its spirit; the concern with mediation and balance between particular and universal goals which permeates Hegel's system is almost entirely absent from Chicherin's. The directing theme of his analysis of the state is the "conservative" part of his slogan?"strong authority". The

bureaucracy is essential primarily because it has proved its ability to

"preserve order and [. . .] strengthen the state"94 in the past; the nobility's attachment to the status quo is an important reason why it should be

pre-eminent in the state.95 Even the corporations are seen primarily as a "support of order", useful in subordinating particular interests to the central power.96

This emphasis on centralism as against mediation and balance crucially affects the call for "liberal measures" which forms the second part of Chicherin's slogan. It is on the balance between the principles of freedom and order implied in this slogan that his reputation as a moderate liberal rests. However, his distortion of the concept of "positive liberty" destroys this dialectical balance, so that in his ideal state the principle of order necessarily takes precedence over that of freedom. "Liberal" themes are correspondingly given little place in his writings, the over

whelming majority of which are dedicated to a justification of authority. I have said that those who insist that he was a liberal as much as a conser vative point to those passages in his writings where he emphasises the absolute value of the personality as the source of all social unions and advocates a laisser-faire economy. But, as we have seen, in his theory of the state, where the distinction between moral law and state authority is for practical purposes effaced, it is the absolute meaning of the law and obedience to it which confers on the personality its absolute signifi cance; and reference to those political rights which in liberal philosophies derive from the nature of the individual as an end in himself is notably

missing from his work in the 1860's.97 In the early 1850's he had, with the progressive intelligentsia, called for freedom of speech and of the

press, and reform of the judiciary as the essential premisses of political

4



210 AILEEN KELLY

liberty. In the 1860's, when no real progress had been made in this

direction, conservative pressures in the government having led to trun cation of the reforms and a new wave of repression, the constant refrain of his writings is that change must not be taken too far or too quickly.

As we have seen, he is very sparing with political rights?the overwhelm

ing mass of the population, the peasantry, is to be excluded from them; he even opposes any immediate extension of the rights of the nobility.98

What, then, does Chicherin mean by "liberal measures"? The answer is given in letters written in September and October of 1861 to his brother, a councillor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in which Chicherin elabo rates for the benefit of the tsar and his ministers (to whom the letters were

passed on) his views on the student disturbances in Moscow and St. Peters

burg that year.99 The immediate cause of the disturbances had been the introduction of new regulations by the government, aimed at eliminat

ing freedom within the universities and representing a return to the

policies of Nicholas the First. Educated society in St. Petersburg and Moscow was sympathetic with the students' grievances and indignant when their peaceful demonstrations were broken up by a strong force of

police and soldiers, resulting in large numbers of injuries and arrests. Chicherin's former mentor Ravelin resigned, together with his colleagues in the Faculty of Law at St. Petersburg University, in protest against the brutal repression of the demonstration. Chicherin, however, was

eloquent in his condemnation of the students. In letters to his brother, while criticising the regulations which had caused the trouble for being petty and ineffectual, he accuses the government of being too timid sub

sequently to enforce its orders through sufficiently energetic police action, and emphasises that its most urgent task must be to reassert strong police authority over the universities and over society as a whole. Once this is done, it need not fear to introduce "liberal measures", which Chicherin enumerates as removal of the more absurd aspects of the censorship and some curtailment of the activities of the secret police: as this, by satisfy ing society's demands for greater freedom, would in the long run strength en the central power, as long as these "liberal measures" were combined

with the continued exercise of "strong authority". The government was quick to grasp the relation of Chicherin's liber

alism to his conservatism: his brother wrote that the tsar would be pleased with the slogan, inasmuch as it did not impinge on the principle of absolutism.100 The slogan received official approval; the tsar's Foreign

Minister, Prince Gorchakov, remarked that it had always been a motto of his own, and the authorities expressed the wish that Chicherin should

write more on this theme. They found "very valuable" the assessment made by "one of the most progressive" members of society, of public opinion at the time :101 Chicherin had emphasised that the government should not be deterred from the use of strong measures by the mood of

protest at its height among moderates and radicals alike as a result both of the truncation of the reforms and of the government's brutal handling of the students. Chicherin assured the government that these protests

were not to be taken seriously?they had been stirred up by "trash and

nonentities, little twenty-one-year old officers and first-year students". The sole reason for the protests was "the absence of strong authority".




This insight into the roots of political opposition in Russia in the early 1860's is worthy rather of a minor police official than of a member of the

country's cultured elite, and it completed that break with the liberal

camp which had begun with Chicherin's Inaugural Lecture at Moscow

University. Seeing this break in the light of the preceding examination of his concept of liberal conservatism, one may finally dispose of that

popular fallacy according to which his alienation from the Russian liberal

movement, and his failure to influence it, were due to the fact that his calls for gradualism, for cooperation with the government in reform were too "liberal" to be sympathetic to men whose sympathies were closer to the Left. In fact, as is well known, the 1860's saw a sharp polarisation between liberals and Left; such figures as Kavelin and Ivan Turgenev were at least as insistent as Chicherin in asserting that reforms must come about from above, and in urging moderation in demands and cooperation

with the government, to avert the danger of revolution from below.

However, they had few illusions as to the incompatibility of unlimited

autocracy with liberal ideals, however moderate; their support for the

government was tactical?a means to attaining the goals of legality and

political rights; and while from tactics or timidity they were often silent about its most blatant acts of arbitrariness and repression, they never theless never justified them, and like Kavelin, were sometimes roused to

public protest?and here was the gulf that separated them from Chicherin. As we have seen, by 1861 he had come so far to confuse reality and the ideal as to use totally inappropriate categories from Hegel's philosophy to

justify the status quo as the embodiment of eternal laws. It was his

ideological justification and active encouragement of the government, his acceptance of its absolute right to repress, and his total opposition to all extensions of individual rights which might encroach on its power,

which alienated liberals from him; they sensed, as Herzen had done, that he belonged to "another camp". When Chicherin added his name to the Moscow university administration's request for police help against peaceful demonstrations, Kavelin saw this act as "too shameful [...] to be even discussed", and refused to greet him when they met six years later.102

In emphasising to the government that the protests of the early 1860's contained "not only nothing dangerous, but not even anything in the least serious",10* nothing in fact that a show of force would not cure,

Chicherin dismissed with contempt the motives, the convictions and the

strength of purpose not only of the socialist youth, but also of the liberals of his generation who unlike him, believed that liberalism was based on a conception of rights and liberty incompatible with autocracy. In so

doing, this self-styled "liberal" and "realist" proved himself to be neither the one nor the other.

IV

To conclude: I have attempted, through an analysis of Chicherin's "liberal conservatism" as he applied it to the issues of the sixties, to prove that, contrary to the generally accepted view, Chicherin cannot be called a liberal even in the most conservative, Burkean sense of the term. For



212 AILEEN KELLY

liberalism to mean anything at all, it must posit as its central goal the

protection, through constitutional forms, of the freedom and rights of the individual.104 This goal cannot be said to be Chicherin's central concern. As we have seen, for Chicherin, men's self-realisation was

ultimately achieved not through assertion of their autonomy, but through submission to historical determinism, in the form of the "purposes" of the absolute: a rational human being could experience "no greater satis faction" than to be the conscious instrument of Spirit.105

It is true, as is indicated by the term "liberal conservatism", that "no liberal is only a liberal"?106 that every liberal thinker has sides

which conflict with his liberalism; but when the non liberal sides so

heavily outweigh the liberal as in Chicherin's case, it is as grotesque to describe such "liberal conservatism" as a form of liberalism as it would be to describe German National Socialism as a form of socialism. Those allusions and passages in Chicherin's work which, taken separately and out of context, have been used to support an image of him as a Western

style constitutionalist, lose their significance when seen in the context of his work as a whole; as applied to the Russia of his time, this is a mon

strously incongruous system in which the concept of positive liberty becomes the cornerstone for a justification of autocratic and arbitrary rule. The government had reasons to be grateful to him; he provided it with a philosophical justification of the status quo, often going further in his zeal to defend it, than the tsar's own ministers. In 1859 Cherny shevskii had predicted that Chicherin's philosophy would soon lead him "to prove by means of philosophical constructions the historical inevita

bility of every [...] police edict" and that what was historically inevitable would soon become "rational" for him.107 Three years later, after the student disturbances, Chernyshevskii was to congratulate himself on his

perception: Chicherin had indeed come to "comprehend the duties of a

policeman in a light more absolute than the police itself".108 He was not exaggerating: Chicherin had castigated the Governor of Moscow, General Trepov, a man notorious for brutality, for showing insufficient

energy in suppressing the student disturbances; he also strongly criticised the Minister of Popular Enlightenment, Pirogov, for permitting discus sion in the press of new measures which he had introduced. A man who allows public polemic about his policies, Chicherin wrote, has no concep tion of what authority is.109

But Chicherin was not, as Soviet scholars tend to depict him, a court

philosopher, a hardheaded realist of the landowning classes, who pre ferred the realities of power to the ideal of social justice. Indeed, he cannot easily be fitted into any conventional political category; he

represents a peculiarly Russian phenomenon, whose origins lie in that extreme alienation which generated among the intelligentsia of the 1840's a passion for all-embracing metaphysical systems founded on some vision of an ultimate "reality" which would give coherence to the conflicting phenomena of the external world. I have attempted to show that such a

conception of "reality" is the key to Chicherin's political philosophy. In the sixties as in the forties historical events were for Chicherin signif icant only inasmuch as they reflected the "rational reality" of Hegel, defined as "Spirit, working out its self-definition according to eternal




laws", and, as Herzen had perceived, he accepted only those political aspirations which could be "reconciled" with the foreordained movement of the Absolute through history. Those "realities" which he invokes

against the ideals of the Left are rooted not in the data of experience but in Hegelian logic; and, ultimately, in the doctrine that the modern state is the supreme manifestation of the Absolute in the world. His central

argument against any form of federalism is based on a simple logical deduction from this; if only nations in hierarchically centralised states "have a higher consciousness [. . . and] are called to play a role in his

tory",110 all deviations from centralism are eo ipso regressive. A similar confidence in their self-evident nature characterises all his utterances on the hierarchical structure of the state; there is almost no attempt to

justify it on empirical grounds, it being implicit in that ultimate and incontrovertible "reality"?the Hegelian pyramid of consciousness.

Thus, those who take issue with him meet with a barrage of axioms: the

political rights of all the estates depend on what they are "appointed" (in the Hegelian scheme of things) to do;111 just as the "purpose" of the

nobility is to stand at the head of society,112 so, "by the very nature of

things", the lowest position in society is given to the peasant, whose

"purpose" ("rational consciousness" being least developed in him) is to stay within the bounds of his commune.113 Women are "naturally" incapable of taking part in political life;114 "history" proves the bureau

cracy to be essential in a state;115 the less uniform a society the stronger must be the central power;116 it is Russia's fate eventually to have a

bourgeoisie, "because this is the eternal law of development of human societies".117

That preoccupation with the ideal essence of reality, and consequent indifference to its individual and particular manifestations, which Herzen

had seen as the cardinal sin of the Right Hegelians, Chicherin regarded as a supreme virtue: only by cutting oneself off from "the sphere of

everyday aspirations and passions" could one rise to that "broad and free contemplation of life"118 which was the premiss of useful political activity. But it was precisely this attempt to maintain Olympian objectivity, at a time when political and moral issues engaged the minds and passions of all society, which condemned him to complete isolation and political impotence, and led him to be regarded as something of a

curiosity by men of all political persuasions. Even conservatives were struck by his inability to realise that what might be true in the realm of abstract logic might be inapposite and even false in the context of the battle of historical forces. Thus the government censor A. V. Nikitenko wrote that though Chicherin had been justified in seeing Herzen's radi calism as harmful, his public attack on Herzen in 1858 had been even

more harmful, as it had given support to the elements of extreme reaction in the government at a time when even conservatives recognised the need for reform.119

The same criticism, from a radical viewpoint, is expressed pungently by Chernyshevskii. Commenting on Chicherin's predilection for uttering abstract truths without regard to their relation to social realities, he

points out that to defend bureaucracy, centralisation and obedience to the state against the forces of anarchy in the Russia of the early sixties



214 AILEEN KELLY

was as apposite as to prove to Hottentots the danger of too intense intellectual activity. "Only a man in the grip of scholasticism can

imagine that Russian society needs to defend the bureaucracy."120 This view that abstract principles must be adapted to historical

circumstances was incomprehensible to Chicherin. When Herzen

published in Kolokol, with a contemptuous comment, a secret report which Chicherin and four other professors had made to the government on the student disturbances, Chicherin replies bitterly: "As if we had committed some heinous crime, instead of setting down quite objectively all the facts of the affair . . ,"121 When even the mild Ravelin breaks off relations with him over the same issue, he complains that he cannot understand this estrangement of his former friend?he has not changed his opinions since the time when they both stood on common ground against Herzen; now, as then, he is opposed to despotism and intolerance

whether from "above" or "below".122 To Ravelin, it was little comfort that Chicherin's views on the potential despotism of the Left were theoreti

cally correct when, by enunciating them at that juncture in events, he had refused much-needed support to the liberal professors in their unequal battle with the actual despotism of the Right.123

Chicherin's ideology was no less alien to those whose interests he was most concerned to defend: the conservative nobility were suspicious of the lofty philosophical significance with which he invested their material interests. As one of their representatives remarked: "Monsieur nous

d?fend trop."124 The only force wholeheartedly on his side in the sixties was the government, and its support became an increasing embarrassment to him. By its orders, all press criticism of his notorious Inaugural

Lecture at Moscow University was banned. Chicherin protested against this on the grounds that the influence which he hoped to exercise on

Russian society depended on his being seen as an independent thinker and not as the mouthpiece of the government. The latter appeared not to understand this distinction, for in that year Chicherin was asked, first to contribute to its official propaganda organ Severnaia Pchela; and sub

sequently, after Ravelin's resignation from the Chair of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, to take his place, in order to imbue the rebellious

university with a more obedient spirit. Chicherin refused both requests on the same grounds

as before.125

The predicament into which his confusion of reality with the ideal had led Chicherin was satirised by Ravelin in reply to a letter in which Chicherin had dissociated himself from the government's action in ban

ning criticism of his Inaugural Lecture. Ravelin urges him on the contrary to accept the government's "canonisation" of him as the logical conse

quence of his consistent defence of its rationality and good intentions

against those who "by their foolish chattering are destroying the trium

phant development of the destiny of our fatherland"?the oppositional intelligentsia. "Why are you so embarrassed that our wise government, in its unremitting concern for the good of its loyal subjects, has closed the

mouth of calumny and disloyalty and thereby gained for the truths

expressed in your writings a full [. . .] triumph?" But perhaps, when

declaring war on all the enemies of the government, Chicherin had had in mind not the government with which they all had to deal, with its




reactionary ministers and corrupt bureaucrats, but one of his imagina tion, and was therefore dissatisfied when the real government thanked him in its characteristic way. If so, it was his own fault?he should have

made some reservations in his defence of the autocracy: "... otherwise, from your words one would think that you are talking not about an

imaginary ideal, but about reality, which is far from the same thing."126 Chicherin's tragedy was that he had lost the capacity to make the

distinction. It is true that reality begins to impinge on his ideology in the mid-sixties; if his account in his memoirs is correct, it was then that he first became aware of a characteristic of autocracy which to his contem

poraries had long been self-evident: hearing that the tsar was encouraging his advisors to intrigue against one another, he is led to reflect that an autocrat expects his ministers to be passive instruments of his will;127 and when in 1868 as the result of an intrigue among members of his

faculty, supported by a government minister, he is forced to resign, this

personal humiliation provokes the only really hostile comments in his memoirs against a regime which, he then asserts, placed more value on

intriguing court favourites than on its few independent "thinking conser vatives".128 But it is only thirty years later, that he first suggests publicly that the time may be ripe for constitutional reform; and he does so anonymously, in a pamphlet published abroad.129 These precautions, contrasting with his fearless public denunciations of the regime's oppo nents, testify perhaps to some sensitivity as to the true "reality" of

autocracy. If so, it was somewhat belated; in 1883 when he was dis missed from his post as head of the Moscow City Duma, on suspicion of

having hinted in a speech at the necessity for constitutional reform, he

indignantly rejects this accusation as "libellous".130 His doubts about the autocrat did not seriously shake his view of the existing Russian state as the embodiment of Reason in the world, with the result that up to the last years of his life he maintains a truly staggering blindness as to the strength and the nature of the oppositional forces?a blindness which can have had few parallels outside court circles. We have seen his assessment of the ferment of the early sixties as the work of "little

twenty-one-year old officers" and "first-year students". Even more gro

tesque is the assertion, attributed to him two decades later, that the

revolutionary activity culminating in the assassination of Alexander the Second was all the work of one ill-intentioned individual: "It is all Cher

nyshevskii's fault; it is he who has injected revolutionary poison into our lives."131

To sum up: Chicherin's relation to liberalism can perhaps best be described in terms of Isaiah Berlin's characterisation of two opposing human types, the hedgehog and the fox.132 If the liberal, with his

rejection of absolute solutions, his emphasis on the value of diversity in social life, is the "fox" of the Greek poet, who "knows many things", Chicherin is the hedgehog, who "knows one big thing". Indeed, he defined as the aim of all his intellectual activity: to establish the funda

mental unity underlying the diversity of phenomena, to "reduce to a few



2l6 AILEEN KELLY

general, simple and clear principles the totality of human history, of

philosophy and law, and on that basis to deduce a general law of the

development of mankind".133 He exemplifies, in a particularly extreme form, that very character

istic of the Russian intelligentsia whose left-wing manifestations he so

abominated?that fanatical ideological intransigence, generated by intense alienation, which led them to take the ideals they embraced to their logical extreme, however absurd; marching as Herzen described them "in a fearless phalanx, [. . .] to the very limit, and beyond, in step

with the dialectic, but out of step with truth".134 There is a curious resemblance between Chicherin and the most extreme example of this

phenomenon, Belinskii in his Right Hegelian period. Like Belinskii, Chicherin had experienced a moment of revelation, like a religious conver

sion, when he perceived "the marvellous harmony of the supreme prin ciples of existence", and the direction of "the whole historical movement of human thought".135 The immediate consequence for both was

"reconciliation" with existing reality, whose phenomena could all be

explained and justified by their necessary role in the unfolding of the

higher Reason. Like Belinskii, when his grotesque idealisation of the Russian autoc

racy, its brutal police and ignorant bureaucracy, brought on him the

contempt of those who had been his friends, and earned him the favour of slavish timeservers whom he despised, Chicherin bore this with self

righteous resignation, as a martyrdom imposed by his dedication to truth.

However, the parallel between Belinskii's and Chicherin's "reconcil iation with reality" should not be taken too far. Belinskii's was brief, tortured and followed by a passionate humanism which was to inspire future generations of the intelligentsia. Chicherin's was much more

self-assured and was to last nearly all his life. There is no reason to

doubt that as a Hegelian student he drew a sharp line between the regime of Nicholas the First and the ideal state of Hegel, but with the increasing threat from the Left, Hegel's state became less a goal to be attained than the basis of a defence of the status quo. Inevitability had, as Cherny shevskii asserted, become for him "rationality". Those philosophical arguments which had led him to embrace Hegel's state as the crown of

history were now applied to justify the regime of Alexander the Second, and one aspect missing from that regime?constitutional legality?came to seem little more than an extra decoration on an already finished structure. True, he never renounced his view that it was an ideal for the future, but he relegates it to such a distance that it fades into insig

nificance. It should also be noted that his first real doubts about the

"rationality" of the tsar's rule were due not as in Belinskii's case, to indig nation at injustice done to others, but to his own wounded vanity. Even at the height of his aberration, Belinskii would not have commented, as Chicherin did in a letter intended for the eyes of the tsar: "The Russian likes to be whipped from time to time."136

It was not, as is so often asserted, his "moderation" or his "gradu alism" which alienated Chicherin from Russian liberals; it was his aloof

indifference, from the heights of abstraction to the fate of real individuals




and the realities of their experience; the total absence in him of that humanism which, with few exceptions, was characteristic of the Russian

intelligentsia. As Herzen describes him at their first meeting: "There was a cold light in his eyes, a challenge in the timbre of his voice and a terrible and repellent self-assurance."137 The judgment of Chicherin's

contemporaries on him was expressed by Kavelin when he wrote that while he was prepared to vouch for his sincerity, he could not attempt to defend "the clarity of your understanding of the reality around you, the

subtlety of your sense of justice and injustice in that milieu in which we are fated to live".138

Cambridge (G.B.), 1976.

i. Novus (pseud, of P. Struve), "Na raznye temy. G. Chicherin i ego obrash

chenie k proshlomu", Novoe slovo, 7 (1897): 40. 2. V. Maklakov, "Iz proshlogo", Sovremennye zapiski [Paris], 40 (1929): 308

310. Another admirer, Prince E. Trubetskoi, describes Chicherin's life as "the

story of a man who was ill-suited to Russia and was thrown overboard by life, because he was too crystal-clear, too granite-firm, too whole-hearted". (Quoted by D. Chizhevskii, GegeV v Rossii (Paris, 1930): 289.)

3. V. Leontovitsch, Geschichte des Liberalismus in Russland (Frankfurt am Main,

1957): 129. See also F. Venturi, Roots of revolution (London, i960): 157, where

Chicherin is described as "one of the strictest theorizers of the Liberalism of the

time".

4. D. Hammer, Two Russian liberals. The political thought of B. N. Chicherin and D. K. Kavelin (Diss., Columbia, 1962): 9. He admits elsewhere, however, that "there is some difficulty in identifying Chicherin's place in the history of Rus

sian liberalism." (Ibid.: 373.) See also G. Gurvich, "B. N. Chicherin", in Ency

clopaedia of the Social Sciences (London, 1930), III: 372. "Politically he [. . .] paved the way for the Russian Constitutional-Democratic Party." Soviet scholars, too, are almost unanimous in seeing Chicherin as a leading liberal. Typical is the

description by V. E. Illeritskii ("O gosudarstvennoi shkole v russkoi istoriografii",

Voprosy istorii, 5 (1959): 143), where Chicherin and K. Kavelin are described as the

"leaders of landowning-bourgeois liberalism, and its most eminent ideologists in

the middle of the last century". See also L. Ginzburg, "Pis'mo k B. N. Chiche

rinu", in Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow, 1953), 61: 248: Chicherin was "a moderate

liberal, an advocate of certain bourgeois reforms, as implemented by the monarchy, with the help of the privileged classes". The sole departure from this standard Soviet interpretation is that of S. Bakhrushin, who sees Chicherin as the ideologist of a form of enlightened absolutism already anachronistic in his time. (Introduc tion to B. N. Chicherin, Vospominaniia. Moskva sorokovykh godov (hereafter VMsg) (Moscow, 1929) :x.)

5. S. Utechin, Russian political thought (London, 1963): 107, 104. 6. G. Fischer, Russian liberalism: from gentry to intelligentsia (Cambridge,

Mass., 1958): 19. See also the interpretation of Chicherin by K. von Beyme, as

attempting to "mediate between ?tatiste and laisser-faire liberals". (Politische Soziologie im zaristischen Russland (Wiesbaden, 1965): 34.)

7. D. Hammer, op. cit.: 335. He asserts that Chicherin's thought "does not

fall short of, it goes beyond liberalism", in revealing the latter's "shortcomings". 8. G. Gurvich, art. cit.

9. F. Venturi, op. cit.: 99. 10. See for example L. Schapiro, Rationalism and nationalism in Russian nine

teenth-century political thought (London, 1967): 90 and G. Fischer's curious descrip tion: "Typical of [a middle group of liberal] was a solitary figure"?Chicherin.

(Op. cit.: 19.) 11. See the formulation of this distinction by J. L. Talmon, The origins of

totalitarian democracy (London, 1952), Introduction.



2l8 AILEEN KELLY

12. Among Western scholars the most interesting and sustained attempt to view the course of Russian intellectual history in terms of such a schema has been

made by L. Schapiro (op. cit.). In his article, "The Vekhi group and the mystique of revolution", Slavonic and East European Review, XXXIV, 8 (1955): 56-76, he

emphasises Chicherin's influence on the Vekhi writers who, he claims, belonged to the "same tenuous truly liberal Russian tradition". See also his article "The pre

revolutionary intelligentsia and the legal order", in R. Pipes, ed., The Russian

intelligentsia (New York, 1961): 26, where he writes that it was their "emotion and passion" which made the intelligentsia reject liberalism, and that "if reason alone determined political convictions, Chicherin's influence [. . .] might have been

greater". M. Malia in an article "What is the intelligentsia?", in the same volume, asserts that the successive generations of the intelligentsia were linked by an

"irresponsible" belief in the primacy of principles over "the intractibility of every day life, or what the vulgar call reality", and he sees Vekhi as one of the few attempts by the intelligentsia to "adapt to the real world". See also L. Haimson, "The

parties and the state: the evolution of political attitudes", in C. E. Black, ed., The

transformation of Russian society. Aspects of social change since 1861 (Cambridge, Mass., i960): 110-145. Haimson contrasts the Kadet Party's "old intelligentsia prejudices" with the Vekhi authors' platform of political responsibility, realism and

moderation.

13. VMsg: 34. 14- VMsg: 74. is. VMsg: 7.5. i6. VMsg: 77. il. VMsg: 89. i8. The letter is reproduced in V. Baturinskii, "Gertsen, ego druz'ia i zna

komye", (I), Vsemirnyi vestnik, i (1905): 20-33. 19. See the letters printed by M. Dragomanov, in Vol'noe slovo [Geneva], 61, 62

(1883). 20. A. Gercen, "Nas uprekaiut", Kolokol, 1 Nov. 1858. 21. Kolokol, 1 Dec. 1858. 22. See the letter to Herzen of 11 November 1858: "We are separated [.

. .] by one thing, which is perhaps more important than all the rest: political temper ament." (M. Dragomanov, loc. cit.)

23. Only two of Herzen's former liberal friends, Ketcher and Korsh, took Chicherin's side in the dispute. A collective letter of protest, signed by I. Turgenev, Annenkov, Babst, N. Tiutchev and A. Galakhov, was sent to Chicherin, who forwarded it to Herzen with an accompanying letter. (Letter to Herzen of

25 February, 1859, in M. Dragomanov, loc. cit.) 24. V. Baturinskii, art. cit., viii, Vsemirnyi vestnik, III, (1904): 23-29. 25. A. Gercen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (hereafter Soc.) (Moscow,

I954-65), IX: 250-253. On his reason for not sending the letter, Herzen writes that it had been intended "to initiate a friendly polemic, which was forestalled by his

prosecutor's indictment". (Soc., IX: 250.) 26. See below, p. 204. 27. A. Gercen, Soc., XI: 300. 28. G. Fischer, op. cit.: viii.

29. V. Leontovitsch, op. cit.: 18.

30. R. Pipes, Struve, liberal on the Left i8jo-igo$ (Cambridge, Mass., 1970): 283. 31. Changes in his outlook in the 1880's, when in the opinion of some scholars,

he began to move closer to the Left, do not concern this study. (It can be argued that these changes were insignificant; see below, p. 215.)

32. G. Fischer, op. cit.: 119.

33. Letter to Herzen of 30 november, 1858 (M. Dragomanov, loc. cit.). 34. B. Chicherin, "Razlichnye vidy liberalizma", in B. Chicherin, Neskol'ko

sovremennikh voprosov (hereafter Nsv) (Moscow, 1862): 19.

35. Nsv: 193.

36. Nsv: 194. 37. Letter to his brother of October 1861. Quoted in B. Chicherin, Vospo

minaniia. Moskovskii universitet (hereafter VMu) (Moscow, 1929): 39.

38. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe okhranitel'nye nachala?", in Nsv: 181.

39. B. Chicherin, "Razlichnye vidy liberalizma", art. cit.: 200. According to

P. Struve, the term "liberal conservative" was first used in Russia by Pushkin's friend Prince P. Viazemskii. Preface to S. Frank, Pushkin kak politicheskii

mysliteV (Belgrade, 1937): 9.



chicherin's political philosophy 219

40. B. Chicherin, "Razlichnye vidy liberalizma", art. cit.: 197. 41. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe . . .", art. cit.: 156. 42. P. Struve, "Intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia", in Vekhi. Sbornik statei 0 russkoi

intelligentsii (5th ed., Moscow, 1910): 156-174.

43. See in particular P. Struve, "B. N. Chicherin i ego mesto v istorii russkoi

obrazovannosti i obshchestvennosti", in P. Struve, Sotsial'naia i ekonomicheskaia

istoriia Rossii (Paris, 1952): 323-331.

44. N. G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1950), V: 656.

45. I. Turgenev to P. Annenkov, letter of 6 April 1862.

46. From an unpublished letter of 1857, quoted by D. Hammer, op. cit.: 114. 47. VMsg: 89.

48. On this see P. Miliukov, "Iuridicheskaia shkola v russkoi istoriografii", Russkaia mysl', 6 (1886): 80-92, and V. E. Illeritskii, op. cit. Chicherin defines the basic law of history as "the movement of Spirit from unity to division and from

division back to unity." (VMsg: 88-89.)

49. Chicherin describes those nations which have attained the state form of

organisation as "the crown of mankind". ("Vstupitel'naia lektsiia po gosudar stvennomu pravu", in Nsv: 33.) He sees in Russian history three stages, resembling

Hegel's three moments of the will (immediacy, in family relations; subjectivity, in the conflicts of individual purposes in civil society; and objective universality, the submission of individual wills to the higher social will of the state). The first

stage was a primitive patriarchal society, the second a civil society which, though

institutionally an advance on its predecessor, had lost its primitive unity, and the

third, the state. The other representatives of the ?tatiste school present variants

of this pattern. (See P. Miliukov, art. cit.) 50. See B. Chicherin, O narodnom predstaviteVstve (Moscow, 1866).

51. See L. Schapiro, Rationalism . . ., op. cit.: 92-94; S. Utechin, op. cit.: 107; and K. von Beyme, op. cit.: 34.

52. B. Chicherin, Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii, part I (Moscow, 1869): 7.

53. B. Chicherin, O narodnom predstaviteV stve, op. cit.: 569-573.

54. B. Chicherin, Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii, op. cit., I: 7.

5^. Ibid., part IV (Moscow, 1877): 602.

56. See for example D. Hammer, op. cit.: 336, and L. Schapiro, "The pre-revo

lutionary . . .", art. cit.: 22 sq.

57. In spite of Hegel's influence on subsequent liberal thought (which like him

emphasised the social essence of man and laid less stress than classical liberalism on "negative freedom"), the claim that Hegel and his most orthodox followers

were liberals is, as J. Plamenatz asserts, "not often" made. (Readings from liberal

writers (Oxford, 1965): 25.) One notable exception is G. Ruggiero. (See The

history of European liberalism, trans, by R. Collingwood (Boston, 1959): 229-240.) But the consensus is that Hegel's idealisation of the state, with its authoritarian

and nationalist implications, "ran counter to the gradual acceptance of liberal

doctrines throughout the nineteenth century". G. Lichtheim, "Hegel", in Inter

national Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, VI (1968): 342.

^8. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe . . .", art. cit.: 149. In the introduction to the

first volume of his History of political thought he emphasises his conservative inter

pretation of Hegel, asserting that he had learnt to see past events as "not transitory moments of development, but expressions of eternal truths, inherent in human

reason". (Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii, op. cit., I: ix.) Elsewhere he writes:

"I came to understand that those stages which Hegel calls moments of development are eternal elements of the human spirit, having the right to independent existence

and being preserved in subsequent movement. . ." (VMsg: 90.) 59. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe. . .", art. cit.: 154. 60. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 150. 61. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe. . .", art. cit.: 169. 62. Ibid.: 166-167. 63. This is one of the central arguments of O narodnom predstaviteV stve, op. cit.

Although censorship did not allow him to refer directly to Russia, he hoped that

the Russian reader would read between the lines, and understand that Russia was

not ready for a constitution. (VMu: 164.)

64. In an unpublished article written in 1862 at the request of the tsar's minister



220 AILEEN KELLY

N. Miliutin on the situation of the peasants in Poland, Chicherin took the opportu nity of asserting that neither Russian public opinion nor the new institutions intro duced after 1861 were yet stable enough to support a constitutional order. If introduced before the people was "educated" to its level, it would lead to "fruitless

discontent [. . .] and dictatorship". (VMu: 113-114.) 65. B. Chicherin, "Razlichnye vidy liberalizma", art. cit.: 193, 197. 66. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (London), ? 257, 155. 67. See I. Berlin, "Two concepts of liberty", in Four essays on liberty (London,

1969): 118-172. 68. Hegel, op. cit., addition to ? 297. 69. B. Chicherin, Istoriiapoliticheskikhuchenii, op. cit., partIV (Moscow, 1877): 595. 70. Ibid.: 596. 71. VMsg: 158. 72. B. Chicherin, "Mera i granitsy", in Nsv: 78. 73. B. Chicherin, "Vstupitel'naia lektsiia . . .", art. cit.: 32-33. 74. B. Chicherin, "Razlichnye vidy liberalizma", art. cit.: 199. 75. B. Chicherin, "Vstupitel'naia lektsiia . . .", art. cit.: 34. 76. The lecture, while arousing the fury of the progressive press, was greatly

approved by the more conservative government circles, in particular by the tsar

himself, who read it and wrote approving comments in the margin. (VMu: 44.) 77. He asserts: "We do not yet possess the most essential conditions for a

just court system." (VMu: 24.) 78. "Razlichnye vidy liberalizma", art. cit.: 197. He is here referring primarily to

moral law; but he proceeds to assert that "[state] power and freedom are as insep arable as are [.

. .] freedom and the moral law". (Nsv: 198.) It is true that he makes a highly ambiguous caveat: any citizen "without submitting uncondition

ally before the [state] power, of whatever kind it may be, is obliged, in the name of his own liberty, to respect the essence of the power itself". Whatever the

meaning of the curious distinction between submission to some kinds of power, and respect for all power, he had, as his Inaugural Lecture showed, no sympathy for these who chose not to submit unconditionally to the kind of power represented

by the Russian autocracy. 79. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 93. 80. Ibid. 81. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe. . .", art. cit.: 170. 82. Ibid.: 173-174. 83. In 1853 his dissertation, Oblastnye uchrezhdeniia Rossii v XVII veke, was

rejected by the University of Moscow, as containing "libel and abuse of ancient Russia". (See VMsg: 122 ff., 209-210.)

84. See VMu: 163. 85. Nsv: 91, 169. 86. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 103-104. 87. B. Chicherin, "Sovet ministrov", in Nsv: 205-235. 88. He makes an unconvincing distinction between a despotism and an "un

limited monarchy" (the latter being his term for the Russian autocracy) on the

grounds that the autocracy, like a monarchy, acts through a subordinate body, the nobility. ("Chto takoe . . .", art. cit.: 176.)

89. VMu: 164. 90. See, for example, ibid.: 50. 91. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 123-131. 92. See B. Chicherin, Ocherki Anglii i Frantsii (Moscow, 1859). 93. B. Chicherin, "O zemskikh uchrezhdeniiakh", in Nsv: 258-259. 94. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe. . .", art. cit.: 170. 95. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 106. Chicherin advocates

a property qualification for the privilege of belonging to the nobility, which would ensure both the supremacy of the upper classes and their attachment to the status

quo, without making them a closed estate. (Ibid.: 105-106.) 96. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe. . .", art. cit.: 173. He does, however, use the

curious argument that in an "unlimited government" the corporations can protect the "independence of society"( !) from the "boundless dominion of the bureau

cracy". (Ibid.: 175.) 97. It should be noted that the only assessment of Chicherin by a contemporary

which emphasises his defence of individual liberty was in his "official" obituary, published by a government journal, where he is praised for opposing those theories




which exaggerated the "social principle" to the detriment of the moral freedom of the individual. V. Speranskii, "B. N. Chicherin. Nekrolog", Zhurnal minister stva narodnogo prosveshcheniia, 4 (1904): 186-196. As Chicherin saw the person

ality as achieving its moral freedom through obedience to the state, this official

blessing on his "individualism" is not as odd as it might seem.

98. B. Chicherin, "Vstupitel'naia lektsiia . . .", art. cit.: 25. See also his

argument against setting up an assembly of estates to advise the tsar: this would

present "too much difficulty for the state". All should be concerned only with

the Emancipation; there must be no reproaches or demands, only support, for the

government. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 131. 99. FM^: 23-25, 28-34, 37-41. 100. VMu: 35. 101. VMu: 26. 102. Quoted in VMu: 61. On Ravelin's attitude to the student disturbances see

V. Baturinskii, "Gertsen. . .", Vsemirnyi vestnik, 5 (1905): 72 ff.

103. VMu: 25 (Chicherin's italics). 104. Thus V. Leontovitsch, the most "conservative" of liberal interpreters of

Russian history, sees the central task of the state as the defence of the individual's

unhindered enjoyment of his rights. (Op. cit.: 3, 17.) 105. B. Chicherin, Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii, op. cit., part IV: 603. 106. J. Plamenatz, op. cit.: 37. 107. Review of Chicherin's "Ocherki Anglii i Frantsii", Sovremennik, 5 (1859): ^8. 108. N. G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, op. cit., X: 62.

109. VMu: 40. no. B. Chicherin, "Vstupitel'naia lektsiia. . .", art. cit.: 33.

in. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 121-123. 112. Ibid.: 123. 113. Ibid.: 122, 137. 114. Ibid.: 122.

115. B. Chicherin, "Chto takoe. . .", art. cit.: 169. 116. Ibid.: 165. 117. B. Chicherin, "Russkoe dvorianstvo", art. cit.: 93. 118. B. Chicherin, "Vstupitel'naia lektsiia. . .", art. cit.: 41. 119. Quoted by V. Baturinskii in Vsemirnyi vestnik, 3 (1904): 21. Kavelin

makes the same point in his letter to Chicherin: by giving the bureaucracy a pretext to justify its reactionary measures, he is "selling [his] birthright for a mess of

pottage". (Ibid.: 29.) 120. N. G. Chernyshevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, op. cit., V: 648-651. 121. VMu: 42. See Kolokol, 22 March 1862; 1 Apr. 1862. 122. VMu: 64-65. 123. Chicherin asserts that this is the reason Kavelin gave for refusing to shake

hands with him when they met six years later. (VMu: 66.) 124. The remark was made by Count P. Shuvalov, the marshal of nobility of

St. Petersburg, when Chicherin was introduced to him as "one of the rare defenders

of the nobility". (VMu: 71.) 125. For his account of these events, see VMu: 47-52. 126. The letter is quoted in VMu: 61-63. 127. VMu: 112-113. 128. VMu: 227. 129. See Rossiia nakanune dvadtsatogo stoletiia (Berlin, 1900). (Signed "Russ

kii patriot".) 130. B. Chicherin, Vospominaniia. Zemstvo i moskovskaia duma (Moscow,

1934)- 237 131. He is reported to have made this assertion to I. M. Sechenov, professor of

medicine at St Petersburg University. See L. F. Panteleev, Vospominaniia

(Moscow, 1958): 530. 132. I. Berlin, The hedgehog and the fox. An essay on Tolstoy's view of history

(London, 1953). 133. B. Chicherin, Istoriia politicheskikh uchenii, op. cit., part I: ix.

134. A. Gercen, Soc., X: 320. 135. VMsg: 74.

136. From Chicherin's letter to his brother on the student disturbances. He

expresses the hope that there will be found in the government "at least one brave

man, who will take a stick into his hands, and then everything will return to the

old order [. .

.] The Russian likes to be whipped from time to time; only he need

not be constantly kept in shackles". (VMu: 25.) 137. A. Gercen, Soc., IX: 248. 138. Quoted in VMu: 63.



222 AILEEN KELLY

* An important, if partial exception to the general approach to Chicherin's

thought, and one which has points in common with the present study, should be noted. In a monograph published after this article was written, S. Benson attrib utes Chicherin's political isolation to a doctrinaire Right Hegelian liberalism

which was inapplicable to the specific conditions of Russia. But he concurs with

the majority of historians in asserting that Chicherin was in the period under review "one of the few true liberals' in Russia", isolated because there was no

place for his moderate reformism in a society polarised between conservatives and an intelligentsia whose "moderates" were at one with the radicals in their distate for gradualism, liberal constitutionalism and their "total opposition to the existing order". (S. Benson, "The conservative liberalism of Boris Chicherin",

Forschungen zur Osteurop?ischen Geschichte, 21 (1975): 17-111.) The present study, while in agreement with Mr. Benson that Chicherin's ideology developed from a Right Hegelian liberalism, rejects the view that it was itself a form of

liberalism, and will argue that it was because Chicherin was not a liberal that he

became isolated from moderates like Ivan Turgenev or A. V. Nikitenko, who as

supporters of gradualism, constitutionalism and the rule of law, do not fit into Mr. Benson's schema.



"what is real is rational": the political philosophy of b. n. chicherin

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