Herzen Alexander (1812–70), Russian editor, memoirist, and social philosopher, in exile in Western Europe from 1847. Herzen moved in his philosophy of history from an early Hegelian rationalism to a ‘philosophy of contingency,’ stressing the ‘whirlwind of chances’ in nature and in human life and the ‘tousled improvisation’ of the historical process. He rejected determinism, emphasizing the ‘phenomenological fact’ of the experienced ‘sense of freedom.’ Anticipating the Dostoevsky of the ‘Legend of the Grand Inquisitor,’ he offered an original analysis of the ‘escape from freedom’ and the cleaving to moral and political authority, and sketched a curiously contemporary-sounding ’emotivist’ ethical theory. After 1848, disillusioned with ‘bourgeois’ Europe and its ‘selfenclosed individualism,’ but equally disillusioned with what he had come to see as the bourgeois ideal of many European socialists, Herzen turned to the Russian peasant and the peasant village commune as offering the best hope for a humane development of society. In this ‘Russian socialism’ he anticipated a central doctrine of the Russian populists of the 1870s.
Herzen stood alone in resisting the common tendency of such otherwise different thinkers as Feuerbach, Marx, and J. S. Mill to undervalue the historical present, to overvalue the historical future, and to treat actual persons as means in the service of remote, merely possible historical ends. Herzen’s own central emphasis fell powerfully and consistently on the freedom, independence, and non-instrumentalizable value of living persons. And he saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries that there are no future persons, that it is only in the present that free human individuals live and move and have their being.
See also RUSSIAN PHILOSOPH. G.L.K.