On Diversity by Russell Jacoby

Author:Russell Jacoby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, political science, political philosophy, globalization, business, geopolitics, world history, government, business books, history books, history, philosophy books, political books, politics, gifts for history buffs, history buff gifts, international business, history gifts, historical books, history teacher gifts, growth, political science books, international politics, history lovers gifts, world politics, marxism, sociology, capitalism, critical theory, socialism, economics, political theory, essays, ecology
ISBN: 9781609809805
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2020-01-10T18:00:00+00:00

Mill’s essay “should not be called On Liberty, but rather On Diversity.” He correctly supposes that “the peculiarity and diversity of human nature” sustain humanity. But he proposes an “impossible antidote—he wants individual peculiarity and diversity in European thought without individual peculiarity and diversity in European life.” So commented the 19th-century Russian critic Constantine Leontyev in “The Average European as an Ideal and Instrument of Universal Destruction.”62 Leontyev (1831–1891), who is not well-known, resists classification. He was an aesthete, mystic, and hedonist all rolled into one. One of his current editors calls him a minor philosopher, but a major critic with “an almost demonic clarity.”63 The philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev dubbed him a Renaissance type, “and for that reason he tended to be a reactionary in our own time.”64 Leontyev hated the uniformity of bourgeois life: that comes across loud and clear in his writings. “It is not vice that is to be feared nowadays; it is banality and facelessness that are frightening.”65 Like other conservatives such as Möser, he turns to nature as a counterpoint. “Organic nature thrives on diversity, on antagonisms and struggles” and “not in flat unison.” Nature “loves the exuberance of form and it loves diversity. Our life must be patterned after it.”66

Leontyev was on to something. Perhaps On Liberty should indeed be titled On Diversity. But Leontyev’s comments suggest something else. By mid-century the denunciation of encroaching uniformity passed to outliers—reactionaries, philosophical malcontents, and Russian nationalists, who distrusted Western society. A case in point would be another Russian, coming from the Left, not the Right.

Like everyone else, it seems, Alexander Herzen, the Russian writer, was in Paris during the revolution of 1848; and like many others, he was shaken to the core by the events. Even before the election of Louis Napoleon and his coup, the ineptitude of the Left, as well as the savagery of the Right, disabused him of hopes for change. “It is the peculiar destiny of the Russians,” he wrote in his brilliant reflections on the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, From the Other Shore, “to see further than their neighbors, to see in darker colors and to express their opinions boldly.”67 And what did he see?

He saw that the liberators were weak, and “the masses” conformist and obedient. The masses are not only “indifferent to individual freedom, to freedom of speech,” they “love authority” and “the arrogant glitter of power.” Herzen admitted that, along with other socialists and liberals, he had been wrong about “the people.” Liberals live “in large towns and small circles” among “books, journals, clubs.” Liberals “did not know the people at all; they studied it with immense profundity from historical sources, antiquities, not in the villages and the market place.”

The reality evaded liberals. “It was easier for liberalism to invent the people than to study it.” If liberals had known the “inner life of France,” they would not have been surprised that the people voted for Louis Napoleon. They would have realized that “the French people have not the faintest notion of freedom, of the Republic, but they have bottomless national pride.

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