The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly (review)

Kelly opens her monumental new biography by noting that Alexander Herzen (1812–70) is claimed by social theorists of every persuasion, from radical Bolsheviks through Westernizing liberals to conservative Slavophiles. Little surprise, then, that there is no “Herzenism”—only the charismatic man and his evolving corpus of texts. Earlier biographers, dazzled by Herzen’s syncretic memoir My Past and Thoughts, focused on his early Romantic roots, his revolutionary activism as an expatriate journalist in London during the Reform decade, the tragedy of his family life, his insistence on the innate socialism of the Russian peasant commune and on the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, all of which uneasily coexisted with a fervent defense of open time and a nonteleological view of history. Kelly does not contest this profile but seeks to ground it in a single understudied invariable: Herzen’s passion for natural science. Kelly is a devoted student of Isaiah Berlin (who admired Herzen deeply), and in keeping with her mentor’s resolute secularism she avoids emphasizing anything in her subject that suggests a religiously inflected mysticism, sentimentalism, or utopianism. Kelly stresses that Herzen the skeptic and naturalist, having moved to England in 1852, is on site when Darwin publishes The Origin of Species. Evolutionary biology is shown to be compatible with Herzen’s earliest writings on the role of contingency in human affairs. This is true: throughout his life Herzen preferred diversity to single solutions. He was far too agile and witty to succumb to impersonal fate. He never ceased to be appalled at the world’s injustice, cruelty, and casual slaughters. But in one important way Herzen was not a reliable scientist. Berlin put the matter well in his 1968 essay “Herzen and his Memoirs”: “All his life Herzen perceived the external world clearly, and in proportion, but through the medium of his own impressionable, ill-organised self at the centre of his universe. . . . Herzen was not, and had no desire to be, an impartial observer.” This deeply Romantic personality, who valued above all self-expression (expression of his unique self and its reactions), is in some tension with Kelly’s quest for the objective scientist. She succeeds in fusing her vision of Herzen with that of her mentor Berlin by focusing on history itself. As we read in her chapter 19, “What Is History?,” for Herzen history is “a meandering, shapeless, and inconclusive process, constantly prone to aberrations and easily deflected from its inchoate purposes.” Whether applied to the person or to the progression of world events, nothing could be more contingent than that.