The opinion I have formed regarding Mihailovskii as politician, an opinion based upon my first study of his writings, may now be briefly elucidated by an examination of his ethical teachings and of such clandestine works as are at my disposal.
Like Lavrov, Mihailovskii assumes the unity of theory and practice.[1] He refers to the development of the fifties. The younger Russians of that day adopted materialism, positivism, and realism because, after the experiences of the Nicolaitan epoch, they wished to know what the world really is, whilst simultaneously, and for the same reason, they desired to know what the world must become. Not merely did they contemplate the world positivistically, but they wanted to transform it in the positivist direction.
From the mutuality of the individual and of society there is deducible, according to Mihailovskii, but one practical morality, which is far from being a morality that implies, under ethical pretexts, a withdrawal from social life. He opposes recipes for self-development; he opposes the comfortable and cheap individualism which works "upon, in, over, and under itself" (compare Pisarev's similar expression), whilst ignoring the folk, the working people. For the same reason, Mihailovskii rejects liberalism because it is concerned only about the few. He is not satisfied with political freedom in default of economic freedom, for he will not consent to the sacrifice of millions of hungry proletarians for the sake of a few thousand fat bourgeois. For Mihailovskii the only ethics are socialist ethics, and the socialist tests everything by its effect upon the workers. For Mihailovskii, therefore, "the right of ethical judgment is per se the right to intervene in the course of events, and to this right there corresponds a duty, the duty of responsibility for one's actions. The living individuality, with all its thoughts and feelings, becomes, at its own risks, a factor in history."
The ethical struggle must therefore at the same time be a struggle for the right. To Mihailovskii it seems that the motivation to this struggle is necessarily twofold. The campaign on behalf of individuality, intervention in the causal chain of historical and social events, is on the one hand determined by a sore conscience, and on the other by an
- ↑ Mihailovskii is fond of pointing out that the Russian terms for the respective concepts of truth and justice, pravda and spravedlivost', have the same primitive significance.
