injured sense of honour. In his study of Saltykov, Mihailovskii brings into prominence these two fundamental motives of practical socialist ethics. A man's conscience, he says, leaves him no rest as soon as he has come to realise that in one way or another he has unjustly exercised power over his fellows; his conscience demands an adequate sacrifice. If he cannot change his nature or his habits, it is his duty to offer up his life. The sense of honour is the awareness of needlessly endured affronts and constraints, and this therefore demands, not self-sacrifice, but space for all the energies and ideals that have hitherto been repressed. If, from the pressure of circumstances, this space, this satisfaction, cannot be secured, the man whose sense of honour has been awakened is in this case too impelled to sacrifice his life. Mihailovskii is aware that this rigorous demand will not always be fulfilled; he knows that the conscience and the sense of honour are not in every case sufficiently keen; he knows that compromises will be effected. There are cases, again, when the sacrifice of life is not required, and when men find satisfaction in struggle. Finally, in the great majority of men, conscience and the sense of honour are not awakened at all.
Mihailovskii enters a protest against the criticism that his concept of honour is identical with the feudal and aristocratic "honneur" of the days of chivalry; it is, he contends, a new and entirely different ethical sentiment. Personal wellbeing as an ethical principle, he says in one place, is old, and it is enough for the bourgeois; the ethics of compunction are likewise old; but new, perfectly new, is the "sentiment of personal responsibility for one's own social position."
In his study of Renan and Dühring (1878), Mihailovskii contrasted the idea of the sovereignty of the individual, the democratic right of every individual to political initiative, with the oligarchical and monarchical right of the few or even of a single person, which the bourgeoisie regards as valid. We may harbour doubts concerning the way the principle is formulated; we may ask whether the relationship between conscience and the sense of honour be rightly conceived; but the fundamental idea is sound.[1]
- ↑ In the study of Dühring, Dühring's theory of vengeance as the source of criminal law and of law in general is described as negative, and autonomy of the individual is asserted as a positive, as a reasonable demand of democratic equality, But it is a matter for examination how much of Dühring's theory underlies Mihailovskii's theory of the sense of honour.
