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A Note: Moses Hess on Alexander Herzen’s Vision of Russia’s Future Emancipatory Role in European History1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
Extract
THE DÉBÂCLE OF THE 1848 REVOLUTION WAS A SEVERE SHOCK to most European radicals of that period. The resilience of the anciens regimes proved that, contrary to the revolutionary prophecies, the millennium was not around the corner. If the powers-that-be withstood such a powerful revolutionary wave, how were they ever going to be toppled?
The disillusion was strongest among German radical revolutionaries. Many emigrated to the United States; some, like Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer, slowly slid into co-operation with conservative circles, and re-emerged, decades later, as spokesmen for Bismarckian politics; many just dropped out, quietly slipping into obscure and respectable bourgeois existence; Karl Marx, in his London exile, abandoned his hopes for an imminent social upheaval, stayed away from the more radical, Jacobin elements of the League of Communists and immersed himself in his journalistic and scholarly work, expecting the long-range internal contradictions of capitalist society to bring about the dissolution of the bourgeois order. Only in the 1860s did he return to some sort of political activity in connection with the First International: even there he was a moderating influence against the more extreme Blanqukts and Bakuninkts.
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References
2 The most extensive biography of Hess is Edmund Silberner’s Moses Hess – Geschichte seines Lebens, Leiden, 1966. For an excellent resumé of his thought, see Berlin’s, Isaiah ‘The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess’, in his Against the Current, New York, 1980, pp. 213–51.Google Scholar Cf. also my ‘The New Jerusalem of Hess’, Moses, in Kontos, Alkis (ed.), Powers, Possessions and Freedom – Essays in Honour of C. B. MacPherson, Toronto, 1979, pp. 107–18.Google Scholar
3 Von dem anderen Ufer – Aus dem russischen Manuskript, Hamburg, 1850.
4 ‘Iskander’ (Alexander) was Herzen’s pseudonym.
5 Hess to Herzen, February 1850, in Hess, Moses, Briefwechsel, ed. E. Silberner, The Hague, 1959, pp. 240–1.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., pp. 244–5. In a later letter to Herzen, which does not belong to the ‘Letters to Iskander’ series, Hess again maintains that Herzen’s Russian patriotism clouds his vision (Hess to Herzen, November 1851, in Briefwechsel, pp. 278–9).
7 Ibid., p. 245. Hess refers here to an earlier work of his, Die europäische Triarchie (1841), where in an Appendix called ‘Russian Politics’ he warns against the dangers of a socialism imported from Russia (cf. Hess, Moses, Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. H. Lademacher, Koln, 1962, pp. 125–8).Google Scholar
8 Briefwechsel, p. 246.
9 Cortés, Donoso, Situation générale de l’Europe: Discours prononcé le 30 Janvier à la Chambre des Députés de l’Espagne, Paris, 1850.Google Scholar
10 Hess to Herzen, March 1850, Briefwechsel, p. 253.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 256.
14 Ibid., p. 239.
15 Ibid., p. 242.
16 Ibid., p. 249.
17 Ibid., pp. 252, 256–7. After this reference to Marx, there follows a passage which was deleted and was not included in the final version of the letter sent to Herzen. In this passage Hess paints a very telling picture of Marx ‐ and also brings out the ambiguity of his own personal relationship with him and the complexity of Marx’s attitude to his colleagues: ‘It is such a terrible pity that the self‐esteem of this man [Marx], the greatest genius of our movement, is not satisfied with the recognition given to him by all who justly know and honour his achievements; rather, he demands a personal kind of submission which I, at least, am not ready to render to any human being’ (ibid, p. 256).
18 Ibid., p. 258. Hess goes on to suggest (p. 261) that with the emergence of an economic crisis in England, a world crisis and a subsequent proletarian victory would follow.
19 Ibid., p. 256.