The founder of Russian socialism, Alexander Herzen, was also an original moral and social philosopher, anticipating much twentieth-century thought in his attack on “grand narratives” that endow history with a rational direction and a final goal. The critique of radical utopianism which he based on his observations of the French revolution of 1848 did not (contrary to the common view) deprive him of any further role as a revolutionary intellectual. Rather, it forced him to redefine this role. The key influences on him in this respect were the thought and the activity of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He saw Proudhon's attack on the anthropotheism of Feuerbach's “religion of humanity” as completing the demystification of the world begun by the Left Hegelians' critique of religious alienation, and interpreted Proudhon's unpopularity with the French Left as confirmation of his role as a forerunner who had articulated a vision of freedom from transcendent authorities and systems much in advance of his time. During his subsequent involvement in the Russian political scene Herzen modelled himself to a significant degree on Proudhon, attacking systematizers on all sides, urging a pragmatic approach to the problem of political reform, and accepting his loss of influence among Russian radicals as the price for unmasking the authoritarianism hidden in the ideologies of the Left: a notable instance of cross-cultural influences at work in the history of nineteenth-century revolutionary thought.