Just 150 years ago, in 1869, Tolstoy published the final installment of War and Peace, often regarded as the greatest of all novels. In his time, Tolstoy was known as a nyetovshchik—someone who says nyet, or no, to all prevailing opinion—and War and Peace discredits the prevailing views of the radical intelligentsia, then just beginning to dominate Russian thought. The intelligentsia's way of thinking is still very much with us and so Tolstoy's critique is, if anything, even more pertinent today.
“If we concede that human life can be governed by reason, then the possibility of life is destroyed,” the book's epilogue instructs. Even more than their Western European counterparts, Russians were obsessed with establishing a hard social science, as certain as physics. Any Western theory that promised such certainty found enthusiastic Russian supporters. In England, utilitarianism supported moderate liberalism, but by the 1860s Russians took it as proof of revolutionary socialism. The French positivist Auguste Comte, who coined the term “sociology,” originally planned to call his new discipline “social physics.” His Russian followers presumed that this “physics” already existed. Of course, Marxism—or “scientific socialism”—would eventually triumph over its rivals.
Read Full Article »