The Ideology of the Russian Terrorist-Revolutionaries
The Ideology of the Russian Terrorist-Revolutionaries
The crucial thing about the revolutionary movement in Imperial Russia is that it is, as Tibor Szamuely puts it in his magnum opus, The Russian Tradition, “the history of the Russian intelligentsia. … In no other European country did a social stratum exist that remained, through three or four generations, exclusively and specifically devoted to the idea of [violent] revolution. For the bourgeoisie of the Western countries, revolution was but a means to an end; for the Russian intelligentsia it was the be all and end all of their existence.” The intelligentsia provided the ethos, values, worldview, methods, training, support, and, of course, members, for the revolutionary movement, the first modern wave of terrorists and the blueprint for all those that followed.1 The revolutionary movement and the Soviet regime that its triumph produced are, “therefore, a historical judgment on this intelligentsia”.2
The following sketch of the Russian intelligentsia is drawn from Szamuely’s The Russian Tradition,3 which you should really get hold of if you can.
As a matter of nomenclature, the Russian intelligentsia was not akin to the educated middle class or the intellectual community of Western European states, not least because Russia did not have a middle class when the intelligentsia, “the generation of the Fathers”, coalesced in the 1840s: there was the nobility and the peasantry. When a bourgeoisie did begin to appear in Russia, after the end of serfdom in 1861, it was treated with a pathological hatred by the intelligentsia, the leadership of which was beginning by that time to pass into the hands of “the generation of the Sons”. The intelligentsia believed the growth of a Russian middle class—lifting people out of poverty and giving them property to defend—would transform the state from a remote autocrat defended by the army and the police into the representative of class interests, with deep roots among the population. Having earlier scorned gradualist reform and constitutionalism as insufficient to the scale of Russia’s problems, after the 1860s the success of these things became the justification for revolution: only the immediate, violent overthrow of the Tsardom could prevent Russia’s evolution along the lines of European capitalism, which the intelligentsia despised.
The intelligentsia was set apart from fellow Russians by the possession of some education, but it is perhaps better to think of them as partially educated:4 lapsed seminarians, autodidacts, and above all failed students, since the universities were the premier incubators of the revolutionaries. The life of the eternal student was the perfect social space for the “superfluous men”, as Szamuely calls them,5 to half-learn radical ideas, foreign and domestic, and live out their disorganised, ascetic existence in isolation from the society around them. The intelligentsia drew from people of quite diverse socio-economic backgrounds, a result of the Tsardom and charities having provided subsidies for the poor to attend universities since their foundation in Russia in 1755. Unlike in the West, Russian universities never had an aristocratic character and, by the second half of the nineteenth century, more than half the students were from needy families.
The Russian intelligentsia was more a “state of mind”, defined by its adoption of a certain set of ethical and philosophical values, and an attitude of total hostility to the autocracy.6 The alienation of the intelligentsia from the state and society was a result of it adopting this consciousness; alienation from the state for material or other reasons was not the cause of them adopting this consciousness. Once within the movement, members did take on distinctive trappings that symbolised their disengagement from the society around them. Personal affairs, like care for appearance, were dispensed with; a revolutionary’s undivided attention was on the problems of mankind. This revolutionary subculture—with its own customs, living habits, pantheon of heroes, and songs—made its unkempt, unshaven, youthful members, with dishevelled dress and a cheerfully disorganised and feckless private lives, reasonably easy to identify.
This was a nihilistic existence, and it was accompanied by a nihilistic moral orientation that subordinated everything and everyone to the revolutionary cause: anything action presented as being for “the cause” was permitted; the judgments of society, and basic human sentiments like familial relations and patriotism, were rejected outright; and culture was approached in a wholly utilitarian manner. Art, literature, and science had no intrinsic and objective value to the revolutionaries; their use was only to the extent they could be used to further political goals. Sergey Nechayev expressed, and acted upon, this view so forthrightly that even the revolutionary movement (initially) recoiled, but he was doing little more than articulating in blunt terms the philosophy of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, the hallowed founder of Narodnichestvo (Populism), the dominant revolutionary ideology.7 The proof of this is that the “ends justify the means” outlook was shared across the whole spectrum of the revolutionary movement, even if Nechayev personally remained controversial and nihilism as a developed ideology had a more limited influence.
The Western issue of “elite over-production” that has led to a rebellious youth culture over the past half-century or so did not apply in Russia: without a class system that could guard its privileges, talented and ambitious people of the humblest origins could rise to the top of the government, the only serious career there was in a country where “society” and “economy” were not even theoretically separate structures from the state.8 These successful people, however, many of them better educated than the intelligentsia—civil servants, university professors, doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, businessmen—were excluded from the “intelligentsia” label by engaging with the system, either serving the state or living a normal life (trying to earn money, having children, partaking in the “rat race”). To reiterate: it was not that the intelligentsia could not a find a place in this system; they chose to reject it, seeing it as founded on injustice and repression. As such, only the total destruction of the Russian state and society would do for the intelligentsia, though it axiomatically entailed their self-destruction. This perspective made it licit to persecute anyone who had anything to do with the state, first by literary “criticism” that took the form of pure abuse, and later by assassination.
The revolutionaries spawned by the intelligentsia were generally “globalist” in outlook, but there can be no question they were distinctly Russian. One form this took was the intelligentsia unconsciously taking up “the Russian idea”, which, as Szamuely points out, had, by the mid-nineteenth century, been abandoned by most of the governing class, to use as a weapon against the state. The notion of a unique Russian mission took hold: after its unparalleled suffering, centrally focused on serfdom, it had acquired the right to lead mankind into the future. This idea of Russia’s unique circumstance allowed the intelligentsia, even the relative moderates of the Fathers’ generation, to argue that nothing short of a maximal and absolute solution would do, and it reinforced the tendency of the movement towards a cult of martyrdom. If suffering was the path to redemption, then Russia’s past suffering, since it had been worse than anyone else’s, licensed the Russian intelligentsia to chart the way forward. By implication, it meant that fresh suffering must be a positive for the cause as well. The outcome was a glorification of suffering that amounted to a collective death-wish among the revolutionaries themselves and a conviction that the revolution must take the form of a great cataclysm: blood would baptise the new order.
The “globalism” of the intelligentsia was undergirded by the fact that they truly were Nowhere Men, disconnected from obligation, kin, and country. The intelligentsia was the first group in Russian history to truly free itself from the state, as Szamuely documents: identified by the ideas it held, and physically separated off in universities and eventually safe houses, “it came to inhabit a world of its own”.9 Once driven further underground after it provoked the state with acts of violence, this tendency increased further, yet it cannot be construed as a reactive phenomenon—again, the terrorism, begun in the 1860s during a period of relative openness, provoked the crackdown, not vice versa.
The intelligentsia prioritised ideas to the point of believing “the future of mankind hung … on the results of their doctrinal arguments”.10 “Indeed, one of their most characteristic features was a penchant for translating every practical problem into an abstract point of doctrine, for raising specific concrete issues to the level of universal laws”, Szamuely notes.11 At any point where ideology and reality conflicted, the latter gave way, hence the cultic nature of the revolutionary-terrorist groups that emerged.
Operationalised, this elevation of ideas to idols meant an atmosphere of complete intolerance. After all, while the right answer would bring happiness to the whole world, the wrong answer would bring misery to everyone. This also set in train the dynamic that ensured the triumph of extremism: the accusation of “moderation”—i.e. trying to accommodate ideas to the realities of Russia—was itself deeply wounding, not least because the moderates, in their hearts, agreed that the extremists were correct and hated themselves for being unable to go along with the extremists, whether this was on tactics or ideology. This inner shame meant the moderates defended the extremists against all external criticism, justifying everything the extremists did and canonising the extremists’ heroes, and it demotivated the moderates in any internal struggle, ensuring that over time, the ideas and practices of the extremists—almost invariably the younger cadre—would come to dominate the movement.
This mindset entailed a refusal not only to engage in compromise but a refusal to do practical politics at all. There was no plan for the intermediate steps between the present and the ultimate aim. To the contrary, the ultimate aim of revolution became the one practical policy, to be achieved as quickly as possible, by any means necessary. This maximalism meant there were no restraints on how the intelligentsia got there. The same held true for what came after the revolution: there was no constructive plan for building something new—not that these people were capable of carrying out any such plan, as was demonstrated after the “February Revolution” in 1917. The Provisional Government, staffed by the intelligentsia and even some of the terrorists, most prominently Boris Savinkov, proved incapable of exercising effective power, and was ultimately undone by its own crippling inability to break out of the mindset that saw the revolutionary extremists as the most noble beings: not even when their lives depended on it could the intelligentsia in the Provisional Government see that the real danger was the Bolsheviks, not the constitutional conservatives and the Army.
The furthest anyone got in terms of a positive plan to follow the devastation of the revolution was “equality”, again an abstract principle, and all descriptions that approached a practical plan for equality made clear that what was meant was redistribution of resources produced by the old regime; there was no serious thought given to what the development and production of new wealth would look like. Those who did any practical, honest thinking about this, such as Pyotr Tkachyov, were under no illusions: they knew there would be resistance and forced egalitarianism would require a long period of unlimited despotism—enlightened and with its guiding mission to care for all humanity, of course—and the mass extermination of class enemies. That this conflicted with notions of personal freedom was seen as no problem at all: the intelligentsia rejected liberal precepts altogether. The only slight exception to this rule is the minor trend of pure anarchist Bakuninites and the brief period in the early 1870s, when the ideas of Pyotr Lavrov gained supremacy over the intelligentsia, but Lavrov is very much the exception that proves the rule: concerned as he was about the revolution resulting in a new form of dictatorship and exploitation, his refusal to countenance legal or constitutional mechanisms as safeguards left him advocating justice through mob rule of the kind seen in the American “Wild West” and Lavrov’s whole program was decisively repudiated.12
The valorisation of ideology was visible above all in the revolutionaries’ approach to “the people”, the totemic object in whose name they acted. For the intelligentsia, “the people” did not refer to the Russian population, but to the revolutionaries’ idea of the population. The revolutionaries were at all times utterly divorced from the realities of life for Russians, despite their copious literature on “the people”. The intelligentsia held to the contradictory stance of love and mistrust toward “the people”, who were both the repositories of the purest truths, nature’s socialists, and yet would, if left to their own devices, do nothing. The Fathers and the Men of the Sixties were agreed the peasantry was incapable of political action, and after the “Going to the People” debacle under Lavrov’s influence the revolutionaries were sure it was worse than that: if the post-revolutionary situation was left in the hands of the peasantry, the people the revolution was supposedly carried out on behalf of, they would go astray in search of their own interests.
The contrasting views over the “revolutionary potential” of “the people” were the central dividing line in the revolutionary movement, far more important than any ideological differences. Crudely put, one side argued “the people” had revolution within them but needed a vanguard to awaken and guide them to its attainment, and once freed the peasants could be trusted to proceed on a socialist course. The other side argued the revolution would have to be the work of a minority that understood better than “the people” what was good for them: the revolutionaries would have to do the job of getting rid of the Tsardom for “the people”, albeit while mobilising some of the population (through deception, if necessary) to give them the numbers to bring down the regime, and afterwards revolutionary rule would be needed until “the people” had been remade into socialists. Tkachyov made the latter argument in the mid-1870s and, though he suffered a Nechayev-like fate of denunciation at the time from both main factions of orthodox revolutionaries and was then disappeared from revolutionary historiography, his view basically won-out. It is not a coincidence that the two most successful terrorist groups were the unconventional representatives of the Narodists and Marxists, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) and the Bolsheviks, respectively, neither of which “bothered to conceal their admiration for many of [Tkachyov’s] views”.13
There was an echo of Rousseau in this condescending view of the peasantry, but it was faint: the ideas of the French Enlightenment in general had minimal impact on the Russian intelligentsia. And the ideas more associated with the English and Scottish Enlightenments—the liberal focus on the individual, the rule of law, legalism generally, protection of private property—were actively detested and regarded as missing the point. As Szamuely points out, the entirety of the radical political literature “contains not a single work on legal theory, constitutionalism, the rights of man, the natural law”, or any of the rest of it.14 Even the relatively moderate Men of the Forties thought the absence of legal guarantees in Russia was an advantage: Russia was considered more ripe for socialist revolution than Western Europe precisely because of its lack of legal and economic development; it meant the destruction would be easier, since there would be no claims raised in the New World after the revolution to hold on to rights from the Old World.
The upshot was the intelligentsia had a concern for mankind in the abstract and a complete indifference to living human beings: there was no “revolutionary act” that could not be justified as a means to the greater end of liberating all humanity. A central concept developed by the intelligentsia, bred of this primacy on ideas and utopia over actual people, was “the worse it is—the better”.15 This is why the intelligentsia was so furious when the Tsardom abolished serfdom: they would rather serfdom had remained or that emancipation had taken place without gifts of land to those freed, since this reform that helped actual people was a blow to their ideological certitude that only an absolute solution of total destruction was possible, and it reduced the suffering they could ride to catalyse revolution. It is no accident, as the comrades used to say, that the terrorist movement begins in the wake of the serfs’ emancipation. It was a persistent theme for the intelligentsia that the peasants should forgo any attainable alleviation of suffering in the here-and-now in the name of perfect future happiness. Many revolutionaries were quite direct in stating what a cruel and dirty business their work was, but their utilitarian calculus said that even the suffering of millions at the present was worth it to catalyse the revolution against the Tsar that would bring global happiness later. And the revolutionaries were not only demanding sacrifices of others. They were quite prepared—often almost eager—to die for their principles.
The moral utilitarianism meant everything was reduced to a single criterion: did it serve the revolution? Charity and humanitarian activity were scorned in general because the “small deeds” that gradually improved life eroded problems that could be exploited and delayed the revolution.16 Ordinary human instincts like love of one’s own, whether family or countrymen, were despised since they bound people together and made them averse to destroying everything around them. Writers and literary critics acquired a status they achieved nowhere in the West: they were the ideologists of the intelligentsia, engaging in fierce polemics and the production of novels to guide “the people”. It is this tradition that is inherited by figures like Trotsky, admired for his writing in the West now even by many political foes, just as the nineteenth century Russian literati first conquered their own land and then all of Europe. The unanimous hatred of Russia’s literary geniuses for the intelligentsia is notable and understandable.17 The intelligentsia’s utilitarianism meant they opposed art for art’s sake, the objective study of history, and the pursuit of beauty. Literature was to carry a social message to “educate” the masses. The morality inherited from Christianity, as a bulwark of the old world, had no place in the intelligentsia’s scheme, and neither did truth.
The intelligentsia were atheists by definition, but, as mentioned, they were highly theological, and the imprint of Christianity is very clear. Tellingly, Chernyshevsky was born to a clerical family, as was Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky’s closest ally in spreading his revolutionary creed, and Nechayev had been a religious teacher.18 Serfdom was the central issue. The guilt over this original sin and the need to expiate it and atone for it through suffering coloured everything. It inspired the Sons’ hostility to the Fathers’ generation, the latter having been aristocratic and thus beneficiaries of slavery, and stood behind the revolutionaries enshrining “the people”, meaning the lower orders, as the focus of liberation. These most oppressed people were seen as innocent of the original sin and the closest to holy. The last would be made first.19 This cult of the victim went hand-in-hand with the intelligentsia’s well-developed martyrology: in the cosmic struggle against the Antichrist (the state), immediate individual and mass suffering were the necessary price of ultimate victory. This millenarian belief that it was possible through some level of sacrifice to build Jerusalem on earth was inherently messianic and eschatological: it longed for the apocalyptic catastrophe that would bring about the earthly paradise of absolute justice. In this vision, the intelligentsia were to play the role of Providence, with the modification that instead of the divine hand working through a multitude of human activities, there was a single mechanism to steer a course towards apocalypse and renewal: violence.
The last ingredient in the intelligentsia’s worldview was Science, at whose shrine they all worshipped. They never thought it was worth Russia engaging in scientific research—this would have been to use Russia’s intellectual resources on a luxury that could not be afforded—but European Science could be imported to smash superstition and revolutionise the social outlook of Russians, to overthrow every traditional concept, view, and assumption. The obshchina, the village communes that were central to Narodism’s thesis of the Russian peasantry as natural socialists, was given to the revolutionaries by a European scientist.20 The reasoning process itself and the assumptions underlying the European scientific method, like individual rights and free inquiry, made little headway among the intelligentsia, but the belief that Science validated their primitive materialism and the answers they had given to all questions was very powerful. “Science became the handmaiden of nihilism”, as Szamuely summarises.21 In the 1870s, this mystical scientism would have Social Darwinism added to it, increasing the revolutionaries’ sense of their right as Übermenschen to decide the fate of the peasants, and of course all along it ran in parallel with messianism. This all preceded the advent of Marxism—another doctrine that claimed to be scientific—among the Russian intelligentsia.
The final stage in the intelligentsia’s evolution was the addition of Marxism, which was, to put it mildly, imperfectly understood, but Marxism’s hostility to the bourgeoisie, its egalitarianism, advocacy of revolution, and messianism made it consonant with their pre-existing beliefs, and Marxism gave the intelligentsia the scientific certainty they had longed for. “The people” were linguistically replaced by “the proletariat”, and the fusion of Russian and Marxist messianism produced a force that changed the world.
It might be asked what relevance the Russian terrorist-revolutionaries have for the present, their project having collapsed in ruins more than thirty years ago. To give just two examples.
First, probably the most durable aspect of the terrorist-revolutionaries is their highly exaggerated propaganda image of the Tsarist despotism that was used to justify their extreme behaviour. This propaganda was picked up and circulated by radicals and reformists alike in the West in the nineteenth century, shaping the popular imagination of the Tsardom, and it has been reflected in academic historiography down to the present. One factor in this is political bias, not driven solely by those consciously writing apologetics for the Bolshevik regime. “Revolution” has acquired in the West almost exclusively positive associations, meaning it is often taken as an axiom that what preceded 1917 in Russia was much worse than what came after. To make this story work, given the scale of the horrors wrought by the Soviet system, the Tsardom has had to be depicted in ludicrous and hysterical terms as a proto-fascist totalitarian state.
The other factor abetting this misportrayal of the Tsardom, ironically, is the nature of the Soviet Union. The centralised power of the Lenin-Stalin state—its ability to reach into any village and exert its will, and the degree of social control it aspired to and achieved—gives for many a distorting impression; it is assumed Russia was always like this. Dubious accounts by visitors with ideological axes of their own to grind have furthered the perception that the Soviet police state was a continuation of earlier practices,22 that Lenin and his heirs were merely “Red Tsars”. The reality is quite otherwise: even at the zenith of the Tsardom’s power under Nicholas I (r. 1825-55), the state’s repression simply cannot be compared with that of the Soviets. The difference is not just one of capacity—the Soviets having access to modern surveillance and communications, for example—but of intention, and this is particularly obvious in the rural areas. The Soviet regime waged a war of extermination against the peasantry to try to make them Communists, while the Tsarist government had a staggeringly minimal police presence in the villages.23
Second, arguably the most profound impact down to the present is the Russian revolutionaries’ weltanschauung. Szamuely was able to detect alarming parallels between the Russian intelligentsia and Western liberal-progressive circles fifty years ago, and these parallels are more obvious and powerful now. There is the partial education, the universities as the hub of sedition, “revolutionary” having only noble connotations, and the mindless cult of youth, letting the young set the trends in everything from clothes to intellectual fashions. The idolisation of ideas as the solvent for all societal ills, no matter how impractical, and the relentless persecution of people who hold the wrong ideas or express them with the wrong words. The Russian revolutionaries’ tendency to turn every issue into an abstract moral question, where they can substitute self-righteous judgment for understanding issues in any depth,24 is by now very familiar, as is the related belief that for every problem there is a simple solution, and the pursuit of this solution with the youthful combination of energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and idealism, plus arrogance, inexperience, credulity, impatience, and ruthlessness.25 Less pronounced in the West when Szamuely was writing in the 1970s, though certainly visible, were: the cult around Science and the belief it validates every idea of “progress” the intellectuals come up with; equality (or “equity”) as the sole guiding light; the guilt-complex that demands collective suffering in the present to atone for past sins; and the valuing of art only as a political weapon. These things are now societal orthodoxies recognisable to everyone.
Subsequent articles will explain the cast of characters that made up the Russian revolutionary movement and its evolution, from the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 to the formation of the intelligentsia beginning in the 1840s, the adoption of terrorism in the 1860s, and the long struggle thereafter that saw the emergence of the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary triumph.
Tibor Szamuely (1974), The Russian Tradition, p. 143.
The quote comes from Vekhi (Milestones), a collection of essays critiquing the Russian intelligentsia published in 1909, edited by literary historian Mikhail Gershenzon, a Russian Jew who lived to see the Revolution (he died in 1925). Gershenzon was the first chairman of the Moscow Writers’ Union in 1918, holding several other positions within the People’s Commissariat for Education (Narkompros) thereafter.
The Russian Tradition, pp. 143-79.
Michel de Montaigne (d. 1592), a conservative and Catholic, one of the most important figures of the French Renaissance, wrote in his essay ‘On Pedantry’ on the hazards of partial education: “what is the use of learning, if understanding is absent? … [W]e must not attach learning to the mind, we must incorporate it; we must not sprinkle, but dye. And if learning does not change the mind and improve its imperfect state, certainly we do much better to let it alone. Learning is a dangerous sword that will hamper and hurt its master, if it is in a weak hand that does not know how to use it.” [Translated by] Donald M. Frame, Complete Essays (1957), p. 103.
The Russian Tradition, p. 148.
The Russian Tradition, p. 145.
The Russian Tradition, pp. 248-60.
Mikhail Pogodin (1800-75), the “official ideologist of autocracy”, and Ilya Ulyanov (1831-86), a senior civil servant and Lenin’s father, were the sons of serfs. Aleksandr Nikitenko (1804-77), the “long-time liberal professor of literature at Saint Petersburg University and prominent civil servant”, had actually been a serf. Anton Denikin (1872-1947), a senior official in the Imperial Army before he led the Volunteer Army (“the Whites”) in trying to reverse the Bolshevik conquest, was also the son of a serf. See: The Russian Tradition, pp. 146-47.
The Russian Tradition, p. 146.
The Russian Tradition, p. 159.
The Russian Tradition, p. 157.
The Russian Tradition, pp. 272-86.
The Russian Tradition, pp. 302-15.
The Russian Tradition, pp. 171-72.
The Russian Tradition, p. 167.
The Russian Tradition, p. 154.
The dislike of “avowed conservatives” like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Fyodor Tyutchev for the radicals is a given, but Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and even the mild-mannered Anton Chekov wrote with great passion against the intellectual vandalism of the intelligentsia. See: The Russian Tradition, p. 168.
The Russian Tradition, pp. 251-52.
Matthew 20:16.
In the late 1840s, a study of the Russian agricultural landscape by a German, Baron August von Haxthausen, brought the obshchina or mir to the attention of Alexander Herzen, the grand old man of the Father’s generation and ideologist of Narodism, and the institution was thereafter at the heart of the Narodniks’ theory of revolution.
The Russian Tradition, p. 169.
The classic case is the Maquis de Custine. Custine had lost family in the Terror of the French Revolution and emerged as a reactionary Roman Catholic, looking for ways liberalism could be contained. Having settled in his mind on the Tsardom as the model of monarchical autocracy, his utopia, the reality of Russia during Custine’s three-month visit in 1839 could never live up to expectations. The book Custine produced after this visit is as much about his own despondency and disappointment as it is about Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. It is not surprising, however, given that Custine presents everything about Tsarist Russia in the most negative possible light, that the book was designated by Herzen as “the cleverest book ever written by a foreigner about Russia” [The Russian Tradition, p. 3]. Despite the obvious slanting of Custine’s work and the clear errors—in uncontested, concrete matters of fact and in his sweeping judgements of Russian society, like his dismissal of the importance of Pushkin’s poetry—the book has been highly influential in shaping the presentation of the Tsardom by many historians, often explicitly because it allows a back-projection of continuity between the Soviet Union and the old regime [For example: Christopher Andrew (2018), The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, 377-78]. Even authors who admit the problems with Custine’s report will still then declare it “remarkably insightful” and rely on it [See as an example: Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (1995), The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering, p. 256].
Even when compared to liberal Britain, the Russian Empire generally had an extremely small police force, let alone when compared to, say, Prussia. In rural Russia, the disparity was even more extreme: 100 million people (out of a total population of 136 million) were policed in 1900 by about 8,000 officers. See: Orlando Figes (1996), A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924, pp. 46-47.
Whole academic disciplines have been lost to this tendency. For example, Edward Said’s “Orientalism” is now the dominant framework for examining the history of the Middle East in university departments. The fact Said’s thesis fails very elementary tests of historical accuracy is beside the point. The need for knowledge and evidence has been downgraded, if not eliminated. What is valued is whether someone holds the “correct” moral-political views.
The Russian Tradition, p. 163.