his ethical measure to economic development, to apply it, that is to say, to the individual men who were conducting economic development.[1]
Mihailovskii found the correct answer to the question whether Russia had or had not yet become a capitalist country. In Europe, he said, capitalism was not so completely dominant as the narodniki maintained (Mihailovskii was criticising the views of Voroncov). In Russia, on the other hand, the development of capitalism had proceeded a great deal further than the narodniki were willing to admit.[2]
Mihailovskii believed that it might be possible for Russia to overleap the middle stage of European evolution, that of the bourgeois state, and to attain forthwith the higher phase of political and social order. Writing in 1880, he said this development was theoretically conceivable, but that its likelihood was daily diminishing.[3]
- ↑ Here is a characteristic sentence from an economic report of the year 1872: "True freedom, rightly organised and useful industry, honest financial combination, the construction of necessary railways, genuine self-government, cannot be opposed to the interests of the folk, or, and this is the same thing, cannot be opposed to the interests of labour." True, useful, honest, necessary, genuine—these and similar epithets show what were Mihailovskii's views upon industrial development. Nor must we forget that for him the folk did not signify the agriculturists alone. We see in the passage just quoted that he accepts the definition of the concept folk which he has taken from western socialist science.
- ↑ Mihailovskii found much to say about the leading narodniki, and especially about Voroncov and Nikolai-on. With perfect justice he wholly condemned Juzov; but he approves the sociological works of Južakov.
- ↑ In 1877 Mihailovskii defended Marx against a Russian critic (Carl Marx before the Tribunal of I. Žukovskii). He here mooted the question whether Russia, now enlightened by Marx concerning the capitalist evolution of the west, must necessarily follow the same course. Accepting Marx's description of European evolution, he enquired whether Russia might not fake warning by this development. As shown above, he made a distinction between historic determinism and fatalism. He held, therefore, that a Russian disciple of Marx could not be content to look on quietly at his country's evolution. It was necessary for the onlooker to take a side, he must make up his mind whether he was to rejoice at the capitalisation of the still medieval economy of Russia, to rejoice despite all the evils attendant on the process, to rejoice in the break up of the medieval mir and artel and of the system of common property in the soil and the instruments of production; or whether he would deplore these developments and seek to resist them to the uttermost. Quoting Marx's polemic against Herzen (in the first edition of Capital) Mihailovskii defended Herzen's view that Russia could traverse an evolution sui generis, but did not surrender to slavophilism, and did not ascribe to the Russian folk any mystic or sublime qualities peculiar to the Russian national spirit. The Russian, he said, must and will learn from Europe. The man who has studied Marx will reflect upon the evolutionary process to which
