The Liberal Kernel

Drahomanov’s thought is syncretic. It combines democratic and socialist, patriotic and cosmopolitan, Slavophile and Occidentalist ele­ments. In order to view Drahomanov’s system as an organic unity it is necessary to find the centre of gravity of the whole.

I define Drahomanov’s liberalism as the doctrine that the freedom and worth of the human being are the highest values. Politically it is primarily concerned with the extension and strengthening of the rights of individuals. Like President Wilson after him, Drahomanov believed that the history of liberty was the history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. The security of the personal sphere is more important than participation in the creation of a collective political will.

It is self-evident that for each person the inviolability of his indi­vidual rights is much more essential than the right to direct, and particularly to indirect, influence on the course of affairs of state.⁴

In political revolutions he [the liberal] will be relatively indif­ferent to the form taken by the state at the top governmental level. However, he will always intervene to enlarge the freedom of every person, in word and deed—equally so for the freedom of races, as­sociations, communities, and regions—this through the limitation, wherever possible, of the power and the authority of the state.⁵

For Drahomanov the logical consequence of this thought was the ideal of anarchy—not of course in the popular sense of the word as disor­der and the war of each against each, but as a vision of a condition where external authority and pressure would no longer be necessary, since men would have learned to govern themselves and live in peace with their fel­low men.

Mankind’s aim, which is completely unlike present-day states, is a condition where both larger and smaller social bodies will be composed of free men, united voluntarily for common work and mutual help. This goal is called anarchy, i.e., the autonomy of each individual and the free co-operation of men and groups.⁶

Proudhon’s influence on Drahomanov is visible here, and Drahomanov acknowledges it himself.⁷

The doctrine of anarchy was formulated by Proudhon as an an­tithesis to French theories of the forties and fifties, which all, whether monarchic, constitutional, or republican, were more or less centralistic. Proudhon’s anarchism is the doctrine of the com­plete independence of the individual and the inviolability of his rights by all governmental powers, even elected and representative ones.⁸

It is improbable that Drahomanov believed that anarchist ideals could be realized in the foreseeable, or even in the remote, future. He saw them rather as an indicator of the direction in which progress should be made, whether or not the goal could ever be reached. At one point Drahomanov compared the ideal of anarchy with the efforts of an engineer to reduce the friction in machines to nothing, although this natu­rally is impossible.⁹ Here a critic is inclined to remark that without fric­tion no machine would function at all. The analogy is not completely fa­vourable to Drahomanov⁵S thesis!

Drahomanov⁵S anarchic ideals led him to federalism. This is the part of his political philosophy which is best known. Anyone who has heard of Drahomanov at all knows that he was a federalist. People think that the federalization of Russia was his aim, but in reality this federalism was a universal principle. For a political thinker who takes the autonomy of the individual as his starting point, and who rejects every form of author­itarianism, federation—-the adherence of persons with equal rights to groups and communities, and the co-operation of these in greater unions — is the only way to overcome the atomization of society.

In practice Proudhon’s anarchistic doctrines come down to fed­eralism. Not only does federation not exclude discipline, but rather it is the best form of organization and discipline for humanity.¹⁰

Proudhon says that the synonym for anarchy is the English word self-government. In its practical application the theory of anarchy leads to federalism.¹¹

Only small states, or rather communities, can be truly free societies. Only a federation of communities can be truly free.¹²

The next quotation is especially important. It comes from a letter writ­ten in answer to a friend’s request for information about federalism. The letter shows Drahomanov’s wide erudition in this field and the sources he used, as well as certain practical implications of his federalist philoso­phy.

Among continental authors who have been concerned with the problem of federalism, the first place belongs to Proudhon and his Du Principe Federatif. I must pass over the English [he probably means Italian] and Spanish works except for the mention of Pi-y- Margal, Les Nationalites; there is also a German translation. Con­stantin Frantz, Der Fdderalismus, is unreliable. It is hard to obtain Eotvds [a Hungarian author]. Much of value is to be found in Mill, On Liberty; Laboulaye, L’Etat et ses Iimites; Odilon Barrot, De la centralisation et ses ejfets; Dupont-White, L^tIndividu et Γetaf₃ and in old Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique.... The theoreti­cal pros and cons of federalism can be discussed endlessly. In some things centralization is necessary, in others, decentralization. Fed­eralism has two main practical advantages: a) By the use of the na­tional languages federation aids education and brings the courts and the administration closer to the people. There is a good book on this problem in modern Europe by Fischhof, Die Sprachenrechte in den Staaten gemischter Nationalitat. b) Administrative affairs are conducted by those whose interests are most directly affected.

Perhaps we can best see the natural tendency of Drahomanov⁵S thoughts in his sympathies and antipathies toward various lands and their governments. From the abstract discussion of the ideas of liberalism, anarchy, and federalism we here return to the world of concrete political reality.

Up to today the only states in Western Europe which have en­joyed solid political freedom are federative Switzerland, England —with its system of the guaranteed rights of classes, corporations, counties, and cities—municipal Belgium, the formerly federal re­public of Holland, and the Scandinavian states, where centralism was never strong.¹⁴

I put no faith in any state, with the exception of Switzerland and England.¹⁵

It will immediately be noted that among the states which Drahomanov considers nearest to being the incarnation of his ideal there are a number of monarchies. Drahomanov did not share the automatic republicanism of most East European progressives, not because he had any particular fondness for monarchies, but because for him the form of the central gov­ernment was of secondary importance.

Certain modern monarchies, such as the English and the Bel­gian, better guarantee a larger degree [of self-government and per­sonal rights] than does the French Republic, for instance.¹⁶

Finally let us remark that Drahomanov had a rather low opinion of the French Republic and its system of parliamentary centralism.

Drahomanov believed that ever since the Great Revolution France had been on the wrong track.

Since 1789 France has experimented with seventeen constitu­tions [this was written in 1881] and has gone through four revolu­tions. In spite of this it has had to suffer three military coups d’etat.

The expression “autocracy of the people” in the last sentence is an allusion to the famous theory of popular sovereignty, according to which the source of all power and authority is to be sought in the will of the people. The classic form of this theory is the doctrine of the social con­tract, i.e., the conferring of rights upon the government by the citizens. Rousseau gave this doctrine of social contract a revolutionary twist, which then served the French Revolution as the ideological justification of the Jacobin dictatorship. In the nineteenth century the historically un­founded doctrine of the social contract fell into disrepute, but the theory of popular sovereignty, of the unlimited authority of the popular will, re­mained untarnished in democratic circles. Drahomanov was very scepti­cal of this theory, to say the least. He believed in the inviolable rights of individuals and natural groups (communities, economic groups, nation­alities, etc.). For him freedom consisted in political and social pluralism, while the doctrine of the popular will obviously led to a process of level­ling and to the creation of large, centralized, collective bodies.

The concept of “the popular will” is almost the exact opposite of the concept of “political freedom.”... It [the popular will] can mean nothing other than the will of the majority, and in modern states, so different from the ancient communal and cantonal states, this means the will of the majority of the representatives of the majority. It is obvious that the absolutism of such a will may be in opposition to the interests of a great part of the population and to the essential rights of persons, groups, areas, and entire nation­alities.²⁰

In developing this thought Drahomanov adds that the doctrine of the absolutism of the popular will may contribute to the creation of dic­tatorial regimes. This is demonstrated by the examples of the tyrants in the Greek city-states, of Roman Caesarism, of the Jacobin dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, and of the Bonapartism of the First and Second Empires. In all of these regimes the absolute power of the gov­ernment was supposedly derived from and legitimated by the will of the people. Napoleon I and Napoleon III even used plebiscites, and every time the “popular will’’ endorsed the constitutional amendments and the extensions of powers desired by the government. Drahomanov remarks that Muscovite Slavophiles are also fond of using the argument of the will of the people; for them the tsar is the incarnation of the will of the Russian people. Drahomanov was disturbed to hear the Russian revolu­tionaries also speak of the omnipotence of the popular will.

So far we have shown what Drahomanov understood by political free­dom. It is interesting to see where he felt the historical roots Ofliberalism were. In his early work on Tacitus he opposed the thesis introduced by Montesquieu that freedom originated in the Germanic forests. He pointed to the Roman Empire with its ruling humanitarian and cosmopolitan stoic philosophy, enlightened lawmaking, improvement of the lot of women and slaves, gradual extension of the rights of provincials, and self­government of communities and provinces.²¹ Here we cannot evaluate these views. It is enough to say that later Drahomanov himself expressed a very different opinion, tracing liberalism to the institutions of territorial and class self-government and the feudal parliamentarianism of the late Middle Ages.

In part liberalism is the heir of feudalism, a medieval thing. En­gland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland preserved their medieval freedom, and did not fall victim to later absolutism. Therefore they gave the impetus for the development of modern liberalism.²²

The question of the rise of political freedom leads to the problem of progress in general. The idea of progress was a basic component of nineteenth-century liberalism. What distinguishes Drahomanov’s idea of progress is his precise, cautious, and relatively critical formulation. Drahomanov never regards progress as a sort of automatic process of na­ture, or identifies it with technological achievements and the accumula­tion of material goods, as did so many representatives of the vulgar liber­alism of the nineteenth century. To anyone as ethically oriented as Drahomanov, progress is essentially a question of a higher degree of spiritual culture and of social justice. Drahomanov provides a remarkable pragmatic justification for the idea of progress. Belief in progress allows men to strive for the perfection of conditions as a realizable aim, and does not permit fatalistic resignation to the existing state of affairs. Since men fight for improvement, true progress will then be achieved.

Only the belief in the stern ideal of progress saves man from pes­simism, doubt, and misanthropy and teaches him to judge epochs of history and historical personalities according to the idea of rela­tive perfection.... It is only with the acceptance of the idea of progress that a solid basis is found for the idea that historical phe­nomena follow certain laws and rules.²³

One of Drahomanov’s last works, published a year before his death, was the pamphlet Rai ³ postup (Paradise and Progress). It is written so as to be intelligible to peasant readers, the members of the Galician Radical Party. But its simplicity should not deceive us; here Drahomanov devel­ops a truly original philosophy of history. In contrast to most of the apologists for the belief in progress, he does not construct his argument from a demonstration of the outward achievements of civilization, but on the development of the idea of progress itself. The biblical myth of Para­dise, like similar myths among other peoples, shows how men, dis­satisfied with reality, began to imagine a better life, even if in the remote past. The next step was Persian dualism, with its belief in the final vic­tory of good. Then came Christian chiliasm, the hope of Christ’s coming to reign during the millennium. From the sixteenth century men began to turn their eyes from heaven toward the earth, no longer hoping for the victory of good as a supernatural event at the end of time, but as the re­sult of their own conscious efforts.

The truth of the idea of progress is shown through the develop­ment of this idea itself. In its development we see a clear advance with the passage of time.²⁴

In this connection Drahomanov demonstrates briefly how each ad­vance in the concept of progress has corresponded to an advance in civili­zation. This idealistic philosophy of history can be expressed in the fol­lowing way: the moving force behind positive development is the prog­ress of ideas.

To complete the picture, we must also speak of Drahomanov’s attitude toward religion.²⁵ This is not out of place in an examination of Drahomanov as a political thinker. He himself had the following convic­tion:

It is well known that there is a close connection between men’s conceptions of political and social matters and their religious ideas.²⁶

Drahomanov had a clear practical program in regard to religious ques­tions. He always desired the separation of church and state and the turn­ing of the churches into private, financially independent organizations. He referred specifically to the American example, and expressed the hope that it would be followed by the European states as soon as pos­sible.²⁷

He believed that in politics free-thinkers and liberal Christians should work together, but he feared that the Catholic and Orthodox faithful were unlikely to be useful in the struggle for civic progress. Later he modified this opinion. He realized that in lands such as Ireland and Belgium the Catholic church worked for the interests of the people. In the work of such men as Cardinal Manning he saw the beginnings of social Catho­licism. He also saw that there was a difference between lands such as the United States and Switzerland and other lands, such as Austria. In the former Catholics and Protestants lived together in a mixed population, and the Catholic hierachy had adapted itself to democratic institutions; in the latter the Catholic church was still linked to feudal interests. In a let­ter to a Galician leader Drahomanov expressed the opinion that the Radi­cals in Galicia could find a modus vivendi with the clergy of the Uniate church (an Eastern-rite branch of Roman Catholicism), provided that freedom for scientific research was undisturbed and that the social inter­ests of the working classes were supported.²⁸ In the heat of his struggle against clericalism, Drahomanov was unable to appraise correctly the historical services which the Uniate church had rendered to the Ukrainian people in Galicia. However, it is difficult to deny that his appeal for the secularization of Ukrainian culture and politics corresponded to an urgent need of his time.

Both during his lifetime and after his death Drahomanov was often considered an atheist. This was one of the principal reasons for much of the hostility against him, as well as the cause of his popularity in other quarters. Such an interpretation is possible on the basis of certain of his writings, where he attacks the churches as the cause of many bloody wars and unnecessary battles, and calls for rationalism in religious affairs. However, Drahomanov does not offer a rationalist ersatz religion in the style of Auguste Comte’s positivism or the all-embracing ideology of Marxism. On closer inspection it is seen that Drahomanov’s positivism may be reduced to the demand for the freedom of scientific investigation, unhindered by traditionalist taboos of a religious, or any other, nature. In one of his popular pamphlets he gives a beautiful interpretation of the Prometheus myth as the ancient but eternally new symbol of the human spirit storming heaven unafraid.²⁹ In connection with his studies of folk­lore and ethnography Drahomanov took a scholarly interest in the prob­lems of the history of religions. He tried to spread among Ukrainians the study of the history of religions and of biblical criticism. In a society where religion was almost universally identified with the traditional faith and the established churches, Orthodox and Uniate, this was quite enough to give Drahomanov the reputation of being an atheist. He did re­gard the religious situation in the Russian Empire as pathological. There, thanks to the censorship and to tsarist policy in general, even most edu­cated people saw no other alternatives than the Orthodox state church (which was backward even in comparison with Byzantium of the fourth to eighth centuries) or the crude materialism of the Nihilists.³⁰ There is no doubt that Drahomanov tried with all his strength to indicate to the Ukrainian people a third way out of this religious dilemma.

No reader of Drahomanov^,s writings can fail to notice the attention he gives to Protestantism, so disproportionately large in relation to its actual role in the life of the Ukrainian people. He sought all the heterodox influ­ences in Ukrainian religious history, from Manichaeism through Hus- sitism, Calvinism, and Socinianism. He was also extremely interested in the lay brotherhoods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These represented the democratic element in the government of the Orthodox church in Ukraine; they controlled the hierachy, fostered the develop­ment of schools and presses, and led the resistance against the militant Catholicism of the Polish Counter-Reformation. In the second half of the nineteenth century peasants of Russian Ukraine who were dissatisfied with the official Orthodox faith founded an evangelical movement called Stundism. In spite of the harsh persecutions of the tsarist government, Stundism became increasingly important, and in the course of time it took on the character of a Protestant sect related to Western Baptism. Drahomanov followed the progress of the Stundists with unwavering in­terest. As early as 1875 he endeavoured to provide Ukrainian translations of the Bible for them.³¹ In the early 1890s he wrote a number of pamphlets, among them one in 1893 on John Wycliffe, which were aimed at acquainting the Ukrainian peasant reformers with the traditions of Western Protestantism. At the same time he spurred on his Galician friends to try to propagate in Austrian Ukraine a movement similar to the Stundism of Russian Ukraine. Drahomanov even made a proposal of basic principles for a ‘^kRuthenian Brotherhood.”³² Drahomanov’s death prevented him from writing two pamphlets he had planned, one on Roger Williams and the other on John of Leyden. The first was to illustrate the relationship between enlightened Christianity and social and political progress; the second, the dangers of fanatical sectarianism.³³

It has been claimed that Drahomanov^,s interest in Protestantism was of a tactical nature, an attempt to weaken the traditional faith and prepare the way for the penetration of radical ideas. This explanation does not fit a man of Drahomanov^,s intellectual honesty. Drahomanov had many of the Charactistics of a puritan reformer: severe self-discipline, high de­mands on both himself and others, tireless work, a moralistic attitude to­ward life, stiff-necked fidelity to his principles, and the courage to go his own way. It must be acknowledged that there was a genuine inner rela­tionship between Drahomanov’s spirit and that of Protestantism.

It is well known that the emergence of liberalism in the West was closely connected with the Protestant spirit. Nothing shows better the depth of Drahomanov⁵S liberal position than does the attraction which Protestantism had for him.