It Was the Influence of Solov'ev That Helped to Inspire Spirited Criticism Of
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It was the influence of Solov'ev that helped to inspire spirited criticism of positivism and, in the process, ushering in a theosophic and socio-political renaissance represented by such talented men as Nicholas Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Semen Frank, and Peter Struve (pp. 252-259). To conclude, despite some of its shortcomings, the book on the whole is informative and, at times, intellectually stimulating. T. Hunczak Rutgers University Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. xiii, 415 pp. $10.00. This is the first volume of Professor Richard Pipes's two-volume study of the life of P. B. Struve (1870-1944). It consists of three parts: Part One, entitled "Implanting Social Democracy," deals with Struve's youth and intellectual devel- opment up to and including the publication in 1894 of his famous CTitical Remarks on the Question of Russia's Economic Development. Part Two, "The United Front," is devoted to Struve's Social Democratic period - in large measure to his relations with Lenin. It carries the story to the turn of the century. "Liberation," as the third part is called, deals with Struve's career as philosopher, publicist and politician in the Liberation Movement from the turn of the century to October, 1905. Pipes has done his homework extremely well in preparing this book, having taken great pains to search out material by and about his subject in the archives and among survivors in numerous countries, in addition to examining Struve's published work. In studying this data he has perceived and convincingly communicated the development pattern of his subject's thought. Struve is shown to have formed precocious political views under the influence of the social- monarchist, nationalist writings of Ivan Aksakov and the liberal tradition of the "Epoch of Great Reforms." By age fifteen, at the outset of the reactionary offensive led by Interior Minister Dmitrii Tolstoi against the "Great Reforms," he became a liberal and a constitutionalist. But with the zemstvo liberal movement in effect non-existent at that time, Struve - young, idealistic and critical-minded - gravitated leftward in the late 1880's and early 1890's. Rejecting the philosophical confusion and political opportunism of the populist "old left," he became one of the first spokesmen inside Russia of the "new left," Social Democrary. But by the turn of the century the liberal political opposition had revived in the zemstva and was generating new institutional forms, while the Social Democratic movement was rapidly moving toward revolutionary exclu- sivism. Struve, in the author's words, then found a "natural home" among the zemstvo constitutionalists and the non-revolutionary opposition as a whole once it had become active. The correspondence between the political and philosophical aspects of his thought were always a constant and central concern to Struve, dyed-in-the wool intellectual that he was. In his youth he was a positivist and a disciple of Riehl's Neo-Kantian criticism; he cut his philosophical teeth attacking the logical in- consistencies of "subjective sociology," the views of Mikhailovskii, Vorontsov, Danielson, and others. He displayed a pronounced intolerance for "metaphysics" and any kind of philosophical pluralism. These inclinations first drew him to Marxism, or rather to Marx's sociology and economics, for he never embraced Marxism as a total explanation of reality, and he found the dialectic a philosoph- ically unacceptable notion from the outset. (As Pipes points out, the seed of revisionism was therefore present in Struve's Marxism from the beginning: rejection of the dialetic led him to rule out the idea of social revolution on purely logical grounds). For Struve the central principle of Marxism was economic determinism, which provided him with "'scientific' proof that the autocratic regime in Russia would dissappear" (p. 59). By the same token, Struve's with- drawal from Social Democracy was accompanied by a critique of the Marxian sociology and economics he had previously accepted, and his turn to liberalism by the abandonment of positivism and the urge to philosophical unity. Struve found himself obliged to "acknowledge an independent realm of moral values" and to accept a political philosophy which assumed the "existence of absolute and eternal ethical norms" (pp. 300, 293). He gave in to metaphysics. This surrender, accomplished by late 1900, was, as the author puts it, Struve's Rubicon, and it marks the line between his early and late intellectual biography. Although Pipes acknowledges that Struve's philosophical writings were "distinguished neither by clarity nor by originality," there is no disputing that he was a first rate philosophical-logical critic, intellectual historian, and concep- tualizer in the area of socio-economic development (in this last department the fertilizing role of Marxism is clearly in evidence), not to mention a major figure in the early history of Russian Marxism, Social Democracy and the Liberation Movement. One is tempted to dwell here on his fascinating and pioneering study of the young Marx, his brilliant critique of Marx's sociology and economics, on his strikingly modern views on development and social dynamics. There are some claims made for Struve in this book, however, with which this reviewer would take issue. His role in the Liberation Movement is exagger- ated, more by the cumulative effect of the narrative than by any specific errors of judgment or fact. He is presented as the Liberation Movement's "foremost theorist and champion" (p. 360) and as the architect of the Union of Liberation. (See, e.g., pp. 32, 374) One cannot deny Struve the title of the Movement's foremost publicist, but others got the Movement under way, provided the initiative in founding its emigre organ, and organized the Union of Liberation. If awards were to be given for Founder of the Liberation Movement and Architect of the Union of Liberation, D. I. Shakhovskoi, P. D. Dolgorukov and I. I. Petrunkevich should probably all stand higher on the list of candidates than Struve. In regard to Part Three, one should also note that Struve's writings from 1902 to the autumn of 1905 on the pages of his journal Liberation are not systematic- ally analyzed, and the reader is left curiously in the dark about many of his reactions to the revolutionary crisis, particularly in the crucial period February- October, 1905. While it is true, as the author says, that by 1905 Liberation had lost much of its former importance because of relaxation of domestic censorship (and also because events by then were occurring so quickly that the emigre publicist could not keep abreast of them), does this diminish its value as a source for the study of Struve's political thought? Some of the affirmations about the Union of Liberation's role in the Revolution of 1905 seem exaggerated or at least unclear. Was it the Union, and it alone, which "forced the autocratic regime to give up its monopoly on political power"? (p. 337) • Also disputable is the claim for a secure place for Struve "as one of Russia's greatest economic historians" on the basis of his work The Serf Economy, which .