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The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly tionary essays nearly results in a kind of intellectual despair. It is as if the world is, for Lilla, so messy and unpredictable, and our ideas so vulnerable to delusion, that we might as well not philosophize at all. — Matthew Mutter doi 10.1215/0961754X-4254168 Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 582 pp. Kelly opens her monumental new biography by noting that Alexander Herzen (1812 – 70) is claimed by social theorists of every persuasion, from radical Bolsheviks through Westernizing liberals to conservative Slavophiles. Little surprise, then, that there is no “Herzenism” — only the charismatic man and his evolving corpus of texts. Earlier biographers, dazzled by Herzen’s syncretic memoir My Past and Thoughts, focused on his early Romantic roots, his revolutionary activism as an expatriate journalist in London during the Reform decade, the tragedy of his family life, his insistence on the innate socialism of the Russian peasant commune and on the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, all of which uneasily coexisted with a fervent defense of open time and a nonteleological view of history. Kelly does not contest this profile but seeks to ground http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Common Knowledge Duke University Press

The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen by Aileen M. Kelly

Emerson, Caryl
Common Knowledge , Volume 24 (1) – Jan 1, 2018
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Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press
ISSN
0961-754X
eISSN
1538-4578
DOI
10.1215/0961754X-4254180
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Abstract

tionary essays nearly results in a kind of intellectual despair. It is as if the world is, for Lilla, so messy and unpredictable, and our ideas so vulnerable to delusion, that we might as well not philosophize at all. — Matthew Mutter doi 10.1215/0961754X-4254168 Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 582 pp. Kelly opens her monumental new biography by noting that Alexander Herzen (1812 – 70) is claimed by social theorists of every persuasion, from radical Bolsheviks through Westernizing liberals to conservative Slavophiles. Little surprise, then, that there is no “Herzenism” — only the charismatic man and his evolving corpus of texts. Earlier biographers, dazzled by Herzen’s syncretic memoir My Past and Thoughts, focused on his early Romantic roots, his revolutionary activism as an expatriate journalist in London during the Reform decade, the tragedy of his family life, his insistence on the innate socialism of the Russian peasant commune and on the moral bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, all of which uneasily coexisted with a fervent defense of open time and a nonteleological view of history. Kelly does not contest this profile but seeks to ground

Journal

Common Knowledge – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2018

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