At the Cold War’s end just over three decades ago the mainstream political philosopher Francis Fukuyama enthralled the American elite with a thesis that the world had arrived at, as his article was titled, The End of History. Writing in 1989, before the Berlin Wall had yet to fall, Cold War had yet to end, or the Soviet Union collapse, Fukuyama did not merely tout “(t)he triumph of the West, of the Western idea” over the East, “an unabashed victory of democracy and capitalism,” and the “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” over socialism and fascism. He asserted boldly enough the end of any prospect for the success of communism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism, fascism or any other non-democratic idea or system to triumph in human history: “What we may be seeing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.”[1]
This was a teleology and eschatology of the kind we find in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel, Alexander Kojeve, Karl Marx, and innumerable religious thinkers. It was also an echo of American messianism: the idea that the American revolution had initiated the inevitable march of ‘democracy’ or republicanism – that is, government by representation of the people endowed with political liberty and civil and human rights – across the globe. Indeed, Fukuyama, was declaring the American liberal democratic mission triumphant over its only real remaining ideological competitors—communism and fascism – and would now be completed by establishing democracy across the globe.
Fukuyama later pushed back the end of history; he acknowledged in his 2018 bookIdentity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment that one passion – the demand and pursuit of “dignity” by identity groups, including enthno-nationalist ones, which range from ethnic minorities in the US to Putin’s Russia, drive political conflict. Dignity now was his “master concept,” reflecting another idea that is all-encompassing in nature.[2] As a review put it, Fukuyama’s concept of the pursuit of dignity “explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, isis, Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir.”[3]
However, by 2022, after the beginning of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, history was ending again. The focus now, according to Fukuyama, should be the threat of authoritarianism to the liberal democratic order. This has become very mainstream thinking, however unoriginal. There is no reason to worry, Fukuyama asserts, since liberal democracy has the upper hand. Authoritarian leaders and their regimes are self-destructive. Undermined by their reliance in decision-making on a single leader or small circle of leaders and by “the absence of discussion and strong debate,” such regimes are prone to end by the resulting “catastrophic consequences,” presumably unlike liberal republican regimes.[4] By a curious ‘coincidence’, the main threat of this authoritarianism emanates – if one is to tell by the examples he cites – are authoritarian regimes that resist Western encroachment on their states’ self-interest and national security. Even more curious has been Fukuyama’s complete failure to notice the rise of authoritarianism in the US in the form of the Democrat Party-state’s revolution from above, but that is another story.[5]
My task here is not to belabor Fukuyama, the point is the teleology and absolutist eschatology of the claim that there will be an ‘end of history’ under capitalist republican dominion and that political theories and practices such as socialism, nationalism, fascism, and authoritarianism shall wither away. This is utopianism of the grandest sort. Perhaps, Fukuyama would retort as the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevskii did to a criticism of his own thinking as utopian end of history under Russian Orthidoxy. Dostoevskii concluded his millennial vision of world unification under Russian Orthodoxy by noting that if it was received as “a ‘utopia’ worthy only of laughter,” then he happily would count himself “among the utopians.”[6]
Reading Fukuyama at the time, I and others – most notably Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations – wondered why Fukuyama did not consider nationalism and confessionalism – what we can call ‘communalism’ of ethno-national or religious type, respectively – to be ideologies or at least potential sources for the rise of new illiberal ideologies that might challenge the coming heavenly republican kingdom. The same could be said of authoritarianism. Today we can amend the list of communalisms with various forms of genderism: radical feminism, homosexualism, transgenderism and the like. If liberalism is an ideology, then why is illiberalism or anti-liberalism – i.e., authoritarianism – not an ideology or a source for an illiberal or anti-liberal ideology? Moreover, what of backsliding in democracy in the the world’s perhaps most strong and consolidated democratic regime? The imprisonment of journalists, the quashing of free speech, the politicization of the FBI and CIA undermining the rule of rule and equaity before the law, and biased impunity for violence committed by leftist political organizations are just a few examples of how the Barack Obama and Joseph Biden administrations have failed to meet key criteria for democracy as posed by Fukuyama himself. Modern day American liberalism is really a new version, a racialized and genderized version of leftism – reverse racism and sexism married to genderism and communism, e.g. Black Lives Matter and Antifa – having little to do with individual liberty, equality before the law, and representative government. Clearly, Fukuyama has been accessing only a part of the picture.
The USSR had hesitatingly abandoned communism by the end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Great Reforms or ‘Perestroika’. To the dustbin of history were thrown: communist internationalism, the mono-organization and centralized Party-state machine, and the state-owned and planned command economy. Fukuyama had this aspect right. But according to the teleology of Fukuyama and the American elite’s consolidating ideology, the USSR’s main successor state, the Russian Federation was destined to be a Western-style republican and free market system – as all former Soviet republics, other post-communist states, and non-democracies worldwide were destined – by History’s predetermined course. Russia, a country with little ‘usable past’ of republicanism and free markets must come to the end state of liberal democracy in America’s new world order and do it soon. It had to ‘democratize’ (republicanize) its politics, pluralize its discourses, resolve nationality issues, and privatize its state economy rapidly no matter what the cost. Most difficult to swallow perhaps for Russians was the idea that Russia had to abandon any claim of belonging for the 25 million ethnic Russians cut off from Moscow in the USSR’s 14 former union republics, including Ukraine, and play fifth, sixth, seventh fiddle to the US, the EU, NATO, and their most powerful members. This and Russians’ sense of history, aspiration for wholeness, and obsession with national security and the West helped to ignite a revival of Russian traditionalist and patriotic thought purged during the Bolshevik Soviet whirlwind. NATO expansion was the spark that ignited the reconstitution of Russian traditionalism based on authoritarianism, Orthodoxy, and Russian culture or way of life. In reaction to Western encroachments (NATO and EU expansion), interference (demands for rapid republicanization and threats of isolation if not met), and threats (color revolutions in support of military cooperation towards NATO membership in neighboring or friendly states such as Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and Montenegro), Russia returned to its national security vigilance norm in relations with the West and its traditionalist, Orthodox-based belief in and aspiration to wholeness or tselostnost’ in all of its forms: monism, universalism, communalism, solidarism, and historicism (see below).
Moreover, just as Moscow was struggling to build and consolidate its weak, even still nascent republican system and a requisite political culture in the Western scheme, the West was beginning a transformation from liberal republicanism centered on the rule of law, equality before the law, free and fair elections, and free market economics to one centered on legal bias in favor of ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and women and state-corporate partnerships to control the market. This marriage of nascent ethno-national fascism and economic fascism when consummated produced the present-day Western ideology of ‘Wokism.’ It mixes and combines cultural Marxist economics, internationalism, and nihilisms targeting the national state, ‘white’ majorities, family, social mores, and even biology (AI, transgenderism). The end of history has not even come to the West, no less Russia, China, and most of the ‘rest’ of the world, even though the world now is split between the West and the ‘rest’ over, supposedly, the ‘universal’ values of democracy and markets.
Fukuyama, perhaps the last Hegelian, would have done well to question his Hegelian teleology, avoid ‘apophatism’ in relation to Marx, and instead refer to the more balanced, modest, and rather superb thought of one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers. Isaiah Berlin was born on June 6, 1909 in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. He died at century’s end in 1997—just as liberal political mystics following the path Fukuyama had shown undertook NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, driving the first nail into post-Soviet Russian republicanism’s coffin and ultimately that of the ‘end of history’ as well. When Berlin was still a boy, his family of Jewish lumber merchants moved to St. Petersburg where he witnessed some of the events of the Russian Revolution. The family then moved to London, and Berlin entered, then graduated Oxford, eventually teaching and writing there on the history of ideas. He turned to reading Russian writers, novelists and social thinkers, who, he acknowledged, “did much to shape (his) outlook.” In particular, he respected their “moral” “approach” concerned deeply with the human condition, “what was responsible for injustice, oppression, falsity in human relations, imprisonment whether by stone walls or conformism – unprotesting submission to man-made yokes – moral blindness, egoism, cruelty, humiliation, servility, poverty, helplessness, bitter indignation, despair on the part of so many.”[7]
Berlin’s study of the history of ideas and philosophy led him to reject all total views, any all-encompassing, all-explanatory theory, any and all monism. Political theories, models, ideologies, and the like were alien to him. He believed in combining theory and practical realities. He offered critiques and praise each for Hegelianism, Marxism, historicism, positivism, and romanticism. Among Russians, he admired the non-monists Turgenev and Herzen and respected others. For Berlin, humans have free will and require liberty to flourish as individuals, nations, states, and species, and individual liberty was for him perhaps the highest political ideal. However, he was no libertarian or even a strict free marketer; he was “an enthusiastic New Dealer.”[8]
To Berlin, Fukuyama would have seemed to be a “teleological thinker” on the order of a Hegel or Marx, for whom “all apparent order, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to a failure to discover their purpose.”[9] And for whom the world and History move “from explosion to explosion to fulfill the great cosmic design.”[10]
For America’s global oligarchs and democratizers today “(t)o be wise is to understand the direction in which the world is inexorably moving, to identify oneself with the rising power which ushers in the new world. Marx – and it is part of his attraction to those of a similar emotional cast – identifies himself exultantly, in his way no less passionately than Nietzsche or Bakunin, with the great force which in its very destructiveness is creative, and is greeted with bewilderment and horror only by those whose values are hopelessly subjective, who listen to their consciences, their feelings, or to what their nurses or teachers tell them, without realizing the glories of life in a world which moves from explosion to explosion to fulfill the great cosmic design.”[11] Berlin noticed that historical, teleological monists of this type, like today’s erstwhile Wokists, democracy promoters abroad, and NATO and EU adepts brook no resistance:
“When history takes her revenge – and every enrage` prophet in the nineteenth century (and our own – GH) looks to her to avenge him against thise he hates most – the mean, pathetic, ludicrous, stifling human anthills will be justly pulverized; justly, because what is just and unjust, good and bad, is determined by the goal towards which all creation is tending. Whatever is on the side of victorious reason is just and wise; whatever is on the other side, on the side of the world that is doomed to destruction by the working of the forces of reason, is rightly called foolish, ignorant, subjective, arbitrary, blind; and if it goes so far as to try and resist the forces that are destined to supplant it, then it – that is to say, the fools and knaves and mediocrities who constitute it – is rightly called retrograde, wicked, obscurantist, perversely hostile to the deepest interests of mankind.” [12]
We can see this very dynamic today in the incessant charges of ‘transophobes’, ‘homophobes’, ‘insurrectionists’, ‘Putin agents’, ‘white supremacists’, and the now more quaint ‘racists’ and ‘sexists’ leveled against anyone who opposes men in women’s bathrooms and sports, breeding heterosexual children to ‘realize’ their -non-binary’ essence and cut off parts of their bodies, the emerging single-party DemParty-state authoritarian regime, the illegal import of ‘refugees’ from Latin America and Wokist reverse racism and cultural Marxsim, or the continuing support of a war that pits one authoritarian regime (Ukraine) against another (Russia) in the name of democracy and freedom.
One of Berlin’s central points was that any preconceived all-encompassing theory, model, unified system, or explanation of the past, present and future is fraught with the danger of authoritarian or totalitarian repression of liberty justified by political priests as a necessary sacrifice for their attainment of their grand, universal vision and goal. No over-arching, all-encompassing historical, philosophical, religious, or political vision, in Berlin’s understanding of the human predicament, can save humankind from the moral responsibility of building our world in such a way as to avoid conflict, violence, repression, and poverty. And whatever solution that may be found, it will only mitigate not eliminate human problems, frailty, evil, and egoism. Rather than any historical destiny, each human generation has to confront anew its situation, challenges, and weaknesses and must fashion concrete solutions to address them as best they might.
Thus, in an excellent introduction to a revised edition of Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, the set of Berlin’s magnificent essays on 19th century Russian history and literature, Aileen Kelly notes that Berlin revealed the nature of a passion for a certain genre` of historical determinism and wholeness among many Russian thinkers. Berlin himself was offering a vigorous and profound rejection of both materialist and “historiosophical” or “metaphysico-theological theories of history.”[13] Berlin found the phenomenon of teleological, single-factor thinking oddly fascinating and certainly did not see it as a malady confined to Russian thinkers alone.[14] He discovered, in Kelly’s words, “monist visions” in Western political thought and extending to Hegelian and Marxist analyses which propose “a fundamental unity, deriving from a single universal purpose, underlies all phenomena.”[15] These phenomena can be discovered and used to determine how humankind, whether as a group, groups, or individuals, should live. An aspiration to, and/or a belief in wholeness, the craving “to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present, and future, actual, possible, and unfulfilled is symmetrically ordered,” according to Berlin, “(i)s one of the deepest of human desires.”[16] This passion for monist explanations, a “transcendent whole,”[17] is driven in part by a desire to throw off the burden of individual responsibility in an unfathomable, chaotic world. This escape from responsibility, indeed freedom is accomplished, in Berlin’s terms, by handing it over to a “vast amoral, impersonal, monolithic whole – nature, or history, or class, or race, or the ‘harsh realities of our time’, or the irresistible evolution of the social structure – that absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticize, and against which we fight to our certain doom.”[18]
Berlin occasionally listed the kinds of supreme causes around which various monist myths had been constructed, and which he thought ought to be avoided. Typical is the following list of “concepts” that had “played their parts in teleological-historical systems as protagonists upon the stage of history”: “Race, colour, Church, nation, class, climate; irrigation, technology, geopolitical situation; civilization, social structure, the Human Spirit, the Collective Unconscious.”[19] Oddly enough political system, regime type, democracy, republicanism, or the like are missing consistently from Berlin’s lists.[20]
In his ‘end of history, these factors were very much included in Fukuyama’s monist teleology, and it has been Fukuyama’s ideas unfortunately that have prevailed since the Cold War’s end. They massaged Americans, the American elite, and theur democratic messianism, an important element in US political culture since the founding. Early Americans hailed Napoleon’s effort to bring freedom, brotherhood, and equality to the world. They saw him, as an apostle not the messiah of universal liberty. America was the messiah, and Providence dictated that it would spread the gospel of liberty across the seas. America had a duty to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, then to make the world democratic (republican). The prophet and its European apostles of the world republican order spawned armies of democratizers, democracy-promoters, democracy consultants, and economic consultants. They fueled an American hubris that was already bursting with national pride and egoism by the time of America’s ‘victory in the Cold War’ and its acquisition of a new status as ‘the world’s lone superpower,’ the indispensable country, the global hegemon. The American apostles and armies of democracy spread the good news that that there was a sure solution to the world’s plagues and pestilences of repression, war, violence, racism, and poverty. All these problems would wither away, if states democratized, marketized, and generally liberalized here and now, and –with a little nudge from Washington – they surely would. The outcome was foretold by Fukuyama. All regimes designated as authoritarian were on the wrong side of history, and to be on the right side of history means that countries with such regimes could be destabilized, infected with Western ideas and pr-Western groups funded by U.S. government bodies and organizations tied to them, and then subjected to coups and revolutionary plots. Mechanisms such as prospective EU and NATO membership, IMF and World Bank loan programs, and government-funded grants could be used to split societies and states.
The curious urgency that emerged, of course, had nothing to do with some mandated teleological tempo or some grave need to avert an imminent apocalypse (excluding the green movement’s claims about global warming, cooling, climate change). It had much to do with human ambitions. Careers are not built on deliverables with a posthumous timeframe. The ambitious, messianic American elite is populated by no less ambitious apparatchiks, to whom the message of the End of History appealed quite nicely because through it they might become iconoclastic pioneers and heroes in the great eschatological adventure of building the liberal democratic utopia to be constructed on the model of their homeland.
For these democracy-promoting missionaries’s ‘target states’, they only needed to follow the American playbook in order to traverse successfully the road to salvation in the new order. But just at the height of its greatness, America was well into an era of decay and decadence that began during the victorious Cold War. The purity and beauty of her message belied the impurity and ugliness of many of these American elitists, who brought to the capitols of the world the increasingly greedy, hedonistic, and corrupt way of life of a too well-fed, too well-appointed, too self-centered, too self-impressed nation and a good many of its people. American artistic culture and entertainment was already perverse by Cold War’s end. The political system and culture were being ‘solved’ by American elites, who could now remain in power for decades on end as they began to resemble the Soviet gerontocracy. The media would help Bill Clinton get past his direct lie to the face of the American people” ‘I never had sex with that woman. Never’ and helped his wife pedal the idea that the notion that he had was a ‘right-wing conspiracy’. That by now is routine Democrat Party-state practice, perfected as has its media control over the ensuing three decades as Americans portrayed themselves and imagined their system as something quite different. Corruption was attaining an inordinate level, driven by the lobbying industry and the lust for power and influence among American elites—the lust intensified by the realization that one was not just a ‘player’ in the nation’s capitol, but in the world’s capitol, the center of the universe about to be unified under the Heavenly Kingdom of American Democracy. One – the most mediocre, sniveling bureaucrat – could imagine himself a god, determining the fates of people, nations, states, and entire continents.
Thus, the advancing kingdom was careful not to leave everything to History’s inevitable teleology and eschatology of an inevitable republican utopia at the end of time. It chose to be proactive and mitigate the risks of ‘spontaneity’ as Lenin had chosen to do in regard to Russia. Lenin deplored the Mensheviks’ tendency towards spontaneity or the natural, historically determined evolution from capitalism to socialism, using the proletariat’s majority in capitalist states in order to transform their systems gradually from the inside using the liberalism and pluralism of republican representation and freedoms to hang capitalism. The idea of organizing revolution in Russia was itself already a rejection of spontaneity. For Lenin, there were probably no doubts about the outcome, but the tempo had clearly dubious benefits for his lust for power and revenge of the execution of his brother by the Russian Imperial autocracy. An overwhelmingly agricultural state like Russia with 80 percent of the population consisting of rural peasants could not be relied upon – at least in Lenin’s lifetime, so it seemed – to yield a proletarian revolution by and of itself. For a socialist revolution in Russia to rise up, the weak proletariat needed the energetic, concentrated leadership of a professional revolutionary party, alliances with ethno-national minorities and the peasantry, revolutionary terrorism, and financial and economic backing from the Russian Empire’s enemy in World War I, capitalist Germany.
Now, a century later, Americans too would not simply rely on History taking its natural, predetermined course to the republican, free market end. Spreading the Word through preaching the American playbook of democratization was not sufficient to bolster Historical spontaneity’s perhaps limited dynamism. There were doubts among many, despite Fukuyama’s prophecy. Proactive, even aggressive American leadership from Washington and Brussels was required, and woe to the government that sought to avoid fulfilling American playbook’s requirements because it feared the risk of the collapse their government, economy, or the state and society themselves. Washington realized that governments might need mre than nudging. If economic threats and political coercion did not suffice, such governments needed to be overthrown in color revolutions, even military interventions. The list of such cases is long: Iraq, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine again. But most important was Moscow for it had turned against the West’s force-feeding of NATO expansion and the coups undertaken so the feeding went easier among Russia’s allies and neighbors. Moscow itself should not be tempted to rely on extensive methods of post-Soviet development such as rebuilding its empire or simply retaining historically tied former Soviet republics as close allies rather than democratizing and building free markets the Western way. Russian officials might need to be bought and convinced to betray the national interest so that they privatized as rapidly as possible. Elections might need to be rigged – this was authoritarian, barbarian Russia after all! – to ensure communists or fascists did not return and undermine democracy. NATO might need to be expanded in order to maximize American power and hegemony without limits so that governments did not follow the Russian example and begin to act on second thoughts about following the American, IMF, World Bank pressure and demands stipulating the urgency of rapidly democratizing and marketizing their systems even if such policies risked political instability, state failure, military coups, and the like.
American messianism and teleology had a dark side. As with the all-encompassing, universalism of the international communist eschatology that the US and its victory in the Cold war had demystified and defeated, America’s belief in its values’ universalism and her messianic teleology and eschatology came with a confining monism that could easily devolve into republican liberalism’s opposites—authoritarianism, repression, even terrorism. Notwithstanding Berlin’s allegiance to the New Deal practice of the managerial society, he was well aware of the danger of “the unnumbered American disciples” of a centuries’ long line of “benevolent sages” and contemporary “benevolent humanitarian prophets” such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.[21] If Berlin were alive today he surely would be consternated by American Wokism at home; the American zeal for democratism, color revolutionism, and universalistic democracy-promotion abroad; and the mammoth gap between these respective domestic and foreign agendas. In a letter, he once wrote: “Equality is a noble ideal … but when the desire for social justice takes resentful … forms, it leads to repression.”[22] Given his value pluralism and practical fatalism, Berlin, if he were with us today, would not be surprised that nations, cultures, or civilizations are frequently incompatible with each other and clash. This was mankind’s eternal, common predicament, and fault could be found in all entities. Berlin, therefore, might very well also have found fault with the Russian response to American democratic teleological historicism.
PART 2: FUKUYAMA, BERLIN, AND RUSSIA is forthcoming soon.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, Summer 1989, pp. 3-18, at pp. 3-4.
[2] Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).
[3] Louis Menand, “Francis Fukuyama postpones the End of History,” The New Yorker, 3 September 2018 Issue, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/francis-fukuyama-postpones-the-end-of-history.
[4] Francis Fukuyama, “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History,” The Atlantic, 17 October 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/.
[5] On the Russian and US revolutions from above, see, for example, Gordon M. Hahn, “Working Paper: Comparing the Russian and American Revolutions from Above, Part 3,” Russia and Eurasian Studies, 6 January 2022, https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/06/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-3-conclusion/.
[6] F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, 1873-1881 (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2001), pp. 254-5.
[7] See Berlin’s semi-autobiographical “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Vintage, 2013), pp. 1-16, at p. 2.
[8] Roger Hausheer, “Introduction,” in Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, pp. xxxiii-xlvi, at p. xlv.
[9] Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Vintage Books, 2013), pp. 119-90, at p. 132.
[10] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” pp. 138-9.
[11] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 138.
[12] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 139.
[13] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 187.
[14] I explored the phenomenon of Russian thinking centered on ‘wholeness’ or ‘tselostnost`’ in a signifcantly comprehensive and not as an idea confined to Russian culture but one that to a considerable degree is more pronounced in Russia. See Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2022).
[15] Aileen Kelly, “Introduction: A Complex Vision,” in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. xxiii-xxxv at p. xxv.
[16] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 180.
[17] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 154.
[18] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 189, see also pp. 152-4.
[19] Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” p. 139.
[20] See Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” pp. 139 and 151-2.
[21] Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” p. 137.
[22] Dalya Abrege, “Isaiah Berlin’s Letters reveal his despair at the growth of ‘barbarism’,” The Guardian, 15 June 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/16/isaiah-berlin-letters-modern-youth.
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.