Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Konstantinovich (1842–1904)

Along with Lavrov, N.K. Mikhailovskii, a non-academic social theorist and literary critic, was the most representative and influential thinker of Russian populism. His most distinctive contribution to populist ideology was his attempt to reconcile the ’principle of individuality’, so dear to the Russian intelligentsia, with the old, communal ’principles of the people’, represented by the non-Westernized Russian peasantry. Unlike Herzen and Lavrov, Mikhailovskii did not see the principle of individuality as a product of Western progress, that is to say, as something which should be introduced from outside to the archaic world of Russian village commune. He challenged the stereotype which associated individualism with the capitalist West; instead, he tried to prove that the principle of individuality was in fact fully compatible with old Russian communalism, and incompatible with Western-type modernization. He did so by a radical redefinition of the very concept of individuality. For him individuality was not the product of a process of ’individualization’ in the sense of loosening the communal bonds, making people socially differentiated, functionally specialized and separated from each other. On the contrary, by individuality he meant the ’inner wholeness’, that is to say, the non-alienated, many-sided and harmonious development of human beings. Following the romantic critics of modernity, he claimed that individuality, so conceived, was being destroyed by capitalist progress. Mikhailovskii’s notion of individuality was similar to the Slavophile ideal of ’integral personality’. Unlike Slavophilism, however, Mikhailovskii’s ‘sociological romanticism’ was bound up with a secularist worldview and a semi-positivist position in philosophy. For this reason its affinity with Slavophile romantic anticapitalism was relatively inconsequential and remained unnoticed.