French enlightenment and Russian revolutionary thought: pages of the history of ideas

The work traces the influence of the ideas of Voltaire and J.-J. Rousseau on the formation of socio-philosophical views of Aleksander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin. The key themes for Russian thinkers are following: the relationship between the individual and the collective, or “brotherhood” and “egoism”, a critique of religion from the Enlightenment perspective, the confrontation between society and the state, the problem of freedom and building a “new world”. In the course of their meditations on these themes, Voltaire and Rousseau served as constant interlocutors; in polemical dialogue with them, the Russian revolutionary democratic philosophy was born. Bakunin saw Rousseau’s fundamental error in confusing society with the state. Herzen, at the end of his life, came to understand the historical immaturity of the revolutionary movement. History is the objective process, and revolutions cannot succeed if the prerequisites necessary for the birth of a new society are not in place.