Nikolay Konstantinovich Mikhaylovsky (1842-1904)

Russian sociologist, modern liberal Narodnik theorist, literary critic. Born into a noble official family of Meshevsk, Luca Province, Russia. Mikhaylovsky studied in St. Petersburg Mining Institute. He began to engage in literary activities in 1860 and became an influential figure among the radical writers at that time. In 1868, he began to write for the journal of Notes on the Fatherland, joined the ranks of revolutionary Narodnism, and later became the editor of this journal. In the early 1870s, he took part in the struggle against serfdom and Tsarist autocracy and also began began to tweak his original ideas of Narodnism, such that two groups of Narodniks emerged: the so-called "Critical Narodniks" and "Doctrinaire Narodniks". Critical Narodniks followed Mikhaylovsky.

In the 1890s, he became the leader and theoretician of the modern liberal Narodnik thought trend. Since 1892, he was the editor in chief of the Russian Fortune, a Narodnik journal, and used it to launch a fierce debate against Marxism. His main works are What is Progress? , Analogy in Social Science, Heroes and Hooligans, Literature and Life, and others.

Influenced by positivism and Kant’s agnosticism in philosophy, Mikhaylovsky advocated idealism in the field of history, attacked historical materialism as economic materialism and fatalism, he regarded man as a puppet pulled out of the mysterious dark cellar by the inherent law of historical inevitability. He advocated to oppose both freedom and necessity, regard history as the product of free will, advocated that “heroes” lead and dominate the masses and create history, he regarded the masses as “hooligans”.

Politically, he advocated that the ideal of scientific socialism “is purely advocated and maintained in the last link of Hegel’s three item chain”, and advocated the restoration of small-scale production economy and class reconciliation on the basis of capitalist system, and favored building agricultural socialism.

He advocated subjective sociology, and held that “sociology should start from a certain Utopia” and “the fundamental task of sociology should be to clarify the social conditions that satisfy one or another need of human nature”.

In 1877, in the 10th issue of the Journal of Notes on the Fatherland, Mikhaylovsky published an article titled as “Karl Marx Being Tried by Mr. Y. Zhukovsky”, to criticize vulgar bourgeois ideas of Y. Zhukovsky, but through this critique he distorted the core ideas in Marx’s Capital and interpreted the historical overview of the origin of Western European capitalism in Capital into a historical philosophical theory of general development path. To this end, Marx wrote the following: such an interpretation “gives me too much honor, but also too much insult”, and wrote a letter to the editorial department of the journal Notes on the Fatherland to try to correct Mikhaylovsky’s misinterpretation. In his pamphlet What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats and in other works, Lenin systematically criticized liberal Narodnik views and pointed out that they represented the interests of the rich peasants under the banner of “Friends of the People” and that their theoretical views were bourgeois-democratic views concealed under socialist phrases.