Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
From the Other Shore
Dialogues and essays written after the defeat of 1848: history has no libretto, and no future goal justifies sacrificing living people.
Introduction
Herzen wrote the dialogues and essays of “From the Other Shore” between 1847 and 1850, under the impression of the revolution of 1848 and the bloody suppression of the Paris June uprising. The book first appeared in German in 1850 as “Vom andern Ufer” and in Russian in London in 1855. In conversations between a disillusioned sceptic and a younger idealist it attacks the belief that history follows a plan and that present generations may be sacrificed to a future harmony; history, it says, has no libretto. The “other shore” is the position of someone who has left behind both the old order and the hopes of the revolutionaries. Isaiah Berlin introduced the English translation of 1956, and the book is read today as an early critique of the secular eschatologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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