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ationalist and scientific thought, the democratic andatomic ideas of government and society popularized bythe American and French revolutions, the ideas andresults of the industrial revolution, capitalism, and laissezfaire, with their unbridled competition and class conflicts—all these forces at one and the same time were becomingmore and more influential in Russia through the rapidlyincreasing economic and intellectual impact of Europe,and on the other hand were being criticized, attacked, orrepudiated in protest against the assumption that Europewas "the sine qua non of historical progress in the future,''The protest was made, in varying degrees, by a very widerange of Russian writers and thinkers. It was not apeculiarity merely of the Slavophils, whose outlook was ingeneral based on an antithesis between East and West,the Greco-Slavonic and the Romano-German worlds, anantithesis grounded in the nature of Orthodoxy andhostility to Catholicism (cf. p. 241).It is true that the radical ' westernizers ' of the thirties,forties, and fifties looked to the West as in many waysthe exemplar of Russia; but it is significant that Herzen(b. 1812, refugee from 1847, d. 1870), the greatest andmost influential of the ' westernizers,' became bitterlydisillusioned after the 1848 revolutions and inveighedagainst the half-measures of parliamentarism, the smugcomplacency and bourgeois decorum of Western life. Inthe end he turned away from the West, where he spent hislater life, and looked "with faith and hope to our nativeEast, inwardly rejoicing that I am Russian," to theRussian peasant masses in their communes and artels. 1The later generations of the populists and socialrevolutionariesdenied the necessity of Russia followingthe path of Europe. Many of them opposed industrialdevelopment of the Western type; all of them believedin the peasantry as the talisman of Russia which alonecould remake her on a model new to the world. Theywere haunted, as all the intelligentsia during the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, by the problem as to1Herzen's views are well illustrated in "Ends and Beginnings" and"The Russian People and Socialism," in vol. 6 of the English translationof his Memoirs (see p. 350 note).320