In this debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers, Herzen took a characteristically idiosyncratic position that alienated both camps. He was a convinced Westernizer in his belief in science, knowledge and human freedom, a cluster of convictions that owed a great deal to his contemporary John Stuart Mill. Unlike many Slavophiles, he hated the Russian traditions of despotism and the Russian Orthodox worship of czar and throne. At the same time, like them he was convinced that Russia had to find its own distinctive route into the 20th century. The heart of his socialist faith was a lifelong commitment to the ideal of the Russian peasant commune. He hoped that the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 would lead to the emergence of a network of self-organizing peasant cooperatives. Contemporaries like Ivan Turgenev thought Herzen’s embrace of the peasantry was sentimental foolishness, but in hindsight, Herzen’s instincts were farsighted. He understood that the most urgent task in Russian politics was to find some alternative to capitalist wage labor as the only road into the future. In the event, of course, the road actually taken was catastrophic: forced collectivization of agriculture by the Soviet regime and the ruthless destruction of the Russian peasantry.

Herzen matters today because he thought about the cruel dialectic between hope and history in politics and because he struggled to find Russia its own way into the 20th century. He also matters, Kelly argues, because he was the 19th-century thinker who thought most deeply about the implications of Darwinism for the theories of history that the European intelligentsia inherited from the Enlightenment. Kelly pays attention, as her mentor Berlin did not, to Herzen’s lifelong fascination, begun in his university days in the 1830s, with the science of Darwin’s precursors — Buffon, Cuvier, Lamarck and now forgotten Russian popularizers like M.G. Pavlov. Thanks to his exposure to Darwin’s predecessors, Kelly argues, Herzen was the only Russian socialist who immediately grasped the implications of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” when it appeared in 1859. He realized that evolution overturned the idea of history as a purposive story of progress guided by human intention.

Herzen also saw, as none of his socialist contemporaries did, that Darwin had overturned socialist politics, particularly its assumption that revolutionaries — or a leading class like the proletariat — could guide history toward revolutionary triumph. Kelly’s book is called “The Discovery of Chance” because she believes that Herzen, more than any other 19th-century political philosopher, understood how devastating it was to political hope to discover that evolution worked through chance, through the random emergence of evolutionary variations that turned out to have adaptive survival value. Remarkably, this insight did not lead Herzen to pessimism, despite the blighting of so many of his political hopes. In one of his characteristically vivid metaphors, he wrote: “We must be proud of not being needles and threads in the hands of fate as it sews the motley cloth of history. . . . We know that this cloth is not sewn without us. . . . And that is not all; we can change the pattern of the carpet.” Even as man develops “according to the laws of the most fatal necessity,” he wrote, “he constantly posits himself as free. This is a necessary condition for his activity, this is a psychological fact, a social fact.” The logic of history may escape us, he wrote, but “man can do his duty.”

These hidden strands in Herzen’s thought, painstakingly uncovered here by Aileen Kelly, provide yet another compelling reason we should read the melancholy old Russian again and recognize, in his anguished attempt to defend human freedom in dark times, amid all the cruelty of history, that he is truly our contemporary.