The Discovery of Chance Quotes

“intellectuals became preoccupied with an aspiration as fundamental in humans as the urge for individual autonomy: the need to belong.”
― Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

“Herzen declared that there were “no solutions”: history, like nature, was an improvisation, subject to the play of chance.”
― Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

“My own interest in Herzen was sparked by an exception to this rule: Isaiah Berlin’s essays. These still seem to me to have best captured the distinctiveness of Herzen’s thought by identifying him as a precursor, spelling out truths too novel for most of his contemporaries to understand and far too frightening for them to accept. The present study will approach his ideas in the context of the revolution in European thinking on man’s place in nature that would culminate in Darwin’s treatise on the origin of species.”
― Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

“Berlin stressed the farsightedness of his perception of the destructive power of ideological abstractions over human lives: “Herzen’s sense of reality, in particular of the need for, and the price of, revolution, is unique in his own, and perhaps in any age.”
― Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen

“Comparisons have been made with Stirner, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus, to name only a few.3 He won tributes from Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, who acknowledged his formative influence on their work in both content and style.”
― Aileen M. Kelly, The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen