Freedom Without Limits

In “Encountering the Spirit of Revolutionary Negation,” Daniel J. Mahoney describes Dostoevsky’s Demons as a diagnosis of the psychology that gave rise to the modern project of revolutionary nihilism, political atheism, and an incipient totalitarianism that “rejects the primordial distinction between good and evil.” According to Mahoney, Dostoevsky’s novel is prophetic in its account of the moral fanaticism and fashionable nihilism that we find among our own cultural elites, and its most salient features include its cancel culture, identity politics, and a new form of anti-rationalist atheism. By revisiting this book, Mahoney hopes that Dostoevsky will help us “to see our way amid the cultural, spiritual, and political darkness of our time.”

I want to deepen Mahoney’s analysis by looking at one of the enduring themes that haunted Dostoevsky throughout his life: the centrality of freedom as an essential part of the human condition. Dostoevsky believed that one cannot live as a full human being without individual freedom: a freedom that acknowledges limits in its striving towards a chosen ideal—and the willingness to suffer for it. In his works, Dostoevsky portrayed this type of freedom rooted in transcendence in contrast to the nihilist’s account that rejected God.

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